Journalist Edward-Isaac Dovere on the Soul of America

On today’s episode of the podcast, Ryan talks to journalist and author Edward-Isaac Dovere about his new book Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump, being courageous and fighting for what’s right, how to ignore the noise and focus on the things that truly matter, and more. Edward-Isaac Dovere is an American journalist who serves as staff writer for The Atlantic and former Chief Washington Correspondent for Politico. LMNT is the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. As a listener of this show, you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked. The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today. Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookFollow Edward-Isaac Dovere: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am fresh off the completion of the audiobook for the next book, which I've teased a little bit. I won't tease too much more, but I was joking on Instagram today that I am now measuring the pandemic in how many audiobooks I've been forced to record at home. The number is two. I did Lives of the Stoics here, not in a studio, because last summer, the surge was really bad. And this summer, I just recorded Courage is Calling. I'm vaccinated, but my two young kids

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  are not, and I just didn't feel great going to a studio for three or four days. Plus, I liked being able to dip in and out, just walk in the other room and do some recording, walk back to the other room and write. So it was much less disruptive, but... It is an exhausting experience. Let me tell you, it does not come quickly or easily. You know, you get, you can do maybe 20, 25 pages a day and then you start just sounding like a blubbering idiot. It's not that your voice gives out, it's that your brain gives out and all the words blur together. I think reading out loud must have been a skill that people had, you know, in decades and centuries previous that's atrophied. You know, these days, the most I'll, I'll ever read out loud is like one kid's book to my kids or two kids books or, you know,

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  one of the episodes for the, for the podcast or whatever, um, you know, the, the daily email, but you know, rarely reading more than a few pages at a time. And so it was, it's quite an ordeal, but, but the, the core of it is done. Just waiting for the pickups, uh, all the things that I got wrong, the things I mispronounced. I was patting myself on the back. There was less words in this one that I had to look up the pronunciation. I think that's good. It means, uh, I'm, I'm stripping down my writing, using fewer thesaurus words and, and, and just being blunt. And more to the point, lives of the Stoics were such a pain because it just included so many different names.

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  Anyways, that is done. Uh, it was incredibly hot in here. As I mentioned before, uh, we need a new air conditioner here at the painted porch, which, uh, the quotes came in at like 20 to $40,000. So that's fun. And even if it had been replaced, I probably would have had to turn it off because you can't have any background noise running. But, uh, that's done. And now I can get back to work on the new book, which I am working on. In the meantime, I wanted to bring you a guest today who's writing. I am a big fan of. I read it at the Atlantic.

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know if I've ever talked about my reading habits. I try not to read a lot of news, but I do try to read news from people who are smart, who, uh, help aggregate things, who give you context on things and who often have sort of direct access to, let's call them newsmakers, if you will. Today's guest, Edward Isaac de Vere over at the Atlantic is

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  A person who's writing, I do that with. He is the author of a new book called Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats Campaigns to Defeat Trump. It's a fascinating book about the 2020 campaign, all the different candidates, the egos, the dysfunction, the urgency, the near misses of it all. It's a fascinating book. I had a bunch of questions to ask him, but sorry, I distracted myself. What I was saying is, my reading habit is I try not to read a lot of news. When I do read news, what I'll do is I'll see an article that I think is interesting and I save it to Instapaper, which I then read on my phone. And what I like about Instapaper is, first off, it gets rid of all the ads, gets rid of all the distracting

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  other articles that might suck you in, like, oh, read this story, or look at this thing, or, you know, whatever. It's just, you're just reading it, no ads, just white text on a black background, stripped down. I find it a more conducive way to read. I used to do it when I was sort of on planes or something. That's when I would catch up on stuff. But anyways, I've read him on Instapaper for a long time. That's how I try to read the news. I try not to read breaking news. I've always tried to be sort of low social media, but I'm in the midst of a Twitter detox, not even checking my own stuff, which has been healthy. We talk about that a little bit in the interview. It's a great chat. We talk about the soul of America. We talk about being courageous. We talk about fighting

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  for what's right. We talk about discipline and patience, ignoring the noise, ignoring the chatter, and what's at stake here politically in America. And I do recommend the book. I enjoyed it. I read it from cover to cover. Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump. I've got a sense we're going to carry this in the painted porch. And in fact, I'm going to send an email to my manager right now to make sure we do. And enjoy this wonderful interview. And you can follow, I know I just said I'm in the middle of a Twitter detox, but you can follow Edward @isaacdover. That's I-S-A-A-C-D-O-V-E-R-E.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you you came very highly recommended. I've read your stuff for a long time in The Atlantic, but anytime Arnold Schwarzenegger suggests I have someone on, that's a that's a suggestion I'm gonna take.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  It's a weird thing with him. I mean, I met him originally because I did a podcast with him and we we developed a pretty good rapport and he's he's a good person to know, which seems like ridiculous to say, but I enjoy talking to him whenever I do.

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  No, he is. He is a great person. He is a great person to know. I was. So I know his guy, Daniel, and I was in I was doing a talk in Austria and I was like, hey, I'm in Austria or something. And he's like, where are you in Austria? And I said, oh, I'm in Graz. That's where I was giving the talk. That's where that's where Arnold is from. And he was like, Arnold needs you to meet this guy. And I was like, okay. And so this guy came to my hotel and it was like his best friend from elementary school, who was the head of some Austrian newspaper. And he was like, I'm taking you out to dinner. He's like, any friend of Arnold is a friend of mine. He took us all around. And then I had told him that my grandfather

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  was from Slovenia. And he was like, all right, that's it. We're going to Slovenia right now. And then he drove us to Slovenia. It was one of the one of the most memorable and also surreal moments of of my life, actually. So again, when he suggested you.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I my, I guess, I've been to Graz too and with him because we we did the podcast we recorded was like around this time, July of 2017. And he really liked it. And I wrote an article off of it. And he really liked that, too. And then Ketchell called me up and he was like, Arnold says that you should come to Oktoberfest with him. And I was like, what?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  And he said to me, yeah, and he's brought it up twice. So I think he actually means it. Um, and I said, okay, well, why don't you like, find out if that's real? Um, and then also like, is this like, he wants, like, I should write another article about it? Like, what's going on? Like, what, what work? What's the frame that we're going in with?

• 8:47Speaker 01

  And he said, yeah, he said, you can, you know, he'll, he'll do, he'll talk, whatever you want. Um, and he's serious about it. You should come. And so I met him in, uh, Spain. Um, in San Sebastian, where there was a film festival that he was promoting. And the article ended up being like, you know, the weird, I think we called it the strange political afterlife of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And like how he was staying involved in things despite not being in office anymore and like the things he cared about. So it was this movie that he had narrated about, um, underwater, like under, uh, deep sea stuff that was about the environmental causes. And then we flew to Munich to go to Oktoberfest, um, which was weird.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  I think Oktoberfest is probably weird anyway, but my only experience of it is walking around with him. Uh, including when he got up to conduct the band at one point and pulled me in so that I would conduct the band. Um, and he put his hand, you know, his Arnold Schwarzenegger hand on my wrist and pulled me in. And of course, like, even if I wasn't overwhelmed with surprise about what was happening, he's still quite strong. Uh, and then like, and we just spent like a lot of time together with that. And, and then, uh, the neck, the two days afterwards, what was going to be my last full day in Munich. Um, I, I, I got a text from Ketchell and he was like, Arnold wants to take you to his museum.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  And I said, uh, you know, I'd done enough of my own background research and I knew that that was in Graz and we were in Munich. And I was like, I don't understand what that means. And he said, it means that he's got his assistant finding a charter plane for us. And we're flying to Graz tomorrow.

