David Wallace-Wells on Empowering the Future

Ryan talks to journalist David Wallace-Wells about his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, seeking out information, challenging assumptions, and becoming empowered through better understanding. During his 11 years at New York magazine, David has emerged as one of the nation’s most formidable thinkers about science and society, writing agenda-setting essays on the dangers and complexities of global warming. His 2019 book, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” was a number one Times bestseller, and reviewers called it both “brilliant” and “the most terrifying book I have ever read”; The Washington Post aptly called it “the ‘Silent Spring’ of our time,” and it has become a touchstone for the younger generation of climate activists who have helped redraw the landscape of global climate politics in just the last few years.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  I guess it would have been, it's either 2017 or 2018. I was in New York City on my book tour for Conspiracy, and my friend Tib Urban threw together a little dinner at this steakhouse. It was really cool. I forget everyone who was there, but one person was there. I wasn't familiar with his work before, but he has since become one of my absolute favorite writers, especially over the last couple of years. I'm talking about David Wallace Wells. You've almost certainly read some of his columns in The Times or in New York Magazine. He has a really cool new newsletter for The New York Times that I very much recommend.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  But he is a climate change reporter, a pandemic reporter, and just a really thoughtful, intelligent guy. His 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, was a number one bestseller. It was, as one reviewer said, "one of the most terrifying books you will ever read." The Washington Post called it "the silent spring of our time." I really enjoyed this conversation. I've been waiting for it to come out. Somehow it got like lost in the shuffle, so it's a little later than I would like it to run. But I very much think you are going to enjoy this interview. I won't belabor the intro

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  too much. I am a bit exhausted. I just got back from Mantino, Illinois, where the warehouse for Daily Stoic is. And I was trying to sign as many copies of the book for the pre-orderers that I could. I ended up doing like 2,750 the first day. I did like 3,500, 3,600 the second day. So more than 6,000 copies already signed, and then I'm back at the office here on a Saturday, signing some more copies. You guys have been overwhelming in the support of the book, and it means so much to me. If you haven't pre-ordered Discipline is Destiny yet, you can do that at dailystoic.com/preorder. But back to David. When I said that he went

• 3:00Ryan Holiday?

  on to become one of my favorite writers, there was a part of me that was somewhat resistant to reading his writing at first. And we talk about this in the interview. I guess, you know, it's not that it's a buzzkill, but it's not exactly the most inspiring stuff to read about how badly we are screwing things up. But to me, this is a really key part of Stoicism, the virtue of wisdom, which I will tackle two books from now. But the idea that you have to seek out uncomfortable information. And if you are studying information that makes you comfortable, that confirms your viewpoint, you're not learning, you're not pushing yourself. I really think David does a great job of challenging assumptions, looking at data both dispassionately as well as passionately. And, you know, he lays

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  it all out there. His reading was a lodestar for me during the pandemic. And I would say his pandemic reporting, and how right he was, and how wrong many other people who I previously, you know, liked to read were, you know, it's definitely made me reevaluate some of the climate change stuff that maybe I wasn't as concerned about as I should be. But remember, a key part of this Stoicism is giving a crap about people you will never meet, including future generations. And that's why I very much recommend David's book. You can read The Unenhanced. Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming. You can follow him on Twitter, D Wallace Wells. And you can get his new New York Times subscriber only newsletter.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  Just go to nytimes.com/newsletter, David Wallace Wells. There's a dash in between each one. And yeah, I really think he's a great writer. I really enjoyed this conversation and I think you will too.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  I'm trying to think. So we met at that dinner, like, when was this? This 2007? No, 2017, I guess, right? In New York.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Sounds ballpark right to me. Yeah.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  I think that was it, right? This is right before Uninhabitable Earth came out?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  It was, um, well, it was probably, yeah, I mean, that the book came out in 2019. I don't, I mean, somewhere in that ballpark, 2017, 2018. Um, it might be like closer to a, like a landmark day in your life than mine. Um, so

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  If you, if you're like, it was definitely 2017. I'm sure you're right.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, actually, I don't know when that this, I think I was there because Conspiracy had just come out, but I honestly, I don't remember.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could also be like getting older, I think.

• 5:32Ryan Holiday?

  That is, that is true. It does blur together. Yeah, like, like when you're younger, like even, okay, so let's say that was four or five years ago. Like five years used to be a long amount of time, right? Like, because

• 5:44Speaker 01

  General life is cool.

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I'd only been through a number of five year spans. And then as you go through more of them, it all blurs together.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's something I think about a lot with my kids, which is that it's a, I'm, you know, as like any parent is, I'm constantly amazed at how fast they're growing up. And then you're like, oh, I'm aging at the same exact speed.

• 6:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Which like, well, doesn't occur to any of us, but

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  I, um, my youngest was like nine months old when the pandemic started. And so you know, there's like little frames that you have where you take like the nine month photo and then the 10 month photo and the one that we just stopped it like the, it's like, that's when, like, that's when the, the Titanic hit the iceberg and my watch stopped. You know what I mean? Like, so we have this like weird, like that's, that's when it happened, you know, kind of a thing. So your kids do help you benchmark. It is funny. Uh, I, I wrote this email a while ago where I was saying like,

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  Every time you like cut your kids nails or every time you get you take them to get your haircut, you think it's like this wonderful moment, which it is, but then it's also a terrible moment. If you think about it, because that's like a one way street, not just getting older, but it's a one way street for both of you, like heading towards a place where that won't happen anymore.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, my older daughter, who's four and a half, has never had her haircut. And we were just talking about it the other day. And my wife is like, I think that means like the end of your hair may have been inside me. It's amazing to think that that's like.

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, right. That is that's both beautiful and weird. Yeah. So I was talking to I thought you would like this. I was talking to John M. Berry, who wrote The Great Influenza.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  And and I loved I read his book Rising Tide many years ago, which I think is kind of a climate change book. It's certainly about what happens when we fuck with the climate and the consequences therein. So I was like, OK, so you wrote this book like 15 years ago about climate change, basically, or 20 years ago about climate change. Then things have gotten worse. Then you wrote this book about pandemics. And then that was like sort of eerily prescient. And I was like, could you stop writing books about these topics? That would be nice. And he we laughed at it. And then later in the interview, he mentions I said the phrase church and state. And he's like, you know, I wrote a book about that, too, which I did not know. And I read he wrote this book about the invention.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  Like, we think of America being founded as people who fled religious persecution, right? Which is kind of true. But they weren't seeking religious freedom for everyone.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Trying to establish religious societies just their own.

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, they were. They were attempting to set up a religious a religious theocracy for their religion, right? And and it's only this guy Roger Williams, who who sort of differs from that, goes on to found the state of Rhode Island. But I was like, God damn it. Could you stop writing about the terrible things that are happening right now in the world? But the historical prequel to them. And then I guess it's just like, humans have always struggled with these things and struggled with collective action problems, with thinking about complicated topics. And then we're so often at the mercy of singular, mercy and at the, uh, saved by heroic or evil

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  individuals who sort of decide to exert their will on everyone else.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  And now we're in a situation on a number of fronts where, you know, one big question is whether these are unprecedented challenges or whether we just feel that they are.

