Fix Your News Diet NOW (Before It Breaks Your Brain) | John Avlon (PT. 1)

How do you stay informed without losing your mind? In this episode, Ryan sits down with journalist and historian John Avlon to discuss how to fix your “news diet,” why local journalism matters more than ever, and what studying Lincoln can teach us about leadership, empathy, and navigating chaos. They talk about Lincoln’s surprising use of humor, the ways history repeats itself, and what it really takes to stay sane in today’s overwhelming media world. John Avlon is an American journalist and political commentator. He was a senior political analyst and anchor at CNN, and was the editor-in-chief and managing director of The Daily Beast from 2013 to 2018.📚 Grab signed copies of John Avlon’s book Lincoln and the Fight For Peace at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/👉 Follow John Avlon on Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/johnavlon/?hl=en📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am in desperate need of a haircut. I've just been busy. I haven't gotten one. I've got some talks coming up. I need to get a haircut. When I used to live in New Orleans, I would go and get my haircut at this barber shop attached to the Mont Leon Hotel in the French Quarter. It was this lovely little place. Actually, I told a story about it when I gave my talk about Jimmy Carter at the Naval Academy. Let me play that for you real fast. I was getting my haircut in New Orleans several years ago. And as I was sitting in this old-timey barber shop, I looked around and I noticed that the barber was the only

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  one there. There were a bunch of chairs, but he was the only one there. And so I asked him, I said, "Hey, how come you're the only one in here?" And he said, "You know, I used to have a number of barbers that worked for me, but they kept speaking badly of our president, and so I fired him." And I, maybe I forgot I was in the middle of the deep south, but I said, "Oh, really? What president?" And before I could regret my question, He said, "The name I probably would have expected least out of any president he could have named." He said, "They kept speaking badly of Jimmy Carter." And I thought, two things, I thought, two things. One, I thought, "Has this guy been holding on to a grudge and working by himself for 40 years?" And then I thought, "He thinks

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  Jimmy Carter is a great president." And I don't know why that struck me as odd. Maybe it's what I heard growing up, maybe it's what I'd read, but it struck me as a solvable problem. I realized I didn't know very much about Jimmy Carter, and so I decided I would read about him. I've thought very fondly of this. As I said, sometimes when I go back to New Orleans, I sneak in there, but I'm not going to obviously fly to New Orleans to get a haircut. But it was really funny when I had today's guest on, after we finished recording, he pulls up a picture of his phone, and he shows me a picture of John, the barber from the Mont Leone Barbershop. It's where he gets his haircut too, or has for many years. He doesn't

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  live in New Orleans, but when he's there, he gets his haircut. What a crazy fucking small world, right? It just blew my mind. It made me smile from ear to ear. That guest, John Avlon, is someone I've been wanting to have on the podcast for a very long time. I've known his wife, Margaret Hoover, for many years as well. I met her when I lived in New York. So this is a kind of geographically diverse episode, I guess. But that's the cool part about moving, traveling, living an interesting life, is you never know who you're going to bump into and kind of end up with friends in places all over the country. That's sort of what we talk about in today's episode. John has written two great books

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  on Washington and Lincoln. He came out to Bashup. We had a great conversation. And we're talking about Lincoln and Washington because they remain great examples for all of us. His book, Washington's Farewell, is fantastic, and so is Lincoln and the Fight for Peace. He signed both of them at the Painted Porch. John was previously a senior political analyst and anchor at CNN. He was the editor in chief and managing director at The Daily Beast from 2013 to 2018, and was a former speechwriter for a number of politicians. I think you're going to like this episode. And let's just get into it.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  One of my open questions and curiosities with you is your your love of Iron Maiden, which I find

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Fascinating.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  Why is that fascinating?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Because it's the opposite of my jam. And I don't, I would love to learn more about how that's a world that you're like

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  I could talk about Iron Maiden all day. I don't, yeah, I don't know.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  I'm a huge music fan in general, so.

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know why. Yeah, it's weird because I don't like a lot. I mean, I do like heavy metal, but it's not like I'm, I love all those other bands. I just love that one.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Why?

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Is it like the iconography of it?

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  I like, I think I like, it's a whole universe. All the songs are about history and

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Are they actually about history?

• 5:10Ryan Holiday?

  Most of them, yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  That's interesting. Okay, so that's, that's an entry point.

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's funny. I think people who don't listen to heavy metal think it's maybe stupid. And then you kind of get into it and you realize actually these were like, like Rush is very smart.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  They're kind of like nerdy universe. It's like this kind of sci fi universe world. I think I was always into that.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Uh, that's interesting. Okay, so that, that, that begins to answer my question.

