Lessons & Meditations from the Stoics — with Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday, an author and media strategist, joins Scott to discuss his latest book, “The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids.” We hear about practicing patience, rethinking our outsized reactions, and teaching discipline. Follow Ryan on Twitter, @RyanHoliday. Scott opens by discussing Nvidia’s journey to become the next $1 trillion company. Algebra of Happiness: it’s not about you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  Episode 252. 252 is the area code serving the northeastern corner of North Carolina. In 1952, microwave ovens were made available for domestic use. They retailed for $1,295 apiece. I sexually identify as a microwave. I last 30 seconds and look nothing like my picture.

• 1:41Scott Galloway?

  Go, go, go!

• 1:51Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to 252nd episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Ryan Holiday, our favorite modern philosophy guest and the author of 12 books, including his New York Times bestseller, Stillness is the Key.

• 2:06Scott Galloway?

  That was our moment with stillness. How do you feel? We discussed with Ryan the lessons from his latest book, The Daily Dad, 366 Meditations on Parenting Love and Raising Great Kids. I love Ryan and his work. I'm just super impressed when people this young, especially men this young. Is that a hate crime? Is that a hate crime? That's right, you can shitpost men. That's okay. That's allowed, right? I find Ryan just incredibly thoughtful and I learn from him. I sign up for his daily emails and they're just nice and pleasant. And I love when people are figuring out great little businesses and prospering, which is my sort of, I don't know, starched way of saying, making a shit ton of money and doing good things and making people feel better. Anyways, what's happening?

• 2:49Scott Galloway?

  Nvidia is on its way to becoming the next firm to join the $1 trillion market capitalization club. Nvidia, think about that. After 24 years, or 24 years after going public, it's about to breach $1 trillion. Nvidia's stock is sort of the past week after reported second quarter revenue that beat analyst estimates by more than 50%. Once Nvidia hits a trillion dollar market cap, it will become the first US chipmaker to reach that threshold. I guess Intel never got there. By the way, when I got out of business school, everyone wanted to go to work for Intel. That was the hot firm to go to work for. Bloomberg reported that thanks to Nvidia's forecast, the seven largest tech stocks, which include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla, added a combined $454 billion

• 3:33Scott Galloway?

  in value over a five-day period. Think about that, a half a trillion dollars. I just read that our market, the market capitalization of the S&P, was the S&P or the Dow? Anyways, kind of there's some overlap there. Anyways, let's just call it the US market is worth more than the next 10 combined. Similar to our military spending, which we, which we best the next nine nations combined, the market capitalization of our companies is just so much greater. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite stats is that Apple is worth more than the entire FTSE. That is the 100 biggest companies in the UK. Think about that, one company in Cupertino worth more than 100 of the best and biggest companies in the United Kingdom. And Nvidia is kind of the latest, I don't know, playing the latest kind of hot and heavy hand here.

• 4:18Scott Galloway?

  Okay, so what's happening here? Different technology waves have different accrete value to the incumbents or new players. You could argue e-commerce went to the new guys or the new guy, specifically Amazon. The phone went to existing players, the smartphone. There was new players, Nokia. Motorola, I guess, was an older player. And then it all kind of accreted to Google and Apple. And then AI looks as if it's going to accrete, if you will, or add value to incumbents, specifically the big tech players. And Tim Wu had an interesting viewpoint that was articulated in the Washington Post today that the biggest threat he believes about AI is more concentration of power across companies that are very good at avoiding regulation and coming up with reasons and

• 5:03Scott Galloway?

  a lot of jazz hands for why, you know, they want to be regulated, but just not this regulation. And Nvidia is sort of in the perfect, you know, the perfect storm of good things. Because if you think about the latest computing trend to push up or the latest trend in digital to push up their valuation, it was metaverse. And now it is AI. And the one thing these things always have in common, for the last 100 years, the gift that it's kept on giving to our modern economy, although we don't like to say this, but it's true, has been fossil fuels. You wouldn't have hospitals, you just wouldn't be able to build a home without fossil fuels or you wouldn't be able to build them, you know, the cost to build them would be eight or 15 or 20 times more without fossil fuels.

• 5:44Scott Galloway?

  Fossil fuels have been the world's greatest arbitrage, turning something that was lying, you know, in a sea, an underground sea, into some sort of energy that made individuals more productive. And now the next arbitrage, we might think, or the next kind of, if you will, fossil fuels or big arbitrage might be in AI. And that is you can take a lawyer's work who is writing a lease for a strip mall in Cleveland, Ohio, and make it much more efficient and dig that trench in a fraction of the time. And there's always externalities whenever you have this kind of arbitrage. But underneath that, what's powering all of it, what we are insatiable for, just the same way we're insatiable for fossil fuels, the price never goes below zero. Oh, actually, that's not true.

• 6:27Scott Galloway?

