#419: Ryan Holiday — How to Use Stoicism to Choose Alive Time Over Dead Time

Ryan Holiday — How to Use Stoicism to Choose Alive Time Over Dead Time | Brought to you by LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/ and Trello http://trello.com/tfs. "Anger is often what pain looks like when it shows itself in public." — Krista Tippett Ryan Holiday (@RyanHoliday https://twitter.com/ryanholiday) is one of the world’s foremost thinkers and writers on ancient philosophy and its place in modern life. He is a sought-after speaker and strategist and the author of many bestselling books, including The Obstacle Is the Way https://www.amazon.com/Obstacle-Way-Timeless-Turning-Triumph/dp/B00K5JUNSU/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Ego Is the Enemy https://www.amazon.com/Tim-Ferriss-Audio-Ego-Enemy/dp/B01GSIZ9EY/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and The Daily Stoic https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Stoic-Meditations-Wisdom-Perseverance/dp/B01MA32SO0/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold more than two million copies worldwide. He lives with his family outside of Austin, Texas. You can subscribe to receive his writing at RyanHoliday.net https://ryanholiday.net/ and DailyStoic.com https://dailystoic.com/. Ryan was also the fourth-ever guest https://tim.blog/2014/05/06/the-tim-ferriss-podcast-episode-4-ryan-holiday/ on the podcast in the very beginning, and he has written multiple popular guest posts https://tim.blog/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practical-guide-for-entrepreneurs/ for my blog, which you can find at tim.blog. His latest book is Stillness Is the Key https://www.amazon.com/Stillness-Key-Ryan-Holiday/dp/0525538585/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller and Wall Street Journal bestseller. This episode focuses on Stoic philosophy and how to apply it in our current uncertain times. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/. I've used this service for many of my businesses, as have quite a few of the icons on this podcast, including Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame. LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/ is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted for everything from setting up wills, proper trademark searches, forming LLCs, setting up non-profits, or finding simple cease-and-desist letter templates. LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/ is not a law firm, but it does have a network of independent attorneys available in most states who can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract reviews, and otherwise help you run your business with complete transparency and up-front pricing. Check out LegalZoom.com and enter promo code Tim at checkout today https://www.legalzoom.com/ for special savings and see how the fine folks there can make life easier for you and your business. This episode is also brought to you by Trello http://trello.com/tfs. 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• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

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• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by LegalZoom. I have used LegalZoom for years. Many of the guests on this podcast actually got their businesses started with LegalZoom, but that's not why I'm mentioning them today. Health and safety are on top of everyone's minds right now, yours truly included. I'm thinking a lot about contingency plans of all types. You want to make sure that your loved ones are protected and provided for. That's why LegalZoom continues to provide a reliable way for you to set up the right estate plan without leaving your home. It starts with finding answers to all sorts of common questions. Do you need a last will and testament or a living trust, for instance? What about an advanced healthcare directive? What is that? And what is a power of attorney and how should you use it or not use it?

• 1:09Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:53Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:38Tim Ferriss?

  helping teams communicate, focus, and connect. So, teams of all shapes and sizes at companies like Google, Fender, as in Fender guitars, Costco, and even perhaps your favorite neighborhood coffee shop, all use Trello to get work done. So, whether you're tiny, medium, large, huge, Trello can be used by your team. Keep your workflow going from wherever you are with Trello. Try Trello for free and learn more at trello.com/tfs. That's trello.com/tfs. T R E L L O dot com slash T F S. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health.

• 3:20Tim Ferriss?

  I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one.

• 4:03Tim Ferriss?

  Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 4:14Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hello, boys and girls, cats and dogs, lemurs and squirrels. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is a special quarantine edition, as has been common recently, and it includes a conversation with my good friend, Ryan Holiday. Specifically, he had asked me if he could interview me about Stoic philosophy, how to apply it in our current uncertain times, how I am using certain tenets from people like Seneca and others to calm my nerves and not just survive, but perhaps benefit from this time in some fashion. So who is Ryan? Ryan Holiday, on Twitter and Instagram @RyanHoliday, is one of the world's foremost thinkers

• 4:57Tim Ferriss?

  and writers on ancient philosophy and its place in modern life. He is a sought-after speaker and strategist, and the author of many bestselling books, including The Obstacle is the Way, which I loved so much, I was the producer of the audiobook, The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and The Daily Stoic. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages. His books have also been used by some of the top-performing sports coaches in the world, many, many names you would recognize, also in the military, and have sold close to 3 million copies worldwide. He lives with his family outside of Austin, Texas. You can subscribe to receive his writing at RyanHoliday.net and DailyStoic.com.

• 5:38Tim Ferriss?

  Ryan has also been a popular guest poster, or guest author, on my blog, and you can find a number of those, including Stoicism 101: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs, on tim.blog. Just search his name, Ryan Holiday, and it will pop right up. He was also the fourth-ever guest on this podcast in the very beginning, many years ago. His latest book is Stillness is the Key, which was an instant number-one New York Times bestseller and Wall Street Journal bestseller. Please enjoy.

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  Alright, so I was thinking, so we last talked podcast related in January and man, life comes at you fast. I don't think, yeah.

• 6:23Tim Ferriss?

  The three great correctors of human population, war, pestilence and famine, and we certainly have number two in abundance and scaling rapidly. So things have changed quite a lot since January.

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I was, so I was curious, as someone who is a longtime fan of the Stoics like yourself, how, how have you been thinking about these sort of ancient ideas or ancient strategies for dealing with what is a very timeless ancient problem?

• 6:59Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the first thing I did was I looked into my stored belongings because I moved from California to Austin, Texas, three years ago, four years ago, but the vast majority of my stuff is still in storage. And I'd been sent as a gift, a bust of Seneca that was still wrapped in bubble wrap. So I tracked that down, opened it up, and put it in an upstairs room where we tend to spend, my girlfriend and I, mornings, so that I would at least see it. And so I think that there are a whole lot of different ways to attempt to answer this. And I will begin with putting someone like Seneca, although he's a very

• 7:44Tim Ferriss?

  crafty, funny character, so we could spend a whole lot of time on him specifically.

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:48Tim Ferriss?

  Marcus Aurelius and so on, as ideals that I, on some level, strive to emulate. And I think the word ideal is important because...

• 8:00Tim Ferriss?