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And then I'm, I'm super interested in like the whole, like as a career and as an arc and as a sort of world they've created. I think it's very interesting because they've never, they've basically never been cool. Like they were never a big band. They don't have like five or six huge hits, like some of those.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  I couldn't name, but I'm not a huge metal fan at all.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  They sold a hundred million albums.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  That's really interesting.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  Actually, somebody just sent me, so on one of the tours, because the lead singer, Bruce Dickinson, is a pilot. And during breaks from the band, he Got certified to fly like seven forty sevens. And so he was flying for British Airways.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Really?

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, just for fun. He's like this Renaissance man. And and so they had this idea that he would fly the band from show to show. So there's there's this plane. It's called Ed Force One, and it's their seven forty seven that they would load all the gear in, all the crew, and it would fly from show to show. And so some guy, I guess afterwards, the plane, like this was ten, fifteen years ago or whatever, and he's now too old to fly planes of that size. Like he aged out.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Didn't realize you age out from flying planes.

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  I think you do from commercial plane.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  I don't, I think you'd fly whatever you want yourself.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  But, yeah.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  But I don't think you can fly a seven forty seven.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  What a trip, man.

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  But but anyways, this, they took the plane apart and they sold pieces of the plane. Like, so it's like a keychain, and it's just a chunk of the, like a piece of the fuselage that they just sent me one. It's pretty funny.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 6:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so I'm a huge Iron Maiden nerd.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Clearly.

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  I've probably seen him, I don't know, six or seven times.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Okay, that's, yeah, that's hardcore.

• 7:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Well, you've helped explain part of it to me. So they did a very good job of like world building.

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, I mean, and the joke about some of these heavy metal bands is that they sold more T-shirts than albums. But like, but the, but the economics of selling T-shirts is much better.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  You'd rather sell a T-shirt than an album. Because think about it, like you, you split the, you get a royalty on an album, you make the bulk of the profits on a shirt.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Right. Well, yeah, from, I know that from books.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 7:35Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, would you rather give a talk or would you?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  From an economic standpoint, a talk.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  But.

• 7:40Ryan Holiday?

  Cause there's no one in between you and the thing.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Right, but the book is more, is like the, yeah, it's the crafting.

• 7:45Ryan Holiday?

  You can't have one without the other.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:46Ryan Holiday?

  And so think about it, it's like every album that they put out is a whole new set of artwork. It's a new chore that you then sell the artwork at. So it's the whole, the whole economics.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the things I want to nerd out with you on is marketing and viral marketing, which you've been incredibly, obviously, successful at and began at.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Which is interesting, like how you. Built the thing you wanted to read, but then used everything you'd taken up to that point, which was not interesting.

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think, I think for, and maybe that's even one of the things I took from some of these bands that I like, but it's like, how do you, you could spend your whole life's marketing stuff for other people, or you could make stuff that you like and then be good at telling people.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Which is obviously is, that's the unique, you know.

• 8:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, what I wanted to, it's a question I get the most these days, and you coming from the news business, maybe you can help me with it. People, they're like, watching the news makes me miserable.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  It makes me stressed out.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  It makes me scared. I can't do anything about it. So that's one hand. And then the other hand, they feel compelled as citizens to be informed and to pay attention and to not tune out. How do you recommend people navigate that tension?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  So this is the issue of the news diet, right?

• 8:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  And your responsibility as a citizen. I would say certainly there's no obligation to make yourself miserable and to marinate in said misery.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  You don't need to be sort of like a news junkie.

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  You know, just being besieging your brain with, with, you know, what I think is objectively bad news a lot of the time. That said, the, the extreme alternative, which is like the ostrich approach.

• 9:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Uh, burying your head in the sand, pretending, you know, you can just disengage. I think that is civically unsustainable in a democracy.

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Which, you know, we're citizens, not subjects, and so citizens have to be engaged. So I think one way out of that is to curate your news diet more intelligently and, and beware of the, the amen corner confirmation bias.

• 9:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Diet, but, you know, make sure you're subscribing to your local paper, right?

• 9:38Ryan Holiday?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Uh, your local news source. Make, you know, identify a couple of individuals who have, have a spectrum. Like when I ran the Daily Beast, the, the opinion page, I always said, we're liberal to libertarian.

• 9:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Right? You know, I want a great conversation. It's got to be a fact-based debate, but I want different, different perspectives. Uh, like one of my first hires was PJ O'Rourke as, as we wrote his, published his last column. And that's because it was also like, we're not going to be predictable.