• 9:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  And, you know, you know, it's something we can talk about, but it's something that I feel differently about almost like every minute of every day. I can find myself thinking, you know, especially the climate crisis, but also the whole sort of polycrisis that we're living through right now is really daunting in its scale and unprecedented and has no meaningful analog in human history. And then there are other times and other ways of looking at it where I think, um, you know, this is obviously very serious and managing it poorly will result in an enormous amount of suffering and probably even managing it well will result in some amounts of real suffering.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  But the question of how we relate to it emotionally, politically, philosophically, I think, is kind of an open one. And I do wonder slash worry a little bit whether or to what degree our sort of presentism and our cultural present tense apocalyptic impulses, to which I've, you know, contributed, are pulling us towards a darker vision of, of what we're living through now and what we're heading towards than someone in 50 or 100 years might, um, might think looking back. I don't know.

• 10:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. I, not in the sort of don't look up sense of like, um, like, how do you stay positive? But I am curious, as someone whose job it is to write about. Or to seek out almost universally unpleasant information, right? Like, the data that you look at, the people that you talk to, whether it's your COVID reporting, or your climate change reporting, like, you're talking to the people who are looking at the worst information that there is, right? Like, the things at the fringes, or at the extremes, or the doomsday scenarios. And then, on top of that, you're a journalist, which means that you're sort of in this media

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  culture of presentism, and social media, and, you know, sort of competitiveness, and the day-to-day news cycle, which isn't super healthy, just even when you're not talking doomsday scenarios. How do you manage to stay sane with that? I don't want to, I don't mean like, how do you, how do you see the good in everything? But how does that not just break your brain? Because it seems like it could break someone's brain.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  I guess I look at it from the opposite perspective, which is to say that if I wasn't seeking out that information, then I'd be turning away from what knowledge there was to help us guide thinking about where we are and where we're going. So, you know, the alternative world in which journalists like me are telling, like, just the good news, and our media just has a good news bias, that would actually be a really scary world for me to live in, because I would think that there would be an enormous number of threats that we weren't taking very seriously, but which were very real. And, you know, it's, I think, to some degree, a matter of just your temperament, and probably

• 12:35Speaker 01

  it's a sign that I have some amount of sociopathic/journalistic distance that I'm able to write about these stories, sort of, as stories. But, you know, the fact is that we are living through this enormous transformation, and taking that seriously means looking very hard at where we are, looking very hard at where we're going, and not shying away from whatever that might, whatever might be embedded in that information that is, that is quite scary. So, you know, to talk in slightly less abstracted terms...

• 13:18Speaker 01

  You know, the, talk about climate change for a second, like the, the, um, the planet's like 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was before the industrial revolution. And that, which doesn't sound very much, but it literally means it is warmer now than at any point, and at any point previous to this one in the entire history of human civilization. So the planet's already warmer than at any point when there were humans around to walk around and talk about it. So much of what we know of as human history, our politics, our agriculture, our culture, our psychology, our, you know, everything,

• 13:58Speaker 01

  is the result of cultures that arose from climate conditions that are no longer here. And that means that we are today embarked on a genuine experiment, which is to say, how much of what we have can survive? And how much can't? How much will have to be transformed? I don't think it's like, you know, doomsaying to look into the future with that frame. I think it's just honest. And I think we're-

• 14:30Ryan Holiday?

  It's not good or bad. It just is. It's facts are facts.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  And you know, there, you know, those people who are like, well, we've gotten through challenges in the past. I actually, I do think that that wisdom is valid, although I also don't think it's total. And I don't think that we can assume success based on previous, usually mixed success. But I, I also don't want to let that sort of crowd out the, for me, the central dramatic, emotional, political, philosophical question of our time, which is just, how are we going to survive in this new world that we're making for ourselves?

• 15:06Ryan Holiday?

  No, I get, I get that. And I, I totally understand the duty of it. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't be doing it. I'm, I'm more saying it's like, if I was talking to a, a police officer or a special forces operator, you're seeing dark shit on a daily basis, right? Like your job forces you to stare into a kind of abyss, right? Their job does, but also yours. I'm asking like, how do you actually process and think through that? Or is it, does it just not affect you? And you just see it as sort of like, this is the information I'm processing. My job is to make sense of it and tell that story. I sense though, from your writing, that there's a moral element of it to you

• 15:48Ryan Holiday?

  that alarms you and scares you and upsets you. So how, as you day in and day out are living in that world, like, how do you, how do you not bring that home? How does it not depress you? How do you function with the, the climate in your work that you have to acclimate to?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I have an especially satisfactory answer to it because, I mean, I can tell you the way that it affects me, which is at an abstract and intellectual moral level more than at a base emotional, psychological level. And that may make me well suited to this work, or it may make me a sociopath who has no business talking about these things. I don't entirely know. And I think it is important that I came to these stories as a journalist, which is to say a sort of a, someone who's making narrative out of the messiness of the world. And on these two big stories, in particular, climate change and the pandemic, it was the bigness of the story that really excited me, which is to say,

• 16:54Speaker 01

  I didn't find it intimidating or overwhelming. I mean, in certain ways overwhelming and intimidating, but in other ways, I just found it exciting to be carried along on a huge drama. And the pandemic in particular was fascinating in the sense that,

• 17:14Speaker 01

  as a reporter, which I sort of am part time, I guess you could say,

• 17:20Speaker 01

  we just, it was amazing to be very rapidly pulled into a saga that no one understood because the disease was so novel. And you could talk to experts who had, you know, rules of thumb they were carrying from other, you know, epidemiological experience. And there are ways of sort of conceptually modeling it based on previous influences, respiratory illnesses, et cetera. But We have not seen anything like this pandemic in a hundred years. You know, a novel disease that literally infected the entire planet within a couple of years. And we were all figuring it out from scratch at the start.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Now, at the time, I think the world as a whole responded in terror primarily. You know, they were like, let's bunker down. Let's cut ourselves off from one another. We need to protect ourselves. We don't know what this is. And I didn't fight that impulse myself. I wasn't like, no, I want to be going out to, you know, nightclubs in March of 2020. But I was also really pulled forward and excited by the idea that there was a, you know, a grand historical narrative that was not only unfolding through the time of our lives, but had just begun and in which I wasn't behind anyone else who had more expertise. I was able to like, as much as anyone who was not, you know, a scientific expert in,

• 18:46Speaker 01

  you know, respiratory infection, I was like as well positioned to be understanding that at the vanguard as anyone else in the world. And that felt really, really exciting, particularly in contrast to writing about climate where no matter how expert I ever got, I would always know that there were thousands of people who knew the material actually much deeper than I did. And you could like, understand the physics of ocean currents and explain them in a way that I probably never would be able to. And it's one of the sort of strange, strange facts of my life now is that I am in certain ways, this expert and in other ways, this total novice. You know, the other day I was like, I had a couple of interviews on CNN and MSNBC and

• 19:28Speaker 01

  I like literally walked off set and like did an interview with a climate scientist. And I was just like, let's start from scratch. Really big picture, like, you know, and I, it's like disorienting to be playing both an expert and an ignoramus. Yeah. But I think it's also, there's something sort of.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  It reflects our, you know, everyone's basic ignorance about so much of what's transpiring in the world. And that the more that we can, you know, try to do both of those things, both understand how little we know and to do whatever we can to understand more. I think, to get back to your original question, the sort of more thoughtful and empowered will be about the future we're facing, both as individuals and sort of as a collective.