  Oil went below zero for unloading it because all of these tankers at a port, there was this weird thing where if you could come get the oil, they would pay you because for some reason it was too much for it at a port. I forget where that happened. Anyways, that was a bit of an anomaly. But our thirst for fossil fuels has been pretty much insatiable. We keep coming up with new ways to put energy to work. The same is true of processing power. We are much better at coming up with new, interesting ways to leverage processing power than to produce it. And Nvidia is kind of the chips that just keep on giving. They're known for these incredibly innovative chips. What do you know? What's the hottest new technology? Generative AI? What does generative AI need? One massive computing and processing power. So it's interesting that Sam Altman, who will be Time's Person of the Year.

• 7:12Scott Galloway?

  Why? Because the most important person in technology or the richest person in technology has a 1 in 3 chance of being Time's Person of the Year because of our idolatry of innovators and the dollar. So look for Sam Altman to be Person, Time's Person of the Year next year or 2023 or 2024. And he's a very thoughtful guy, but they keep coming up with new ways to where they need massive processing power. So what did Sam do? He immediately partnered with one of the big folks, Microsoft. By the way, if I were going to just make a smart investment, I think the market's overvalued right now. And I big believe that Microsoft on a risk-adjusted basis is probably a good place to put your money. Also, Google, I think Google's taken a bit of a beating and is not, their business is not as threatened as people think. Anyways, another talk show, not financial advice, just telling you what I'm thinking

• 7:57Scott Galloway?

  of doing. I'm thinking of doing a, some sort of a pair trade here, a split trade. Anyways, we'll come back to that. Nvidia Corporation, get this, Nvidia's up about 180% year-to-date. That's probably somewhere around 20% of the S&P's gains year-to-date. I mean, there's just a small number, we're kind of back to the future again. And that is a small number of companies are responsible for not only 25% of the S&P's market cap, but if you look at their contribution or why, if it wasn't for basically six or eight companies, the S&P wouldn't be up 8 or 10% or whatever it's up, it'd be down 2%. So there's, there's this crowding effect.

• 8:37Scott Galloway?

  And it goes back to this notion that Tim Wu's fantastic book, Professor Columbia, The Curse of Bigness, that AI is largely benefiting, while a new company is in the news a lot, OpenAI, it's no accident they decided to partner with a big company, essentially Microsoft. And everyone's panicking. Everyone is trying to grab a dance partner that's much bigger than them because they see how competitive this is about to be. And the problem is, is that again, we're going to see a lot of value creation at the biggest levels or amongst the biggest players. And that's not good. It decreases innovation. It gives them more power in the channel, in the marketplace. There's an interesting article this weekend saying that the biggest players in grocery

• 9:20Scott Galloway?

  are now hammering suppliers so much and they have so much leverage that it basically makes it almost impossible for smaller retailers to compete because they just can't compete against a bigger, a bigger front-end retailer. And what do the, what do the suppliers have to do? They kind of have to increase the prices on the smaller ones because the big sales to the big players cover their fixed costs. But the only way they can make money is to go increase prices across the more fragmented or smaller players. What does this do? It suppresses innovation, creates more income inequality, creates a lack of diversity in the ecosystem in terms of new ideas. In general, it's just, it's just bad for everybody. But Nvidia is the next trillion-dollar company. This is something to watch. Would you buy this company at this point? I probably wouldn't.

• 10:03Scott Galloway?

  I think it's, I think it's trading at something like 25x revenues. And it's in the press so much that I wonder if a lot of the juice has been squeezed here. Anyways, Nvidia, Nvidia, welcome, welcome to the big, welcome to the executive washroom of trillion-dollar market capitalization companies. I remember the first company, it was, I believe it was Apple. And I remember saying, I don't know what'll be the first trillion-dollar company, but the, the first to hit $2 trillion was Amazon. And I got that wrong. I thought Amazon was going to get there on voice and cloud. Anyways, anyways, so see above, not financial advice.

• 10:39Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back for our conversation with Ryan Holiday.

• 10:44Scott Galloway?

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• 11:29Scott Galloway?

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• 11:47Scott Galloway?

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• 12:32Scott Galloway?

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• 13:03Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Ryan Holiday, the author of several books, including his latest, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting Love and Raising Great Kids. Ryan, where does this podcast find you?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Right outside Austin, Texas.

• 13:16Scott Galloway?

  Near the Giga Factory. You're in Musk Town, right?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Yes, he's actually building his own town inside this town. I live in Bastrop, Texas. I have this little bookstore here on Main Street. And Elon Musk has opened a factory, a SpaceX facility, and a boring company facility, all within like five minutes of it.

• 13:36Scott Galloway?

  Now, hold on. Whatever, car factory, Schmar factory. You have a bookstore?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  I do. I have a little bookstore here on this old town in Texas. And it's my office and my podcast studio. And it's like a throwback to Mayberry.

• 13:53Scott Galloway?