• 10:35Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  And I ended up getting a tour of the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum from Arnold Schwarzenegger. And it's in the house that he grew up in. So like, he's like, oh, yeah, this is where the bathroom was and we, you know, there was no plumbing and you're like, all this stuff. It's just so crazy and weird. And maybe like even the weirdest part of walking around in there is there was someone who was visiting the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum who didn't recognize him when he walked by. If you've made the trek to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum, like, wouldn't you realize that that was him?

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  And, and then we like went around Graz a little bit and, and then flew back to Munich. And trying to explain both to like my editor and to my wife and like, like what had happened was really hard.

• 11:29Ryan Holiday?

  No, as, as a writer, you, you do have this sort of weird, you're, because you're, you're adjacent to sort of powerful, interesting people who are doing things on a whim that, that seem very self indulgent, that like you kind of have to follow or attend as part of your job, but it's, it's fun for you, but it's, it's, I remember a couple of years ago going to my wife and like, um, yeah, this NBA team wants me to go to Las Vegas for the summer league, you know? And she's like, all right, yeah, like, you know, and it's like, I don't want to go, but I also want to go, right? It's not something I would have asked to do, but it feels bad not going, you know? And so, yeah, you end up being like, no, no, sorry. I, I, I need you to take care of the kids for a couple of days because

• 12:13Ryan Holiday?

  I need to go to Oktoberfest with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  But my, my wife has, um, she, someone, I remember someone, a politician said to me on the campaign trial at one point, um, like two years ago, she is an elected official herself, right? And she was like, so is your wife's appreciative of all the work you're doing being away this much? And I was like, appreciative is not the, I would say supportive.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  No, she's supportive. Like, she thinks it's good and I'm doing good work, whatever. And she's knew what I was doing this work when we met each other. Like, um, but I don't think appreciative is exactly the right.

• 12:58Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I I had a moment in Graz that sort of reminded me of your book and and the title of the book, of course. So my my grandfather was from Slovenia, but but he actually ended up in Graz during the war as a displaced person. So basically a refugee wasn't Jewish, but just the destruction of the war, he ends up in this this refugee camp. And I went and visited it. It's it's like an apartment complex now or something. But but so when I saw that that speech that Arnold gave after the election about the sort of Nazi collaborators and and the sort of uh, uh, the the people that had gotten caught up in this whole thing and the wreckage of that,

• 13:40Ryan Holiday?

  it really hit me because it was like, oh, yeah, he would have been around after this happened. They never would have touched past, but that he would have seen the wreckage of this whole thing.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:49Ryan Holiday?

  And this idea of of sort of battling for the soul of a country or a culture or a continent. It it's not, uh, it's not really an understatement. I mean, that that kind of that is the stakes of what we're talking about. I know every politician makes their campaign a sort of a moral crusade, but there was something different about this cycle that you covered here.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  And when I was sitting and signing on to write this book in, uh, and I signed the contract in July of 2018, like, the proposal says, like, this is going to be the craziest election ever, um, and a really definitive one, uh, for the history of, uh, this country, maybe the most important one. And I didn't know, obviously, all the things that would end up stacking up. But like, this is something that is deeper than the basics of politics that's going on. It's about it's not about Republicans versus Democrats or like, what kind of tax policy do you favor? It's like, this is bigger. This is what kind of country are we? What what what kind of spirit do we have of the country?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  And you can be, uh, someone who buys into the Trump vision, or you can be someone who buys into the Biden vision of it, or some of the other visions that are out there. Obviously, those are the two most prominent. But we're figuring it out. And it's like, is this the adolescence of America? Is it the midlife crisis of America? Is it the, the slow decline into dementia of America? I don't know, but it seems like it's one of those, right? And I remember right before Trump was inaugurated, having a conversation with an editor then who said to me,

• 15:41Speaker 01

  is this election, is this presidency going to be? He said, like, assign odds to this, that this is the beginning of the fall of the empire, you know, the, the end of Rome? Or is it like you go to the doctor and you get a checkup? And you realize you have to have like a real correction to how you do things? And that's not necessarily to say that Trump inherently was a bad thing, but it was, but Trump being elected was definitely a check on how everything was running. And people say like, we don't like what's coming. We don't like how this has been operated. You go back to the, the first debate that Clinton and Trump had,

• 16:24Speaker 01

  and she was going at him and saying like, you got a sweet deal on your taxes, you use Chinese steel, and now, and how could you say all those things and do all those things? And, and say that now you want to improve the country? And Trump said, well, I was playing by the rules that were there. And you were the one who was there in power for all that time. If you wanted to change the rules, then why didn't you change them? Why should we believe that you're going to change them now? And that was sort of the fundamental thing, Clinton as the, the, the way that things were and saying, we can tweak it and improve it and refurbish it and go forward. Or Trump saying like, blow it all up, change again in, in a bigger way than you've ever changed.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  And Some of the reporting they have in my book is of these focus groups that were done that Obama actually asked to have conducted of the fabled Obama-Trump voters, these people who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then for Trump in 2016. And people say, how could these people exist? And they go to Iowa and the people say to them, to the focus group organizers, they say, listen, we voted for Obama because we thought everything needed to change. And then Washington wouldn't let him change and they stopped him at every turn. And so now we need something that's much more aggressive and explosive in making the change because we really want that change to come.

• 17:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, before we get to the 2020 election, it was, what I kept feeling in your book, what struck me is like how people who are ostensibly like world-class at what they do, like running campaigns, being politicians, are not really that good at it, right? There's sort of a bumbling veep quality to a lot of the different campaigns you profile. And in retrospect, it seems so amazing that Hillary's campaign with all its consultants and all of its data and all of its money essentially boiled, like, she obviously knew that she's not particularly well-liked, right? And yet she ran a campaign that basically was, I'm

• 18:39Ryan Holiday?

  Hillary Clinton, vote for me, right? Like, she took the, her main detriment as a person and made that the forefront of her campaign and then was surprised at the referendum that people would pick such another, that some, people would pick anyone but her when pretty much they'd been quite loud and vocal about the fact that they wanted anyone but her.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a moment that I describe in the book early out of a couple of days before the election in 2016, I was sitting in a diner in Brooklyn, a couple of blocks from campaign headquarters with a few of the top Clinton aides, and one of them said to me, "We realized this was going to be a change election, and she could never be the change candidate, so we decided to change the question." And I was like, I remember thinking, I put this in the book, like, "It's great, did you win the meeting when you..." Yeah. You played yourself. Right, like, great, I'm sure everybody thought that was really smart, but it clearly didn't work, right?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  And, I mean, to your point, right, we, I think the mistake that gets made somewhat inadvertently often in writing about politics and in a lot of campaign books is you drum up these people as the campaign managers and press, as these great geniuses who've got it all figured out and thought it through. And, you know, some of them are really good at what they do, and some of them get lucky in good ways or bad ways for them, and some of them are not so good at what they do. And you don't have often these, like, movie moments where, like, the decision, like,

• 20:26Speaker 01

  in that moment, in that meeting, it was the, that conversation which changed everything, and which led to the downfall of the candidate, or led to the amazing victory of it. And I try in this book to give you a real look at how this works, and how the candidates are sometimes very good at what they're doing, and sometimes just very bad at what they're doing, and sometimes are just, like, fools and make mistakes.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  And say something stupid that gets them in trouble and leads to other things going wrong, or they're someone who works for them does, or something gets blown out of proportion and takes on a life of its own that the candidate can't ever quite get away from. And that can be anything from Hillary Clinton and saying that basket of deplorables line, which was just sort of like a throwaway comment that she'd said a bunch of times, but caught in that moment and made-

• 21:25Ryan Holiday?