• 20:17Ryan Holiday?

  It is kind of weird because you think about history and you think about these moments, but like all the edges are rounded off those moments. It just feels like it's this thing that happened. You don't get the sense, it doesn't fully strike you that the people who were living in it were not aware of what it was, its significance, or where it would go. They were experiencing it day to day, right? So like, the depression happens, you know, the stock market crashes in 1929. Nobody knows that this is the Great Depression, right? They'd obviously lived through panics and things before, but they didn't know how big it would be. They didn't, they certainly didn't know it would last this many years. They didn't know that this president would flub it and then this president

• 20:59Ryan Holiday?

  would come in. Like, they had no idea. They just, it was just day to day life. And then so something like the pandemic happens, and this is also happening, I guess, with the climate, but it's over a longer time span. I don't just mean like decades, but just like years. So it doesn't feel the same way. But like, the pandemic is one of those things where you're like, oh, this is history. This is the things that I read about, that's the day to day-ness that I'm feeling, that's what World War II was like. That's what the Great Depression was like. That's what the Great Influenza was like. And that history's not fun, really. You know what I mean? Like, just a reminder that like, this is what living through history is like.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Especially for us now. Yeah, because I think one of the, you know, uncertainty about the course of the larger narratives in our lives is, was a much bigger part of human experience for all of human history. But we sort of more recently started to believe that we were really profoundly in control of everything, or should be. And I think it's a much deeper emotional violation to us to try to accept the basic uncertainties. And

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Embrace a sort of more humble perspective about what's about to come than it would have been 50 or 75 or 100 years ago, where we didn't even have models, let alone know that models didn't, um, did, where it didn't work all that well. Yeah. And, and so I think that we were all knocked off our feet a little bit more and really wanted to believe that we could, if we had chosen to, stop this disease. I mean, especially across the West, there was this mantra all through 2020, we know what we need to do. And I think to some degree, you know, we knew what, we knew what tools we

• 22:47Speaker 01

  had, that's true. Um, but I think that we really were flattering our capacity to fundamentally change the course of a once in a generation, a once in a century pathogen. And, you know, there were places in the world that did better and managed, especially by taking very, very rapid early action, were able to sort of eliminate the disease from, from their borders. But they were actually very few and they were culturally relatively foreign from places like the US and Europe. And while And over a long enough time span, it evened out for the most part. Yeah. I mean, now you're like, would you rather be living in China or the UK? Uh, you know, um, you know, probably the UK. I mean, for many reasons, but even just on

• 23:30Speaker 01

  the pandemic front, like probably in the UK. And, um, you know, and, and yet we, we told ourselves all through the pandemic, we told ourselves these stories that it was essentially,

• 23:41Speaker 01

  um, you know, we were living through not just history, we were living through a fable, which was revealing our virtue. Yeah. And we said in 2020, oh, it's political malfeasance that our leadership was so broken about this, which I think, you know, that's fair enough to say. Um, but I also think that, you know, it wasn't like Angela Merkel, like oversaw a dramatically better pandemic than Donald Trump did. It was better, but it wasn't categorically better. Um, and, you know, these failures were really pervasive because the, the challenge is really hard and really human and not reducible to ideology or partisanship, which revealed itself, I think, again, in, in 2021, where we told ourselves that. The main driver of the disease was vaccination,

• 24:25Speaker 01

  which to a certain degree, again, was true. It was not untrue. But you know, the gaps in vaccination between red states and blue states, Republicans and Democrats were large, but they were roughly comparable to the gaps by education, by race, by income. And we didn't want to see that complexity. We wanted to see pandemic death in 2021 almost as willful. And the people who chose not to get vaccinated as deserving whatever fate they got. I actually think we're in a slightly more healthy place narratively about the pandemic now because we've sort of, because of reinfections and because of breakthrough deaths, we've

• 25:09Speaker 01

  sort of dropped that pretense that pandemic suffering is elective. And we've started to just treat it as background noise, which is probably how earlier generations would have treated it, gotten around. They would have gotten around to that point much more quickly because they were much more familiar with the idea that things were out of our control. But we're so addicted to the idea, especially the wealthy, powerful countries of the world, especially wealthy, powerful people in wealthy, powerful countries in the world. We're so addicted to the idea that we can control whatever we set about to control that we were just unwilling to admit that this virus was bigger than us, which it turns out to have been. I mean, it's literally infected the entire planet.

• 25:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, it's interesting, this idea of like, what's in our control, what's out of our control? Do we come to terms with things? Do we practice acceptance? This is like the essence of, obviously, of Stoicism. And I go back to the Antonine Plague. This plague breaks out in Rome. And it's not like a one, two, three year thing. I mean, the Antonine Plague lasts for 15 years, right? And so, and I think one of the things, one of the- One of the lessons we've wrongly learned in the modern world is that things happen quickly, right? Because we can, we, they have like, yes, we still know things happen that are outside our control, but then we could, as you're saying, we figure them out, we come up with solutions, and then that's the end of them. The idea that like, this is how things are

• 26:41Ryan Holiday?

  now, is a more ancient, or we might like to believe antiquated idea, but that is the human experience. That new variables are introduced, new species are introduced, new events, things happen, and then, you know, that becomes the new normal, as they say. But we're more interested in getting back to normal than we are to say like, this is how the world is now. Although you, you wrote that piece recently, where you're sort of talking about people who wanted the COVID, wanted COVID to go to the endemic phase, and you're like, endemic COVID is still pretty fucking bad. Like, it's just because it's normal doesn't mean that normal is good, or acceptable, or even reasonable. It can

• 27:26Ryan Holiday?

  still be quite tragic on a day to day basis.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  And just at a, at a population scale, I mean, it's one of the things I think connects, I've been thinking a lot, both about in climate and about the pandemic, is just when you have impacts that are relatively trivial, that affect a small number of people, but everyone is, you know, in fact, they're applied to everyone, the numbers really add up. So even before vaccines, even in the initial phase of the pandemic, we're still talking about, you know, a, a infection fatality rate that was, you know, between 1 and 2%, which is, and all of that was, or not all of that, but most of that was concentrated in the very old, you know, this is not Ebola, but Ebola doesn't infect the entire planet

