Author Robert Wright on Buddhism vs Stoicism

Ryan speaks to the author and journalist Robert Wright about the Stoic obligation to being involved in politics, staying creative while controlling your own destiny, the temptations and distractions of social media, and more. Robert Wright is an author and journalist who has written five books including The Moral Animal and Why Buddhism Is True. He has also written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. His weekly newsletter Mindful Resistance is sent out every Saturday. This episode is brought to you by Box of Awesome from Bespoke Post. They have a huge number of collections no matter what you’re into: the great outdoors, style, cooking, mixology, and more. To get started, you just take a quiz at boxofawesome.com your answers help them pick the right Box of Awesome for you. Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code STOIC at checkout. This episode is also brought to you by Scribd, the e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd uses the latest technology with the smartest people to recommend you content that you’re going to love. We’re offering listeners of The Daily Stoic a free 60 day trial. Go to try.scribd.com/stoic for your free trial. That’s try.scribd.com/stoic to get 60 days of Scribd for free. This episode is also brought to you by stamps.com, a secure Internet mailing solution to print postage using your computer. Stamps.com allows you to mail and ship anytime, anywhere right from your computer. Send letters, ship packages, and pay a lot less with discounted rates from USPS, UPS, and more. There’s NO risk. Use the promo code, STOIC, to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Robert Wright:Homepage: http://robertwright.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/robertwrighterYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MeaningoflifeTv 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 Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom, designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:25Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you would ask me 15 years ago, would I be doing a podcast with today's guest? I probably would have said, "What's a podcast?" But I would have been very excited, because this book, The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, was a total quake book, game changer for me. It introduced me to the concepts of evolutionary psychology and so much more. I didn't know that many years later, he'd write another favorite book of mine, Why Buddhism is True. Robert has been a longtime influence of me. I think a modern philosopher and political thinker of great value.

• 1:08Ryan Holiday?

  He also has a newsletter that I strongly recommend. It's one of the few that I get every day called Mindful Resistance. You can check that out, mindfulresistance.net. The idea being that, and this is a very Stoic idea, we have to be politically engaged. We have to be civically involved. But how do we do that rationally? How do we do it courageously? But also, how do we do it without making ourselves miserable and unhappy, and giving into despair? So I don't think, we don't get particularly political in today's episode. We do talk about the idea of being involved in politics, which of course is essential to the Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca most of all. And we talk about being a creative, controlling your own destiny, and the temptations and the distractions of social media.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  I loved this interview almost as much as the book. It was weird preparing for this interview. You know, here's like, I even have these little flags here. Here's some highlighted passages. Here's an arrow, note I made to myself. It was like having a quick, as I prepared... Prepared for the interview, having like a quick little conversation with myself 15 years ago, which felt surreal and I feel lucky to be in this position. Feel lucky that you guys are listening. Enjoy this interview with the great Robert Wright. Check out mindfulresistance.net and you can follow him on Twitter at at Robert Rhyter, W R I G H T E R, and enjoy.

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  I wanted to start this by going way back. This is my, this is my copy of The Moral Animal, which I bought in 2005.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Wow, that looks, it looks as if someone's actually read that.

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  It, it, look, I'm gonna go through, not only am I gonna go through it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick some sections that I highlighted 15 years ago. Because as I was going back through it to prepare for this interview, something, I found a passage that I think, one might think, what does the, the ideas in The Moral Animal, which is, which is my favorite book of yours, connect to your work on Buddhism? But I thought, I thought this passage ties to something I just had someone on the podcast talking about. You say, "We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. Of course, we're designed to pursue happiness and the attainment of Darwinian goals, sex, status, and so on, often brings happiness, at least for a while.

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it and thus makes us productive. Darwin's heightened fear of criticism kept him almost chronically distanced from serenity and therefore kept him busy trying to reach it."

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of the problem that Buddhism highlights, I, I, I think, which is that we always want more. We always want things to be a little better than they are. I mean, you know, gratification happens and, and that's part of, of the, the, the engineering of natural selection is that we do feel good upon attaining goals. It's just that the gratification is designed to evaporate so that we will keep pursuing goals.

• 4:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was, I was, I've used this example of someone like Elon Musk. If Elon Musk was happy at PayPal, that would be good for Elon Musk, but probably bad, both for capitalism and for the world. So that the system, it's almost as if we've designed the perfect system to optimize for achievement and accomplishment, and the exact opposite of the system that you would want for human happiness or contentment.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Pretty much. I mean, I guess the exact opposite would be for us to always be depressed and or anxious, and it's not quite that bad.

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  We do, we do, you know, we do get these little rewards doled out to us. But it's true that I think people of high achievement very often are people for whom the gratification is particularly fleeting. And so, you know, that's kind of bad news for them in a way. And I guess, you know, often good news for the rest of us, depending on what you think of Elon Musk and, you know, and his tweets and the whole package. But anyway, I'll, I let's stipulate that Elon Musk is good for the world for purposes of this analysis. Yeah, now, there are people who seem pretty happy and say they're pretty happy and get a lot done.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  But I don't know. I don't know, what drives you? Why do you keep doing stuff?

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's, it's, if you and I were happy just putting out one book, what would we have done after that? Life would have been empty in some ways. Life would have been different in some ways. I guess, I guess the, the place to get to, and I'm not sure if it's possible, but I think it's worth striving for, is can you get to a place, and this is, I think, both Buddhist and Stoic, where you're You're driven, but not by the external rewards. So you're, you actually enjoy whatever it is, the thing that you're doing. So if Elon Musk is, and this, this example falls apart, I'm sure. But if he's actually just enjoying the process of starting companies and making a difference and so on and so forth.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  It, that's different than the, the NFL player who's motivated by the trophy. You know, do you actually enjoy showing up every day in the practice and the game and the strategy? And it doesn't come at the cost of other things. That's philosophically a better place to come from.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, I think, um, to get back to Buddhism a little, I think one idea behind mindfulness meditation is it helps you get better at experiencing and enjoying, you know, the, the, the day to day just journey as opposed to only the destination. On the other hand, it does sometimes lead people to reduce their level of achievement as contemporary, as conventionally measured. And, um, which is fine. I mean, it, it, it's up to them. I would personally ideally like to have it both ways. And, and that's the trick.