  Okay, you have a bookstore and a pod. You are so dreamy. You're literally, you're like, I don't, I'm shocked that you're something out of a Lifetime movie. The dreamy guy who owns the bookstore but is a podcaster. You're a Lifetime movie.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Well, it's, you know, it's great. Like, I pick my kids up from school and we hang out here. And they help me arrange books on the shelves. And, you know, we walk across the street to eat at the diner. It's a throwback, for sure.

• 14:23Scott Galloway?

  That does sound like a throwback. Sounds like a nice life. Okay, enough of that. Let's bust right into it. So, a lot of your focus over the past decade, and sort of what you're known for, has really been understanding the Stoics and ancient philosophy. And you've recently, you've tried to apply some of those principles to parenting. And you've attempted to encapsulate that in a new book. Can you talk more about that shift?

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Well, let's emphasize on try, because I think there's nothing that tests one's philosophy and certainly one's command of their emotions quite like parenting. But 2016, I wrote this book called The Daily Stoic, which is one page a day of Stoic philosophy. And I really fell in love with that medium. The idea, not just of reading a page a day, but writing like one page or one post a day. Like, I really benefited from returning to the same ideas over and over again, forced to look at them from different angles. And so, a couple of years later, I decided to take a track, a crack at that from a parenting perspective. So, I started this email, The Daily Dad, which is basically Stoic-inspired parenting advice,

• 15:29Speaker 02

  or philosophically-inspired parenting advice. And then, that's what the new book is about. There's something fundamentally wrong with almost all parenting books, which is this idea that you read something once and then you're just good, that you're going to go apply this in your actual life, particularly when you're reading about, you know, challenges that you haven't actually even come close to experiencing yet. And so, I really think there's something about studying or reading about being better at parenting, but doing it as part of a daily practice or a routine.

• 16:05Scott Galloway?

  You wrote that parenting is, open quotes, "psychological." What do you mean by that?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Well, obviously, parenting is a biological thing, or it's a legal thing, right? You have kids and you sign a piece of paper, birth certificate, or you, you know, the adoption papers, and you are a parent. But I think we all fundamentally understand there is something, there's a difference between people who have kids and people who are parents, right? People who actually make that thing a central part of their life. They make changes accordingly. The comedian Tom Segura had this joke I heard recently. He was saying, you know, we go, "Oh, having kids changes you." And he was like, "That's not true." He was saying, "Having kids should change you," right? It doesn't change some people.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Some people have kids living in their house, and that's different than being a parent.

• 17:02Scott Galloway?

  Walk us through some of the basics of how the Stoics, or lessons from the Stoics, have informed your parenting.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Well, the most basic definition of Stoic philosophy is this idea that we don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens, which is obviously how I try to parent, but it's also something I try to teach my children, right? They, you know, my brother hit me. Okay, that happened. That doesn't necessarily follow that you have to hit your brother back, right? So, this idea that we only control ourselves, and that's sort of the central task of one's life, is managing one's own emotions, one's own actions, and then trying to use the situations or circumstances that we find ourselves in, in life,

• 17:53Speaker 02

  to see those as opportunities to grow and change and do things. That, to me, is the central lesson from the Stoics that we're all struggling with as parents. And I think one of the tricky things about parenting is that, at least when they're little, you do have some control over them. And so, I think a lot of parents get hung up on that. We try to make our kids do stuff. We try to exert authority or control over our kids as opposed to focusing on the example that we're setting or the advice that we're giving them. I think we're, we overuse our authority

• 18:34Speaker 02

  and probably underuse our moral authority or our own actions.

• 18:41Scott Galloway?

  I thought of you. I've been seeing this talk on TikTok a lot. I think it's a child psychologist saying that we should think of our role with kids as we're shepherds, not engineers.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:52Scott Galloway?

  And it goes to your notion of focus on what you can control, but give into the notion that a lot you can't control. And this gentleman's basic premise was, you can decide what fields they graze in, what you feed them, point them in a certain direction, but you can't engineer the sheep. The sheep is who the sheep is. And Michelle Obama said this, "Your kids come to you." And if anybody wants to believe in nature over nurture, just have two kids, because you just don't treat them that differently. And the only thing I know about anyone having a second kid is it'll be nothing like the first, even if they're twins. Is it more about how you respond to parenting or how you try and impart certain values on them?