• 28:10Speaker 01

  within a couple of years. And we had such a hard time wrapping our mind around that set of facts. Like, people either acted as though

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Almost anybody getting infected was effectively getting like a death sentence and needed to run from the disease as though it was that scary. Or that we didn't need to worry about the spread of the disease at all because nobody was going to die. And both of those are really, really misleading conceptual models for what we're going through, which may, you know, depending on where we end up on climate, may also be true for our climate future, which is to say, there's probably going to be considerable, really unconscionable levels of human suffering that come out of climate change, as I see it. But it also isn't, I don't think, going to be the case that, you know, every person on the planet alive in 2070 is going to look around and think that, you know, we're living in a total hellscape. There's still going to be life going on.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  And we need to be able to think about both of those things as being true at once, that many are affected and suffering without the world ending as a result. But our, our emotional impulse is always to, if we're scared, to treat it as a sort of a universal apocalypse, which I think, you know, yeah, I think it's, it's not the best.

• 29:24Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, that's, that's really interesting. It's like, we have this blind spot for things, like, it's like, no one would want their country to become, like, overrun and become a totalitarian state, right? This is an analogy. You would, you would reject that, hopefully. But we struggle with dealing with, understanding why we should care about a system that might be totalitarian for 0.01% of the population, right? So it's like, you know, it's unlikely, you driving down the street, you're going to be harassed by the cops, thrown in jail, never see a lawyer, never see the light of day again. But, and because of that, you're not that worried about it.

• 30:07Ryan Holiday?

  But the fact that that potentiality exists for a small fraction of the population, doesn't make it any less of a human travesty and any less of a sort of problem that should be dealt with. So we struggle with this idea of like, what doesn't really affect me, and I'm not like seeing the bile, the bodies pile up in the street, or I'm not being paraded by the injustices. We struggle when things are happening to people, or places, or things at the margin. And as you said, when the world gets bigger and bigger and more interconnected, more interconnected, things that happen at the margins. Cumidively mean a very large amount of people are negatively affected by this thing. And a lot of our best, like, the US legal system is supposed to be predicated,

• 30:52Ryan Holiday?

  again, to go to this analogy, on the idea that, like, it's better that 100 guilty people go free than one innocent person be convicted. But it's hard to get a person to care about an innocent person getting convicted, because that's not happening to the vast majority of people. And so that, that sort of fundamental-

• 31:13Speaker 01

  They also know more victims than no criminals.

• 31:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. So that, yeah, and you're actually getting upset that the people who are breaking car windows in San Francisco, or shoplifting at the CVS are, are getting bought. And so that fundamental tenet of justice, that, like, you have to care about people you will never see or meet, and bad things happening to them, that you have to care about that. It does feel like we're struggling both to agree about that, and then struggling even more to care about it, or marshal resources to do anything about it, in a lot of these problems, whether it's climate, or COVID, or criminal justice, or, you know.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  And just to stick with your analogy for a second, that's not just how, like, creeping authoritarianism works. That's how real authoritarianism works too, because most people in an authoritarian state are not being policed in a daily way by the, you know, they're, they're living lives and they're thinking, well, it's nice to, you know, there's no trash on the ground.

• 32:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  And, and so it works, it works all the way up. And I, you know, I think about this a lot. I've been writing a fair amount about air pollution, which tells a very similar story, which is, you know, you know, there are range of scientific work, but the high end estimates suggest something like 10 million people are dying every year, annually, from air pollution. And even the low end estimates are still in the millions. So we're talking about an unbelievably large toll. And yet it has, in some profound way, like, not even registered-

• 32:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  -on, you know, our, our, anybody's, aside from a very small number of advocates, anybody's sense of, you know, political, social outrage. There are a lot of reasons for that. It's complicated. But one of them is that, you know, what we're talking about is an ambient-

• 32:57Speaker 01

  You know, an ambient stressor, which is ultimately affecting a small fraction of people in certain parts of the world.

• 33:05Ryan Holiday?

  And not super visibly in the sense either. Like it's, it's like, I imagine dying from the effects of air pollution. It's probably comorbid with a lot of other things, right? So it's, it's not like you're just keeling over and dying and then there's a mark on your face and they say, oh, air, you know, air pollution death. So the ambiguity of all of it too, makes it easier. If you already didn't want to care, or you're already inclined not to care, it's conspiring with you so you don't have to.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  But that part of it is really important too, in the sense that, you know, so much of it is concentrated in, I mean, in particular in India where, you know, in Delhi, the average resident of Delhi's life expectancy is 10 years shorter than it would be without air pollution, which means every single person in Delhi on average could count on 10 extra years of life if there was no air pollution. That is just mind bending and especially wild when you think, okay, well, that's just the average. So for a lot of people, those effects are much, much bigger.

• 34:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  And, and it's, and so how much we care about those people when the average American life expectancy is being reduced only by point two years or a couple of months by our pollution is really relevant. And in fact, I think in some perverse ways, the fact of pollution and our sense of the dirtiness of the developing world, and by dirtiness, I mean pollution, is making us, it's, it's like it's, it's poisoned our sense of even what those people's lives could be like sufficiently that we treat it as just what it is there and not something that could be designed differently there because we don't, we don't treat them in the same category,

• 34:45Speaker 01

  as the same category of ultimately moral creature as we would treat someone who lived down the street from us or in our family. And part of that is natural, but part of that is totally inhumane and unforgivable.

• 34:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like they could get on a plane, although that might contribute to said air pollution and land in a different country and immediately their lifespan increases by 10 years. That's like in, and, and that, and Tyler Cowen has talked a lot about this on immigration and Alex Terabek is writing partner too, just the idea that like. You know, your average, uh, medium wage is here and then you travel across this line and it doubles or triples. The policies that prevent people from doing that are... I found this on the web. Sorry, my stupid Apple Watch. Anyway, the, the policies that prevent someone from doing something like that are profoundly unjust.

• 35:41Ryan Holiday?

  If you think about it, it's, I mean, it's a daily human rights travesty that someone who lives here, you know, dies 10 years earlier, can't afford this or that. And then if they could just go here where there's plenty of space, you know, and, and that we, we don't see ourselves as complicit in maintaining that status quo because we're concerned with this or that. But, but there, there is blood on people's hands as a result of that.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think the even darker interpretation of that, which I find myself thinking occasionally when it comes to climate, um, is that there's something we find comforting about the suffering of people living elsewhere because it reassures us of our relative privilege and prosperity. And, you know, it's not just that we don't want to be bothered to help the people in the developing world, it's that we actually like having them suffer. And I think about that, not just in terms of climate, as I mentioned, but, you know, about the global vaccination rollout. Um, um, you know, the IMF in 2021 estimated that, I think it was, uh, global vaccination

• 36:53Speaker 01

  program would cost $60 billion and they thought that the returns by 2025 would be 9 trillion. So it was like the, the biggest economic no brainer you could possibly imagine. And even if like the US paid for it entirely themselves, the returns even within the US economy would be so much bigger than the, the outlay.