  And in retrospect, entirely correct.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  I mean, she was saying something that, again, she'd said it a lot and that a lot of people agreed with then. And certainly, when you look at folks who stormed the Capitol, supporting Donald Trump, and this is not about Trump supporters overall, but I would say anybody who tried to invade the Capitol of the United States, knocking over police officers, saying that they were gonna hang Mike Pence and like kill Nancy Pelosi and chasing others around the Capitol, those are deplorable people. They are.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  And I think as a country, we should condemn them, and we should condemn anybody who's engaged in any kind of violence like that. But you don't want to get into this complete equivocation of things. That's those people, those however many thousands of people it was, those are people who are particularly troublesome. Because no matter what else has, whatever other protests have happened, nobody else has done that. And that really was, and I know we're jumping ahead, not just past 2020, but to the aftermath of 2020. But that's like the moment that I think should make us all realize that this isn't just something that's happening on Facebook, or, you know, it's just like the political

• 22:50Speaker 01

  conversation. This is real things that are blowing up and making people, and should make people think differently about how we've gotten to this path. You know, I'll just throw in one story from before- Before we come off this, but there's a woman, her name is Lisa Blunt Rochester. She's the Congresswoman from Delaware, she's a black woman, a friend of Joe Biden, because everybody in Delaware is a friend of Joe Biden. And she is in the gallery of the House chamber when the rioters get there. They never get in the chamber, but she thinks they're going to get in. She starts praying, thinking she's going to die. And as she's being escorted out of the chamber,

• 23:34Speaker 01

  she takes that pin that all members of Congress have that identify them as members off of her jacket because she thinks they're going to come and kill me as a member of Congress, maybe, and I don't want it. But she doesn't want to put it away in her pocket because she thinks, well, like, if I'm just a black woman walking around the Capitol, will I get protected? I might have to show this to get protected. And so she decides to keep it in her clenched fist so that she can show it quickly if anybody asks. That's like a really crazy thing to think about, that that was an act of, that a woman walking around in 2021 in America had to think like-

• 24:14Ryan Holiday?

  Seven months ago.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Like, either I'm going to be killed because I'm identified as a member of the government, or I might not be protected because I'm just a black woman walking around. That's bad. That's really bad. And we have to reckon with what that all means.

• 24:35Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think that's right. And actually, weirdly, it's more related to the sort of win the meeting thing that you were just talking about. Because the other moment that struck me in 2016 that was related to that was Hillary's response to "Make America Great Again", which is an incorrect slogan, but let's say a sort of rhetorically brilliant one. You know, she responds, "America is great because it is good." And it's like, as a writer, I get the play on words there. But as a human being, like, I'm also, any four-year-old would tell you that great is better than good, right? And so, like, there's this element of sort of like-

• 25:16Ryan Holiday?

  Fencing in the mirror, arguing over these ridiculous like little things, winning the meeting, winning the cycle on Twitter. And, and you contrast that with the stakes, you know, sort of people storming the Capitol or, or what have you. It, it does feel like as urgent as the election was, and you talk about in the book, there was also just this like delusional sense of priorities and unlimited time and, and you know, that, that, that all the candidates seemed to have. I was, I was just sort of struck by like fiddling as the, as, as Rome burned kind of thing as, as some of these candidates were battling it out over this nonsense.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there were a lot of moments of nonsense in the campaign. I think the, the weird thing about our current situation is that we have this larger battle for the soul, this existential crisis that America is going through. And the only way to sort it out is like through presidential primaries and house elections. That's how we play it out through our political process. And it feels sort of lacking to have that be the only way that we can do it. And that like I had to spend cumulatively, probably six weeks plus of my life in Iowa,

• 26:43Speaker 01

  running around to these events where, and no offense to the people in Iowa, but what I would hear all the time from Iowa voters and sort of famous is like, yeah, I, I would say like, what do you think of that candidate? Well, yeah, it's interesting. I, I've met him three or four times. I gotta see him a couple more times and see something else. I was just like, what, how is it this hard to make a decision? But it's, it's sort of like going into the cereal aisle and having 40 different varieties of cereal. And you can stand there for a long time and think like, oh, should I get the Chex of the life or whatever? Or, or, or the, the Honey Crisps or the Lucky Charms, right? Like it. People, when they're given too many choices, or and there were, I think you can fairly say

• 27:28Speaker 01

  there were too many choices. There were 26 candidates in the primaries for the Democrats in 2020. They get frozen in not being able to figure out which ones to take.

• 27:41Ryan Holiday?

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

• 27:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And when you think about 26 candidates, that was something else that struck me in the book. You had this line, I forget who you were quoting, but they said something like, you know, the campaign's a bitch, and then you have to be president, meaning that it's super hard. And then it's actually not like a fun job, right? Like, especially now. And what struck me was how many people kept throwing their hats in the ring for a job that, one, they probably didn't want, two, that they had no real possibility of actually getting, but three, if they had any shred of self-awareness, were woefully unqualified for. So what is it? What is it that, like, what is it that attracts these people on

• 28:34Ryan Holiday?

  both ends of the party? Is it that they don't actually want to win, and they just want the indirect benefits of coming close? Is it that they actually have no self-awareness? Is it ego? What is drawing? Like, when I look at the candidates on both sides, I am reminded of Trump's line about how they're not sending their best. Like, this is not the best of anyone, anyone on any side of the ideological spectrum. We are not, we are, these are not the best Americans. So what is attracting 26 candidates to this primary?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's all of those things. I think it's also, some people see it as a way to advance their political careers. You know, if you're a Low level, not well regarded, not well-known politician. That's a good way to get people to write more about you or get on TV more. It's sometimes there is a financial pull to it. I remember I wrote something in 2012, I believe, about, yeah, it would have been then, about the Republican primaries and how many people seem to be getting in it and then signing book deals.

• 29:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  And then it becomes this, the book tour is the presidential campaign for some folks. That, it's a weird thing and we have only, I think, in America, and I'm not an expert on politics all over the world, is it this thing where people start becoming prominent and then we start to say, oh, you should run for president, right? Like, that doesn't happen in a lot of other countries. And obviously, that's what led to Donald Trump running for president. He was well-known and people say, oh, you should run. You say, okay, I should run, right? And, but, you know, I've written in my life a story about whether Oprah would run for president.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Why would we think that someone who has a talk show and is a successful, one of the most successful, obviously, in the history of the world, entrepreneurs and of changing communications and all that, like, why is the next step to run for president, right?

• 30:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  And it's just there in our psyches that that's somehow like the pinnacle of achievement, even though, you know, it's a tough job and it's not a job that I think a lot of people would actually enjoy. Obama had this line where he would say that every decision that would come to him was like an impossible decision. Because if somebody else could have solved it, it wouldn't have gotten to him. And so you're every day presented as president with things where it's like, none of these are good options, but you have to pick which, which bowl of shit you feel like eating.

• 31:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I think that's always been the, the problem of leadership and

• 31:39Ryan Holiday?

  And so there is this weird paradox where like the person who is so egotistical as to think, oh, I could do a great job at that, or I was destined for that, is ironically often the person who lacks the humility and dedication and work ethic to actually do the job. I think the Wall Street Journal had a great piece about like the Eisenhower paradox, or whatever, the idea that actually you want the leaders who don't really want to be the leader, you know, you want the reluctant presidents.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:16Ryan Holiday?

  And there was, I think, when you look at the Democratic candidates in the 2020 election, there was a thirstiness to all of them that was pretty unbecoming and one might say inherently unqualifying for the vast majority of them, you know, Beto O'Rourke being, someone in Texas being the sort of prime example of that to me, someone who not only isn't qualified to be president, but does untold damage to himself, his state, and the field in running for president.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  But and of course, like, he's a good example of like, why was he qualified to run? Because people were really excited about his-

• 32:54Ryan Holiday?

  Because he lost another race?

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Well, but and people were really excited about his Senate candidacy. And so people thought, oh, you could get people excited. Hmm, that's interesting. That's something different. And look, one of the people who thought that that was an intriguing possibility was Barack Obama, right?

• 33:10Ryan Holiday?