  It is very easy to beat yourself up for not being stoic or resilient or calm enough, which in and of itself is very unstoic. So it can turn into this spiral of self-loathing related to not being, one could say stoic enough, or simply calm enough. And so the first is to really recognize that these are ideals that I'm striving for, but that they are not a pass-fail hurdle. Sure. In that, in that, in that respect. The second is, I've been doing a lot of rehearsal,

• 8:42Tim Ferriss?

  so premeditatio malorum, rehearsing of the worst-case scenarios and combining that with the fear-setting exercise that I tend to do, which is really just a written practice of writing out the worst-case scenarios, what you could do to decrease the likelihood of them happening, what you could do to decrease the damage if they do happen, et cetera, et cetera. And a big part of that for me has been deeply envisioning the worst-case scenarios and what they would not just look like, but feel like to observe and experience. So I'll give a concrete example. As is the case for many people, and is the case for me, I have

• 9:22Tim Ferriss?

  seen my stock portfolio drop, I don't know, let's call it 70% in value in certain cases. And I had a, a good line of sight into coronavirus and its growth quite early on, and began writing about it publicly in, I want to say, second week of February, but had been tracking it prior to that. So I was able to sell a portion of my stock.

• 9:52Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, let's just call it February 2021, whichever was the closest weekday trading day. And then I decided to hold the rest. Now, that could prove to be a terrible, terrible, terrible decision, right? This could be the worst financial decision of my life. Could be. But after lots and lots and lots of discussion and lots of number crunching, lots of thinking about it, I decided to, to hold on with the belief that, and in this case, I'm referring to Uber, that I was an early advisor to. So it represents a disproportionately high percentage of my net worth. Now, this video will be trapped in the amber, so people will go back and say, what a fucking idiot.

• 10:35Tim Ferriss?

  If it turns out poorly, but the decision-making process I felt was reasonable. I felt like it was defensible. Now, at the time, the stock was trading around $40 price per share. And the, well, I was talking to this much more experienced investor and he said, if you're going to hold this, you need to commit to yourself to hold for at least five years. And you should expect that the stock will go down to $20 or $15. Now, at the time, it was about 40 and this seemed not necessarily inconceivable, but probably far off in the distance.

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Tim Ferriss?

  And he said, when it hits 20 and 15, you are going to want to sell more than you do now. And you need to prepare for that. And that's what I did. So I really mentally committed to holding for an extended period of time. I prepared myself for $15 a share. Little did I know that something like two weeks later, two and a half weeks later, would actually hit $14 a share or closer to it. And

• 11:46Tim Ferriss?

  That is the, I have had many struggles throughout this coronavirus experience. And considering the ramifications, not just for me, but for my family, I have family members in the service industries, for instance, for the economy, for people who are far less fortunate. And I've, I've, I've struggled a lot in certain areas, but the areas where I have not struggled are the places where I have rehearsed to the extent possible what might happen. So that has been one of the most powerful Stoic practices that I've been using in the last certainly two months.

• 12:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I've got a bunch of stuff. So this is my Marcus Aurelius statue. I bought this when I was writing The Obstacle is the Way. So this, this is, from, from what I read about it, this, this statue is from 1840. So I, I like looking at it and then thinking like, okay, this stat, this literal piece of stone survived through cholera epidemics, smallpox epidemics, polio, the Spanish flu, the flu of the 1950s. So I like thinking about not just like, okay, who are your ideals? But then also, how have humans gotten through, like, what, what sort of totems or reminders can you have that like, oh, life goes on?

• 13:10Ryan Holiday?

  Like, I'm talking to you from my office and I, my office was built in 1880, I think. So like this office got through, you know, the Spanish flu, the First World War, the Second World War, you know, the Cold War. And you know what I mean? I think like, part of one of the things I think the Stoics would ask us to do is like zoom way out and sort of be reminded that like, hey, as bad as it is, like, history does go on. There's no guarantee you and I will be a part of that history, but like, you know what I mean? Like, we'll either get through it or we won't.

• 13:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 13:47Ryan Holiday?

  I'm curious about the the stock market thing because that's something I was going to ask you because one of the things I'm dealing with, I think the the loss aversion is a big part of it and and it's hard for people to manage. Um, what what I'm struggling with is kicking myself. So I wasn't as early as you, but we you and I had some conversations. And so I took it seriously. I went and stocked up on food. I cut back on my travel. I basically said like, hey, I'm sort of a buy and hold kind of a guy. Uh, and I don't have the the exposure that you do to to some of those stocks. But but the thing I I said is like, hey, this is going to be bad. But it's not going to be literally, it's not going to be the worst

• 14:27Ryan Holiday?

  uh, decline in market history, you know, I I didn't think that. So I didn't do anything. Um, and so one of the things I'm struggling with is like regret, you know what I mean?

• 14:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 14:39Ryan Holiday?

  And and I'm wondering sort of what you, how how you deal with some of that, like, are you mad that you didn't sell more? Like, how are you dealing with decisions you made that you can't undo, but now you have a lot of time to sit and think about them?

• 14:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, that's the nature of all decisions, right? I mean, the, as I understand the etymology of the word to decide, a a decision is like an incision. It is a cutting away. So once you have cut away. Now, that could be some fake attributed to Mark Twain and uh, Abe Lincoln type quote, maybe Oscar Wilde for on the internet, but nonetheless, that's that's what I've I've been told before. So all of our decisions are irreversible. Uh, and at least temporally speaking. This is something that I didn't grapple with until reasonably far after

• 15:36Tim Ferriss?

  the

• 15:38Tim Ferriss?

  Covid nineteen and coronavirus came on to the main stage, so to speak. Sure.

• 15:45Tim Ferriss?

  So when I was campaigning in part for the cancellation of South by Southwest, which brings 400,000 plus people to Yeah. Austin and it was be, I was just attacked by almost all sides and viewed as an alarmist, as fill in the blank. I did not have trouble with that because I felt like the data were on my side. But I was so focused, and I think rightly so, on my household, on my family, on my girlfriend and her family, and ensuring that everyone were prepared that I did not, I really wasn't looking

• 16:26Tim Ferriss?

  at, say, investment as, as an example. So now there are, and I, and so part of the reason I'm not beating myself up is that I, at the time at least, in retrospect, I was beating myself up for a while. Then I realized, well, do I even have the toolkit to have taken advantage of that effectively? Sure. And by take advantage of that, one might be talking about shorting the market in some fashion. Well, it turns out it's very easy to get your face ripped off trying to short the market. Right. And it's very, very easy to lose that game, or at least those bets. And so I have,

• 17:06Tim Ferriss?

  I do have friends who are career investors who have the toolkit to take advantage of something like this. I gave them a heads up that

• 17:18Tim Ferriss?

  I, I gave them a preview of what was coming early. So let's call it late January or early February. And they missed those opportunities and they are beating themselves up because they do have the toolkit and the experience and yet they didn't take the actions. Whereas you have, say, some people who did, like Bill Ackman at Pershing, who, I don't know, made $2.6 billion from short positions or something like that. Yeah. Not bad. And so I

• 17:50Tim Ferriss?