• 37:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  And yet there was no interest in taking that up. By any leader of any country or any group of countries around the world, we've in fits and starts talked about maybe loosening IP and maybe donating some vaccines here and there, but nothing like a we're actually getting to get the entire world vaccinated kind of a program. And that's just like, this is a deal in which not just, you know, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and Southeast Asia would benefit, but Americans would benefit too.

• 37:36Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Economy will be so much stronger as a result that even just thinking about our narrow self-interest, it makes it worth doing. And we wouldn't even take that deal. So we didn't take the deal that maximized our own well-being. We didn't take the deal that maximized the world's well-being. We took the deal that maximized the difference between the people who were best off and the people who were worst off. And that is...

• 37:59Ryan Holiday?

  Right. We're like, where's my stuff? And they're like, yeah, the people who would be making it in the already moral abomination sweatshop, you know, sweatshop, they're dead. That's why they're not working on making this or that, right? Like, when you put it in this dark of terms as it can be, it becomes so repugnant as to be almost paralyzed. Like, you're just like, man, are we the worst? You know, it's difficult to comprehend. There's a, one of the Middle Stoics, his name was Heracles. He comes up with this exercise. He says that there's like these concentric circles. So the first circle is you. He says, everyone's born thinking of themselves, right? I have to survive. Then you have your, you know, your parents and your spouse and your children. And that these circles get bigger

• 38:43Ryan Holiday?

  and bigger and bigger. And he's like, the point of the philosophy, which is funny because people think of Stoicism as this individualistic philosophy, which it is. He's like, the whole point of the philosophy is to figure out how to draw the outer rings inward, right? So how to care about the faceless person in India, although they literally do have a face. There's faces to you. It's how you justify not caring about them. But how to draw just the 80-year-old woman dying at 70 in India, instead of the 10 years that she's entitled to, her dying of air pollution, how do you pull that?

• 39:25Ryan Holiday?

  Person into the inner circles to the degree in which you care about them and want to do something for them. But I don't think just in the form of mindless, meaningless sympathy, but like you said, let's approve this global vaccine package. What are you actually doing about these problems?

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Were you asking me personally?

• 39:47Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I'm saying that that's, that's, yeah, there are, I mean, you have written a lot about what to do, but the point we, we, we, we just don't do it like some people get to a place where they at least have empathy about it.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Which on some level, that's also, there's a way in which that's kind of ugly, too, because it's a way that we exercise our moral feelings without ever actually asking, demanding anything from ourselves materially to fall from that. So it's a little bit like, yeah, we're going to the, we're going to the morality gym for a little while to feel guilty about our carbon footprint or whatever. By the way, I'm not, I don't say any of this to say that I'm immune to it. And, you know, the, the, the expanding circle idea that you talked about is interesting. I mean, Peter Singer writes about this, too, in a more modern context. And I've always found his formulation interesting in the sense that, you know, it's certainly the case that our liberal cultures tell us that our, our circles

• 40:44Speaker 01

  are growing and more and more people are included and more and more people are counted as human and counted as equal over the centuries. And that's, that's, that's not just what we've been told. It is, from broad strokes of history, true. But I also think, you know, it's interesting to think about in terms of where we started the conversation about the sort of networked bad news bias that we have in our, in our narrative impulses, where we now know so much about the rest of the world that we see so much more suffering, not just in the sense of poverty, but in the sense of natural disaster. And, you know, there are just more bad news stories that rise to the level of global attention because we are all networked

• 41:29Speaker 01

  together. We're also made in certain ways more vulnerable because of those networks. Although you could argue that on net, we're less vulnerable. But, you know, there are some vulnerabilities that are introduced by that, by globalization effectively. But we are, we are in this like incredible.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, tragedy economy, narrative tragedy economy as a result of globalization that I think is really, really, in the context of, you know, you're expanding circles or whatever, is really novel as a human experience. Like, we just didn't hear these stories in centuries past. And tragedies might have been overwhelming when they were local, but they were also experienced collectively by everyone who was local. And, you know, obviously in differential ways, but you know, a community would see something immediate and understand that as a tragedy. And I don't

• 42:27Speaker 01

  think we really have a lot of the tools we maybe should try to develop for how to process and contextualize tragedies which we understand to be horrible, but which are, yeah, not, ultimately not even relevant to our particular lives. Like, it's just a very different experience than we've ever had before as people.

• 42:47Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, you go back not that many hundreds of years, and like, not only did they not know the bad stuff that was happening, let's say you live in Europe, you don't know what's happening in North America, till the, you know, a certain period there, you're not even aware that North America exists. You're not even aware that things are happening to those people, right? So like, as our ability to understand more and more what's happening in the world, there are more things tugging at your heartstrings, which I think is good because it allows you to do something. But then you're right, it can become kind of this, like, information overload where you're like, everything's terrible, I'm just going to care about the seven people around me, or whatever. I'm not-

• 43:30Speaker 01

  I think it gets back to what we were saying earlier about the, you know, the way, tiny adjustments to calibrations of any kind, when, when applied to the entire planet have huge effects. So even if your bad news bias is just, just tiny, it's just like a little to the negative side. If you're really applying that to a planet of eight billion people, it's going to add up in an absolutely overwhelming way. And I actually think that's, you know, that's a bigger part of the, why is the media so depressing story than clickbait, which in many cases isn't as relevant anymore now that we're doing subscriber based stuff.

• 44:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Or like the sensationalism, or, you know, it's, I think it really is just like- It's just like a little bit more of a story when something bad happens. Like, people care a little bit more. And even just a little bit, when you're talking about a global, a global feed, has an unbelievably dramatic effect.

• 44:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, my first book was about media manipulation. So I've, I've always thought about this and you, you, you mentioned a word a couple of times. I think the bad news bias is there. The, the, the more, the other distorting bias is just the human bias you mentioned, which is narrative. Like, a journalist can't, a journalist can't be like, here's a complicated series of facts. You figure it out, right? The journalist has to put it in the form of a narrative or has to, to come up with an argument and explain, like, you, you have to put it in a story, right? To go back to the word of narrative. And so that's the other problem is like, people are consuming information day to day, even though our understanding is changing on a slightly different time span and then events are transpiring on a different time span.

• 45:14Ryan Holiday?

  So I think one of the things that makes, even, even if we could all immediately download, everyone give us a shared consciousness of all the problems of the world, the, the, that would be, it would be hard to mobilize us to solve those difficult problems. But that can't happen. Between us and the alignment we need is this inherently unreliable, unevenly distributed media system. Like, I wouldn't say I was a climate skeptic or that I have been, but I would say that, given my experiences with media, I was skeptical of some of the media, uh, let's say, lenses on the climate story.

• 45:59Ryan Holiday?