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think ideally, it's more of the latter than the former, that you are showing them that you believe in these things and also that these things work, right? That, hey, here is what a person who is in command of themselves looks like. To me, that's the most powerful thing we can, we can provide our kids. The sort of mantra that I've been thinking about, I talk about in the book, similar to what you're talking about, is this idea that our job is to help our kids become who they are. It's not to make them what we want them to be. The idea being that everyone has a sort of a unique set of DNA and circumstances, and experiences, and likes, and dislikes, and proclivities.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  And our job is to help them become who they are. And I think, you know, when you hear... About things that go wrong. When you think about kids that don't, adult children who don't have time or interest or a relationship with their parents. At the root of that, whether that kid is successful or a struggling drug addict, at the root of that so often is a parent who tried to make them something other than what they wanted to be. There's a line from Harry Truman. He's like, your job is to figure out what your kids want to do and advise them to do it. Right? Your job is not to, like Tiger Woods's father, shape them into being this golf prodigy

• 20:57Speaker 02

  that maybe deep down they resent and dislike and have some kind of loathing for. It's to help them uncover and discover who they are and what they're meant to be and facilitate that as opposed to deciding, you know, like I think about that. Obviously, I read about Tiger Woods many times. I know Tiger Woods's story. And it wasn't until I had a two-year-old that I heard, you know, about the two-year-old, you know, watching his dad hit golf balls in the garage and then, you know, learning to putt at three or whatever. You realize that doesn't happen on its own. That's something that a child is forced into.

• 21:36Scott Galloway?

  I think of some of the best lessons for kids or my experience is that it's sort of indirect learning, that when you try and directly coach them, they have a tendency to put up what are probably healthy screens, especially as you're, how old are your kids, Ryan?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Uh, six and four.

• 21:52Scott Galloway?

  Well, you, so you're not there yet. They're still fascinated by you and listening to you.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Oh, here and there.

• 21:57Scott Galloway?

  Here and there. I find once in about, once they hit about 12, they start observing you, but not listening to you. My thought is like, really valuable time is in the car because they're not looking at you and you can kind of say things or they say things. And it's not like a direct confrontation, if you will, or a direct dialogue. And also I think they really observe how you treat other people, how you treat your partner. Have you thought about your activities and your relationships with your partner? Or the way, you know, you acquit yourself and act around the house and how, how it imparts a certain knowledge or a certain viewpoint on your children?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the things I was writing about in the book is, uh, famous marriage, right? FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. On the surface, it looks like a good, productive, political marriage. And then of their, their four children were married a combined like 19 times. Right? So what did they see at home about how two people relate together? What a marriage is, what it should be? Clearly all the wrong things. And so how do you show them in your relationality to your spouse or your parent or their step parent or whomever the sort of primary relationship is in your home?

• 23:13Speaker 02

  That is where your kids are learning how people get treated and should be treated. That's what, what love looks like, what relationships look like. And so seeing that as the canvas that you are painting or that, that is where you are writing the advice, not in what you tell them about how to teach people or, or go through your life, but how they actually see it day to day. You know, you and your spouse are driving somewhere and you're running late. You know, what does that feel like in the car? Not even what are you saying to each other, but what's the energy? Right? We were just traveling. We just took the whole family to DC. I had a talk I was giving and, and I, I did a lot of thinking about, you know, where does my anxiety and stress come from when I travel?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  It came from the, what was supposed to be fun, quality time trips that I took as a kid that were actually miserable, stressful, tense experiences. At the very least, how can we not ruin this thing for them? And then how do we show them what it should look like?

• 24:18Scott Galloway?

  So you're, how old are you when you had your first kid?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Uh, 29.

• 24:22Scott Galloway?

  So that's young. And I always believe, I mean, at 29, you're more evolved and I think a little bit more present. Uh, when I was 29, I think I was like most 29-year-old men in that I was kind of a boy in man's clothing, if you will, just didn't know much about myself, what I wanted to do. And I'm grateful I didn't have kids then because I was just so all about me. I was so focused on my career. How do you, what advice do you give to other 29-year-olds who maybe don't have economic security, don't have the flexibility? You know, you're managing a lot at 29. You know, you're trying to manage a bookstore, you're trying to build a business. You're, you're at a point right now, Ryan, where you could sort of be that guy who had

• 25:04Scott Galloway?

  one book or you could be a real influence on the world. Right? And my guess is that you would really like to be the latter. And that involves enormous trade-offs and sacrifices. I just don't think you can have it all. And there's just, there's a tension between wanting to achieve what you could achieve professionally, but at the same time, it's going to come at a cost. Your relationships with your partner, your relationship with your kids. Have you thought about managing that tension and where the fulcrum is and decisions you've made?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a, a great quote from Ursula LeQuin. She's saying, you know, it's impossible for one person to do two jobs, which is your career and raising children. But two people can do three jobs. Right? And the idea, I think of partnerships. So I met my wife when I was 19 years old. We didn't get married until we were 27 or 28. We had kids afterwards. But I think it does, it starts with the relationship, right? The, the decision to not just find a person, but to decide to be with that person. Like when people ask me for advice on, on, you know, getting married or finding that person, like I've been with my wife now almost 20 years. And I go, they go, what's the secret? And I say, you know, the secret is not breaking up.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Right? That's the number one secret of being together a long time. It's not breaking up. And I think in a world of dating apps, in a world of potentially limitless options, I think a lot of people aren't willing to do the work that is a long-term, stable, not just a relationship, but partnership. Right? And so I think a lot, and I think a lot of people are worried that being with someone, deciding to be with someone and building a life with someone is going to come at the expense of your career. And there are trade-offs, but you also get a certain amount of stability and strength