• 10:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  That itself is, is I think its own kind of sin. So, you know, but, but subscribe to first of all, like, local press.

• 10:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Trump won 91% of news deserts. And I think that, that has a lot of, it's really important stat from. The last election, one, we're seeing the squeeze of of local journalism media, which atrophies a sense of community and civic engagement. And in the absence of a local news source, people go deeper down the rabbit hole of their own phone and the fragmented

• 10:26Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  news reality, which then can be more easily manipulated through algorithms, which now have been weaponized to pursue administration ends, right? And we see this with TikTok is an extreme example of that, right? But I would say also then, you know, figure out the places that you want to support. You know, you vote with your eyeballs, you know, every day. And so places like The Atlantic are doing it well. The Economist, I revere, I'd say the bulwark where I have a podcast, The Daily Beast, my former shop, you know, individual substacks. This is an incredibly exciting thing that's going on because you can support the people you like directly. I've got a huge like, you know,

• 11:02Ryan Holiday?

  By the way, talking about economics of creation, the economics, suddenly these people are actually getting paid.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  Commensurate with the value that they were formerly creating like

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 11:12Ryan Holiday?

  They were previously salaried employees of institutions that made tens of millions of dollars. There was always a ceiling on what they can make. And now they own the audience and the audience is compensating them. And it's, it's kind of mind blowing.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  It is mind blowing and it's really revolutionary in a pretty liberating way. Cause as you said, there was a huge disconnect between influence

• 11:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  and compensation.

• 11:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  You know, this is one of the key lessons, like if you don't own your own IP,

• 11:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  you know, you're, you're a wage employee and there's a limit there. So this is exciting and you can support the people who you believe are doing it right. Heather Cox Richardson is, you know, I write applied history.

• 11:46Ryan Holiday?

  That's the biggest sub stack there. It's, it's kind of crazy. We can sometimes despair over like who has power or who has influence or what people. And then you're like, yeah, but the biggest sub stack is this, this history professor who for free gives really great analysis of today's news in context of its historical, you know, relevance.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Which is what I was trying to do at CNN with my reality checks, right? It was like a fact check plus with perspective and history. Cause I'm a history nerd, obviously.

• 12:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, me too.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  I've noticed that.

• 12:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  It's one of the reasons why I feel kinship. But you know, like slow boring, Matt Iglesias, a big fan of the popular. And the abundance agenda, I think that's really powerful. Obviously, you know, so you could pick, you know, Damon Linker is someone I like a lot. And we can go through, but that's a part of your news diet. So I would just say, make sure you're subscribing to supporting local journalists more than one.

• 12:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Right. Make sure you're supporting individual sub stacks of people that you feel are trying to do it right.

• 12:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Uh, and then you're getting a couple of things like The Economist or The Atlantic, uh, who I think are sort of best in class, the Bulwark, whatever it is, because that's important. And, and, you know, watch CNN, the shows you really care about for, he does great work. I mean, you know, Jake Tapper and Aaron are great. And, you know, I think Morning Joe does really good analysis and his value add. The news flume is the thing I think that's not valuable. It's the, it's the commodity news approach. And I wrote an essay for a book, The Center Must Hold, about sort of centrist approach to journalism and how to do it right and how to do it wrong. And I think that remains sort of a very live wire debate. But the day that one of the things I'm most concerned about right now is media capture.

• 13:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  The Orban playbook, which the industry, because of the economics is incredibly susceptible to right now.

• 13:28Ryan Holiday?

  Cause they're, and they're owned by big parent companies for whom these news divisions are basically rounding errors.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 13:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  That's right. And it used to be that it was a loss leader because having news was necessary for licensing public airwaves.

• 13:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Right. This was sort of a mid 20th century enlightened self-interest move that we lost sight of. And now you're seeing deals are being held up. You know, the Trump administration is weaponizing that and the big corporations are folding. And you can do that directly or indirectly, you can send, do that by sending pressure. So the fact that the executive producer of 60 Minutes just resigned in a real statement because he was getting editorial pressure. That's a very different dangerous deal.

• 14:16Ryan Holiday?