  I feel as though my perspective on that specifically has been honed, if I could use such a dignified word, through a lot of the startup investing I've done, in the sense that it doesn't matter how many opportunities you miss, it matters how many opportunities you take advantage of. Sure. Does that make sense? Totally. Just like, if you're putting together a book, or a podcast, or fill in the blank, it doesn't matter how many people don't get it, it matters how many people get it. Sure. And by that, I mean, if you are really waiting for the fat pitches, as Warren Buffett would say, not necessarily with his style of investing,

• 18:35Tim Ferriss?

  but if you're, if you understand where your core competencies are, and can focus on the most appealing opportunities, you can miss a lot of opportunities and net-net still do very, very well. So I view, I try to keep that in mind, and as you said a little bit earlier, to zoom out and not look at this as a, an anomaly of a few weeks. So it could be, it could be that a year from now, we look back, and the lowest low was in fact, whenever it was. I can't remember when the lowest low was, March 12th, or whatever it was.

• 19:20Tim Ferriss?

  That might be off, but some, early March, something like that, 2020. At the same time, this could be, and I suspect it will be on some level, a marathon and not a sprint. So there will be more opportunities. And then the reframing of the question for me relieves a lot of stress. So instead of asking, "Why didn't I take advantage of X? What could I have done that I didn't do?" Those are fruitless questions that just create a lot of stress. If you were to ask, how might I look for opportunities that do not have the time sensitivity of trying to time the stock market?

• 20:04Tim Ferriss?

  And one could say the futility of trying to time the stock market. Because even in a bear market, and look, I'm not a professional public equities investor. So no one should take investment advice from me, and I'm not giving investment advice. But the, even in a bear market, there are these rallies that can really hurt you, not necessarily financially, although they can, but psychologically, right? Where you buy and then they spike. And right now, the volatility, meaning the, you know, simplistically, the, the, the sort of amount of up and down is just unbelievable. So you're gonna get whipsawed no matter what. And that can be super stressful.

• 20:47Tim Ferriss?

  So, so I'm asking myself, well, rather than look at my god awful computer screen all day like everybody else in the world, look at all the same information and, and, and develop the like hubris and ridiculous delusion that I can somehow parse out a unique conclusion from that when millions of people are doing the same thing. What do I have access to? Where are my strengths? Where are my weaknesses? What can I do that if this is a marathon or if this is going to last at least six months, there are opportunities I might be able to take advantage of? Where do I have unique domain expertise or an informational advantage? Right?

• 21:31Tim Ferriss?

  So maybe that's, I'm making this up, right? But maybe that is real distressed real estate in Austin, let's say, since I'm here, right? Yeah. Maybe that is any number of other things, but it's probably not going to be figuring out whether Google or Berkshire Hathaway is going to move one direction or another and how much they're gonna move. That is being the sucker at the poker table, I think. So, yeah, so that, so that's maybe a very long-winded way of saying it, but. My belief is there are times when I make very fast, good decisions, but I almost never

• 22:14Tim Ferriss?

  make good rushed decisions. So if I feel rushed to make a decision because, oh, my God, it might go up, it might go this, it might go this, it might do that, the likelihood of me making a bad decision is very high.

• 22:27Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 22:28Tim Ferriss?

  And the cost of undoing that bad decision can also be quite high. So that is to say that if you have dry powder, meaning cash, I think, I don't think it's a terrible place to be right now. But again, I'm not a registered investment advisor, nor am I giving investment advice. But that's how I'm thinking about it personally.

• 22:50Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I think for me, it's less like opportunities I didn't take advantage of and steps that I should have taken to protect myself. And so that connects to another emotion I think a lot of people are feeling, that I'd be curious your sort of stoic take on, given like the South by Southwest example is a great one. So you and a handful of other people campaigned, they shut down South by Southwest early. Who knows how much impact that had, probably a significant amount because it was so early. And then government officials in Texas and all over the country, basically, and this goes back to when it was first coming out of China, sort of sat on that time. It's not like we used that time and built a bunch

• 23:31Ryan Holiday?

  of ventilators and, you know, so how are you processing, or maybe you don't have any, but for someone who has a lot of anger about how this went, or is feeling anger, how do you suggest sort of, what do you think the Stoics say about processing that anger? Because I do know that the Stoics did not tend to see anger as a productive or healthy emotion.

• 23:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I'd be curious to hear your take on that. So maybe I'll turn it around. My default gear for decades was anger.

• 24:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 24:06Tim Ferriss?

  But right now, my focus is related to my locus of control.

• 24:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Tim Ferriss?

  In the sense that my sort of sphere of control has been constrained down to The family effectively.

• 24:21Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 24:21Tim Ferriss?

  And my closest friends and ensuring to the extent possible, those people are safe and prepared and financially capable to to cover their expenses and so on. Uh, I I am more active, as as you know, on

• 24:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:37Tim Ferriss?

  the national level as well, but uh, I suppose, I mean, and this is maybe cliched, but it's, I I would think of the serenity prayer and you probably have the full text somewhere, but you know, in essence, the sort of strength to act on the things that you can act upon and the wisdom to know that which you cannot act upon or influence. And I would say also that I I don't think that the time bought by canceling South by Southwest was used optimally.

• 25:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Tim Ferriss?

  But just in having that time and delay, there was a huge benefit. Right. So it wasn't used optimally, but I but I I'm satisfied with that outcome because it has allowed us to see case studies like New York City that then spur local and state governments to do more so that they do not become the next case study. And also in retrospect, looking at, for instance, Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

• 25:46Ryan Holiday?

  I was just gonna say that, yeah.

• 25:47Tim Ferriss?

  Spring break in Miami and Florida. I don't think those are uncorrelated to those two locations among a handful of others becoming the next hotspots. So I'm very confident in the the the benefits of South by being delayed. Anger, let me think about anger for a second because I I am a somewhat, I'm a connoisseur.

• 26:13Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I was, what I was thinking about anger is like, okay, in war, you could see how anger is a somewhat productive emotion. It's sort of a fury that you could direct at the enemy. So you might at least be able to make the argument that that it has some productive benefits. Uh, obviously, the pandemic doesn't care how much you hate it. Cancer doesn't care what names you call it, right? Like, so when you're fighting something like this, I think you always want to think about, like, is anger productive? Yes or no? And then one of my favorite Marcus Aurelius quotes, it's a quote we know from Euripides, the playwright, but he says, "Why should you feel anger at the world as if the world would notice?" And so that's the other, like, Trump doesn't care that you're angry at him. The governor of Texas doesn't care that you're angry.

• 26:58Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, so, so, and in fact, i- if you are active in, in politics or at the national level, you have to work with these people. So I think you're also seeing some of the governors, Democrat and Republican, having to figure out, oh, hey, if I, if I yell at this person on television, that might feel cathartic, but then the next day I have to call them and ask for ventilators or ask for the National Guard. So, so I think what the Stoics talk about is like, is anger making things better or worse? And 90% of the time, it makes it worse. That doesn't mean that there wasn't something wrong and you can't be upset about it, but it's, you've got to control that anger because there's a problem to solve.