• 27:00Speaker 02

  and, uh, support that I feel like when I had my success in my early twenties, if I had been a single dude, if I hadn't been on a track towards buying a house, getting married, having kids, I think I would have spun off the planet. I don't, I don't think social media, dating apps, you know, cheap airfare to anywhere in the world, Airbnb's on the beach. I don't think that would have channeled me towards being a mature, responsible, resilient adult, because it's so easy to run away from everything. It's so easy to live in a fantasy world, to live out of a suitcase or to hop from

• 27:41Speaker 02

  job to job, opportunity to opportunity, concert festival to concert festival. And there is something about, you know, making a decision, putting roots down and being a responsible adult that I think a lot of the things that people want later in life all stem from, but they don't make that decision earlier. And at a certain point, it becomes harder and harder to make that decision.

• 28:06Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I did what you're describing for 20 years and that is arrested adolescence. So in, in your book, you write, "We can find lessons on how to control our temper in front of our kids from Plato." And you have a bunch of them and I want to go through each of them. Tell us about figuring out how to control our temper in front of our kids from Plato.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a story about a young boy who goes to live and study under Plato, who's obviously one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Then after his sort of apprenticeship ends, he goes back home and he's living with his dad and he, he watches his dad lose his temper at a servant or a server or something. And, uh, the boy says, wow, I never saw anyone act like that at Plato's house. And the idea of, you know, the model, uh, that we show our kids obviously is important. But one of the things I try to stop myself, whenever you're out in public, you're at the airport, you're at a restaurant and you watch someone lose their temper at their kids, uh, you know, you watch someone really lose it, you're never like, that's a great look. They are crushing it.

• 29:06Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, well done.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. And then the idea though, is that somehow we look differently when we do that. Right? And so one of the big stoic exercises is just stepping back and going, you know, what does this look like to someone else? What does this look like with even a modicum of distance? And it gives us a little bit of perspective. There's a great quote from Seneca where he says, you know, "Getting angry is like returning a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog." You know, it doesn't make anything, it doesn't teach that animal a lesson. It just makes you look like an animal. And so when I get mad that my toddler is throwing a temper tantrum, I go, but now I'm throwing a temper tantrum in response to the temper tantrum. And what is this teaching them?

• 29:51Speaker 02

  It's that when you're upset, when you don't like what's happening, a temper tantrum is appropriate response.

• 29:57Scott Galloway?

  I'm torn on this one because I can see that raising your kids, being a role model, controlling your emotions is a fantastic, sets a great example for your kids. At the same time, occasionally when I've lost my shit with one of my kids and my partner says, that was an outsized reaction, you shouldn't have had it. I'm like, well, you know what? They're going to face a series of outsized reactions their whole life. They're going to face a series of people in unusual situations who act irrationally.

• 30:27Scott Galloway?

  And I think it's okay. I think that they learn certain skills that occasionally they learn, well, sometimes people have outsized reactions and maybe they even learn, well, it's not about me, that I can survive someone having an outsized reaction to something. At the same time, I think, well, maybe I'm just rationalizing what is irrational behavior on my part. But Jonathan Hyde, my colleague at NYU, talks about the coddling of the American mind, that we spend so much time trying to create this utopia for our kids. We use so many sanitary wipes on their lives that they don't develop their own immunities. Is there something valuable to occasionally having an emotional reaction around your kids and teaching them that, yeah, occasionally people get angry for the wrong reasons and you need to figure out how to deal with it because it's going to happen a lot?

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, especially when they're younger, sometimes that's the only way to convey something serious. And one of the distinctions I make both as a boss and as a parent, I learned from professional basketball, which is sometimes the coach gets a technical on purpose, right? There's a difference between the coach who doesn't have command of themselves and just goes around giving the other team points. That's not a good coach. But sometimes the coach can sense that the team's a little listless, or it can sense that the ref isn't taking them seriously. And, you know, a well deliberate orchestrated technical foul can be exactly what a team or an organization needs. I watched

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Greg Popovich once get thrown out of a game, so an assistant coach would take over, and I watched the team rally in response, right? This is what a seasoned pro knows how to do. So I think there's a difference between losing your shit and making your children think you're losing their shit. You know, there's a difference. But I would also say that sometimes we just, we do lose our temper. Sometimes we mess up. Sometimes the heat of the moment gets the best of us. But how quick are you when you do that, when you go, that was an outsized reaction? How quick are you to talk about that with your kids, right? To go, hey, dad was stressed because he was worried about missing our flight? Or dad was stressed because

• 32:33Speaker 02

  I'm worried about you and you're the most important thing in the world to me, and I felt like I needed you to get this because I don't want anything to happen to you. But I should do better. My son, the other day, my youngest was sort of freaking out in the car, and my oldest goes, I think he's just overstimulated, right? And I liked that so much because what he realized from our language with him was that there's a difference between just, you know, having a bad reaction and understanding why, what's going on around you, what's happening in the world that's contributing to that reaction and having that awareness, that's what allows you to stop, you know, a downward spiral before it gets

• 33:18Speaker 02

  too serious.