  It struck me that the tension of staying informed and, you know, what's happening and the sort of fundamental historical context that philosophical truth, wisdom, that this tension is very old. And actually Lincoln embodies it. Because on the one hand, he's this savvy politician who even his own admirer, friends and staff would say like, no one was a more astute reader of public opinion than him. He was great at kind of knowing which influential journalists to cultivate relationships with, who he couldn't afford to lose. And, and I mean, there's scenes of him, it's in the movie Lincoln, but it's true. He would like basically fall asleep at the telegraph office so he could

• 14:58Ryan Holiday?

  get the news like right off the wire. And then the epigraph of your book, which I think captures the other side of Lincoln is, "Human nature will not change in any future great national trial. Compared with men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as good and bad. Let us therefore study the incidents of this as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged." He also had this sense that humans were humans, it had always been thus. And I think so much of his civil war strategy, his political savvy, is actually rooted in his reading of poetry and Shakespeare and history, less so than, you know, his, you know, what's happening in the papers. Like, so he has this kind of like

• 15:41Ryan Holiday?

  rooting it in timelessness and a sense of the timely.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Yes. And that's what great leaders do, right? It's, it's, in Lincoln's case, the ultimate dichotomy is, as Sherman said, he had more of greatness combined with greatness than any man that I met. It's the combination of the two. It's his goodness that makes him truly great. And it's that ability to be a savvy politician, a political entrepreneur, remembering that the Republican Party is an upstart third party, a modern progressive party, that he is the first president to represent. That is unbelievable political entrepreneurship, right? Teddy Roosevelt takes great comfort and all that. Also, there's not a precedent. I mean, much like Washington, and I wrote a book on Washington's farewell address before this, and they're sort of complimentary, both are uniting leaders in divided times. But Washington's a president without precedent, but there'd never been a crisis like the one

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Lincoln faced. And his key insight is, you don't win the war unless you win the peace. So he's thinking like several moves out. And I agree with you, though, the beautiful thing about Lincoln, the poet of democracy, the philosopher, is that he He does have this, it's rooted in his understanding of Shakespeare, the Bible, Aesop.

• 16:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  You know, there's amazing scenes where he's like, he's reciting Macbeth from memory on the boat back from the front lines, um, right as Adam Appomattox is being signed. And that quote you read, the epigraph to me is, it's everything. It's the Zen Cone. It's, it's the reason and rationale for applied history.

• 17:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, and he's a, he's a president without precedent, not just because we're in the civil war, but America is in the process of becoming a modern nation. It, it as is not just like they're, they're building the capital and, and Washington has a federal power. That's new. And the war makes it only more so, but also like railways and newspapers. We're starting to get a national culture in this moment, right? And so he's having to, to balance this sort of, this sense of historical significance and philosophical truth with the, hey, we just heard from hundreds, thousands of miles away, this bit of breaking information. He's, he's struggling with, for the first time, I think, a lot of the things that we're continuing to struggle with

• 17:47Ryan Holiday?

  in the, the modern world, which is just more information than you know what to do with. And how do you, how do you kind of stick with what matters when you're besieged by contradictory information and news and noise on all sides?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the fog of war is an extreme version of news and noise on all sides. You know, it, it's fascinating because you key into one of the really underappreciated things about Lincoln, right? The second inaugural is the first speech transmitted by telegraph. It gets to San Francisco in basically real time.

• 18:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  And, and that's a revolution in terms of combating the tyranny of dissonance. And, and we think of history and historical leaders like Lincoln of their time, sort of in amber, but Lincoln is a guy who I like, I think all great leaders is fascinated by the future.

• 18:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Right? So it's that, my kids sort of mock me about this because they say, oh, what'd you give a talk about the past, the present, the future? And how they all are like, yes, you know, uh, but Lincoln is very aware, you have to remain fascinated with the future. This is one of the things, um, that I think, you know, great leaders do is, is they engage people in solutions and visions of the future. It's empowering. It's not just about resenting.

• 18:49Ryan Holiday?

  Political career was like, what if we build canals and railroads?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 18:52Ryan Holiday?

  Like Lincoln didn't. Didn't live in the black and white 1800s. Lincoln lived in the cutting edge future. I mean, he's testing repeating rifles in the like the lawn of the White House. He invents like a boat, like he is the only president with a patent. And, and so there, there's something about Lincoln where it's easy to think of all these people as historical figures as people who are living, as opposed to people who are living in, in what they thought of as a brand new age, a new future. Everything shiny and new. I like, it occurred to me, for instance, I've said this before, but like Stoicism is ancient philosophy to Marcus Aurelius already. Like it's already five, 600 years old by the time he gets to it. But he doesn't think he's studying this dead philosophy.

• 19:34Ryan Holiday?

  To him, it's still this new, exciting, interesting thing. And he doesn't know he's living in the decline and fall of Rome. He still thinks he lives in Rome, right? Like the statues were still painted, you know? They weren't like old marble like, and so, yeah, Lincoln didn't think that he lived in this antiquated time. They, they had on the latest fashions, not old clothes.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And that's why the more you can make their times come alive, the more relevant it is. You take the historical figures off the pedestal. You try to understand them as much as possible as they understood themselves. And that actually adds to the poignancy of Lincoln because he does think he might be living at the end of the American experiment.