  True.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  So a lot of people were into it. I think the flip side of what you're saying is, everybody runs for president these days, no matter who they are, what they believe in, is an egomaniac. Because now you have to be putting yourself over and saying like, yeah, I think I should be the most powerful person in the world, right? That is inherently an egomaniacal decision.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  You have to find the balance, it seems, between the person who is an egomaniac, but isn't overblown with being an egomaniac, because you want someone as president who is going to be ready to make hard decisions and say, yeah, this is what we're doing, and feel strong about it. And you do see that voters respond to folks who have that feeling. When George W. Bush said, I'm the decider, he got made fun of a lot for it.

• 34:03Ryan Holiday?

  But that is the job.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  That's the job, right?

• 34:05Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  And then he said it in a way that was kind of weird, and that's part of why he was mocked for it. But the president is the decider, and you don't want someone who is not going to be able to make a decision and feel ready to stick by it, because these are hard decisions. And often, they are literally life and death decisions. And when they're not literally life decisions, then they are figuratively life and death decisions.

• 34:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you could argue that I'm the decider is just a less eloquent way of expressing Harry Truman's idea of the buck stops here.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's interesting when you think about like, sort of, why someone's running for president, and my experience with some of the politicians that I've gotten to meet through writing my books and stuff, and what I've found so discouraging about Washington is, you have all these people sort of running, and then they get the office. At the end of your book, you talk about the dog that catches the bus, and which I think is a great expression, actually, for a lot of these people who win office. It's actually weirdly not probably apt for Biden, and so it's ironic that he would say that, because he was preparing for it his entire life.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  It's true, but the context of what happens there is that he was saying to, I said to him, that we were, it's an interview that we did at the beginning of February, and he has been president for about 10, 12 days at that point. And I said to him, so, you know, sort of chit chat at the beginning, how does it feel to be in the Oval Office every day and to be waking up upstairs? And he says, well, you know, the Oval, I was here a lot over the years. I was here almost every day when I was vice president. So that's familiar to me. But waking up upstairs, you know, like, sometimes I can't find my clothes, man. And he was sort of joking around. And I, being a smart ass, said, well, you're the one who wanted this job.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  And you know, it sort of does capture a lot of what's in the book. Like, why did anybody want this job exactly?

• 36:00Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  And he says to me, yeah, you know, a friend of mine said to me, you're the dog that caught the car. And I said, no, I'm the dog that caught the bus. And like, and what that was getting at, I think, is also sketch out in the book of how he, this presidency that he has, the huge pile of problems that he has to deal with, is so different from what he thought he was getting into when he jumped into the race. He saw himself as that after Charlottesville, the kind of challenge to the fabric of America was so deep that he, that you just needed to get Trump out of the way and that he was running basically as the safest, surest bet to get Trump out of the way.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  And certainly, a lot of voters respond to that. What he did not anticipate was that he would have all of these crises of the public health, of the economy, of race relations, of democracy that are there, and that he would have both the obligation and the opportunity to do something about it. You know, I think in the middle of the interview, he pointed out the portrait of FDR that he has hanging over the fireplace in the Oval Office in that prime spot. That's how he sees himself now. I think that if he had been honest with himself in 2019, when he got into the race, he probably would have put like Harry Truman up there as the continuation of something, right?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  And instead, now he's seeing himself as not just a function of Obama or a function of Trump, but no, he's going to be a big transformative president. Now, whether he actually gets to be that person, we are going to see over the next couple of weeks and months.

• 37:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, and that was sort of my point is that, so you, you, you meet these people who they caught the car, they caught the bus, and then they're like surprised that the job involves hard, unpleasant decisions, or that they, they would have to risk what they just earned to, in order to enact this legislation or to stop this bad thing from happening. You know, it's sort of like. It's like, look, guys, there's, and women, so I'm just saying to all of them. But it's like, there was like a million ways you could have made money. There was like a million ways you could have become famous. There's a million things you could do that are more fun and easier than this.

• 38:20Ryan Holiday?

  You chose politics and then you're like surprised that politics is requiring you to do something other than pursue your self-interest at any moment, you know? Like, I got this sense when I would talk to these different politicians that they're like, well, why should I put my ass on the line, you know, to, if I, I remember them saying something to me, like, I was like, well, why don't you do this, right? Some, you know, about some Trump thing they were telling me they disagreed with. And they were like, well, I don't want to be Bob Corker, you know? And, and who, or, or, um, Jeff Flake. And it's like, then you picked the wrong line of work. I don't know, I don't know what to tell you. Like, you know what I mean?

• 39:03Ryan Holiday?

  You, you didn't decide to become a regional business executive or a social media influencer. You're one of a hundred people in the Senate. Like, how is this, how is this hard for you to wrap your head around? But it really does feel like there is a, a misunderstanding about what the job of a politician is.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, it would be like if you, if you woke up one morning and you're like, I mean, do I really have to talk to people for this podcast?

• 39:36Ryan Holiday?

  Like, that's. Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Hey, you don't have to do a podcast. I don't think you're like legally required to. Uh, but it's the job you signed up for. And, and the way that unfortunately, uh, too many politicians, and I, I think one of the frustrations that I have had over the course of Trump's rise is, uh, hearing Republican

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Politicians, Republican elected officials, who say to me, like, off the record, or privately, like, I don't agree with anything that we're doing, but I can't say it, or I'm not gonna say it. And that, I think if you agree with what Trump is doing, that's great. Like, you know, like, fine, go and say that you agree with it. There are a lot of Republicans who do, right? But if you don't, and you say, like, I can't really say it, what are you doing? What's, what's the point of having this job? You were elected to have, to take positions, and not always comfortable positions. And, you know, politicians always want to avoid having an unpopular opinion or an unpopular

• 40:50Speaker 01

  position, sure, but, you know, when we're in this big moment for the country, and no one who's paying attention would deny that we are, then this is, you're called to have a big opinion on things. And that goes not just for Republicans, it goes for Democrats, too. But I will tell you that it is much more rare to hear Democrats say, off the record, well, I can't stand anything Biden is doing, but I can't say anything about it. And some of that is just like the Democratic mentality, because Democrats just sound off all the time whenever they are frustrated about anything.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  But it's a confusing thing to cover, and I, to watch people who have, you know, yes, I'm a reporter who's based in Washington, which means that I do have, like, private dinners with politicians sometimes, and that, I guess, makes me part of whatever, the insiders of the swamp. But sometimes you watch people who have, who say something over a dinner table to you, and then say the exact opposite thing in public.

• 41:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  And, and how, and then they, you know, sometimes those same people will complain, like, oh, your reporters are so cynical. And we say, you make us cynical when you do things like that. That's your fault.

• 42:10Ryan Holiday?

  I was, I was at a dinner and probably one of those sort of half private, half public dinners a few months ago and Nikki Haley was there and she was like the sort of guest or whatever. And she was talking and, and I'm saying this so my, my listeners don't think I'm just some sort of extreme leftist because I'm not. I was perfectly inclined to like Nikki Haley and certainly better, like her better than, than many other people. But you know, she was, she was talking about, you know, that it's inappropriate that these social networking platforms are banning people and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I remember saying something like, look, why do you, I was like, do you think Facebook wants to be in the business of censoring politicians? The, the reason they're doing it is because their employees

• 42:55Ryan Holiday?

  are making them do it. And the reason their employees are making Mark Zuckerberg do it is because the employees feel impotent to make their politicians, that is you Nikki Haley, or anyone else in Washington, or, or within the party infrastructure, do what needs to be done. Like, the reason this escalated and escalated and escalated to the point where there was an attempted coup and insurrection is because at every step of the way, exactly along the lines of what you're talking about, people thought one thing in private, but another thing in public, refused to put their butt on the line in even the smallest way, which created, you know, the, the monster that we dealt with. So it's this weird thing

• 43:40Ryan Holiday?

  where you see these politicians who again, will give everything and try so hard to get elected, but then don't actually seem to want to do the job once they have it. It's this, it's the strange, as if, as if it's somebody else's job, like somebody one position higher than them. It's like, you were the ambassador to the United Nations, you know, you, you had no ability to influence the behavior of this person in any way. What are you talking about? You know, it's, so it's, it's very strange, this sort of complete dereliction of duty, coupled with the sort of like hand wringing about where things are going.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, and this is not just about politics. I think the probably clearest parallel is in the media world, where you have media executives who say like, well, what do you want us to do? People want more coverage of the Kardashians or whatever, you know? And we all have a role to, if you're taking a position, a public position, right? I mean, I think anybody in journalism takes a somewhat public position. Anybody in politics is obviously taking a public position, where it's part of like, the implicit trust that consumers and voters have, and all of us, to say like, we want you to be a little responsible about what you're doing, and to think through it a little bit more.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  And we trust, basically, that you will. And you have to take that and be responsive to people want, what people want. I don't think that, like, if I thought that the most interesting thing to write about was, I'm trying to think of something like really boring, like, dry cleaner prices or something, right? Like, it's not, if I say to you, like, this is really what's changing the world, is whether you can get your shirts done for under $3. How many articles should I write about that if nobody is reading them? Probably not another, right?