  And so then you, you play that out with lots of people. People don't trust the media and then the media is how they learn about COVID. The media is how they learn about pollution deaths in India. The, the media is how we learn about this stuff. And we're in a real difficult situation because like, now we can't even get people to understand the reality, let alone do something about the complicated reality once they learn about it.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  I was just looking at some polling the other day. Yale does this sort of, it's called, kind of considered like the gold standard opinion polling about climate. They've been doing it for like 20 years, so they have a very, you know, good running data set. And I think that 72% of Americans think that global warming is happening. And 55% of Americans think that scientists agree that global warming is happening. So there are more Americans who believe this is happening than think that there is scientific consensus about it, which is an incredible. Yeah, what is that? Well, I think it gets back to the basic trust in institutions and authorities that like you're talking about. But yeah, it's kind of remarkable.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  I mean, there's another way of looking at it, that it's a sign of, of, you know, the sort of disinformation denial campaigns of the last couple of decades, which is probably playing some role. But it's notable that so many of those people who are basically discarding or discounting. Can you hear me? I broke up for a sec. Scientists are doing it by saying, we actually know better than the scientists and are more concerned rather than less concerned. Did I lose you? Are you back on? Yeah, yeah, sorry. Keep going. No problem. Um, wait, so I just did that riff about the. More people believe climate change is happening than believe scientists believe it's happening. Yeah.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Well, I just said that, like, I went through it. Should I do it again for you? Yeah, yeah. Or should I go? So, yeah, I mean, what it basically, there's part of it, which is just a basic distrust in elites and institutions and media in particular. I think part of it is also, you know, a sign of some amount of disinformation and denial and the sort of fossil fuel campaigns that have happened over the last couple of decades that's playing some role. But nevertheless, it's remarkable that there's a really significant chunk of people, even among those who are discounting the conventional scientific wisdom, who think both that they know better than scientists and that they are more worried about climate than scientists. Like, 17% of America, that's the gap between those two numbers, 17%.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  That's, you know, what is that, 50 million people? Wow, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. And we hear a lot about people who distrust the science and distrust the public narrative, but we don't hear about those who distrust it in the other direction very often. And it seems like, at least according to this, like I said, it's sort of considered the gold standard polling. There's quite a lot of them.

• 48:53Ryan Holiday?

  I always go back to that study that said, like, 15% of Americans think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. And then I use that at like, whenever, whenever they're like, can you believe this many million people think this or this many million? I'm like, do you know how many 15% of America is right? The same thing. And you're like, and they they look at a cow and they think that's a chocolate milk cow. And you're just like, ah, OK, that's again, when you think about percentages, that's a lot of dumb people or a lot of people who aren't thinking very much.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  My I used to use the number of people who believe that aliens were living among us on planet Earth. But now it seems like that's, you know, that's

• 49:31Ryan Holiday?

  That might be true.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Former directors of the CIA now believe. Yeah. And on the on the bigger question, you know, it's something that I've tried to do more on in COVID in my COVID writing than in my climate writing. But I've tried to be a sort of counter narrative writer and someone who treats the narrative itself as a sort of subject of an area of inquiry. And, you know, who knows how useful that is. But it's been really, really interesting to me. Just all of the complicated ways that we, as we were talking about earlier, have narrativized this pandemic, almost beyond the point of sense of, you know, of it being sensible, legible to us. And, you know, it's, it's just wild, the things that

• 50:16Speaker 01

  our brains have allowed us to do. And our, you know, I think a lot about how liberals I know spent 2020 yelling at people for going to visit their family at Thanksgiving and being like, the thing we need to do most of all is to protect one another and to sacrifice in order to protect one another. And then by 2021, they were really just like, you know, your death is on your own hands. You've chosen not to get vaccinated. And I don't want to do anything. To help you or, you know, stop the disease from getting to you.

• 50:49Ryan Holiday?

  Why is that?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  And those are the same people within like a year.

• 50:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Well, don't you see this in the, in the peer group that we're in? Cause we both have young children where you're like, they were hardcore. Everyone's got to get vaccinated. Uh, you know, uh, vaccine mandates, blah, blah, blah. And then you're like, uh, so, hey, I heard your, you know, your kid just turned five. Did you get him vaccinated? No, I think I'm going to wait. Right? Like, like the, the, the difference between like the decision they made personally for themselves. And then the cognitive dissonance they've picked up about kids and COVID, of course, it's super, it's not nearly as dangerous for children as it is. For adults, which wonderful news, but like, I, I was talking to a reporter I know about this.

• 51:32Ryan Holiday?

  I was saying that the, what the government did is the government was like, a good, they wanted to convince people they're like, there's no danger sending your kids to school. Right? And then so all the parents sent their kids to school and then they're like, and then by the way, you can vaccinate them now to make them safer. But they already internalized the idea that COVID is not dangerous. So why would you go take this precaution if it's not dangerous? Right? It's like you, cognitive dissonance being this super powerful force. But I, I found it really interesting. The same people, they are super hardcore on COVID, shaming people who, who visited their families, shaming people who didn't get vaccinated. And then they're like, I'm not going to get my kids vaccinated though. Right? So it's like, when they actually take that, when they can do something tangibly themselves.

• 52:14Ryan Holiday?

  But they feel a little weird about it and it's not obvious, then they, then they're, the difference between behavior and public morality is different.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  And you know, just to talk numbers for a second, like 350,000 Americans died of COVID in 2020. About, um, 400,000 died in 2021. We're on track for about 250 or 300,000 deaths this year.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  So we're like in the ballpark of the previous years. And you know, it's very different. We're taking many fewer precautions. So if we had been this reckless, or reckless is probably too low of a term. But if we had been this carefree about mitigation in 2020, we would have had many more deaths. Same in 2021. It's not exactly an apples to apples comparison. But just at the level of like ultimate death toll, like thinking about this as a human story, as a tragic human story, how big is it? How big is that tragedy? I mean, 250,000 American lives is an enormous toll. And most of the scientists that I speak to expect that, you know, that'll be a little bit lower next year, probably in the range of 100, 150. But we're not getting like down to nobody knows anybody who's dying of COVID. We're getting down just in the range where like, oh, it's only grandparents that are dying of COVID.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  And, you know, in some basic way, actually, speaking of narrative, you, you kind of could have said the same thing in 2020. That would have been more of an oversimplification then than it is now. But nevertheless, I think one of the big things that was undersold by public health authorities in 2020 was the age skew of the disease. And I do think there's some-

• 53:39Ryan Holiday?

