BONUS: Toxic Masculinity, Cancel Culture & Politics

In this bonus episode, Ryan answers questions about handling other people’s opinions, toxic masculinity, keeping your ego in check, politics, and cancel culture. Have a question for Ryan? Bring it to one of hisupcoming live shows https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! 🎟️https://www.dailystoiclive.com/DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail -- Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  So I have a bunch of traveling I'm doing through the end of the year on Daily Stoic Live Tour. I just got back from San Diego. I like to stay in the places that I'm staying. I like to book places on Airbnb so I can be like a local. I not only do some of my best writing, but I learn about things that I wouldn't have known otherwise. When I was just in San Diego, I took a walk along the water. I bumped into someone who recognized me and they told me about their favorite local bookstore, which was like two blocks from where I was staying. And I never would have known about it if it wasn't for that encounter. It was cool to me to think that I have helped facilitate that experience for many, many people coming to Austin over the years. The first house that I bought in Austin, when my wife and I first moved here, we would list it on Airbnb and it helped me make the transition from my corporate life to being a full-time writer.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  So if you're gonna be away, you should maybe think about listing your place on Airbnb. It can be a great way to earn extra cash while you travel, can offset the cost of your trip, or maybe even go towards whatever you're doing next. If you've got travel coming up, check out Airbnb. Your home might be worth more than you think and you can find out how much at Airbnb.com/host. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Hi, Ryan.

• 1:22Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I want to say that your book, Obstacle is the Way, helped me finish my master's thesis.

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, congratulations.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Thank you for that.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  I want to ask you about when you know something or someone is like annoying you or whatever, but you can't accept that they don't maybe agree with you, how to kind of have peace with that and not let it kind of take your own peace away?

• 1:48Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite quotes from the Stoics, it's in Meditations. Marx Ria says, "Remember, you always have the power to have no opinion." He says, "Things are not asking to be judged by you." Now imagine this is being said by a person whose opinion was literally law. He had the life and death power over people. And here he is reminding himself to live and let live, that he doesn't have to let things bother him. He doesn't have to try to change everything. He can just let some things be. And now this sounds like not much of a power, you always have the power to have no opinion. But how many people do we know that have no such power? Right? I mentioned Elon Musk earlier. Elon Musk is an incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy person. But has he ever had an opinion he was able to keep to himself? Not that I know of.

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  It's a hard thing to do to just shut up, you know, to just focus on your stuff. That's what I try to do in my life as best as I can. Something I'm going through with my kids, like I'll be like, oh, wait, I don't need to have an opinion on whether this show is good or not. You like it. I like that expression, you don't have to yuck someone else's yum. Like, you like it, so it's good to you. It's not something I need to convince you of otherwise. And so having fewer opinions is something I'm trying to practice and will be forced to practice over the next few years, I suspect.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Quick question. As a father of two young boys, like yourself.

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  I'd just be interested on your thoughts and insights, particularly on the rise of what we call toxic masculinity, the likes of your Andrew Tates, Matt Walsh's, Ben Shapiro's, et cetera.

• 3:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  And particularly their negative attitudes towards women and how you guide, let's say, your sons on the appropriate actions with the fairer sex.

• 3:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's a great question. One of the reasons I feel so strongly about this and why I talk about these things is I have two young boys and I also just so frustrated with the way that people who have platforms and influence over young men have decided to deploy those platforms, to use it to call out and inspire the worst in people. Look, if you want to use your platform to tell people to get active, to read great texts from history, to aspire to do things, to be ambitious, take care of yourself, to make your bed, all that's awesome, right? And I think young men are especially are desperate for that advice and desperately need positive outlets and role models because there are not enough of them out there.

• 4:19Ryan Holiday?

  You know, being a young man is hard. Being any kind of person is hard, right? And when you look at the stats, young men are struggling. In the United States, two thirds of college graduates are women. Just young men are struggling across the board. And I think because of that struggle, it makes them a very ripe target for sort of reactionary figures to pander to them. And as all sort of cultures have struggled with over the years, to take those disaffected young men, weaponize that disaffection to say it's this group's fault or it's this part of society's fault, or to direct it at a common enemy. That's what like demagogues do and have always done. So I think that's, that's why I feel so strongly about talking about some of this stuff and talking about it in a positive way.

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  Cause I feel like I'm one of the only people that has a, not a mostly male audience, but has a male audience that hasn't gone in that direction. There's definitely a few exceptions. I think Rich Roll does an incredible job. There's a bunch of people I like, but I think this space is failing young men particularly. I just find in, in the Stoics that I admire a strong social conscience. And that, to me, that strong social conscience has to also include equal treatment for all people, all genders, all orientations, and to really sincerely care about that as if it, as is important to you as your own equality and success. To me, that's just part and parcel of being a decent human. So I have a bunch of traveling I'm doing through the end of the year on Daily Stoic Live Tour. I just got back from San Diego.