• 45:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  But on the other hand, you don't want it to just be like, oh, we're chasing the lowest common denominator all the time. And politicians, it's the same thing. You want there to be this balance between being responsive, but also being responsible and having a sense of the trust that the public has put in you.

• 46:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think there's a Solzhenitsyn quote where he says, you know, let evil into the world, but not through me. You know, I think that there, we do have this tendency as a

• 46:09Speaker 01

  That's a good Russian quote.

• 46:12Ryan Holiday?

  We have this, you know, tendency to be like, why aren't these politicians, you know, standing up, doing what's not in their interest, but in the larger interest? And then, yeah, you have a journalist chasing clicks or like, I do think the imperative, when you look at what these people do is to go, okay, obviously, as a voter, I have a miniscule impact, I have to make sure I use that impact. But also, the lesson is, well, like, how am I being courageous or working for the collective common good in my own industry? I have a friend who's sort of like aghast at like Jeff Bezos and this space thing, you know, he's like posting about it all the time. And it's like, but you work as a salesperson for a different tech billionaire, you know,

• 46:55Ryan Holiday?

  and you have a very nice life, you know? So, so there is this tendency where we want to, we want to question the morals and the purity of other people and then see ourselves kind of exempt from having to live up to our own ideals in any way in our own lives.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like, I, I think that whatever one's own opinion is of Donald Trump and his politics, what his election and his presidency did, or should have done for, for more people, but I think did for a lot of people, is make us all feel like this stuff matters, like politics matters, like, and that we should have a role in it. And even if your role is just to be a voter, but like, to be engaged enough to care about what's happening. And in a somewhat poetic way, the pandemic reinforces that, that we are connected to each other, that like, getting vaccinated or whatever is not just about you, is about

• 47:59Speaker 01

  how we all have a role in things. Anything about climate change, you know, if, if you stop driving your SUV, does that make much of an impact yourself? No, but if we all stop doing, you know, if we all think about these things, there, there does need to be an investment that each of us has in what's going on. And I do think that that's much more alive. Now than it was pre 2016. The question now becomes, what do we all do with that? Because, you know, I wrote this whole book about these four years for the Democrats and the Trump years. It's not like the book is like, okay, that's the end of the story. We all sorted it out. It's clear what happens now.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  It is a continuing story that, and it is a continuing struggle that we are all going through to figure out what we're going to be on the other side of however long a period this is.

• 48:52Ryan Holiday?

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

• 49:00Ryan Holiday?

  Well, speaking of these tech platforms, I have this theory that one of the most toxic forces in our culture, it's not social media per se, but it's how social media influence other forms of culture. So I think when you look at like journalists as a class or as a profession, that was long a profession that prized sort of thinking in long form, you know, the sort of artificial idea of objectivity. You know, the idea of sort of getting the whole story, putting it out there, the sort of definitive take on it. Right. Serving the customer, speaking truth to power, so on and so forth.

• 49:39Ryan Holiday?

  Now you contrast that with the incentives of Twitter, you know, of 240 characters. The hotter, the faster the take, the better. You have, it has this compounding effect of like, if journalists are how the public comes to understand the world and how journalists are understanding the world is being affected by this technological, you know, innovation. You sort of get this weird magnified change in society, you know? You know, Postman talks about how the dominant cultural medium sort of determines the culture itself. I was just amazed at how often in the book, like Twitter's coming up over and over again,

• 50:22Ryan Holiday?

  either as people trying to take a viewpoint from Twitter and. Like form a candidate around it. Or, you know, conversely, often the people in Biden's campaign being like, guys, this is not reality. Nobody cares what these people think. I, I, that tension struck me and I, I just wondered what you thought both as a reporter during the election, but then also a reporter who has to operate on this platform and watches it affect your colleagues. Like what, how do you think about that?

• 50:53Speaker 01

  It's really hard. And I, the part of the thing that is going on is that it's not like no, anybody has experience in what to do here.

• 51:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  That there have been rules that have been so, so we're like figuring out, figuring it out in real time as we screw it up and maybe do it well at certain points. But most of the time screwed up. I, I, I think that

• 51:19Speaker 01

  part of what came from 2016 for a lot of people was this question of like, are we living in bubbles, right? And there was that famous SNL, like commercial of being in a bubble that ran like a week or two after the election in 2016. Twitter is a bubble in itself and a way where like reporters are talking to each other.

• 51:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Only, right? A lot of the time. And like, I, I've covered a lot of things as a reporter in a lot of different places. And the reporters are often, there's like the area for the reporters and the tables where the computers can be set up or the little pen where they can stand. And end up talking to each other and making little jokes about what's going on or sharing some insight back. And now most of that, that you would see not at all public is happening in public view. But with, as you say, like this weird incentive structure where like, if you can say something that's like particularly snarky or particularly sharp in how you say it, or, or that really

• 52:24Speaker 01

  slams someone, then, then you can get a lot of likes or retweets or whatever.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Revelation that I had over the course of a couple of years was that like it is performance art that doesn't actually go that far, right? That it's, you can shape what other reporters are thinking about, or like have a conversation back and forth, and that can sometimes lead to things. There are times where I've tweeted something about an event and used it a little bit as a immediate test to see whether that idea has mileage, or what kind of responses come to it, and then translate that into an article.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  But usually, you can spend a lot of time on Twitter, and I think that one tweet I did got like 60,000 likes or retweets, I don't remember which, and that is by far the most successful thing that I've ever tweeted. And most of the time, it's like, oh, you got like 40 people retweeted it, like, great. You know, like, what's the actual advantage of this? Not all that much. And the downside of screwing something up and seeming like you've gone too far is pretty high. And so the incentive becomes like making sure that you're on the radar for other people

• 53:53Speaker 01

  in journalism politics, which is a pretty small insular group. And that in itself is not always, in fact, I would say, it's most of the time not very helpful. And I say that as somebody who tweets multiple times a day nonetheless.

• 54:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you'd almost have thought there'd be some empathy between the media and Trump in the sense of like, it was like, why is he always tweeting, says person who is always tweeting? You know, like, there does seem to be this compulsion, and it's really the worst way to do it, right? The Stoics talk about sort of taking every impression, putting it to the test, really thinking about it. But what Twitter and Facebook and all these social platforms are, they're like, give me your opinion and then think about it. You know, like, give me your opinion and then let's think, let's see what other people think about it. As opposed to, I'm gonna go off for a minute and work through this, right? And so it's like, if journalists are supposed to be the filter, the people who sort of

• 54:55Ryan Holiday?

  separate fact from fiction, emotion from, you know, reality.