• 20:13Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, sure.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Right? The nightmare the founders worried about most is happening on his watch.

• 20:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  And, and he seems spectacularly ill-suited to lead at this moment, right? He's never been an executive. He's never been a governor or mayor. He's been one term in Congress. It's an upstart third political party. He doesn't correspond to people's idea of a leader. He doesn't have military experience and yet he has this great soul depth.

• 20:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and that's rooted in his sense of history and

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:40Ryan Holiday?

  human nature, the, the humans are humans, they don't change.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so, so he, but the fact he's able to navigate.

• 20:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  And he invents, I argue, sort of a, a, a new form of leadership focused on reconciliation, which is, is, is itself incredibly profound, right? It's no, don't double down on the duality. So, and, and, and he believes that moral courage can be combined, doesn't need to be combined with a sense of moral superiority. That's something we could stand to learn a lot in our politics today.

• 21:06Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, sure, sure, sure.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Right? So he says, look, I'm not anti-southern, I'm anti-slavery. They are just what we would be in their position. So his superpower is in some ways empathy. And being the power to be empathetic in a civil war.

• 21:17Ryan Holiday?

  It's almost incomprehensible.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  It is. And that's one of the things in terms of what we can draw on. If he was able to be empathetic in a civil war, it challenges us to, to, even though we need to be honest that our empathy has been strained.

• 21:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  We can take some courage and comfort from his example.

• 21:33Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think it's also interesting, right? These weren't like historical villains to him. These were people that he knew.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:39Ryan Holiday?

  Like when Alexander Stephens comes to negotiate this, the, the potential peace deal towards the end. They had inside jokes with each other.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:46Ryan Holiday?

  You know, he'd met these people that it was part, because he was a figure of his time. They, they, they weren't, I think, we sometimes, even with a Martin Luther King, we, we think of them as these sort of historical titans and not, he's calling up Bobby or Jack, you know what I mean?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:01Ryan Holiday?

  He's friends with Richard Nixon also because they've been to parties together. They know each other. This wasn't a few historical incidents. This, these were relationships that spanned the periods of years. And he understood them. He understood their motivations, their flaws. And he understood it in this sort of personal context. And that gave him, I think, some sympathy, even though he, he was horrified by the things they had done and found their cause to be like unfathomably bad. But, but he understood that people in it were not what they were doing necessarily.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  That separation and also understanding that the frailty of all those historic figures increases our own empathy and makes their wisdom more accessible to us. And you're exactly right. So Lincoln sees Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who gives the speech called the cornerstone.

• 22:52Ryan Holiday?

  The worst speech in American history.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Makes it very clear that the whole like, oh, the civil war wasn't primarily about slavery and racism. Yes, it was.

• 22:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Exhibit A, Alexander Stephens' speech about the entire purpose of the Confederacy. And it's a reminder that we've always had the struggle between the good America and, and, and the, the bad American. We need to write more love letters to the good America. We need to reclaim that. But the fact that Lincoln is also, the way he uses humor.

• 23:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Is very disarming and it's a very effective political tool. We don't use as much today.

• 23:19Ryan Holiday?

  To me, I, I think if you're not funny, you're probably not very smart. Like, I think there's something about, like, really smart people are under, smart and wise people understand things at such a level that they can be humorous about it. Like, he understands the humor about it. He understands the absurdity of existence, the futility of so many things, like.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Tells a lot of stories about that.

• 23:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. And, and also, like, he has, like, a dirty sense of humor, like, uh, like, he was filthy.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the fascinating contradiction is that, yeah, he's got a very bawdy sense of humor, right? And, um, he's got a complicated marriage. There's a lot of things that are, you know, he's depress, he's alternately, he's sunshine and shadow, right? He's alternately depressive and telling a lot of jokes, which people think are totally inappropriate at the time, like irrelevant and beneath the chief executive at this great moment. But his point is, for him, humor is also self-medication.

• 24:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it says, if I don't laugh, I would die.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that's a, that's a really powerful story, uh, where, where, uh, one of his friends visits him in the White House after a devastating defeat for the Union and finds him sitting by the fireplace laughing. And he friend launches into him and says, how can you be laughing at a time like this? And he throws the book down and looks at him with tears in his eyes and says, don't you realize that if I could not laugh, my heart would break and I would be unable to do my job?