• 27:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I agree. And what I've also been trying to do, and this, this actually came out of an interview I did some time ago with Bosma St. John, uh, who is an incredible woman. And one sort of philosophical tenet of hers, as she underscored, was applauding what you want more of, not just berating what you want less of. And I think the internet has enabled a lot of things, uh, including the dominance of the noise that is just bitching and moaning without any clear proposal for solutions.

• 28:21Tim Ferriss?

  So I have been spending the majority of my time reinforcing particularly politicians

• 28:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:31Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, who are in the game. Everyone's playing a game.

• 28:36Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 28:36Tim Ferriss?

  You, you and I are playing games and we all play games. And there are rules, there are stakes, there are rewards, sometimes there are punishments. And step number one is figuring out what game or games you are playing. And one of the games politicians play is reelection. And so you have, you have to think about if you want to persuade someone who is playing that game. Or not just persuade, but to collaborate in some way or enable someone who is playing that game. You have to think about the incentives at play. And to that end, I've been trying to support people who are making good decisions, even if they are late.

• 29:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Tim Ferriss?

  If they are better late than never decisions. And that's coming from someone who, I mean, has had a lifetime of anger. So I, I do think the, certainly the stoic philosophies and philosophers and writing has had a tremendous impact on my intellectual understanding of why anger can be counterproductive. But it's really been getting on the playing field and trying to get shit done. That has reinforced how imperative it is from a practical perspective. It's one thing to understand logically why anger is counterproductive.

• 30:02Tim Ferriss?

  And it's, it's quite another to not just keep your anger in check, but to sort of sublimate it into

• 30:14Tim Ferriss?

  a different area that you can strengthen, right? And I'm not the paragon of this, I still get pissed off, but.

• 30:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think there's a, there's a difference between being angry and doing things out of anger.

• 30:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. You're allowed to feel angry. Look, I, I get pissed off. And yeah, it's, it's not so much a question of suppressing anger. It's, it's more of a question of, I think, taking notice of what angers you so that over time fewer things hopefully anger you. And one thing that's been very helpful to me also, and this is,

• 30:56Tim Ferriss?

  I can't remember, well, I do remember one quote from.

• 31:01Tim Ferriss?

  Krista Tippett, who has a podcast called On Being, which I believe, I'm gonna paraphrase it, but that anger is fear shown publicly. And so I try to, at least as an exercise, if I'm really angry, to journal or sit and just think about for a moment, if this were traceable to a fear, what would the fear be? Right? So it's presupposing that it's accurate for the sake of a thought exercise.

• 31:35Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 31:36Tim Ferriss?

  And because anger, at least for me, right, anger is, it's harder to wrestle in the sense that like head on treating anger as an object, it's harder for me to grapple with and to disarm, if that makes sense. Because I get, I get where the story I tell myself that perpetuates anger is, well, it's the principle, justice must be served.

• 32:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 32:04Tim Ferriss?

  This is da, da, da, da. And I get on my high.

• 32:06Ryan Holiday?

  That phrase, how dare they, you know? How could you do this?

• 32:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I get on my high, my high horse of righteousness and you can justify a lot of stupid behavior that way, but I don't quite know how to defuse it. Whereas if I can take the anger and turn it into fear, or not necessarily turn it into fear, but find a source that is related to fear, then I can use fear setting or other exercises, primitatium malorum, et cetera, to turn down the volume.

• 32:42Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 32:42Tim Ferriss?

  So that's, that's a step that I've found very helpful also.

• 32:48Ryan Holiday?

  I'm curious about fear, because obviously you have your fear setting stuff, which, which you talk about in your TED Talk, which, which is probably very timely for people right now. But, you know, having sort of two young kids, you get this sort of pit in your stomach, right? And I can sort of empath, people are really afraid, right? And I'd be curious. Well, so two things. One, I'd be curious what you say to someone who is afraid. And then the other thing, which maybe you might want to riff on, I was kind of thinking, I was trying to think of, so I was born in eighty seven, so I was like, what scary things did my parents go through with kids, which is actually really helpful. So it's like, you know, Black Monday, there was obviously nine eleven, there's the tech bubble bursting,

• 33:33Ryan Holiday?

  there's the financial crisis, there's the end of the Cold War. I tried to go through and think of, there are two wars in the Gulf, right? Like, so that was something I did. But I'm just curious, like, how are you thinking about fear? And what would you say to someone who is being overwhelmed by fear?

• 33:51Tim Ferriss?

  It's a very good question. It's a very timely question. I don't have confidence in a single answer for that, in the sense that I do think it's very highly dependent on what you're afraid of. And I have relatives who had restaurant jobs and so on, and they're in very tough positions. And I wouldn't want to make this purely an academic exercise and lose sight of the fact that fear is a gift in many cases. It tells you what is wrong. So I don't want in any way to seem like I'm detached from reality by making

• 34:31Tim Ferriss?

  it sort of mental gymnastics exercise. So let's start there. I would say that, and I've been telling myself this, so I can, which is just because you're feeling afraid, I have, for instance, I have older parents in poor health who are in New York.

• 34:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Tim Ferriss?

  That causes, has caused me quite a bit of fear and anxiety. And there's very little I can do, and there's very little I can do, and I can do a lot. And I have very good contacts, and I have very good contacts in New York itself. And to...

• 35:11Tim Ferriss?

  To an almost complete extent, there's next to nothing I can do if they get sick. Yeah. And that has produced a sense of feeling helpless or hopeless or unable to help that I'm very unaccustomed to. Yeah. And so what I've been telling myself and might be helpful to others is number one, it's okay to feel afraid, like that doesn't make you flawed. That means that your sort of evolutionary machinery is intact and there's a lot of value to that. Right?

• 35:50Tim Ferriss?

  And so I would say that you're not alone, you're not flawed. Millions of people, tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions are feeling the same thing right now. And there are reasons to be afraid. It doesn't mean there's, it does not mean there's nothing you can do. You always have options, right? You always have options. That's the other thing I would say, and this is what I'm saying to myself, it's like you always have options. You may just not like those options. Right. Right? Sure. Right? So for instance, if you look at the plight of some workers right now who have gone from

• 36:31Tim Ferriss?

  kind of getting laid off from one job to say delivering groceries for fill in the blank app or company and want more personal protective equipment in order to do that job. It's a very, very difficult situation to be in because number one, no matter how much those companies would love to give you personal protective equipment, right now, healthcare workers don't even have enough PPE, personal protective equipment. So you have then, you, you might be inclined in such a position to say, I have no choice. You do have choices, they just may be very unattractive, right? So you could stop working for a period of time.