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  I like to stay in the places that I'm staying. I like to book places on Airbnb so I can be like a local. I not only do some of my best writing, but I learn about things that I wouldn't have known otherwise. When I was just in San Diego, I took a walk along the water. I bumped into someone who recognized me and they told me about their favorite local bookstore, which was like two blocks from where I was staying. And I never would have known about it if it wasn't for that encounter. It was cool to me to think that I have helped facilitate that experience for many, many people coming to Austin over the years. The first house that I bought in Austin, when my wife and I first moved here, we would list it on Airbnb and it helped me make the transition from my corporate life to being a full-time writer. So if you're gonna be away, you should maybe think about listing your place on Airbnb.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

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• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

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• 7:54Speaker 03

  So I'm thinking that cancel culture is really awful.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  How can Stoics or Stoicism help reverse the negative effects of?

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  Look, they had cancel culture in ancient Rome. It was called exile and it happened all the time. There's a whole generation of Stoics that were known as the Stoic Opposition and they were either exiled or executed. This is how Seneca meets his end. The reason Epictetus is teaching philosophy in Greece is that there is a blanket ban on all philosophers in Rome around the time he gets his freedom. Look, public shaming, piling onto people, being very unforgiving, you know, making someone's worst moment, who they are as a person. Yes, that kind of cancel culture is not great. We need more grace in this world. We're all imperfect. Seneca talks about this. He says like, "We're all fucked up and awful and the only way we're gonna survive

• 8:48Ryan Holiday?

  is by being kind and patient with each other." That being said, I feel like cancel culture has become a rallying cry largely of people who it would be wonderful if we could cancel and they went away. And so this idea of, you know, like Russell Brand gets accused of a bunch of horrendous things and then becomes like a right-wing cancel culture warrior is very self-serving and transparently manipulative in my eyes. So there's something about where we're going as a society where we're like, oh, because polite society is horrified at what this person has done and rightfully so, I'm actually going to, instead of saying rightfully so and being like, I'm not gonna be a fan of that person's work anymore,

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  we decide to make them this kind of like anti-hero. I feel like it's created this toxic feedback loop where like the worst people get the most attention. And so I'm, I'm more worried about that than cancel culture.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  I'm reading your book now, Ego's the Enemy. I read Obstacle is the Way and I came across an interesting theme in it. As you were successful when you were younger, I wanted to ask you as someone that's quite relatively young, how do you iterate when something doesn't go your way? And how do you keep yourself humble despite having a lot of success at a younger stage?

• 10:03Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you for that. Yeah, I think I was always very cognizant of how lucky I was to have some of the opportunities that I had early on. And my main goal was not fucking them up and not letting them go to my head. When I looked at other people that had started off strong or gotten some lucky breaks, what happened? It wasn't that someone came along and took it all away. It was that they alienated people or took it for granted, got complacent, like lost their minds, you know? I understood that ego was this kind of toxic force that would make whatever I was trying to do harder. And I think that's true at any level of success you have, but it is particularly hard to bear in young people. Like they're choosing between two people to give an opportunity to.

• 10:48Ryan Holiday?

  The asshole is the one they're gonna pass on first, you know? And so I was just thinking a lot about how do I not regress towards the mean? It's a mathematical proof for certainty that all things regress towards the mean. How do I not do that? How do I stay where I am? And to me, that was mostly about staying humble, staying clear-headed, doing the work. But yeah, you're gonna make mistakes, you're gonna screw up. I did that a lot. But I wanted to make sure that I only made those mistakes once, that I didn't make the same mistake over and over and over again and need to make it bigger before I learned the lesson. And I wanted to make sure that when I did make a mistake, I took the feedback, not personally, but as information I could use to get better.

• 11:28Speaker 05

  How do you deal with people on the day-to-day who are on the far opposite spectrum and stand like, believe in everything that you feel like is wrong with the world, but they are actually decent people, but they just believe in our sense, wrong thing?

• 11:45Ryan Holiday?

  Look, I live in a small town in rural Texas on a dirt road. I have plenty of interactions with people that I disagree with on lots of things. Not that I'm on the far left myself, I have not. That's why I live in rural Texas. I feel like I have pretty down-the-middle views. It's just segment of society has gotten more and more extreme. I will say I don't buy the distinction or the benefit of the doubt that you can believe and advocate for horrible things that have horrible real effects on real human beings and then go, well, we just agree to disagree. That's what I mean. Like, people go, why take a stand? You know, why embrace the divisiveness? Sure, like, there's lots of totally normal policies on all sides of the spectrum based on real data

• 12:29Ryan Holiday?

  that people can have lots of opinions about. I don't talk about politics ever in that sense. I don't talk about tax policy. I don't talk about educational policy. None of that. But when it comes down at the most basic level to how we treat human beings and what the social contract obligates us to do and not do, and what history tells us to be very wary of and to be very emphatic about nipping in the bud, that's the kind of politics that I feel obligated to talk about.

• 13:26Speaker 06

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