• 24:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  It's those moments that are so human and those moments that we need to recognize today and that belief that sort of laughter is the shortest distance between people.

• 24:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Humor is really disarming. Those are more things that we can cultivate. And I think when, when, when humorlessness takes root in a political movement, that's a sign that it's not going to be able to resonate.

• 24:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. They've sucked the joy out of life and the connection out of life and the humanness out of it, too. Which I actually do think that it's kind of like, even though comedians seem to have had this kind of right-wing shift, which, which is weird lately, especially in the podcasting space, certainly.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yes, that's true.

• 25:12Ryan Holiday?

  The humorlessness of that whole scene is actually, I think, interesting. Like, they'll laugh at people, but there's a humorlessness as, like, the main victim of Lincoln's jokes was himself. Like he he tells a story about a man sent to to kill someone if he can find someone uglier than him. And and he finds Lincoln, you know, like he most of the jokes are about how gangly and weird. And, you know, they're all at Lincoln's expense.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  And he learned that by actually mocking somebody in the Illinois State Legislature and actually hurting the man's feelings. And he's an empathetic enough, soulful person that he basically resolved that, you know, no, it's to break the ice. And therefore self mocking humor, but but but insisting on humor, you don't wield it as a as a weapon.

• 25:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  And that's where sort of a deeper wisdom and compassion.

• 26:01Ryan Holiday?

  There's no cruelty in it for the most part, unless you'd say he's being cruel to himself. But yeah, there's no victims of the jokes.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  That's right. And and I do think, you know, look, but but we want to be on guard against humorlessness and speech codes. And, you know, because that does sort of suck the joy.

• 26:17Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  A successful political movement, I've been interviewing folks on my Bulwark podcast about how you create a pro democracy movement that can push back on authoritarian moments. And one of the things is it's got to be positive and patriotic. And it's also got to have a sense of fun.

• 26:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  You know, that that's necessary for a movement. People feel like they're part of something bigger themselves, but it's not a grim and humorless march. It needs to be defiant and optimistic and patriotic and inclusive, not exclusive.

• 26:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, that's I think that's right.

• 26:55Ryan Holiday?

  I loved your book. One of my sort of favorite moments in American history is that those couple of days on the River Queen.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:01Ryan Holiday?

  Where you get, because very rarely do you get a bunch of historical figures all in the same room, right? Like Eisenhower, Patton, FDR, Marshall, they're they're never, they're in different places. They're never together, right? But but the idea that you get Sherman, Porter, Grant, Lincoln, and a couple of all of us, I think Stanton's maybe there. But they're all in this room at the same time, just and they're just stuck on this slow moving paddle wheeler. It's just one of my, it's one of my favorite sort of scenes in American, it feels like it should be. A play or a book in and of itself.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  I worked very hard at sort of recreating that that conversation and it's in the painting, The Peacemakers, which Harry Truman buys right at the sort of for the White House after the the Second World War, right at the the sort of that that period and and itself, the painting was drawn from life by interviews with Sherman and Grant and Porter. Lincoln obviously had died and the rainbow behind him is sort of the the poetic license.

• 27:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  And interestingly, George H. W. Bush chooses that painting to be in the background of his own presidential portrait, which is kind of cool in in terms of the work, the work he and Baker were doing to build a new world in the wake of of the Cold War. And so I I appreciate that that moment jumps out at you and you can recreate that conversation.

• 28:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Like Sherman is snapping and he's talking and the painter and Sherman explained this about like he would they would be able to cut Lee off.

• 28:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  You know, with sort of a pincer like movement and you get, you know, and Sam Grant, Alyssa S. Grant is sort of looking on in a bemused way at Sherman kind of.

• 28:35Ryan Holiday?

  Cause Sherman has a ton of energy, Grant's relaxed, yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  He's more, he's more of a, yeah, he's, he's, he's got a different energy about him. He's, he fights and he's dogged, but he's not the same kind of like live wire that Sherman is. And Porter is this weird kind of bump on a log walrus mustache kind of guy, but it is this great compelling moment. And that's part of the the fun of the project of the book for me was, you know, there have been 16,000 books written about Lincoln, but no one had written a book at that point about about his plan to win the peace after winning the war in close focus on the last six weeks because he never gets to implement that vision.

• 29:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  But you can recreate it because it was very much on his mind.

• 29:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  He was thinking long, he was thinking, he was thinking long and short.

• 29:16Ryan Holiday?

  It's funny, I got, you know, those like sort of Fox News history books where the anchors do the, so I.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Sadly.

• 29:23Ryan Holiday?