• 37:11Tim Ferriss?

  You could move in with your parents, you could ask a friend for a loan, you could sell some of the belongings you have that you have great sentimental attachment to, or maybe your only car, whatever it might be. I'm not saying these are all viable, I'm just brainstorming. Or that they're fair. Or that they're fair. Yeah, you have to, I mean, for me, I just take fair out of the equation. I think, I don't think fair, except perhaps under the law, as equal treatment of citizens, I don't think fair is a very, I don't think it's an enabling concept.

• 37:45Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 37:46Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 37:46Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think the Stoics, the Stoics would agree. They'd say, you know, Epictetus, he goes, "It's not things that upset us, it's our judgment about things." And so fair is a, is an opinion we have about an objective reality that we're in.

• 38:00Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So, so if I were trying to train a group of a thousand people to be a really effective, like autonomous army, like benevolent army for handling, like weather, not just weathering, but benefiting from the crisis.

• 38:19Ryan Holiday?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:19Tim Ferriss?

  I think, and if they were just computers, like, you know, Westworld hosts that I could program.

• 38:26Ryan Holiday?

  Put on an operating system.

• 38:28Tim Ferriss?

  There are certain concepts and questions I would remove. I think that unfair is, as true as it may be, subjectively or even objectively, it is a disabling word that even if you are a victim, puts you into the passenger seat of life, where you feel like you do not have options, nor can you take actions. And that is paralyzing, and it's just going to compound your fear. So I would remove that. And then there are questions, right? And I alluded to this a second ago, and I, we're probably straying from the Stoics, but I feel like I've been so infused, I don't know if you've heard of any of these large trees in the Pacific

• 39:13Tim Ferriss?

  Northwest that have like 30% salmon DNA from salmon being dropped off from bears and so on. They, they become these hybrids. I feel that's maybe too long a story to explain now, but I believe the Radiolab has a good episode on, on this, but the, the wood wide web, if you want to look it up, W-O-O-D. But the, the point of that extremely confusing sidebar is that I feel like Stoicism, from having read it and ingested it and ruminated on it and reread it and so on over the years, has kind of infused my thinking.

• 39:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Tim Ferriss?

  To a very large extent. So the then there are questions of, and this definitely hearkens back to certainly some of the moral letters to Lucilius, if we want to cite some of the sources.

• 40:04Ryan Holiday?

  Which by he wrote in difficult times, you know, at the end, you know, at the end of his career, he was threatened by a tyrant. Like, he wasn't writing this in a fun, joyful vacation.

• 40:15Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, he wasn't. And that's, that's Molly who's gonna, Molly's my dog is in the habit of going ape shit these days. Molly, you feeling stressed because of coronavirus? I know. She's actually, she's actually pretty stoked to have her humans home. But I digress. This is, this is audio video verite quarantine edition. So I was going to say that if you look at, say, one of Seneca's letters where he's composing this letter, and it's, it's somewhat petulantly written, which I find hilarious.

• 40:51Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 40:51Tim Ferriss?

  As are many of his letters, but one, one of them, he's writing as he's discussing the, I suppose you would call it like a spa slash gym underneath him. I don't know if you remember this, where he can hear the slapping of flesh and the grunting of lifting weights and all this, and it's.

• 41:10Ryan Holiday?

  I open stillness with that, with that letter. I love that one.

• 41:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a great letter. It's a really, really great letter. So this may not be the perfect citation, but the point I was going to make is that the question I was asking myself early on for me and my family, and it's the question you should be asking initially, was how do we, how do we ensure we don't die? And physically, financially, how do I ensure that my clan doesn't die? And that sounds dramatic. I don't think, I don't think it's going to seem that dramatic. I mean.

• 41:47Ryan Holiday?

  No, those are the stakes.

• 41:49Tim Ferriss?

  Those are the stakes, right? I mean, there are 85 refrigerated, double wide trailers that were just brought into New York yesterday as temporary mortuaries, right? I mean, this is real. And. I have relatives in a number of hotspots. So these are stakes. Yeah. Now, what I'm trying to ask, since I have checked off, at least for the time being, the lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yeah. And not everyone is in a position to do that. Nonetheless, I do think this question is really worth asking, and I owe my girlfriend credit also for reinforcing this, because she's very good at this.

• 42:29Tim Ferriss?

  And that is, how can you make the next three to six months some of the most enjoyable or productive of your life? Or, if that's too much pressure, right? You can phrase it different ways. You know, how can you make the next three to six months something you look back upon as a sacred time that you really treasure? Not just survive, right? And it was kind of like, and look, I'm not whatever. I'll use it, but I heard a Nelson Mandela story once from Tony Robbins, actually, who asked,

• 43:05Tim Ferriss?

  he asked Nelson Mandela during his time in prison, "How did you survive?" Something along those lines. And he said, he said, "Oh, I wasn't surviving. I was preparing." And I think that that type of question, not how I can survive, how you can survive,

• 43:26Tim Ferriss?

  in a sense, is sort of like extreme frugality. And I've had my cup of coffee, so I'm off to the races. But it's kind of like extreme frugality in the sense that if you're trying to find financial freedom through one tool, and that is extreme frugality, you have a finite ceiling to that. Yeah, sure. Like you make, let's just call it for simplicity, a thousand dollars.

• 43:52Tim Ferriss?

  I'm making this up, thousand dollars a week and you can cut from that. You may make some Faustian bargains and cut things that materially detract from your quality of life. But nonetheless, the most that you could possibly subtract is fifty two thousand dollars a year.

• 44:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right? This is ignoring taxes and everything. Whereas if you're building a business, you have, or you have income generation and you're also focused on that. You have a much broader scope of options.

• 44:23Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 44:24Tim Ferriss?

  And similarly, if you ask like, how can I survive? Like survive is a binary pass fail.

• 44:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Tim Ferriss?

  And I feel like that places a ceiling on the options that are visible to you. If that makes any sense.

• 44:39Ryan Holiday?

  No, totally.

• 44:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So when I ask like, how could I most in, and I'm going to use a word here that might bother people. But if you were to ask like, how could I most profit and benefit from the next three to six months? Like, what is this an opportunity to do that I would never otherwise do? So I've been, for instance, like getting rid of clothing that I've had for years and cleaning up the garage and doing the stuff that seems so mundane, but it will, it would otherwise not get done. So I'm trying to ask myself, you know, if this were a sacred time and that what can I do? Or not do that will lead me, say, we're out of this in a year to some extent.

• 45:23Tim Ferriss?

  To look back and say, wow, I'm so glad we had that time in a sense, because it allowed me A, B, C. As opposed to shit, I didn't realize that was going to be so valuable in so many ways. And I was blind to it at the time.