• 55:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's really not good to have them be in constant sort of provoke, react, provoke, react mode all the time. I mean, I'd prefer that you guys go off, really think about something or be reading a book from 100 years ago about presidential campaigns and then being able to contextualize what's happening as opposed to, yeah, monitoring how many retweets something gets.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I was an English and a philosophy major in college. I don't think that many philosophers and certainly any Stoic would do well on Twitter. It's not, it's not the way that things usually get processed when there's a lot of thinking to go on. On the other hand, I'm remembering, as I say this, when I was taking a class on the critique of pure reason, and my professor was trying to explain a section to us, and he said, "This section is really badly written, and this is where you see that if Kant had had graduate students who were working with him, that they would have said, 'Professor

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Kant, we need to clear this up.'" And he said, like, "Don't struggle about..." I don't remember exactly which section it was, but he was trying to explain to us, like, "There's not, like, deeper meaning to be gleaned from this." He was just saying, like, "It's badly written."

• 56:22Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, like, when you read Kierkegaard, you think it's this, like, yeah, philosopher like any of the others, and then you're like, "No, this guy was writing, like, angry letters under a pseudonym to the local newspaper for daring to gossip about him." And you're like, "Oh, it kind of is the same personality, just, you know, like, for thousands of years, just like, in the same way that egotistical people are attracted to politics, like, it would be very unself-aware to imply that those of us who become writers or public, you know, intellectuals or whatever are not also driven by the desire to be seen and recognized and have a large validated, validating following.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's like, I think journalism, in particular in terms of writing, is about writing things not just for the sake of writing them, but for having an impact and an influence in the conversation and in what in political journalism and what happens in politics. I I don't I don't come at writing about politics as a Republican or Democrat or having a slant one way or the other. I don't myself believe that there's such a thing exactly as objective journalism. I think that there's fair journalism. We all have some viewpoint that we come at this with. And and we should all spend a lot of time in journalism striving to be fair. But you want, when you write things, for it

• 57:47Speaker 01

  to matter in the world and for people to read it and for there to be an effect of people reading it. Otherwise, it just ends up being like, I'll go a little PG 13.

• 57:58Ryan Holiday?

  A love letter to yourself.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Well, I was gonna say a masturbatory experience. So you went for the cleaner, more poetic version than Ryan.

• 58:05Ryan Holiday?

  No, and and that was another theme that I picked up on in the book, which I think is is worth everyone thinking about. What I found remarkable about Biden, for a person who is, you know, routinely criticized as being sort of gaffe prone or or, you know, sloppy, he really ran a campaign of pretty remarkable discipline. I was sort of thinking about it via the Rams New England Super Bowl, where Belichick's like, I'm gonna run the most I'm gonna I'm gonna run the most boring offense in the history of football because I'm playing against one of the most exciting offenses in the history of football. And we're just gonna we're gonna, you know, this is gonna be a game of contrast. That

• 58:48Ryan Holiday?

  just at every step of the way, he was provoked, baited, set up for, you know,

• 58:56Ryan Holiday?

  A potential campaign ending mistake and he remarkably didn't, didn't make one. And

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Well, he made, he made a bunch of mistakes.

• 59:06Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, not that he didn't make, but he didn't make any mistakes that cost him the election. By definition, we wouldn't be talking.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  That's true. Yeah. And look, I ran into somebody last weekend whom I haven't seen. It's somebody who I don't know that well, but because of the pandemic, I hadn't seen in a year and a half. And, and this is not somebody in journalism or in politics. And he said to me, he's a very proud Democrat. And he said to me, I remember you saying to me in the summer of 2019, the end of 2019, oh, Biden looks tired and he's screwing up a lot. And hey, look, he's the president now. And I said, and was sort of like rubbing my face in it. And I was like, well, no, I mean, like, he was tired and screwing up a lot in those days. And that doesn't mean, obviously that he's not the president now,

• 59:51Speaker 01

  but there are a lot of things that fit together in this way to make him the nominee and the president that I don't think anybody would have been able to predict, right? To go back, when I turned in that proposal for this book in 2018, the proposal said, like, Joe Biden's probably going to run and he's probably going to be one of the leading candidates. We'll see whether it works out for him. So it wasn't like shocking to me that he would do well. I did think that there was a reasonably good chance that someone else would come out ahead of him. And in fact, when you see the way it went down, where he was struggling and if not for Trump, doing all the things that led to the first impeachment, would

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  that, that ended up benefiting Biden because everybody kind of rallied around him. Would Biden have been the nominee without that? I don't know. Would Biden have been the nominee if there wasn't a real recoil from Bernie Sanders at the end, which would not have happened probably with any of the other candidates in the race? I don't know. There are things there that really fit together in this intricate puzzle. And that's what the book tries to get at. Like, why?

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Why it worked out this way. And it was not as obvious as like, hey, he was the two term vice president, well known, older white guy. Of course, he was going to be the nominee. It like, yes. And it can seem like it was like the obvious conclusion and almost written in the stars, but it really wasn't at any point. And you think like, this is a guy who came in fourth place in Iowa and then followed it up by coming in fifth place in New Hampshire. Right? Like, that's not a story that that usually leads to anything good happening in politics.

• 1:01:36Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and that's kind of what I mean about discipline is that you could, I think, if I was in that position, you know, your, your response would be to overreact or to abandon the plan. And there was a remarkable amount of discipline. You know, it's kind of a tortoise in the hare story. It's kind of a, you know, I have a hypothesis about the American electorate that runs counter to kind of what the polling says, that definitely runs counter to what Twitter says, that runs counter to the, you know, what's getting coverage in the media. But if I can just stick with this, you know, I think it's going to work. And there's the, there's an element of, of that sort of plotting consistency and bet.

• 1:02:19Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it's like he had a vision for the soul of America and he made a big bet on it. And for most of the campaign, it did not look like a good bet. And then it started kind of paying dividends. So it, it, I was just struck by the, in, in sports, we call like, oh, they stuck with the game plan, you know? And, and it seems like of all the candidates, he was kind of the only one that did it.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, he started saying that the expression battle for the soul comes from him. And he started saying it after Charlottesville because there was that, the Nazi march. And it did hit for so many people as like, what is happening? Right? And he puts this, he's thinking about this book that John Meacham wrote called The Soul of America. And then he says, okay, the battle for the soul. And he writes an article about it and he's reading the article to people in draft form. And he's like, starting to shout as he's reading it. And then again, so this whole process that he's going through in the book. And then he. Comes to the point of deciding to run and he says it's a battle for the soul at

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  the beginning and his campaign is doing polling and focus groups about this and they're saying like, people aren't really into this phrase, sir. Maybe use something else and he refuses to and you know, I think it's important like because he won, this does seem like the right strategy. If he had lost, he would have seemed like he was being stubborn, right? And by doing this, right? So it's, you know, it's important to think about the history, not just in the end result, right? But he keeps going at it and he keeps going at it. And like, could I go back to that interview we did in the beginning of February? When

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  I said to him, so by the way, like, there were a bunch of different titles that we had played around with for this book and only maybe three days before the interview that I did with him at the end of January, we decided, okay, we're going to call it Battle for the Soul. It does really feel like that because of the riot, because I had just gone and covered the inauguration and how weird it was to have that behind these fences with the National Guard there. And, and so I said to him, so, you know, we're going to call this book Battle for the Soul. We just decided that a couple of days ago. So I guess I have, I should just thank you for coming up with that phrase and said that as sort of a little joke. And he said to me, yeah, you know, the difference

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  between you and me, pal, is I actually believe it. I love that, yeah. And, and I laughed a little bit and I said, no, I think you actually may have been on to something. And part of that is Biden, he is very much the guy that you see in public as gregarious and warm and, but he also does have this very sarcastic sense of humor and a sense of like, no, I was right. You know, I was right about this. And he wanted to make sure that I felt that. And, and through the conversation, he ended up saying to me, yeah, you know, when I was talking about the Battle for the Soul. A lot of my, a lot of people working on the campaign said to me, stop talking about

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  that stuff. Nobody really connects with that anymore. And I wanted to keep talking about it that way. And I think that this goes to what I was saying earlier, that the presidency that he has is, is pretty different from the one that he imagined for himself. And now, like, it does feel like we're in this battle for the soul in a big, deep way on many, many different levels. But that's not, that's not something that any of us could have anticipated. And so he ends up rising to a moment that wasn't there, but that really is this moment that we're in. And now we see whether he can actually do anything with that moment.