• 33:19Scott Galloway?

  So next sort of lesson from one of the great Stoics, lessons on how to cultivate a peaceful home for our kids from Marcus Aurelius.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I think about, like, when I, we've been talking about the airports a lot, right? Like, when I think about the germs that my body is covered in when I get off of a flight, right? Like, the first thing I do now, when I get home, I've been traveling, is I throw all my clothes right in the laundry, right? And I jump in the shower and I change because who knows what I tracked in. And if you ever think about, like, what you're tracking in on the bottom of your shoes when you walk into your house, it's disgusting, right? And I think about, as Stoics talk about the dust of earthly life, and I think about how much detritus and dirt and disgustingness we track into our homes, figuratively, not

• 34:10Speaker 02

  literally, right? Like, you had a shitty day, everything went sideways, everyone was annoying, there was unnecessary traffic, and then you were on Twitter and you got trolled and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you just bring that into your house and you sit it down at the dinner table. And so I think the Stoics talk about how do you, how do you get that sort of reset? How do you wipe the slate clean? How do you take that minute between the transitions? How do you get faster at making transitions? I think this is something we kind of take for granted as people. We think we're good at multitasking. We think we're good at transitions, but we're not. And your kids, they pick up on it, even if

• 34:53Speaker 02

  you don't mention it. They can sense the energy in their house. And I remember what it was like sometimes for my dad to come home. Like, I heard, I heard a good thing. When you heard the garage door opening as a kid, right? You're inside your house and you hear the rumbling of the garage door going up. What was the feeling that you had, right? Was the feeling, yes? Or was the feeling of panic or scramble, or I need to go do X, Y, or Z because I don't want to get dumped on? You know, that's something we really have to work on as, as, as parents.

• 35:32Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it's interesting. It's a mix of, I don't know what it was like for you dad. It was a mix of all that for me. My dad was a huge presence and he came in and it was like, okay, the sheriff's here, right? And I was happy to see him, but it was like, okay, you know, it's like, there was a different standard of behavior. And it just cracks me up because I'm not allowed anywhere near our TV. And when I was growing up, our TV was there for our father. And occasionally, if he wasn't around, I was allowed to access it. But it was just such a different dynamic. I'm older than you, and I imagine, you know, it started to change. But the pivot, the focus of the household has moved from dad being the focus of all the energy and goodwill, you know, we were all sort of in service

• 36:15Scott Galloway?

  of dad to now it's all about the kids, or that's at least how I perceive it. Talk about lessons on how not to spoil our kids from Seneca.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. It is funny, you know, when you, you read these philosophical tracts, and you know, they're always talking about these big things. And then there's this great passage where Seneca's talking about making sure they work for it. He's talking about making sure that you don't reward them when they try to get things by yelling or screaming. And you go, oh, man, 2,000 years ago, this philosopher was dealing with a tyrannical six-year-old, just like I'm dealing with a tyrannical six-year-old. Or they were dealing with a moody teenager, just like I'm dealing with a moody teenager. And it is, it is, I think, important and humbling to remember that people have been doing this and struggling

• 37:11Speaker 02

  with this for a very long time. One of the things I talk about in the intro of the book that I think about all the time is they, they discovered these footprints in White Sands National Park. And it's the footprints of a parent and a child. And the footprints are side by side, and then the kid's footprints go away for, you know, a couple hundred yards, and then they happen again, and they go away, and they happen again. And it just, it makes me think of the walk that I took with my kid this morning, you know? He was good walking, and then he would go, I'm tired of walking. And I'd have to pick him up. Then he'd be like, wait, no, I want to walk again. And just realizing that this has been the journey for a really long time. And this tension between, you know, giving our kids what they

• 37:54Speaker 02

  need, giving our kids what makes them happy, you know, and the tension between making them self-reliant and also spoiling them. That this has always kind of been a tension, particularly the more well-off one is, right? When I was a kid, there was a bunch of things that I couldn't have because my parents couldn't afford them, right? That it wasn't in the budget. Most of those things are things that I don't have to worry about today. And so the question is, you know, when my kid asks for them, when he asks for a new mod on Minecraft, the fact that it costs $5, you know, it means nothing to me. But then there's this debate about, do you just give them everything they want whenever they want it? What does that

• 38:38Speaker 02

  mean, right? And I think the tension between can and should is the, the, the struggle of sort of parenting in times of abundance.

• 38:51Scott Galloway?