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I, I would like to have it both ways too. And I, sometimes I question myself, like, am I, i- is it actually more, is it a sign of enlightenment or philosophical progress? That say you are less motivated by the external rewards of a book? Like you say, hey, I don't care how many copies this book sells. I don't care whether it hits the bestsellers. Is that enlightenment? Or is that fear or laziness masquerading as enlightenment? That's a question that I often ask myself.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think on the one hand, the, you know, the hypothetical kind of enlightened person by the lights of Buddhism, um, would not particularly care. But at the same time, I'm sure there, there are a lot of people who manage to not care or convince themselves that they don't care and are not enlightened. Um, you know? It's such a challenge because so many of the rewards offered by the world are not worth paying attention to. I mean, you see this on social media, you know, it's like, if you look like these days in a highly polarized society, what does it take to get a lot of Twitter followers? You know, it takes making the problem worse. That's what you get rewarded

• 8:44Speaker 01

  for is making the tribalism problem worse. That's the easiest thing, the easiest way to pick up followers. So I encourage people not to not to obsess with conventional rewards, I guess.

• 8:59Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I want to talk about politics towards the end, but I think that that is an interesting point, which is like, I think you and I both know people who maybe a few years ago, they were in a similar place than us, you know, sort of in the hierarchy of author, intellectual, whatever, who really decided to get into the political social media game. And they've been rewarded. They have a lot of followers, maybe they get in the news a lot. But you I've also seen how it's transformed them as a human being. It's almost turned them into a machine that does nothing but tweet. When you when you look and you go, my God, did that person tweet 78 times today? And then you think about how impossible it would have been to do any other work while doing that, or to be present

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  with their family. You think about how much news they would have had to watch to to generate these hot takes. So it's not just, you know, is the accomplishment worth the reward, but also is the accomplishment worth the cost and the the transformation that one has to undergo to get it?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's tough. We, you know, I mean, one thing we're built to like is social affirmation. I mean, as much as any other single thing. And, you know, especially during a pandemic, you go online to get it. And what are the forms of social affirmation available online? Not all of them are healthy, you know. So we can blame the circumstance for some of that, I guess.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  But I do think, I mean, again, I think mindfulness i- is a good tool to try to bring to social media, try to pay attention to the way you're reacting to tweets and things and, and, and if you're tempted to retweet something, ask yourself why you are. I mean, and, and, and that, that question, you know, the answer to that can be informed by just paying attention to what's going on in your body, when you're, as you're experiencing the thing.

• 11:03Ryan Holiday?

  Well, this is a little bit Epicurean, and I tend to think that Epicurus sits right in the middle between the Stoics and the Buddhists on the, on the spectrum of philosophy. But he says, "Ask yourself, what will you feel after you get the pleasure?" So, you know, you're lusting after something. He goes, "What will it feel like right after the orgasm?" Right? Which I think is, so evolutionarily, all evolution needs you to get to is that thing. Evolution doesn't need to have an answer after, because you've already done it and you can't take it back. And so there's this, what the mind can do is sort of rise above some of these desires and go, "I'm going to put out this retweet." And there's a part of me that's telling myself, "It will feel good. I'll be rewarded for doing it." But how typically do I feel after I retweet something

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  or tweet whatever pops into my head? Usually you feel disappointment, or self-loathing, or frustration. You feel some non-positive emotion, and that's what makes you do it again and again for some insane reason.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the disappointment always comes sooner or later. If nobody retweets it, it's immediately disappointing. And if there's a flood of retweets, there's still that moment where they quit coming. You know, you, you just kind of can't win. And, and it's, it's so easy, I don't know, maybe I'm, uh, maybe I'm atypical and most people are better than this. It's, it's, it's easy if you're not careful to really spend a lot of time monitoring the feedback in real time. I mean, I've, I've started to make a point of kind of like, if I don't, I haven't been tweeting that often, but like I tweeted something this morning that was kind of critical of the way the Wall Street Journal presented a vaccination story, and I just made a point of

• 12:41Speaker 01

  putting my computer in airplane mode after that. So, so I just wouldn't, wouldn't be aware of the, the short-term reaction.

• 12:48Ryan Holiday?

  Which is, in a way, one of the healthiest things. I think it's almost like being an author is the most healthy way to produce stuff, because there's no immediate gratification. It's not instantaneous. And you don't really have a relationship with the people who buy the stuff, because there's so many intermediaries. It's almost the most psychologically sound way to be a content creator.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. I hadn't really quite thought of this before, but I used to think of myself as ideally suited for my career. Because I would write books. And I, you know, I'm an introvert. I don't need a lot of social interaction. I'm fine with being alone and thinking. And I think I was well-suited to writing books. But then modernity arrived. I mean, if you define modernity as the post-internet age, and increasingly, part of being a journalist, a writer, of just kind of in the game, is being on social media. And in fact, you know, it used to be that back in the golden era of physical magazines,

• 13:57Speaker 01

  people would, whether they were paying you to write a piece or actually hiring you to be on staff, the understanding was your job is to produce the content, then you can go home. Our job is to promote it. We bring the audience, you produce the stuff. And now you're actually expected to do both. It's a full-time job. And that second part of it, promotion, I am not well-suited to, and I don't enjoy.

• 14:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I have two more passages I want to read from The Moral Animal. And I want to get credit, again, for a 15-year-old highlight.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Nothing brings more joy to my heart, however fleeting it may be, as we've just discussed, than to see the yellow highlight marker having been applied to a book I wrote.