• 1:06:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you could argue that what great leaders do is they make the moment. And then to a certain extent, the moment wasn't there. And he was kind of skate, he was skating to where the puck would be, which is what

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Ryan Holiday?

  great leaders do. I have a line from General Mattis that I have on my wall. He says, you know, cynicism is cowardice. And there is a kind of an earnestness to Biden that I think does make him stand out in a world of a lot of cynicism, even, even nihilism these days.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I wrote an article in The Atlantic that published this week where, that gets into how he's handling talking about Trump as Trump continues to try to force himself much more onto the scene. And Biden's approach, the White House's overall approach is to be a little bit dismissive of Trump, to say he's not on the same level as the President of the United States. And he's like this crazy guy who

• 1:07:02Ryan Holiday?

  Same with the self-discipline. It's more self-discipline.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Right. And, and what that leads to sometimes, and I can verify this even with the reaction that I got to this article from reporters and politicians alike, is people saying like, does he not get it? Is he totally oblivious to what's going on? Doesn't he know that he needs to get into this big fight? And Biden has this sense of the best way to de-escalate a fight is to not be in it. And he pulls himself out of the fight. And so, and that seems to have, I think to his credit at this point, kept the temperature lower than it might have been otherwise. The question though is, does this end up?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Repeating in a mostly parallel way what happened in 2015 and 2016, where people were for a long time, pretty dismissive of Trump and what Trump was tapping into, and not see that it is very compelling to a lot of Americans and to underplay this and not be ready for the fight that's really coming.

• 1:08:14Ryan Holiday?

  There's a great book, you may have read, if you haven't, you should, and anyone listening should, called The Hidden Hand Presidency, that's mostly about Eisenhower and McCarthy. And basically, it sort of falls in line with what you're talking about in your article, which is that the president has to be above things. So Eisenhower never mentions McCarthy, refuses to give him any oxygen, refuses to attack him directly, but and we only find this out years later, when the archives are started to be revealed, but worked quite Machiavellianly to destroy him in secret through intermediaries. So I would agree that as long as the self-discipline and the outward control is matched by a sort

• 1:08:59Ryan Holiday?

  of inner pragmatism and awareness of the urgency of the problem, the strategy can work well. If it's delusional or naive, I'm going to ignore it and it will go away, then it's probably only going to get worse.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  I have not read that book, but that sounds like it should be on my reading list pretty quickly. I will say that when I was reporting this story about Biden, I said to someone who is one of his top advisers, I said, but like, he's like reading the clips and watching what's happening on TV, right?

• 1:09:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's reading the clips.

• 1:09:35Ryan Holiday?

  Good, good.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  He does not watch as much TV by any measure as Donald Trump did or was.

• 1:09:41Ryan Holiday?

  He dies.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  But he is aware of what's going on. And what Biden would say to people is... You know, that was his son that Donald Trump went after when he was trying to drum up the Ukraine conspiracy stuff. You know, that's cutting pretty close to him. That's his son, whose emails about being in recovery and, you know, that were hacked and put out in public, that that was his own presidency that the riot in the Capitol was meant to overturn. He feels it pretty directly about himself, but there is this,

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  and even sometimes in talking with him and getting deep into it with him, this place where it's not clear whether it is like a relentless optimism, or a naivete, or just in some ways, I think what I think it really draws from is his experience with grief through his life and knowing that there is, there is a way to handle this when things go terribly wrong that doesn't always involve like screaming back at it. He talks about one of the really,

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  like I've heard him say it so many times, that it's like a complete, every time he says it, I start to be like, oh, he's doing this thing again, as a, you know, jaded reporter. But he will always say to people when they're in, whether it's a one-on-one conversation or talking to like a group of mass shooting survivors, he says, "It's hard to believe it right now, but there will come a time where the memory of the person who was killed will bring a smile to your face and not just the tears that you're feeling now." And he said, "You'll get there, right? And you just have to believe me that that's coming."

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  And that grief is so riven through him that from the experience of his wife and baby daughter being killed in 1972 and his son dying in 2015 and this, what his, one of his best friends Ted Kaufman says to me in the book that Biden is both the luckiest and unluckiest person that he's ever known, right? That he goes back and forth between this and this, I guess, really plugs into stoicism here.

• 1:12:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  That, you know, that car crash that kills his wife and baby daughter and puts his two sons in the hospital happens when he's in Washington as the youngest senator ever elected and in this great high and he gets pulled down, that he goes up to running for president in 1988 and it seems like things are going great and, and then he gets himself into a plagiarism scandal because he's talking off the cuff so much that he talks himself into trouble and he has to pull out and then he has brain aneurysm and the last rites are delivered to him. That's how bad things were. Like it's just constant back and forth with him. And then, so I think that part of what he's facing now, when he looks at

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  what's ahead for the country is thinking like, how do we keep this on an even keel? And how do I use my own personal experience of thinking about that to inform how I lead the country?

• 1:13:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. In my book, The Obstacle is the Way, I use this great book called Lincoln's Melancholy as a source, which everyone should read. But it's about, you know, sort of Lincoln's crippling battle with depression for most of his life and how this sets him up for this unique moment that he ends up occupying in history. And I do think there is an element to that of Biden and his story, which is that it, it forges a temperament that is both uniquely suited to the times, but also very much needed to the times. Because I, you could argue that, you know, we're all addicted to social media. We are all trapped in this outrage cycle. Having a president, as Trump was, politics aside, who was very

• 1:14:01Ryan Holiday?

  much the apotheosis of that, you know, escalated it and took us to a much worse place culturally. Again, policies aside, it, I am somewhat hopeful that the next four years can perhaps, you know, break us from our, you know, Politics as the dominant cultural medium of entertainment mentality that we're in and the the sort of, you know, always following, always responding cycle. We do have a president whose temperament would, we would all be happier if we had a bit more of that temperament as opposed to the watch five hours of Fox News in the evening and then tweet about it mentality.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  And Michael Bennet, who's one of the senators from Colorado and who ran for president, as he himself will say, in a way that almost no one was aware of, including, I remember when he was getting into the race, I was in New Hampshire with one of his fellow candidates. And I said, oh, so I'm going over to see Michael Bennet. And I won't tell you which one this was, but this candidate said to me, oh, is he running too? But Bennett, in the summer of 2019, had tweeted this line that said something like, you know, if I'm president, I promise you'll be able to go two weeks without ever thinking about me. And his campaign didn't do very well, but that sensibility, I do think, connected with a lot of people.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  And especially during the pandemic, where inevitably, we were all, especially last fall, thinking every day about what we were all going through and what the government, how the government and politics was failing us, right? And that we couldn't ever escape it because we couldn't escape our homes, right? And Biden was essentially saying to people like, I'll just take care of it, right? That was his pitch. I'll be, I'm not going to be that exciting. You're not going to get any soap opera level palace intrigue stories out of me. I'm telling you right now, I've tried to report on some of the stuff that the conversations

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  are never that interesting when Joe Biden is involved in them as compared to the Donald Trump ones, they don't go in crazy ways. And Biden made that pitch to the country. And I don't know if without the pandemic, he would have been as successful making that kind of a pitch. But with the pandemic, people did seem to feel like, okay, that's, that seems reasonable to me. That's the kind of government, that's the kind of politics that that I want more of. And there were. A lot of votes that Joe Biden got that were for him, but there were also a lot of votes that Biden got that were against Trump and people saying, we don't want the Trump way of doing things anymore.