  Because they wanted people to care. They didn't want them to be able to do precisely what we're doing now, which is pretend that it's not real.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Totally. And there's some, there's some wisdom in that. On the other hand, like this age skew is so profound. I mean, your risk doubles every eight years about. So someone who's in their 80s is like thousands of times more at risk of death than someone in their 20s. That is not just like eight times more, 10 times more, 12 times more. It is a whole different disease. And, you know, you're, you're, when you get vaccinated, that reduces your, your risk of mortality by about the equivalent of about 20 or 25 years. So someone who's, you know, a vac, a well vaccinated 85 year old is still more at risk than a totally unvaccinated 55 year old. And that's how profound and ginormous the age skew is. And yet, all through the beginning of a pandemic, we were given such, you know, a sense of

• 54:31Speaker 01

  uniform threat and uniform risk. I think, like you say, for, for some good reasons, but it ultimately was, you know, It was ultimately a distortion of the story that anybody looking at the data could follow themselves.

• 54:45Ryan Holiday?

  Well, we're not good at changing narratives, right? So like, people do this now to undermine what they're saying about COVID now. They go, oh, but they said this, but they said this. A lot of what they said this, when they said this, it was true, or it was, it was the understanding of that time. Whether it was true or not is what they believed they, is what the information made it look like was true. And then that narrative changes. And then, once people, even people have said several times, it's like, oh, it's over. And it's like, maybe it was, and then it's changed. So I have this bookstore here in Texas, and we still require masks. We're probably like, the only business left in America that does at this point.

• 55:29Ryan Holiday?

  But I remember somebody posted a picture, and then someone said, whoa, what's this mask? Like, I thought the pandemic was over. And like, that's also a narrative, right? In their head, they've decided a thing is over, and so you can't change, people can't change things. And it's, I think, that is the problem with narrative, is life, the story is always changing, if there is a story. But once you lock into a narrative or an identity around that narrative, it's very difficult to update or counter the narrative, as you were saying with your writing.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the mask story is such an interesting one to me. So, you know, we now, quote unquote, know that there are some meaningful benefits in reducing transmission through high-quality masks, so N95s, KN95s. But for most of the pandemic, we were not given advice that was focused on that. It was focused on covering your mouth with anything. And actually, the science that we have from that suggests that the effects there are quite limited. And, you know, there are often, people point to this big Bangladesh randomized control trial, which found some effect from surgical masks. It found zero effect on cloth masks, from cloth masks.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  And the effect on surgical, from surgical masks was, you know, they grew the uptake of mask-wearing by 3,000%. And the reduction of disease transmission was, I think, by like, 15%. So in theory, that bargain at the peak of a pandemic, at the peak of a wave, that bargain may well be worth taking in a local way. You know, I personally have always thought like, well, what's the big deal? Like, you'd wear masks. It's, you know, even if it has a marginal benefit, it's like, what's the cost to me? That seems like a very easy pro-social thing to do. But I wonder if we rewound the clock to, say, April, May of 2020, when the public health establishment was like, you know, turning towards mask-wearing, having been against mask-wearing

• 57:26Speaker 01

  at the very outbreak of the pandemic and saying everybody should wear a mask. If they had known then what we know now about the relative, relatively limited effect of cloth and surgical masks on transmission, would they have still been making those, giving that advice? Would they still choose to do that? And my own feeling is that-

• 57:43Ryan Holiday?

  Or would they have chosen that as the hill if they knew the political consequences?

• 57:47Speaker 01

  The political consequences are so enormous. I mean, when people talk about, you know, lockdowns, it's like, there haven't been lockdowns since the summer of 2020. What we've had is mask mandates, like, but that's not the same thing. And yet, for people who are opposed to pandemic mitigation policies, they, they sort of became the same thing and they were so offended by any public mask policy, but also any private establishment, like, requiring masks, that they sort of, I don't know, they developed a deep hostility to it, I think, out of proportion, both to the cost to the person, but also to the benefit. And I wonder if we would have taken that bargain? Like, if, if we could have avoided that, at least part of the pandemic culture war,

• 58:31Speaker 01

  at relatively limited cost to the actual levels of the disease, if we had just chosen to, like, you know, whatever, not, not push-

• 58:38Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, that's a really-

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:40Ryan Holiday?

  That's a really interesting counterfactual. Because part of the reason they were, like, there, there's two reasons they were saying, don't wear masks at first. One was they didn't have very many masks. And two, the studies that they had, it wasn't that masks didn't work, it's that masks were a complicated or ineffectual public health measure for the population at large, right? So there, there may have been an argument where there's a counterfactual where they- Side masks are not going to be part of the government toolkit. But then you and I, as individuals who had done research or learning, we're wearing a mask voluntarily everywhere we go. We're probably not getting COVID. But then COVID doesn't become the politicized thing that it becomes to the same degree.

• 59:22Ryan Holiday?

  And then maybe people actually listen better when they say, hey, these vaccines, this is the main thing to treat COVID or this other treatment or whatever it is. Yeah, maybe, maybe the thing goes differently. And then you're like, man, that gut call that whoever made in, you know, March, April of 2020, that actually was the right call. And then they second guessed themselves and then, you know, here we are. We'll never know.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  It's also, it's interesting in, in, in that when you play out the whole narrative, because according to at least survey data, which is probably misleading, but maybe directionally accurate. In the fall and winter surge of 2020 into 2021, there was very little difference in mask wearing among even the most conservative places in the country and the most liberal places in the country. So we had a narrative that like red states and Republicans were like totally unwilling to mask. That became true in 2021, much more than it had been true in 2020.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  But I think it like that, that narrative which existed in 2020 primed us for the same fights over vaccination, which became much more significant and profound. And even there, there are some really interesting counterfactuals. So we know that the FDA delayed approval of the vaccines until after the election for, you know, again, it's, it's a kind of a defensible position. They didn't want it to be a, a campaign trail issue. But even a delay of three or four weeks then would have made a really profound narrative difference in the sense that Trump would have been talking about the imminent vaccines in the last weeks of the campaign. He might have won.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Because the margins were small enough that maybe some additional boost there would have helped him. In which case, maybe we wouldn't have had the partisan split that we have today at all. And that's just like, you know, a war decision.

• 1:01:15Ryan Holiday?

  Or the rollout was then bungled even more. It also could be infinitely worse in so many other ways and probably would be.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:01:26Ryan Holiday?

  Go ahead.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  No, go ahead.

• 1:01:27Ryan Holiday?

  I was gonna say, as far as policy goes, the other interesting thing I found for COVID stuff is like, yeah, basically, everyone's like, life's back to normal, do whatever you want. The only people I know that have strict COVID protocols that treat it seriously at this point are musicians who are still on tour. Because there's something you lose by getting sick, right? And I've had to do this as a speaker. It's like, I have not had not a gig in like, further than two weeks apart, like basically consistently for like the last year or so, right? So like, there's not a window in which I can get COVID, that

• 1:02:09Ryan Holiday?

  it would not cost me a large amount of money, right? And so like, I have to individually think about the choices that I'm gonna make. And so there's also this interesting dichotomy, as you were saying, like when COVID becomes endemic and we all have to make these individual decisions, there's still people for whom COVID is costly, either because they're immunocompromised, they're, you know, someone on the edges of society or life, or they're someone who, you know, is trying to do or see certain things. So it's this weird thing where it puts the burden on the individual to have to make these choices. But then, because things have been politicized and complicated, people don't actually really know what those choices

• 1:02:54Ryan Holiday?

  are. So it's a weird sort of Balkanized world that we live in now.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think everybody's sort of confused in choosing to relate to that confusion by indifference.