• 14:37Ryan Holiday?

  So this, again, feels rather philosophical. Darwin wrote in his autobiography of a habit he called "the golden rule", "to immediately write down any observation that seemed inconsistent with his theories." Quote, "For I had, found by experience, that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones." And then you say, "Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth."

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Darwin was aware of confirmation bias before we called it confirmation bias, apparently. And yeah, I mean, a big, a big theme of that book is that the human mind is unreliable as, as a guide to reality. It, it is in some ways just our lawyer, you know, wants to make the case for our interests and it, and it, and, and it does that most effectively if, if we're not aware of all the evidence against the claim that we should have whatever, whatever it is we'd like to have. You know, I mean, the, the, the generic point here is that natural selection did not design the human mind to see the world

• 15:49Speaker 01

  clearly per se. You know, I mean, it, it designed the, the mind to have the kinds of thoughts and perceptions that were conducive to getting genes transmitted. Now, often that does involve seeing the world clearly. It's like, it's not good for your genes to walk off a ledge, right? It, it, but even there in the realm of kind of everyday safety, you see how the mind can be designed to depart from a strictly accurate view of the world. So people tend to overestimate the speed of approaching objects. Okay. So they're, they're, they're actually in error, but you can see why the mind would build in that bias. It's better to get out of the way too soon than, than too late. Sure.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  But there, there are lots of ways in which we see the world clearly. It's just that, and I think psychology has, has become more and more aware of this lately. I mean, there, you know, more and more people have heard about, you know, cognitive, cognitive biases. And, you know, those are, those are built in for a reason. And you need to be conscious of them to try to prevail over them.

• 17:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was, I was thinking, you know, that this sort of philosophers, they, they, they love this idea of rationality. And then what I think psychology has, has shown us in evolutionary psychology is just how profoundly not our friend our brain is. And to me, nothing illustrates this more than, than cognitive dissonance, right? So it's like you have a belief, then the world shows you truth, right? Like you have a hypothesis, the, you have a belief, whether it's that the world is going to end because that's what your cult says, or you know, that, you know, the, that, that Donald Trump and QAnon theory is going to be this, this or this on this date at this time. So you have some idea. And then the world shows

• 17:43Ryan Holiday?

  you truth. If your brain was your friend, it would accept truth as it is presented. But in fact, your brain does the exact opposite when shown a truth that threatens your identity. It, it actually doubles you down on the false belief, which is a pretty, to me, incredible illustration of just how at odds we are with our own thoughts day to day.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Right. Although, you know, it depends on what you mean by the brain being your friend. If, if your brain was going to be your friend in the sense of telling you the truth, you're, you're, you're right. It would be impervious to these biases. And, and if you had, had a belief that, that on November 3rd, Donald Trump was going to win an election, and that was going to enable him to root out a bunch of Satan worshiping pedophiles in the, in the government, you would abandon that belief if he lost the election. That's all true. At the same time, if, if what you want is to be like, part of a group.

• 18:42Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  And get the affirmation from that. And if being your friend is keeping you, you know, sustaining that social dimension for you, then in the short run, at least, your brain is being your quote friend by keeping you on the same wavelength as the tribe of yours that is continuing to believe in the, the, the false narrative you believed in. And, and again, it gets back to the fact that during evolution, having a social group, having its esteem was correlated with getting genes into the next generation. It may not be now, but that, that doesn't, that doesn't matter.

• 19:21Ryan Holiday?

  Right, no, it's your brain is your friend in the, in the sense of you ask your friend, "Hey, have I been putting on weight?" Or, "How do I look?" And they tell you, "You look amazing. What are you talking about?" It's the friend that lies to you.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Your, your brain is that kind of friend, yes. And that can hurt you in, in, in the long run. Yeah.

• 19:42Ryan Holiday?

  Because you shut a truth up. Eventually, it does, you know, you're, you're really just deferring it with interest, is the way I think about it.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Often, often. But, you know, there, there are people who, who, who die while the, you know, the, still a lot, they're, they're ahead. I mean, you know, it, it's, I mean, it would be easy to say, it would, it would, it would be nice for me to believe that in the long run, clarity of vision is always rewarded. But there are people who are, you know, deeply immersed in, in false narratives and good at purveying them. And in a certain sense, it works out for them their whole lives. And, and that's a sad fact.

• 20:29Ryan Holiday?

  All right. So this is my last, my last section. And to me, this seems like the most prescient passage of the whole book. You say, "This Darwinian brand of cynicism doesn't exactly fill a gaping cultural void. Already, already various avant-garde academics, deconstructionist literary theorists and anthropologists, adherents of critical legal studies, are viewing human communications as discourses of power. Already, many people believe what the new Darwinian underscores: that in human affairs, all, or at least much, is artifice, a self-serving manipulation of image. And already, this belief helps nourish a central stand of the postmodern condition: a powerful inability to take things seriously."

• 21:12Ryan Holiday?

  You're sort of arguing it on the, the other way, like, there, there's this sort of postmodernism that's sort of making everything ironic, and, and that there's sort of nihilism in that. I would argue, we've kind of swung the other direction, where we have a nihilism where everything's awful, everyone's evil, you know, it, it's almost an exaggeration of all the evils and, and problems of history, to the point where it's sort of like, what's the point of waking up in the morning?

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I hadn't thought before this moment of the irony that a lot of evolutionary psychologists...

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Are super down on the kind of culture warrior, social justice warrior, cancel culture deplatformers, kind of, because they, the criticism of these people, and of course, these are, these are academics who, I mean, I've taught a little at the college level, but it's not what I do. These are people who are at college, and so they are like tormented by these people. It's understandable.