  And then the last one here, lessons on how to support our kids from Queen Elizabeth.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Yes. It would have been really hard to have your mom be the Queen of England, right? And there's this, there is a great story. Early on, you know, she meets, I think, every Thursday with the Prime Minister. So she has a standing meeting with Winston Churchill. The meeting, historically, for her father is always at like 6:30 PM. And I love the story of Queen Elizabeth having to decide to push the meeting with Winston Churchill because she wanted to be there for bedtime with her kids every night. The idea that matters of state and the state of your family being in tension with each other, I thought, I thought was so fascinating. So I tell that story in the book. But, you know, she, she

• 39:39Speaker 02

  struggles, I think, and her children are an example of a struggle, when one has a calling and a profession and a strong sense of duty, and then the conflicting responsibility and duties that we have to our children. There's another story where she had been gone, she'd taken like a six-month tour abroad. And she gets home, she meets her kids on the royal, royal yacht. They're about the age of my kids. They run towards her, mommy, mommy, mommy. And she stops them. And she goes, no, no, no, not you, dear. I have to follow protocol. And it's actually in, I think, Prince Charles's first memoir, the title of one of the chapters

• 40:22Speaker 02

  is not you, dear. And his struggle with, you know, what it means to have a parent who puts basically everything before their children.

• 40:32Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 40:36Scott Galloway?

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• 41:19Scott Galloway?

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• 41:44Speaker 03

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• 42:14Scott Galloway?

  So I want to ask you about your approach to some issues around parenting and if and how Stoicism has influenced your approach. And I want you, I want to let you off the hook a little bit here, and that is my general observation after having read a few parenting books is nobody has any fucking idea. I mean, you can read a book that says from a very thoughtful person on how the key to creativity is to give them absolutely no boundaries and let them pretty much do whatever they want from a very young age to another thoughtful book saying that the key to secure children is that they have boundaries so they feel more secure and loved. I just, it feels like every bestseller, the first thing it does is contradict the, the kind of the book, the parenting book of the year before that. We talked a little bit about, you know, can versus should.

• 42:59Scott Galloway?

  How do you instill a sense of grit? Or, you know, even basics like connect money with effort or effort with good outcomes when we, you know, once you're above a certain income level, you do grow up in a household of abundance or super abundance as it relates to the kid. A kid doesn't want a Range Rover. They want, as you said, and you know, more skins or a new weapon on Fortnite, which most people can afford. Have you thought about how you're going to try and instill that sense of grit?

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the lines I take from Seneca in the book is that your kid's life should be good, but not easy. Right? The idea that from struggle, we become what we're capable of becoming. So for some kids, that struggle is going to be quite basic, right? Struggle to eat, struggle to get to school, struggle to stay warm in the winter. Gratefully, those are problems that we don't have at my house. But how do I make sure that their life isn't one filled of repose and ease? And, and one of the ways we do that is, is by challenging ourselves, right? We go for this hard walk every morning. We, we try to climb, you know, trees and play sports.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  And I try to push them in ways that gets them out of that comfort zone, that challenges them. There's a story about Theodore Roosevelt. He would take his kids on these walks every morning. And whenever he saw an obstacle, that's what he would go towards. So they have to climb over these rocks or walk through this freezing cold creek. I think thinking about ways that we challenge our kids is how we make them resilient. What is actually important? I don't think it's abstaining from all luxuries or nice things. I think it's making sure that on a regular basis, we are forced out of our comfort zone and forced to learn and adapt and figure things out.

• 44:53Scott Galloway?

  Talk to me a little bit about punishment.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. The best line I, I heard that I, I think about is that punishment should make them better. So my son does Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and another kid slapped a kid yesterday in, in practice. And the coach made him do wall sits, right? He had to sit until basically his legs hurt against the wall. And I think about that as being a punish, instead of kicking the kid out of class, right? For doing something he wasn't supposed to do, he had to go do a thing that made him physically stronger. If we can think about punishments less as, you know, getting a pound of flesh and more

• 45:37Speaker 02

  about teaching them something or making them get better at something, we're probably closer to the path that we want to be on, which again, to go to your point about contradictions, that's not to say that I've never taken away the iPad because someone was doing something they weren't supposed to be doing. And I, I make no pretensions about being perfect at any of these things or about being totally consistent about these things. I think you're right. The idea that there is a consistent, clear, coherent parenting strategy is probably to miss the point. I would argue that this book is riddled with contradictions because life is riddled with contradictions and paradoxes.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  And the whole point is to find what you're supposed to do in this specific situation, which is sometimes the opposite of what you did or needed to do in a very similar situation just a few weeks ago.

• 46:33Scott Galloway?

  And your book offers 366 lessons. What do you hope people take away?

• 46:40Scott Galloway?

  What is the sensation? I was, when I write books, I was saying, I want someone to walk away with a certain emotion or a certain sensation. What, what do you want, what do you want parents to walk away from after reading this book?