• 1:03:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. Well, it's like we are with all things. Like, if I don't think about it, then I don't have to be confused by it. If I don't think about it, I don't have to make decisions by it. And then this is, if I don't think about, as you were saying, that the lifespan in India is 10 years lower because of pollution, then I don't have to, I don't have to make any changes. I don't have to live my life any differently. And although, and this may be a good place to wrap up, the other problem with COVID, climate change, et cetera, is that these aren't things that can be dealt with individually, right? So it's like, hey, the climate is, all this stuff is happening. And so I'm going to recycle or do whatever I can as an individual.

• 1:03:49Ryan Holiday?

  This is nothing compared to Kylie Jenner's 17-minute private jet flight, right? Like, there's not, there's not anything I can do as an individual that would make even a microscopic difference compared to corporate or national decisions that people are making unthinkingly that have enormous impact. So it comes back to, how do you solve a collective action problem?

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think it might be useful to answer that first by talking about the pandemic and then about climate. So we have evolved this very particular sort of risk assessment dynamic that you're describing, where it's basically all on the individual to make decisions about what they're comfortable with and what they're not. And I think in some way, that is useful and empowering, that individuals can make their own assessments and make their own decisions. But we are talking about navigating a landscape that is shaped profoundly by collective and social actions. And by that, I don't mean whether New York City is in a lockdown. What I mean is like, we knew in spring of 2020, that better ventilation systems in public places

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  would make a huge difference. We did not spend that money to upgrade ventilation systems in schools, in, you know,

• 1:05:08Ryan Holiday?

  And made them wear cloth masks.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Right. We were like, we're going to, we're going to put this, put the burden on the, and the cost on the individual. And as a result, we are living with a considerably riskier

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Environment than we needed to. And there are other ways which are play out slightly more subtly. I mean, you were talking about the touring musicians, speaking gigs in a slightly like less sort of like, you know, high rolling kind of way. You just have people who are like, they don't have paid sick leave.

• 1:05:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  So if they want to protect themselves or their coworkers and they get COVID, they can't do like a two week quarantine and they can't elect to do that. The law does not support them doing that. And that's really broken.

• 1:05:57Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  We should, if we're gonna, if we're gonna try to empower individuals to navigate the risk landscape of their own lives on their own, which I think is, like I said, a pretty useful thing to do, we should also be trying to design that landscape so it minimizes the absolute risk to everyone and makes it possible for people who want to make responsible choices to make responsible choices. And the same is absolutely true in climate. So, you know, the average American refrigerator uses more carbon than the average person living in Sub-Saharan Africa. Like, you just cannot live in the United States responsibly by global standards when it comes to carbon. You cannot live.

• 1:06:35Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I have two refrigerators. You know, I got an extra one in the garage, right?

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Your flat screen is just as bad. And like, you can buy your, you can buy your EV. You can do what you can to try to power your home through, you know, personal solar power, but many people can't do that.

• 1:06:51Ryan Holiday?

  I just, I just did this, by the way. I don't know how anyone can afford to do it. It was insanely expensive. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, I could have just, yeah, I probably should have just bought, it would have been better for the world if I had just bought a small house and put a homeless person in it. Do you know what I mean? Like, like, that's how much it costs to put solar on my house. Like, it was not, it was insanely expensive.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I like Texas, say, state by state. There are tax incentives elsewhere that make it better. But yeah, it's, it's, it can be cumbersome and certainly beyond the reach of, you know, working class, poor people in the country who are just gonna get whatever electricity comes into the plug in their wall and don't have any say about it. But like collectively, we have a say in what kind of electricity goes into the plug in your wall. And we have a say in whether our grid wastes two thirds of the power that's put into it through waste heat, or whether it delivers it much more efficiently. Right. You know, on a longer time scale, we can be pouring money into carbon neutral jet fuel so that a 17 minute private jet flight doesn't have a carbon impact at all, let alone

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  one that is so wildly disproportionate. And this is like, this is, you know, true of everything. It's a sort of a naive, basic thing to say, but like, it's really true of every aspect of climate. Like, we are living in a policy landscape that has been designed for us in part to maximize the use of fossil fuels. And if we are able to change that architecture, so that fossil fuels are less present, less dominant, or ideally absent, it means that we can make any choice we want to make without any guilt or responsibility at all. If we get to a genuinely net zero future, which is, you know, it'll take a lot, and but I think we will get there. The question is whether we're going to get there in 2060, 2070, 2100. But when we get there, we won't have to be thinking about our consumption

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  patterns in terms of environmental guilt, because anything we consume will have no carbon footprint at all. And the fact that we're not excited by that prospect says a lot about, I mean, how broken our political economy is, but it also says a lot about our limited moral imaginations that we're not even Political vision. Both. I mean, you know, but but like, we're not even interested in bringing about a future where we don't have to think about how much of a burden we're imposing on the rest of the world. We can just make the choices we want to make and trust that the impact will be neutral, responsible, sustainable, however you want to think about it. So, you know, that's just like, to circle back to some of the themes we were talking about

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  earlier in the conversation, like, you know, if you're the kind of person who is burdened by a sense of guilt and responsibility, there is a path forward to, you know, eliminate that from your sense of, you know, the political shape of the world and the political shape of your own life. And yet, we're not moving, I think, nearly fast enough to sort of embrace that opportunity, which is worth embracing for many reasons, like, you know, saving the 10 million people a year who are dying from air pollution, you know, More prosperity, economic growth, more global justice, environmental justice, et cetera. But even at the level of like the selfish consumer American individual, you're like, you could be.

• 1:10:07Ryan Holiday?

  You have more freedom. If we made these larger policy choices, you would have more individual freedom to do what you wanted and live how you wanted.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you would have to feel much less guilt about about making those choices, even if they were by today's standards, like obscenely wasteful, grandiose, and ultimately harmful to the planet. In a future that's not that far off, those same choices wouldn't have any of those impacts at all and could be, you know, just sort of embarrassing on a personal level.

• 1:10:44Ryan Holiday?

  No, I will say, once we got the solar panels installed, I was much less of the cliche dad of like, giving a shit where the thermostat was.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:55Ryan Holiday?

  Because it's not really my problem. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I saw, you solved the problem at the source, instead of dealing with the piddly shit on the margins.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  That seems like a good deal.

• 1:11:07Ryan Holiday?

  It was not a good deal, but I could, I made it work. Anyways, dude, this was awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  No, my pleasure. Great to talk. And yeah, let's hopefully cross paths again soon.

• 1:11:17Ryan Holiday?

  Let's do it.

• 1:11:25Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.