• 22:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  They're antagonistic toward them. But, but I just, only just now appreciated the irony that these, and I know these, these evolutionary psychologists, I remember back in the 1990s, talking to them at these, these conferences on evolution and human behavior, and we did share the kind of worldview you've just described, which is that, in a certain sense, you know, human communication is about power. Powerful people sometimes manage to have their narratives prevail, and, and, and so on. And so, so that, that is a fact, but you're right, that, that idea has been taken so far, in some circles,

• 22:55Speaker 01

  that, you know, it's been taken farther than these evolutionary psychologists think is, is appropriate, even on intellectual grounds. And it's also been taken far in a way that, that they have found, kind of unfortunate, in their, in their everyday lives as academics. So there is that irony. But, but anyway, I think, I certainly believe there's such a thing as taking this too far. And, and, and especially if you go so far as to quit taking seriously the idea that there is such thing as the objective truth about things. And I'm not saying we can ever be sure we've got the objective truth about things, or it's, or it's realistic to think we can get there very often. But I do think that's a good

• 23:37Speaker 01

  ideal to, to keep in mind, and we can do things that get us closer to it.

• 23:43Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 23:49Ryan Holiday?

  You almost look at some of these academics and it's like they've almost been sort of paralyzed by their own analysis and their own explanations. Like I was, this is the scandal of the day. And who know, I think we're always taking these things much to be much bigger deal than they actually are. But you know, San Francisco, as always, is supposedly renaming a bunch of schools or suggesting they rename some schools, whether it's Abraham Lincoln or whomever. But but at one part stood out to me where it was like they were, they were changing the name of an art department at a, at a school because it was an acronym. And acronyms themselves are apparently symbols or parts of white supremacist culture. And so what struck me

• 24:34Ryan Holiday?

  about that is not, is not whether it's true or not, because it's like, obviously not true. But it just struck me as like, I almost felt some, some semblance of pity for the person who would make that argument, because I think they're actually making it in good faith. But just imagine if your mind has, is so, it's like when, when all you have is a hammer, all you see are nails. Like, imagine a mind that's so looking for something that it sees it in an acronym, and then it cancels out the ability for acronyms to exist. I mean, it's almost as if you're shutting doors until there's no doors left and you're just trapped in a dark, empty, meaningless room.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny, my brother actually graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco, which is no longer going to be called George Washington. And I went, I went to junior high about a block from there. But um, so I was definitely keeping tabs on this story. And as you suggest, the more surprising thing is Abraham Lincoln.

• 25:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  And that name is not even surviving in San Francisco, which, well, my whole view on this is, is maybe not worth getting into. I do think, my own tendency is, first of all, to try to judge people in the context of their time, because I know this is a tangent, but, but the reason.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  The reason I think you have to is because I think there has been moral progress over time as a pattern. And as a result of the moral progress, the further back you go, the less likely it is you're going to find anybody worthy of approval because things, you know, things have progressed. And by the same token, if you can judge people that way, you should recognize that, that if God willing, moral progress continues, we will all someday be judged as unmentionable on whatever grounds, maybe because we've eaten meat, most of us have it one time and another, whatever. So that's a tangent, but you were, you were talking about the whole, I mean, I do have

• 26:37Speaker 01

  a reflex that may bother you a little, which is that I, I always look, when I see things like that, that seem crazy to me, that people in some other tribe are doing, I do look for things that my own tribe is doing that are at some level comparable. And I think usually you can find those. I mean, the generic, part of the generic problem is that, again, it gets back to the mind not being designed to apprehend the truth necessarily. I think we are all inclined to, if we say something and it gets us more social affirmation, we say it again. Right.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  And we say that, and we repeat the kind of thing that was. So for example, you know, during the whole Trump era, I identified on the one hand with the anti-Trump tribe, but I thought that the resistance was not really behaving, the resistance I was nominally part of was not behaving all that wisely. Sure. And you would see the same kind of thing where people would start saying, you know, Trump is a Russian stooge, he's a Putin puppet. And they would get retweeted for that. So they would just say it more and more and more. And I'd be like, you know, it's possible to find a smoking gun, but I haven't seen one yet. And then you get to the end of the Mueller report and there's no, there's no smoking gun. I'm not saying there couldn't be a connection, but it, one was never found. And so that became kind of a tactical set.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Back for the resistance, a source of huge unhappiness. And I know that the example you gave me of people saying acronyms are evil because, you know, I've seen whatever it is, I've seen white males use them or some, I don't know what the logic is, but, but um, as crazy as that sounds, it is, I do think it's a species of this one thing that, you know, people like if people nod when you say something, you say it again and you say it more intensely and we all have to be on guard against uh, taking social affirmation as our guide.

• 28:36Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's, I think what they're doing is they're taking a logic that's worked in some contexts and just inexorably applying it to every situation until eventually you get to such a laughable extreme. But you don't even realize that you're way off the reservation at this point.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Well, because the social affirmation is coming from your own tribe. I mean, it may also be that you're having success with respect to like the establishment you're trying to tear down. Because they do agree to rename this and this and this, but um, but the main thing is that until your own tribe quits giving you the social affirmation, that's why these things can can go on so long.

• 29:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And this is where, and I've seen this a number, I have actually more friends who have been sort of radicalized on the right than on the left. And I've watched, you know, I knew a number of people who who are sort of in the dating community. So they were already a little bit politically incorrect, right? And then, and then as as we started to-

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Wait a second, this is news to me. Is it politically incorrect to be in the dating community?

• 29:39Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, like in the dating coach community, let's say it to be like the pickup artists and such.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  The kind of player community, yeah.

• 29:46Ryan Holiday?