• 46:50Speaker 02

  The, the idea to me in the page a day format is that it's about the process even more than the content that's in the pages. So the idea of I have this book, I crack it open in the morning. It gives me something to think about. Maybe I agree with today's lesson. Maybe I disagree with today's lesson. Maybe that lesson is easy for me, or maybe it's totally outside the box for me. But the idea is how are we invested in always learning and growing as parents and understanding that we're going to be different people because, and you're in the book because you and I had a great conversation about this. We're going to have totally different kids five or six years from now.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  We're in this constant process of losing the child that we have now because they are becoming a different person. And, and hopefully we are becoming different people as, as time passes as well.

• 47:47Scott Galloway?

  So last question, you've been generous with your time. Love, establishing a more intimate connection with your partner or your kids. What can we glean from the Stoics about what every book on happiness tells you that the, the key, the whole shooting match is the number of people who love you and let you love them? What, how has this informed your ability to establish deep and meaningful relationships with people?

• 48:10Speaker 02

  It's really a shame that the stereotype of the Stoic is the unfeeling, emotionless, you know, robot, the beast, the beast of burden, simply enduring the misery of a dark, terrible world. Because I, in practice, I don't think there was anything further from the truth. There's, there's a passage in the opening of meditations. Marcus really is thanking all the people who have influenced in his life. For paragraphs, he stepped, he thanks his stepfather, Antoninus, who clearly shapes him into the man he is. He thinks his mother, he thinks his stepbrother, you know, he thanks all these people, but he thanks Sextus the philosopher for this really key lesson that, that I think about

• 48:54Speaker 02

  all the time because it so goes against the type of what we think a Stoic is. He says, "From Sextus the philosopher, I learned to be free of passion, but full of love." So he's saying free of envy and anger and jealousy and ambition and, you know, all the, the passions that we call them, those sort of swirling, negative, toxic, competitive, you know, zero sum emotions, if you will. And what, what he feels instead is, is a compassion, a love, an affinity for, an acceptance of, a gratitude for all people and all things.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  And I think that's the attitude that I try to have. I'm not perfect in it, but that's what we try to have. And, and from Marcus's example, you know, this idea of, of starting with gratitude. I have this journal and every morning I just, I try to write something that I'm grateful for, but the exercise, the thing I try to write, I never try to go, I'm grateful for my kids, I'm grateful for my health. I try to think of something frustrating or annoying or something that went wrong or something that on, at first glance I didn't like. And I, I try to will myself to be grateful and feel love for that thing. So it's not just this magical state you arrive at.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  I think it's something you work at, but I think the idea for the Stoics is to be free of the negative emotions and to replace those emotions with a kind of unconditional and all consuming love for everyone and everything.

• 50:35Scott Galloway?

  Ryan Holiday has written 12 books in 10 years, including his latest, The Daily Dad, 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids. Ryan also writes two daily emails and hosts a daily podcast. His books, The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, and the number one New York Times bestseller, Stillness is the Key, have sold more than 5 million copies in the U.S. He joins us from his home just outside of Austin, Texas. Ryan, I, I'm just so impressed with you and what you've accomplished and I'm, I think you're bringing wonderful things to the world and I wish you success, not just for, because I, I'm fond of you, but I think what you have to say is really important.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Well, thank you very much. I'm, I'm a huge fan as well.

• 51:30Scott Galloway?

  Algebra of happiness. It's not about you. I have noticed lately I'm being more of an asshole than I usually am. I'm being shorter with people. I'm being harder on the people I work with, the people in my life. And the first step to fixing that is recognizing it's happening. And I've done that. And the next step is trying, well, what's going on with me? Why am I depressed or angry? And, and I haven't figured that one out yet. But the thing that strikes me is that when you're young and people get upset or criticize your work or whatever it might be, you take it so seriously and it's so rattling.

• 52:13Scott Galloway?

  And then what you realize as you get older is that people's behavior towards you is not only a function of you, but it's mostly a function of them. What do I mean by that? It's mostly a function of what's going on in their life, whether they had lunch, whether they're stressed out. It's not a reflection on you. Some of it is, but it's mostly about what's going on with that person at that time. So when someone is not as kind, when someone is rude, when someone says something that upsets you, keep in mind that yeah, maybe some of it is about you. Maybe your work wasn't very good. Maybe they genuinely don't like you or where, or what you said offended them. But keep in mind, a lot of times, a lot of times it's about them.

• 52:58Scott Galloway?

  And take it with a grain of salt. And you don't have to respond to everything. You don't have to be upset. It's not always about you and your performance. It's about something that's going on with them. And so break it down, be thoughtful about it, appreciate it, register it, ask yourself, what was the veracity of this statement? You know, can I learn from it? And then quite frankly, move on, move on and forgive yourself and recognize, recognize in most situations, it's not about you.

• 53:31Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Caroline Shageran. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly markets show.

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