  They they brought me in, they wanted me to write one for one of those anchors one time and they, but they didn't even, they didn't even have the book idea. Like they, they were like, what book should, what book, what book should I write? Will you write it? And I pitched the the River Queen story and they were, it was just like, like not, not interested at all, but I probably should have picked something more dramatic, but I, that's one of my. My favorite historical moments and scenes. And yeah, it is in that famous painting and Porter details it all in his memoirs, but you're just like, this is what gives you the hint of how it could have gone.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:54Ryan Holiday?

  Had he not been killed. And then my, my favorite sort of little tangent from that scene is Lincoln gets back after Richmond and he writes a letter to the head of the Navy and he says, hey, can we get my son like some Navy flags? Cause he, he like clearly heard about it and he was like, Dad, I want, you know, when you go on trips, you're supposed to bring shit home for your kids?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:15Ryan Holiday?

  And, and here you have Lincoln as the father being like, I think it was Tad, he's like, Tad wants a flag. Can you get Tad a flag?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, one of the most, I mean, I actually begin the book with this. One to me, one of the most cinematic moments in American history that gets really short shrift is where Lincoln sort of scrapes ashore in Richmond while the city is still burning.

• 30:33Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, Jefferson is left hours earlier, like Jefferson Davis, like this, the chair is still warm.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Yes, it's still warm. But he walks up the hill from the river, holding his son Tad's hand on the boy's, I think 10th birthday or 10th birthday. And it's, it's, it's the father and the son surrounded by a group, a small, very small group of soldiers, and they get lost.

• 30:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  There's no welcoming party. This is not a triumphal interest into Richmond. But he sort of walks up the hill and I recreated that walk with my son when he was probably, you know, five or six, uh, up the road and you could get the sense of, of, of it's, it's a steep climb. And then he bumps into like a New York regiment and they take him to Jefferson Davis's White House and he sits in the chair. And that to me is one of the most incredible cinematic moments in American history and it doesn't get a lot as much attention as it should.

• 31:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it wasn't stage crafted, right?

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Not at all. The opposite.

• 31:27Ryan Holiday?

  De Gaulle enters Paris like at the head of a parade, right? And it's a scene and then to go to the point about the media environment shifting, they understood then that they were in the modern media era and this needed to be captured by cameras to sent back to the movies so people could watch it. It was, it was part of that. And Lincoln is still in the past, right? And he's just, oh man, we just took the enemy's capital. What do we do? You know, and he He's there almost before the generals are there.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  No, he is. I mean, General Gottfried Weitzel, who is an immigrant, is in charge of Richmond, and everything is incredibly fluid. And all of a sudden, the president shows up, and he's had this insane journey up the river in which like the boat almost gets sunk. And it's chaotic, and so it's very human. It's very, you know, to the extent he's sort of, you know,

• 32:14Ryan Holiday?

  He's not traveling with a gaggle of reporters.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 32:17Ryan Holiday?

  No one's recording it. It's kind of the last gasp of that sort of, oh, you'll read about this in books later.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  And it's a little Palm Sunday, right? I mean, this all corresponds, he's the sort of, you know, the Jesus of American politics assassinated on Good Friday, but you know, this sort of entry, this non-triumphal entry.

• 32:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  But still a moment suffused with hope. And he himself feels great for boating and exhaustion. But what you're just saying about De Gaulle, and I love when, you know, I recommend your books widely. I actually, right now, when people come up to like, what do we do? And there's not a lot of good answers. And one of the things I do, you know, subscribe to the local paper, patriotic, positive, inclusive, you know, but also, you know, reading your book on courage, for example, I think is useful for people right now. And I do recommend that book to folks all the time. But you talk about De Gaulle. There's another interesting counterweight about playing for the cameras in a way with a sense of history.

• 33:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Which is Eisenhower, because the twist in my book is that it ends in the Marshall Plan. Because General Lucius Clay, the seed of the book, and you appreciate, you know, there are two rules for me. You write the book you want to read, and you follow the seed.

• 33:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  And Lucius Clay was asked what guided his decisions as sort of leader of the good occupation of Germany. And he said, I tried to think what Lincoln would have done for the South if he had lived.

• 33:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  One of the things that Eisenhower and Lucius Clay did during the immediate aftermath and during the Nuremberg Trials was to make sure it was filmed.

• 33:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  So the Holocaust could not be convincingly denied, and then to bring local Germans through those camps and local, you know, so that they had to confront it. And to make sure that German language press covered the Nuremberg Trials.