  So so they're already a little bit politically incorrect. So then as society becomes more politically correct, even though they haven't changed, their position is now more extreme. So then the incentives are, do you disavow who you were to try to be part of the the mainstream group, the politically correct group? Or does it push you more towards the extremes? And so I think it's even interesting when you look at some of the the figures or the the right wing celebrities involved in the insurrection of January 6th, they were not- Even four years ago, as politically radical as they are now, it's that they were pushed, they were marginalized more and more and more. And then the incentive said, "Well, I have no

• 30:31Ryan Holiday?

  chance of resonating over here. If I put out a tweet, there's no chance of normal people liking it. I actually have to go more and more and more extreme." So I think this is, this has happened on both ends of the political spectrum, which is that the incentives of social media, the incentives of your tribe, drive you to be more and more extreme until you're almost unrecognizable from your former self.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, this has been kind of a hobby horse of mine. I mean, I did have this during much of the Trump era, I had this newsletter called Mindful Resistance. It's been renamed the Non-Zero Newsletter, but the idea behind the original name was that we, the resistance, should be mindful, you know, for one thing, in the everyday sense of the word, of just being aware of the consequences of what you're doing. And the more you single people out from the Trump tribe for ridicule, and act as if they are typical of all Trump supporters, the more Trump supporters are going to just kind of buckle down and, as you suggest, identify more intensely with their

• 31:40Speaker 01

  tribe, look more to their tribe for affirmation, and hate our tribe more. And so I think we, my side, you know, bears a certain amount of the blame.

• 31:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I like the concept of mindful resistance. I want to talk about newsletters, too, but because I think mindful resistance is a great concept, whatever it is that you're resisting. So let's, let's take, let's lowercase resistance and just mean resistance to anything, not a specific political resistance. There's that Nietzsche quote where he says, you know, "Be careful when you fight monsters that you don't become a monster yourself." I think you've seen a number of people, regardless of whatever it is they're campaigning against, or wherever they are politically, or socially, or philosophically, it's like, once you pick a side, then your inherent reflexive resistance to the other side can actually make you more and more extreme as you go. And so you need the ability to sort of step back. There's a-

• 32:38Ryan Holiday?

  There's a story I tell in my book Lives of the Stoics. This, there was a Stoic philosopher named Diotymus. And, and the Epicureans and the Stoics were rivals, you know, sort of opposite schools. And, and he's under the impression that the Epicureans are repeatedly libeling and slandering the Stoics. And there, there was supposedly this very aggressive school of, or head of the, of the Epicurean school at the time. So what is, what does Diotymus do? He ends up writing these fake letters as if they were written by Epicurus that, that he puts out into the world where, and they become so popular that, that they really cement Epicurus' reputation as being a hedonist.

• 33:22Ryan Holiday?

  So it's totally untrue. But ironically, it's him committing the exact crime that he is accusing the other school of being guilty of, right? And so there's this, there's this temptation we have where if you're not mindful of your resistance, or your opposition, or your competitiveness, you can really end up becoming the thing that you hate.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, like, again, I mean, right now, a lot of people are accusing Trump supporters of being conspiracy theorists. Some certainly are. But the Trump supporters turn around and say, well, you, you guys had this conspiracy about Russia, which just wasn't totally borne out, you know? It's, I, you know, it's hard to do, but I always encourage people whenever they're annoyed by something the other tribe is doing, to just try, as an intellectual exercise, to find examples of it in your own tribe and even in your own life.

• 34:17Ryan Holiday?

  So before we go back to the newsletter, I, I am curious about this difficult balance of being sort of philosophical and political. Because it, it might seem like the best way, the, the most Buddhist thing you could do would be to tune out politics entirely, right? To sort of, to, to focus inwardly, again, as the Epicureans did, right? The Epicureans said, we're going to retreat to our little garden, we're going to focus on our little pleasures, and we're not going to be sullied and distracted by all these pointless things. The Stoics are much more politically engaged. The, the Buddhists are somewhat politically engaged.

• 35:00Ryan Holiday?

  But, but how does one participate politically and maintain their...

• 35:07Ryan Holiday?

  I don't want to say philosophical purity, but let's say they're philosophical principles.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, well, I mean, there's a couple of, of questions that, that are kind of floating around. And I mean, the one question is like, will the specific philosophical stance of kind of Buddhism mindfulness kind of, does that naturally take you out of the game? Some people think it can, that it does. It, it, it can tend to, I don't think it has to. I, I, I think, um, you know, I, I, I, I recommend that, that, um, that people who are practicing mindfulness try to stay in the game because I argue they're better equipped than others typically to, to play a constructive role.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Um, the, uh, Sam Harris just, just did a, had a thing about, about this on, on his podcast. I think the, the complaining about readers who, who thought that mindfulness was incompatible with, uh, being a political activist and with his, his own kind of confrontational approach to it.

• 36:15Ryan Holiday?

  I have a similar.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 36:19Ryan Holiday?

  I have a similar approach, yes.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Uh, well, you don't strike me as nearly as confrontational as Sam, if that's what you meant. But, but, um, the, uh, but I don't know, you're, you're kind of asking, uh,

• 36:32Speaker 01

  set aside mindfulness, you're, you're kind of asking, I guess, can you remain true to any kind of coherent set of philosophical principles while really still getting in the political fight and mixing it up? Is that it?

• 36:47Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's part of it. I'm actually, I'm not even talking about policies. It's, it's almost if, if, if the point of sort of philosophy is to have equanimity and inner peace and, you know, focusing on the big, big picture, you know, all, all these sort of things that, that are, I think, core to Buddhism and core to Stoicism. It almost seems like being on Twitter, following the news, having opinions about things, if you're not the president, is almost, I don't want to say hypocritical, but, but, but it's somewhat contradictory.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Well, it's challenging and I guess I'd say it's hard to, I mean, if we are going to talk about this from, from within the framework of kind of mindfulness Buddhism, it's very challenging to engage in a way that's consistent with those principles. Because for, for one thing, you have to rule out kind of ad hominem attacks, which is hard because they're effective, they're crowd pleasers, and they're tempting, right? You know, we don't like the people that we disagree with adamantly, right? We want to think they're bad people.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  So that's hard. It's hard to be really, you know, intellectually honest, to not oversimplify the things you're arguing against.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  It's all, it's all hard, it's also hard to just refrain from engaging sometimes when that might be the wiser course. It's hard, it's very, life is hard. That's my conclusion.