• 45:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the, the dichotomy that I use that Robert Greene gave me, and I have this written around somewhere. I was going to show it to you, but he says alive time or dead time. What will it be? And I think that's like whether you're, whether this quarantine goes for two more weeks. Obviously it's going to go much longer than that, or whether it goes for two more years. All you know is that you have that block of time. What you do control is how you use that time and what you get out of it. I have one, one thought on fear. There's a Hebrew saying that I love, um, it's from the 1800s, but he goes, um, the world is a narrow bridge. And the important thing is to not be afraid. The, the point is when you're walking on a narrow balance beam or a narrow bridge,

• 46:21Ryan Holiday?

  the, the one thing you can't do is be scared because it'll mess you up and you'll fall. And I think that's sort of the predicament we're in. It's not fair, nobody chose it, it's not our fault. But you gotta cross this bridge now and this fear. Fear, as you said, there are some evolutionary reasons, but courage is gonna be important, right? And that's one of those sort of core stoic virtues, which is like, and there's another quote I love from Faulkner, he says, "You can be scared, it's okay to be scared, you can't help that." He says, "But, but, but don't be afraid." Do you know what I mean? Like, I think you have to, you have to keep going, that's just the reality, so you might as well.

• 47:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if, if afraid is being paralyzed, right? So, for instance, a few more comments on fear.

• 47:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, because you just reminded me of a few things. So, and I, this could be apocryphal, but I believe, based on the sources I had at the time, I have no idea what they are, that this is true. So Dean Martin, now that name may not mean much to a lot of people, but in his day, Dean Martin was the consummate entertainer, sort of top tier, top five most recognizable names in the United States, probably.

• 47:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Tim Ferriss?

  And he used to vomit, he would get so nervous and one could say afraid, that he would vomit before every performance. Mike Tyson, same story. And his, the trainer who really made Mike Tyson, Mike Tyson, Costumato, uh, you can find video, or at least audio, of Costumato saying this. He would say, "The hero and the coward feel the same thing. They feel the fear. It's what the hero does that makes him different." And...

• 48:06Tim Ferriss?

  Tyson was also terrified. I mean terrified may not be the right word, but fearful before he got into the ring, one of the most dominant boxers of all time. Sure. And if they can't get a immunity bracelet for fear, it's unreasonable to expect yourself to. And I would also say, if this is helpful to anybody, it's very specific to the United States, but the United States, at this point in time, we're recording this, April 1st, happy April Fool's Day. And right now, New York is the hubbey of the US, the global hubbey, effectively. It's the new global epicenter will be. This is going

• 48:48Tim Ferriss?

  to continue. The United States is going to be the largest hotspot. Unless things change dramatically in Russia, it's probably going to be the largest hotspot in the world for some time to come. And the prior to Pearl Harbor, well, the strategic belief on the part of the Japanese was that by destroying the Pacific Fleet, the morale and capabilities of the US would be completely shut down or paralyzed for a period of time. What instead happened, when, you know, the bear got stabbed in the eye with a stick, meaning the US, is that within a very short period of time, that would have previously been inconceivable,

• 49:32Tim Ferriss?

  suddenly we were producing more tanks than civilians in all of Japan. I know that's an exaggeration, but the, the capacity of the United States, when it is forced into a corner, or feels as though it's been forced into a corner through extreme states of duress and crisis, are truly staggering, right? And we've fucked this up so many ways. It's really hard to overstate how badly we've screwed this up in terms of supply chain management and so on. But nonetheless, I think.

• 50:10Tim Ferriss?

  Give it six months, things are going to look very, very different. And like it or not, the global economy is dependent on the US in large measure. Right? So not that it's too big, not that it's too big to fail. Every empire comes to its close. But, but at this point in time, it is in everyone's best interest, the United States not collapse. Almost everyone's best interest. So Russia has gas to sell. China has products to export and so on and so forth. Right? And so, so I, I am, I'm very confident that crisis will overcome incompetence. If that makes any sense.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 50:58Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm very confident that things will get worse. The economy is going to get sort of kicked in the nuts for a while. This is not going to be a one quarter affair at all. And the US is going to have to take very extreme, what might be seen as extreme measures to have any chance of survival economically speaking. So that gives me, that gives me a degree of optimism, if that makes sense. That gives me a degree of optimism. Maybe it will prove unfounded. I hope that's not the case. But that also has, the example of Pearl Harbor, and it's not the perfect example.

• 51:44Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a very easily grasped visual example. I think shows, and there are many examples of this, what the US can do in times of crisis. So I'm, that gives me some degree of optimism as well.

• 52:00Ryan Holiday?

  So, and I'm sure you've got to go. So as far as this sort of a place to close, because I think this ties in well to the fear and I think it ties well into Stoicism. What I love about the Stoics in particular, like the Stoics and the Epicureans were actually much closer philosophically than people thought, right? And you're, you love the good life, you have Epicurean tendencies, but what I, what I think, what I think, what I suspect draws you to the Stoics and ultimately draws me to the Stoics, and I think why there is this threat of Stoicism going not just in the Roman Empire, but to the founding of America, to the US Civil War, to a lot of the great movements

• 52:42Ryan Holiday?

  in history, is the Stoics felt that we were obligated to participate in public life, to serve the common good, to help other people. Most of the greatest Stoics were famous not because of what they wrote, but because of the actual heroism that they did in their life. And I mean, Marcus really specifically is the emperor for 15 years of the Antonine Plague. He doesn't flee Rome. At one point famously, this is one of my favorite stories in all of history, as the Roman economy is collapsing under the weight of this pandemic, he forgives most of the debts owned to the empire. And then he goes through the Imperial Palace and he marks down the treasures owned by the

• 53:26Ryan Holiday?

  emperor for sale on the palace lawn to like sort of get the economy going. So this to me is what, like, I think this goes to your point, when, when stuff breaks down, real leaders stand up. And so maybe as a place to close for people who are afraid but want to put that energy somewhere productive, what do you advise people as far as how can they help? How can they make a difference? And what good can individuals do? You know, obviously there's a lot of, we all have different resources and skills, but what would you advise people to think about as far as making a difference and using this as an opportunity to do that sort of ultimate Stoic duty?

• 54:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, thanks for the question. That's a good question. I want to, I want to just make it an observation first, and that is, you basically have the trifecta of books for understanding and handling this entire chapter of our history, right behind your head. For those people who aren't watching the video, you have, and I'll read from the bottom up, you've got The Black Swan, you have, is it The Forty Eight Laws? I can't read.

• 54:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, Forty Eight Laws.

• 54:37Tim Ferriss?

  Forty Eight Laws of Power, and then Mastery. So The Black Swan by

• 54:40Ryan Holiday?

  And then, and then I have Meditations right here.