• 1:16:50Ryan Holiday?

  So last, last question, and I'll let you go, and I'll just go back to reading your writing, but what do you feel like, what do you feel like, having followed four years of a campaign, and then now we're about to watch another one start?

• 1:17:07Ryan Holiday?

  Unfortunately, it was so early, but what have you seen as far as how the sausage gets made that perhaps you're, that your average person doesn't know that knowing might save them time, save them anxiety, save them outrage? Like, what do you feel like as a reporter, you understand about how media, particularly about politics, gets made that, that perhaps impacts how you read, see the news, your perception of whether the world's, you know, teetering on the edge of destruction, or, you know, if, if we're just getting a bit more worked up than we need to be? Do you know what I mean?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's sort of two questions. I think we should be pretty worked up about what's going on in politics in this country. But the, the, the main insight that I try to bring to every article that I write in this book, I think you see it throughout, is that these are human beings and they're not characters in a play or in a movie. And when you start to think of them in that way, as people, you get such a different understanding of how they do things well, how they screw things up, what their intentions are.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  A lot of this book, in writing it, felt to me like I was writing a novel, though it's all true.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  But that's because I got to know these people really well and cover them a lot and talk to a lot of people about them. And when you see the way that they struggle with decisions, or the way that when something goes really well, what it is that's driving it, and it's not this like, big mythical... Clashes like out of a Marvel movie or something that it gives you an understanding of what's going on, right? Like, there's a lot in there's a chapter in the book about that first famous debate between Biden and Harris when she hit him over bussing and blew up and then she ended up having her own problems because of it. But part of

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  what's sketched out in there is why she needed to do that, why she felt she needed to do that, because she needed to raise money and she needed to raise her profile, but also how they talked through the specific ways of making the attack, how she was uncomfortable about different parts of it, why Biden reacted in the way that he did. And you have to understand that. And then you understand that these people are all fallible. And they are all fallible, not just in like the big way, but like, maybe something goes wrong in a way that reverberates and ripples through government and politics because someone like didn't really sleep well one day. That's possible. That stuff happens sometimes,

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  right? Where one, you know, we're talking about the Hillary Clinton basket of deplorables line. I don't know whether she had had like a bad day that day or was like particularly exhausted, but it could be that. And that ends up haunting her whole campaign. And so when I look at this, what I what's ahead of us now, and think about the people who want to be part of the the political leadership of what that'll be, whether the Republicans are going to start running for president, or the Democrats who are in office now, it's saying like, how do you deal with this stuff? How do you and there to feel like I said

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  to one of the members of the House leadership, a guy named Hakeem Jeffries, who I'll have a story about shortly, a guy who's probably going to be the next Speaker of the House once Nancy Pelosi retires, whenever that day comes. And I said to him, do you feel the burden of like, thinking if you guys screw up the midterm elections, like, that's a big problem for a long time for the Democratic Party, and in your minds, a big problem for like, democracy itself? And that question isn't just about getting the big speechification from him about, you know, ideals, but really how that hits this guy who is a human being and goes home

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  and has to talk to his kids about what's going on and

• 1:21:40Ryan Holiday?

  Right, the kicker that blew the field goal.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Right, like, it's real. And it's, and, and, and when you put these people at a reserve, then I think you both don't give them enough credit and also kind of give them too much credit because you let them get away with things that were like they're as if it's not real and affecting people's lives. But stuff affects people's lives. What happens with the, the bills that are going on in Congress, the, you know, the sort of bouncing around these enormous numbers, trillions of dollars in an infrastructure bill. Will it be three and a half trillion or four and a half trillion? But, you know, that's money

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  that, the difference of a million dollars in one project will, could be enormous for a specific community or for somebody's lives. And you think about it in that way and how they're all processing it. It's really, I, I think that the, the, the failure of politics and the failure of political journalism often is to let things get too divorced from how it actually affects all of our lives. Because it does in big ways, big and small.

• 1:22:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, maybe that's Biden wearing off on you, the idea of some empathy and, and thinking about what people are going through, because everyone is going through something.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I, I guess, Ryan, you think I was like a bad person before I spent some time around politicians. But I, I, it's not just Biden. I think it's, it is the politicians who think about things in that way are the ones that we should all want to have leading things. It doesn't mean that they're all going to agree on the solution to get there. But the politicians who only think like, wow, how do we, you know, keep the Democrats in the majority in 2022? Or how do we win the Senate back for the Republicans? You know, like, that is not

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  A good way of going about things.

• 1:23:48Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's a shitty way to be a person, but it's, I think it's also historically not been a particularly great strategy, you know, like.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and you look at the last, I would say 20 ish years in American politics, and it has been this just sort of like tug and war, tug of war back and forth of who's going to be in power without thinking about like, well, what about all these things that are rotting under the surface? And again, I think Donald Trump is the manifestation in voters' minds of people saying like, we want you to do something.

• 1:24:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  Well, you know, and, and I was sketch, in the book, I write about how like a lot of what was going on in 2016, and I think continued to go on through the, his presidency and in 2020, is people saying like, I'm getting fucked. I, and I can't pay my mortgage. I can't, I'm working harder than I ever worked. I'm working harder than my parents worked. I can't pay for my kids to go to college. It seems like other people are doing well. It seems like we had the Wall Street crash and yet still the big bonuses for all the big banks and I'm getting fucked. And why won't anyone do something for me? And Donald Trump's strength was saying, I know you're getting fucked and I'm angry about it too.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  And that, that, the irony that that was coming from a guy who was born into wealth and lives in literally a gold covered tower.

• 1:25:19Ryan Holiday?

  Could not care less about anyone other than himself.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Right. Like, but he was speaking to that anger. And I think that then what was important again in, in 2020 is that Biden figured out a way to speak to people's anger that they were getting fucked in the pandemic and that they were getting, and that they had turned to Trump to try to change things and they were still kind of getting fucked. It didn't change their lives. And Biden saying, look, I can, I think we can try to get government to work again and I can do something for you. And, and people say like, okay, maybe we do that. We go to this guy who has more experience than like literally anyone else who's ever been president, right? And and Americans, if you go in the history of American politics,

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  it is almost impossible to find an example of somebody who had more experience winning over somebody who had less experience. The exceptions are like George H. W. Bush and Thomas Jefferson.

• 1:26:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  And and so Biden coming and making that argument in a way that really worked is a reflection of just how harried people were by what they were going through and thinking like, OK, like, maybe we need something calmer and more experienced, and maybe that's the way to do something. But Biden now, you see what he's talking about all the time, where he says, democracy is dependent on us showing that government can work. This is not a small thing. This is not just about whether people's like taxes go up or down or whatever. This is something much bigger that we should all hopefully be able to have faith that our government does something, whatever it may be. And I'm not sure that

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  that message is translated so well to a lot of members of Congress, at least so far.

• 1:27:11Ryan Holiday?

  No, I love it. I loved the book, and I'm so glad we got connected. And I can't wait. Actually, I would say I can't wait for the next book, but I hope that the upcoming election is so boring that it does not warrant another book. So that's just my that's just my my view as a citizen. But as a fan, I do I do hope it comes along.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  I I don't think that we're heading into a super boring period in American politics. That being said, I don't have I'm not yet at work on another book, but who knows what will come. I think that there will. The joke is that what's good for journalism is often what's not good for the country and vice versa.

• 1:27:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, may you live in interesting times.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  And I think that there will be still a lot of journalism to do. So you can read into that what you will.

• 1:28:05Ryan Holiday?

  I will. I appreciate it, and we'll talk soon.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  All right. Thank you.

• 1:28:13Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening. We just crossed more than 50 million downloads with the Daily Stoic Podcast. Thanks to you. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Please share it with your friends. Send an episode you liked. If you liked today's episode, send it to someone you know. We're always trying to reach more people and we appreciate it. Thank you for helping us keep the lights on here at Daily Stoic.