• 38:22Ryan Holiday?

  No, I love that because, and maybe, maybe how I've started to think about it too is, it's like, and I think you talked about this in Why Buddhism is True, it's like, you should be able to be mindful and philosophical as you, let's say, do the dishes or sit in traffic. So why shouldn't one be able to be philosophical and mindful as you debate a contentious political issue? I mean, isn't that the point of these things, right? And you were saying that actually what you want is more mindful people engaged in politics. You don't want them, if, if the mindful people leave politics, who are you, who are you seeding the, the floor to?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to, you have to do your best. I, I, it's a very challenging time because you can see that.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Uh, there are these positive feedback cycles that are just making the situation worse and worse, right? So like, uh, you know, again, you get affirmation from with your own tribe, uh, by demonizing the other tribe by taking really aberrant examples from their tribe and acting as if they're typical. Um, that antagonizes the other side and makes it only truer that on their side, you will get affirmation from demonizing the other side. The rewards for demonization grow and, and, and, and like, you know, the process reinforces itself in this cyclical way.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  And I, you know, I, I, I, I, I ask myself how, you know, sometimes if you ask how these things are reversed, the answer is the society hits rock bottom. Sometimes that means like actual civil conflict and they finally recover from it and go, well, let's try to find another way. But I, you know, I wonder, you know, could you have like a, like a grassroots movement or something that, that made it its mission, um, to, you know, that, that within which people gave each other affirmation and reinforcement for being good citizens in, in the way we're describing?

• 40:28Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and I almost wonder if, if part of the resurgence of Stoicism and Buddhism and the popularity of your books and my books has to do in part because people are realizing that the system is not working, that to be, uh, that, that, you know, perhaps religion used to play this role for a lot of people, but also some civic norms and, and your social clubs and such, um, that, that as, as these old structures have fallen away, people are, people are hitting that individual rock bottom and they're going, look, these things are important to me, but I'm wearing myself to the bone or I'm making myself miserable and I need, I need some spiritual helper or I'm gonna go insane.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the challenge is to keep those people from dropping out entirely, right? I mean, because that is the most obviously effective therapy is to just either get off social media or just change your social media feed so that it's all about like, you know, bowling or something. And, uh, and, and the challenge is to, is to convince people to try to, you know, retreat to the extent necessary to regain their equanimity. You know, but but then try to use the equanimity constructively by re-engaging, at least, you know, periodically. And it's it's, I mean, it would also help to have a kind of a rulebook for how do you engage productively. I'm not aware of one. But it's hard.

• 41:55Ryan Holiday?

  Well, this is this is more common in in your philosophy than mine. But, you know, the sort of maybe a metaphor here is the the Buddhist retreat. You go on a retreat, it's silent, you're away from the world, you all the things that were driving you nuts are gone. And so you are able to maintain your equanimity. And to a certain extent, you could maintain that equanimity if you never left. But the the whole point is that you have to go back into the world. Marcus Aurelius talks about, he says, you know, you can't, he's like, you think, yes, you could go get peace by going to the beach or the mountains or the or the the country estate. He's like, but actually, you have this within you at all times. It's in but you have to look inside your own soul. And

• 42:40Ryan Holiday?

  and that that's a much that's like, the elite level is can you get equanimity on demand wherever you are?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Right. In Buddhism, at least in in Mahayana Buddhism, there is this idea of the Bodhisattva. It's kind of an extreme example is the Bodhisattva is somebody who could have enlightenment. That's how far along the spiritual path they are. They could just just live in Nirvana and, you know, in the cycle of rebirth and everything, but they choose to go back into society and and engage. You know, they're almost, they're kind of like saints in Catholicism, I guess, or something. But but, I mean, I'm, you know, most of us aren't so close to enlightenment that we can do exactly that. But but the

• 43:25Speaker 01

  ideal of resisting the maximally comfortable life in order to go back and and help the world is a good one.

• 43:40Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 43:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I've told this story before, but I think there's an interesting contrast in, you know, sort of Buddha is a prince, Marcus Aurelius is effectively a prince. One of them renounces their sort of patrimony, the other embraces it, and they both get to philosophical enlightenment. But there's essentially two different paths. One is sort of of the world, and the other is is kind of apart from or above the world. And I'm not sure which is right, but but there is something I think the world need the world needs the sort of spiritual insights of a Buddha, of the sage, of the monk, the Thomas

• 44:29Ryan Holiday?

  Mertens of the world. But the Thomas Mertens of the world can only exist if there's the Marcus Aurelius's of the world, the people who are doing the work and running the system. Like, you can't if everyone is a monk, things fall apart pretty quickly.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, that example reminds me that another thing we could use, not just people who go back and engage on social media in good faith and in a principled way, but we could use more people in politics who are admirable, you know? I mean, it's a real it's a it's a real problem. You know, I mean, look, we all, you know, as we get older, I think it's natural to think that things have gone downhill, things used to be better. And maybe I'm imagining it. But I'd certainly think that politicians didn't

• 45:28Speaker 01

  used to be as conspicuously obnoxious and and and disrespectful towards their peers, for one thing, and as just trollish as they are now. Of course, it was a different set of rewards that they were that the system was different, you know, they were maybe you could say they were getting rewarded for being civil. And that's true. And the question the question becomes, how do you restore that set of incentives or something? But I don't think we're imagining it when we look at the, you know, the politicians out there and think that we could do a lot better.

• 46:09Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Neil Postman says that you get the politicians that your dominant cultural medium incentivizes or filters. And it shouldn't surprise us that we had a reality show slash social media star president when those are our two dominant cultural mediums.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  No, that's a perfect example. And yeah, I wish I had more answers.