• 33:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  And Justice Robert Jackson, who I'd love to write about a book about someday. I'm doing Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena right now. But I think Justice Jackson is a fascinating American figure and a strong sort of liberal patriot, strong tradition. But the way that they consciously made people confront the horror of the Holocaust precisely because they were afraid that otherwise people would forget, or they'd say it never happened.

• 34:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Doesn't someone, there's a thing about a slave market they want to tear down, right? And Lincoln says, leave you.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  No, it's a prison.

• 34:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  This is a fascinating moment, and I think it's applicable to a lot of the debates we have about statuary today, where, you know, which Lincoln is in a carriage and he's passing a very hated old tobacco warehouse that had been turned into a prisoner, a really horrific prisoner of war camp. And he's going through and, and black citizens or, you know, newly liberated slaves are clustering.

• 34:39Ryan Holiday?

  He encounters with the slaves as if it doesn't touch you emotionally, I don't know what's wrong with you. But where, where they all, you know, he's walking through Richmond and they just, he just bumps into these people who are forever free now from this moment because of the man in front of them. You don't get many moments like that either.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  And, and you have these snippets of, of where you can recreate the walk, right? But so, yeah, so he's taking, he's going around in the carriage and he's getting the tour and he goes and he passes this hated POW camp in effect. And people shout, tear it down, tear it down. And he says very calmly, no, leave it as a monument.

• 35:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  And there too, that is that sort of, we can't escape our past by destroying it.

• 35:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  We need to confront it and reconcile with it and re-assimilate it and move forward.

• 35:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Yeah. And, and again, the, the wisdom that he had in this moment to understand that and then the sort of discipline, the ability to master his emotions is incredible. And then you, it really, it's, I think it's the scenes you tell in the book and this sort of the last couple of weeks of Lincoln's life. I think if you don't know, I history, you're obviously, it's like, hey, we lost a lot when we lost Lincoln. But it's only when you really do a deep dive into that period that you get a sense of truly what was lost and why, in a sense, he had to be killed. Like, why, like, why the South had to kill this person, right? Like, it, it, you can, you can see why it was such a threat because he, I think he would have won. Do you know what I mean?

• 36:07Ryan Holiday?

  Like by killing Lincoln, they basically get segregation for another 100 years.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Well, there, there are two things here, right? Yes. But his martyrdom makes him more powerful.

• 36:16Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Right? And that, that's one of the unintended consequences. You know, one of the fascinating things is you see very often we create the thing we're trying to avoid.

• 36:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  And the South does that with with their secession and and assistance on secession and civil war. Lincoln initially just wants to stop the expansion of slavery.

• 36:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  But by the end, you know, we're this is a war to to remove the the argument about secession and slavery forever free for all time. The the second thing is that the radical Republicans wanted Andrew Johnson. They thought he was going to be more radical. The reconciler dies, the Avenger takes his place, but they misread Johnson.

• 36:52Ryan Holiday?

  They also wanted a less powerful president.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  They they did too.

• 36:54Ryan Holiday?

  Reassert Congress and set the the legislation at the legislature, sorry, legislators as the supreme body of American politics. And Lincoln was kind of the first president to be like, no, I'm in charge.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Right. Well, that that's true, but but I think where it applies to, I think a lot of your work is it's a reminder that character is key.

• 37:14Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Character is the single most important quality in a president or any person. And Lincoln and and Andrew Johnson knew each other when they were young. They both have hardscrabble backgrounds, but the key difference is character. And one of the things I found was a quote from The Atlantic that describes Andrew Johnson at the time as being, you know, vain, ill-temperate and egotistical to the point of mental disease, you know? And and he he he was.

• 37:38Ryan Holiday?

  How does that turn out?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 37:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Not terribly well. And and he starts, you know, saying that, oh, I'll I'll I'll offer pardons to any large landowner, the people who should have known better, but they have to come and kiss my ring.

• 37:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Right? I mean.

• 37:50Ryan Holiday?

  He's immediately corrupted by the power of the president.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Immediately corrupted by the power. He's weak in the moments where he needs to be strong and he's he's he's bent on vengeance, right? This is not a reconciler. This is a person bent on revenge. And as a result of him, and and then within months of the end of of the Civil War, the black codes start getting passed. And the South starts saying, you know, they start saying, well, we we have to accept the end of slavery, but we don't have to accept equality. And that's where, I mean, then Jim Crow's secession replaces slavery for 100 years, like 100 years on the dime. And that echoes on today because the American political map flips in 1964.

• 38:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  When Southern Democrat LBJ takes on the conservative Democrats to push through civil rights and voting rights legislation. And and it happens on a dime.

• 38:36Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.