• 54:43Tim Ferriss?

  And then Meditations, right. So, so you have, but The Black Swan, perhaps just as much so Fooled by Randomness by N. N. Taleb, T.A.L.E.B., I think it

• 54:57Ryan Holiday?

  Anti-Fragile.

• 54:57Tim Ferriss?

  Anti-Fragile, but The Black Swan, or Fooled by Randomness, specifically, I think, helped to explain what we are contending with, and why it is so difficult for humans to grasp what is happening, and properly prepare for it. So I think that is, that is worth reading. Then if you want to understand how seemingly, confusingly, and irrationally different leaders are behaving, and how polarity is affecting our response to this in the United States, and elsewhere, not just here, you look at Brazil, it's the same story, then The Forty Eight Laws of Power do a great job of explaining that. And then if you take Mastery, and The Forty Eight

• 55:39Tim Ferriss?

  Laws of Power combined, those can act as a possible roadmap for the abilities you want to develop in this sacred pause, that is being provided to you, not inflicted upon you necessarily. I understand there are some very serious costs, but that's just a way that you could plausibly, or try to frame it, if you want to feel enabled, not disabled. Those are three fantastic books for the, for the quiver. I'm just gonna say that first. As far as Stoic/Civic duty, and like you said, many of these Stoics, per se, if we, if we, if we just put aside the best-known names, if we put aside Marcus Aurelius, we put aside Epictetus, we put aside Seneca, and so on, you still have

• 56:24Tim Ferriss?

  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, these people are not known as Stoics and yet they, they were very much informed and directed by Yeah. much of Stoic philosophy and to the extent that George Washington, I guess at Valley Forge, had the troops perform, I'm blanking on the name of the play, but it was a play about, it was Cato, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's Cato to boost morale and continue the fight. And the, I want to make a comment in response to something you said and then I'll, I'll answer super directly. And that is that I do have Epicurean tendencies.

• 57:09Tim Ferriss?

  I find the, the Epicureans to be of great interest, but what allows me to tend the garden, to drink my wine and derive great pleasure from simple things is the safety net that is Stoicism. Yeah. For me, I do not think, as someone who, maybe a story for another time, but had some very traumatic experiences in childhood and have, has always been hyper vigilant, without Stoicism and tools that are complementary to Stoicism, I don't feel like I have the safety net underneath me with which I can then walk across that narrow bridge.

• 57:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And that, that is what allows the Epicureanism. So it really is the precursor and necessary antecedent to those things. As far as helping, how can you help? There are two different levels of answers. The first would be my, my most common recommendation and that is don't try to save the world, help the people around you. Yeah. And think of, if you are fortunate enough to be in a stable financial position, even if you are suffering financial hardship, but you have time, think of how you could reach out to people and offer your support. That support could be a weekly

• 58:36Tim Ferriss?

  Zoom or Skype chat with a handful of friends who are all sharing difficulties. It could be reaching out to your barber, I'm bald, so I don't have a barber, but reaching out to your barber or your local coffee shop owner, or fill in the blank, someone to offer to help in some fashion because you know they're also suffering from financial hardship. That could be paying them some amount of money if you have the financial means.

• 59:05Ryan Holiday?

  Buy a gift card and then cash it, like buy, buy six months of haircuts in advance.

• 59:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It could be something like that. It could also be simply reaching out to them and asking, how can I help? And more often than not, because I've done this with, say, the dog walker who I've used, who's just fantastic and I want them to survive this. The, say, house cleaners who help with my home, I've reached out with these offers and asked, how can I help? Would you like me to pay in advance? Would you like to simply have me continue paying? Most of them have declined, but the act of asking, how can I help? And then possibly offering, if you have the means or the space, is tremendously,

• 59:54Tim Ferriss?

  I think, reassuring in times of uncertainty. And the gift doesn't have to be capital. The support doesn't need to be money. It could just be group cohesion and people feeling that they have a safety net of sorts in your offer. So acting locally in that sense makes, I think is tremendously compelling. If you try, as I have done for the last few weeks, to figure out how to save the world or early on, just how to stem the tide for the United States to buy time, there were certain things that I could do, say, as it related to South by Southwest and so on. But I am in a very unusual position and I have a large platform.

• 1:00:39Tim Ferriss?

  For others to feel compelled to do something like that is, I think, very unproductive because it's going to be like shouting into gale force winds. It's, it's going to be very frustrating and I don't think terribly healthy for people to try. So act locally, number one. If you are looking for outfits and ventures that are focused on this crisis and you want to contribute in some fashion. There is, there is a GoFundMe campaign going on right now, depending on when this is published, which is a collaboration. I'm blanking on the exact organizations. Flexport, I know, is one of them. Flexport.com or flexport.org/donate. But they, along with

• 1:01:24Tim Ferriss?

  a number of organizations, have put together a large GoFundMe campaign. If you just search Flexport GoFundMe campaign.

• 1:01:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's called the Frontline Responders Fund.

• 1:01:33Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 1:01:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. So, Frontline Responders Fund, I would say, appears to be well-vetted. I've had conversations with the CEO of Flexport and feel confident in their integrity at this point. I don't know them that well, but they certainly have checked a lot of good boxes. There's another organization, which may be part of the same, maybe not, called Operation Masks. OperationMasks.org is co-founded by a number of people I've had some contact with. And that is, this landscape is very rapidly changing, and access to personal protective equipment and other items is, is in a state of constant flux,

• 1:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  particularly since we have states competing against one another and driving prices up. I mean, the entire thing is quite a fucking spectacle of messiness. But I do think the, you said the Frontline Responders Fund, this is GoFundMe campaign, which includes Flexport and Operation Masks, are two that have kind of checked a few boxes for me. I can't vouch for either 100%, but there is a lot of noise, and those are two that seem to have cut through the noise. So, those would be another two options. Food banks...

• 1:02:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, food banks, anything you can do to prove, vet people from having to leave their houses or go to the store is very important.

• 1:02:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So, food banks, I think, are another, another good option for helping, say, locally, or helping where you grew up.

• 1:03:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or both. So, those would be a few that come to mind. And, you know, last but not least, I would say one way you can help is...

• 1:03:18Tim Ferriss?

  Commit to be constructive and consider, consider perhaps experimenting, and I'm considering doing this myself because I think right now it could be particularly valuable. Something like the 21 day no complaint experiment that, that Will Bowen, B O W E N, wrote about long ago in, I believe it was his first book. But this, if you just search 21 day no complaint experiment, it'll come right up. I do feel like complaining is easy, it's in vogue, it's seductive. It is reinforced socially and it, for me at least, is utterly counterproductive.

• 1:03:59Tim Ferriss?