• 46:34Ryan Holiday?

  But maybe, I mean, I would argue that, you know, we thought we were in a golden age of television with HBO and Showtime, but actually Netflix and these streaming services have unearthed a totally even superior, because the economics are different, right? You subscribe to Netflix, there's no commercials, they have unlimited space. So perhaps, maybe this is, I'm just making this up, but maybe the hope is, well, now that as the dominant cultural mediums are streaming services, podcasts, et cetera, paid subscription newsletters, which I want to, let's talk about now, maybe, maybe in a few years, we get, we start to get a breed of politicians, or leaders, or artists, that

• 47:16Ryan Holiday?

  are, that those mediums incentivize, which I would argue, and I talked about this in my book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, I would argue those are better economics for content and civility and humanity.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  I hope that turns out to be the case. And, and look, you know, we should give ourselves a little time to adjust to radically new things. I mean, social media are brand new, and it was natural that they would design algorithms that optimize for engagement, and it was not necessarily predictable how bad the consequences would be. Now, what you do about that, I would, I would like, to, to whatever extent possible, avoid highly intrusive government regulation, but that, that doesn't mean there aren't There aren't things we can do. And so, so I mean, there is, there is, you know, we should give ourselves a break in that sense.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  I mean, the problem is things are changing so fast. That is, if we get the social media thing figured out, as you've suggested, there will be another thing whose consequences we don't foretell.

• 48:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you need the, the sort of the, the beef and the, the meat truss of the early 20th century were a natural outgrowth of the technology and the incentives and the economics. And you needed the political will to regulate or rein those things in. And maybe we're at that place.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I hope so, and I do hope

• 48:49Speaker 01

  some of the things you're talking about could make things better. And it's a good sign that they are at least part of the conversation, like, you know, the, the, the people at Substack make their case. As, you know, they, they, they say that they are kind of a, an antidote to some of the ills of social media. And, and we'll see, but at least we can judge them by that.

• 49:15Ryan Holiday?

  I, I agree. I love, and I've subscribed to the newsletter since you put it out. What I love about it is it's like, it reminds me of the early days of blogging before social media, where you would get something delivered to you. It was thoughtful. And it helped aggregate and present to you a lot of information that, that saved you a lot of time of searching. So I loved it. It's like, hey, uh, there's, you know, let's say you put 30 links in the newsletter. There's usually an article sort of from you at top and then a bunch of, of, uh, of links and maybe six of the links are interesting to me and I save those to Instapaper and I read them on my phone three days later. It's, it's not the instantaneous viral element.

• 49:58Ryan Holiday?

  It's here's a thoughtful person whose opinion I respect, giving me, distilling down some wisdom and then, and then giving me some, giving me some homework, so to speak.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there are, you know, I'm impressed, there are a lot of, lot of good newsletters out there. It's becoming a very rich ecosystem. I think, I think it will evolve, it'll be interesting to chart the evolution because I now have a paid version of the newsletter, that's new, and it comes out like multiple times a week, and then the kind of the version you're describing will still come out about once a month for free. And so far, you know, the experiment's working okay, but, but I, I, I don't think this can go on forever, that people can keep, you know, paying like five or six dollars a month

• 50:50Speaker 01

  to more and more and more people, right? And so I think you're, and I think it'll be interesting, because I think you'll start to see a kind of aggregation, like several newsletters combining, and, and you, and you get them all for nine dollars a month or whatever, and, you know, you'll have something a little more like magazines, and, and I'm kind of toying with trying to do something like that. You're, you're seeing versions of it, and I think it'll be interesting to see if you see the reemergence kind of of, of magazines in a kind of organic way, in a kind of grassroots way.

• 51:25Ryan Holiday?

  There's something both Stoic and Buddhist, that's kind of an eternal recurrence of like, new technology explodes something, breaks it apart into a thousand pieces, and then somebody comes along who hasn't heard of how it was before, and says, you know what'd be amazing? What if we took all these millions of pieces and we put them together into one big thing? And then, you know, it's, it's funny how we're just, we're just repeating the same thing over and over and over again, and we don't even realize it.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and I'd be okay with that. I kind of enjoyed the era of magazines.

• 52:00Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I've been doing the Daily Stoic Newsletter for four years. Every day I do an email about Stoicism. And it's interesting because I did the book four years ago, one page a day. And then every day for four years, I've done the email. And the other benefit for it is, I mean, I've written to these people every day for four years.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 52:22Ryan Holiday?

  So, you know, sometimes my editor, my publisher will say, well, I don't know about. And it's like, no, no, no, no, this isn't a discussion. I know because I have the, you have the real engagement with the thing. So we were talking about, you know, one of the benefits of being a writer is you're so disconnected. But one of the upsides of the newsletter is that you are connected and you have, you have a sort of a a bond or an intuition about what the audience wants because you're actually interacting with them.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm, it's interesting. One feature of going paid, and I mean, again, you still have the two audiences. You have a smaller number of people who are paying. And then you have the larger number and you send newsletters out to them too every once in a while. But I'm trying to reorient myself to, you know, the idea of like writing for people who presumably like really like your stuff. I mean, they're paying for it, right?

• 53:23Ryan Holiday?

  Right, right.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  And it's a different, I mean, the Substack, their philosophy is that when you're writing for paid subscribers, just relax. You don't have to fuss so much over the style and over drawing them into the piece. Like, they like you, you know, that you're more, and their philosophy is that you should work really hard and perfect the pieces that are going to be publicly available. And then they will draw people into your orbit and, you know, they'll go viral, draw people into your orbit and blah, blah, blah. But it's a, it's something I'm still kind of wrapping my mind around, the idea. Of of an audience that likes me, you know?

• 53:58Ryan Holiday?

  It is a bit strange because we have a paid component of Daily Stoic. It's not on the Substack model. It's it's you get some extra emails and some other bonuses and stuff. And I really like doing that. But there is a weird part too, where as a writer, and this is where the you have to do some work on the ego, is like you spent your whole life, your whole career, wanting to reach as many people as possible.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:18Ryan Holiday?

  So then it's like, wait, you would think like, should I work? You if your first part of the ego is like, well, I should work less hard on this because it's for less people. But it's actually the exact opposite. It's like, no, no, these are the people that really matter. And you have to put out of your mind whether it's for a thousand people or a million people. Because it's all it's it's actually about the true the true fans, so to speak.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Well, the Substack people, when they're trying to lure you into doing this and and doing a paid model, because after all, that's the way they they they make their money. I mean, they say you can be casual with your true believers. So you won't have to spend so much time on the newsletter. I'm just not finding that that's really the case. I mean, I I just still care and I and I I I try to do a good job. But you're right, there can be a frustration when you're like, OK, I think this piece was really good. But wait, it can still only go out to X number of people. There's no way it can like really catch on in a bigger way. And that's, you know, we can't, you know, the kind of timeless pieces, I can kind of wait a while, maybe, and release them into the wild.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  They can become part of the unpaid newsletter at the end of the month or something. But still, it's it's it is a it is a trade off. And it's a new way of thinking about it and brand new for me because this has only been going on for like 10 days.

• 55:41Ryan Holiday?

  There was another weird thing I had at the beginning of the pandemic. I wanted to do this piece about how Marcus Aurelius responded to the Antonine Plague. And, you know, so I reached out to someone who's published me at the New York Times before. And I said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this piece. And they were like, well, I'm really busy, like, contact me in three weeks. And then and and it was like, OK, so so then this, again, this is the ego part. So New York Times, great. The reach of the Times is great. The status of the Times is great. You as a writer, your impulse is to go to all those things. It tickles all the. All the triggers. But then it was like, wait, I send out an email to 300,000 people every day

• 56:23Ryan Holiday?

  who are interested specifically in this thing. That's who I, not only is that who I should write it to, I can send it to them right now. And so there's also something about the newsletter thing where it's, it doesn't, it's, it's not about social media followers. It's not about publicness. It's, it's, are you speaking to the people that you're supposed to be speaking to? But there's something, I don't want to say less rewarding about that, but there is something that challenges the ego about that, that you have to wrestle with.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I did even before I went paid. I mean, I would still, somebody would approach you about writing something. I'd basically say, look, if you can think of a way, there's synergy with my newsletter, one way or another. Like if your author's bio is prominent, it's at the top and it links to my newsletter and I'll, and more people will become aware of my newsletter, fine. But if that's not the case, I mean, I just, I just had this devotion to building up the newsletter. And, and, and it's true that like,

• 57:22Speaker 01

  suppose you do write a piece for prominent venue and a lot of people see that one piece, but you're still not, you're not like capturing them, you know, they're not becoming, you know, an enduring part of your, your, your milieu. And so for better or worse, sometimes I think I'm crazy and I should just stick with what I did 20 years ago, which is write for the most prominent places I can write for. But I've been.

• 57:49Ryan Holiday?

  I think it's the opposite of crazy. I think you should be doing exactly what you're doing. And I think if there's any writers or podcasters or whatever, listening, you want, if you don't own your audience, you, you don't have anything, you know, you're owned by the outlets or you're owned by, you know, the, the market. You want to, you want to control the audience and you want to speak to them directly and regularly. That's autonomy. And the whole point of a writer is to control, to be a writer or creative or an artist is to control your own destiny, in my opinion.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  No, it is autonomy. I mean, it's freedom and that's become, you know, kind of more. More salient as the whole kind of cancel culture thing has unfolded. I mean, I think, I think there are more, there are more journalists, writers who worry a little about what exactly they can say on this platform or that platform. And I'm not like, you know, breaking a whole lot of new bounds. I don't, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't go about trying to violate speech codes, but it's nice. It's, it's just nice not to have to worry about getting fired. There's nobody even firing me.

• 58:51Ryan Holiday?

  Right, right. No. And, and yeah, sure. Some, some really extreme cases, they've been kicked off of Patreon or whatever. But it's like, those were really bad. Those were like-

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not in that, I'm not in that territory.

• 59:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, it's like, try to cancel me. I have direct access to my audience in all, in multiple different mediums, right? Like, try to cancel me, you know? And, and I think that's the place that you want to get, because that's a place of strength and resilience. Whereas if you're surfing the wave of whatever the sort of intellectual trend of the moment is, or publication of the moment is, you're very vulnerable. And things, you, you, things can be taken away from you that you think you own, but you don't own.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I, I, I enjoyed the part of my life where I was, you know, doing, you know, more like New York Times op-eds and, and, and, you know, writing for Time and, and The New Yorker and stuff. And I'm, and I'm glad it happened. But I slowly came to wonder how much influence I was having, because it's like, okay, so I'm writing this piece from this point of view for the New York Times op-ed. But they've got kind of one slot for that particular piece that month. And if, if I didn't write it, somebody else would. Because, and, and, and so, am I really adding that much? So I'm, I'm, I'm enjoying the new environment. It has its challenges, but-

• 1:00:15Ryan Holiday?

  No, and if it wasn't creating more value for them than it is for you, they wouldn't be having you do it.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Right, right. That, that's true, too. They, and that became truer and truer. I mean, I remember a time when all these places paid really well, and then that became less and less true, too.

• 1:00:32Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I love, I love the newsletter. I love the books. I've read all of them. I love this one especially. But, and then here, here's my very old copy. So I appreciate it. And we'll have to do this again.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Warms my heart. Thanks so much for the time, Ryan. I really enjoyed this.

• 1:00:49Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend, whatever you want. We'd love for you to have a copy. I know I love signed copies of some of my favorite books. If you love a signed copy of The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic, we have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.