  I think that complaining and anger are similar in the sense, and I can't recall the attribution for this, but that the, there's an expression as it relates to anger that, you know, a vessel that holds acid is damaged more than anything it pours acid upon. And if you are the vessel for anger or complaining, I think it does more damage to you than that which you point it at. And for that reason, if you want to improve or maintain or improve your health, your wellbeing and your ability to function as a contributor in society,

• 1:04:44Tim Ferriss?

  I think a no complaint experiment goes a long way. And by the way, if you address complaining, which is easier to identify and measure sometimes than anger, there is a very significant carryover effect into decreasing anger. Very, very large carryover effect. So those would be a few things that come to mind as, as possible actions people could take.

• 1:05:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I think for Daily Stoic, we've been doing this sort of a live time, dead time challenge, like, how are you going to use this time? I think that's the... So, it's locally, you know, what can you do for your family? What can you do for your neighbors? You know, if you have old people that live near you, what can you get them so they don't have to leave their house, right? But then, I think also, you know, this is now a time for entrepreneurs and business people. If everyone is sitting at home, watching Netflix for the next three months, there's going to be worse economic damage from that than if people are at home, being productive, thinking about... You know what I mean? Like, I think there is a real economic damage to the world grinding to a halt.

• 1:05:52Ryan Holiday?

  It's not just, "Hey, you can't go to the pizza restaurant anymore." But it's like, if you cease working, and you cease thinking, and you cease taking care of the people that you're supposed to be taking care of, there's going to be even longer lasting residue from this as well.

• 1:06:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I agree. I think this is a, you know, an unfortunate and special set of circumstances that can really foster a sense of community where community has largely broken down.

• 1:06:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. This is where we're weakest, as David Brooks has said.

• 1:06:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and I mean, I remember when I moved from San Francisco to Austin, and my first neighbors approached me and like knocked on my door, and I felt like in a karate stance, because it was so shocking to me, since that never happened in San Francisco.

• 1:06:40Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:06:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I've had more contact at a distance with my neighborhood in the last few weeks than in the last few years. And I do think there's something really unusual about that that will disappear, it will, or at least dissipate, let me say that, it'll dissipate once business gets back on track. And... We have a, we have a very unusual window of time in which, as you put it, and I really like that expression, that you said this from Robert Greene, the alive time, dead time?

• 1:07:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Tim Ferriss?

  What could you speak to, just for my benefit, since I have, I don't remember reading about this, what, what characterizes alive time versus dead time, or how does he talk about it?

• 1:07:30Ryan Holiday?

  So, so, actually, it came up, when I was thinking about leaving my job to become a writer, I had about a year left that I owed American Apparel. And so I said, Robert, you know, I'm thinking about leaving to become a writer, what should I do? And he said, this year for you could be alive time or dead time. You could show up to work every day, you know, cash your paycheck, you know, sit at your desk, or you could learn as much as possible, you could meet as many people as possible, you could, the day you leave your job, be, have all the research and preparation that you need done for your book, right? So, and, and so, I actually ended up writing about this, and he goes to the enemy, but I tell the story of Malcolm X. Malcolm X goes to prison, he's, at this point, is known as Malcolm Little, he's sentenced

• 1:08:15Ryan Holiday?

  to about 10 years. He spends every day in that prison cell, reading, writing, studying, he basically gives himself a college education in, in this prison. And so I think, you know, Nelson Mandela spent a far worse time in prison than any of us are going to be spending during this quarantine. Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, they all spent time in quarantine, you know, fleeing the plague, but how they chose to use that time to write some of their greatest works, to develop relationships, to come up with theories about the universe, you know, to study, to learn, to get in touch with themselves, that's alive time.

• 1:08:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Isaac Newton had one of the most productive years of his entire life.

• 1:09:01Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, yeah. And, and I think, I think that's what's so beautiful and haunting about history is like, oh, this actually isn't new. I was telling you about the statue, this is another thing I keep on my desk, this is a, a penknife, that's from, I think, the, the, the year 200 AD. So like, this knife-

• 1:09:19Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking of prison, it looks like, for those people who aren't watching the video, it looks like a shiv that you would make out of a mattress coils.

• 1:09:28Ryan Holiday?

  But you just think about the amount of times that human beings have spent doing exactly what we're doing, which is, "I can't go outside, a lot of commerce and business has ground to a halt." This situation is not new at all. And the question is, some of those people use that time productively, Isaac Newton, Shakespeare, and then far more people, other people were in the exact same quarantine as William Shakespeare, and they did not write Macbeth. You know? And so, that's the one, you don't control that you're in the situation, the Stoics would say, but you do control how you respond to the situation, what you use it for.

• 1:10:09Ryan Holiday?

  And I think that's ultimately what, that's what we should all be focused on.

• 1:10:14Tim Ferriss?

  Hear, hear.

• 1:10:15Ryan Holiday?

  All right, let's, do you want to close it there?

• 1:10:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let's close it there.

• 1:10:19Ryan Holiday?

  All right, man. This is awesome, appreciate it.

• 1:10:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure. And I'll just, I mentioned the fear setting. For people who want to check, check that out. They can just go to tim.blog/ted. It's also a talk, but the text can be quite helpful as a supplement.

• 1:10:33Ryan Holiday?

  And you have the exercise there, right? You show how it works.

• 1:10:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's all there. There's nothing, there's no paywall, there's no, there shouldn't be any kind of block. If there's a pop-up, you can just close it, but...

• 1:10:44Ryan Holiday?

  No, I mean, you actually show the, like, it's more than just watching the talk. You give people how to do the exercise, so it's really helpful.

• 1:10:51Tim Ferriss?

  I give them all the instructions and examples in the text, since this is something I use myself as well.

• 1:10:56Ryan Holiday?

  Awesome, man. Really appreciate it.

• 1:10:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, my pleasure. Good to see you, man.

• 1:11:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, good to see you, too.

• 1:11:03Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my

• 1:11:43Tim Ferriss?

  close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast is brought to you by Trello. Working remotely can be a challenge. I know, I've been doing it for decades, but this is especially true for teams that are new to it. How do you deal with your work environment being the same as home, as one example, while staying connected and productive? And then there's your nearest coworker, maybe your cat, for instance. Well, your friends at Trello are here to help. Trello has been powering

• 1:12:27Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:13:08Tim Ferriss?

  used by your team. Keep your workflow going from wherever you are with Trello. Try Trello for free and learn more at trello.com/tfs. That's trello.com/tfs. T R E L L O dot com slash tfs. Check it out. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by LegalZoom. I have used LegalZoom for years. Many of the guests on this podcast actually got their businesses started with LegalZoom, but that's not why I'm mentioning them today. Health and safety are on top of everyone's minds right now, yours truly included. I'm thinking a lot about contingency plans of all types.

• 1:13:48Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:14:32Tim Ferriss?

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