Elliot Ackerman on Writing, Military Service, and Polarization | People Do Well When They Can

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Elliot Ackerman about his book Green on Blue, how he became a writer, his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, the problems of radicalization and polarization, and more. Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels 2034, Red Dress In Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoir Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and non-fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others. His writing often appears in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The New York Times where he is a contributing opinion writer, and his stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Travel Writing. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D. C. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50. 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. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Terms and conditions apply. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Elliot Ackerman: 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 Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  People do well when they can. Going back to Socrates, we have this idea that most people are doing the best they can, that almost nobody does the wrong thing on purpose. No, they believe what they think is correct. They're doing what they think is right, what they think they're capable of doing in the moment. When I interviewed Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson about their book, The Self-Driven Child, which I carry at the Painted Porch Bookstore, they paraphrased an idea from Dr. Ross Green that's worth committing to memory. People do well when they can. People are usually acting with good intentions. So when people wrong you, or frustrate you, or their actions perplex you, remember that you yourself are not seeing the whole picture. People have other stuff going on. They don't

• 1:24Ryan Holiday?

  have the tools, or the resources, or the education that you have. They don't have your same sense of good. They aren't perfect. They can't do the impossible. So as Marcus said, you shouldn't ask the impossible. Understand this. Commit it to your memory. People do well when they can. Most people are doing the best they can.

• 1:47Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You can tell I'm congested. I've been sick the last week. It was not COVID, although I took my share of COVID tests. I think one of the reasons I have taken COVID seriously, and this was a nice reminder of it, when I get sick, man, I'm just sick forever. It was like 10 days. And then I get this like- Sinus thing for like weeks after, which messes up all my recording. It makes me sound like I'm kind of weird voice or something. But you won't hear that on the actual episode today because I recorded it a while ago. This was an interview I was

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  very much looking forward to. My friend Dan Barkoff at the Veterans for Responsible Leadership made this introduction. So I feel very grateful. You should listen to my interview with him. He's awesome. And today's guest also co-wrote a book with another Daily Stoic Podcast guest Admiral Stavridis. They wrote a book called 2034, which is a novel about sort of the future of warfare. The first book I read from today's guest Elliot Ackerman was called Green on Blue, which I it was a really haunting novel. He was a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he really wrote a book from

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  the perspective of a young boy in Afghanistan, like who becomes sort of radicalized and drawn into the the sort of tribal warfare there. I just, as I talked about in the interview, it's sort of a remarkable exercise in empathy, you know, seeing the conflict that he was in from from a perspective so different than his own. It makes a beautiful novel, a haunting novel that I very much enjoyed. It's called Green on Blue. I'm reading from the cover, which I just pulled my book off the shelf. To save his brother, Aziz must join the special lashkar, a US-funded militia. As he rises through the ranks, Aziz becomes

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  mired in the dark underpinnings of his country's war, witnessing clashes between rival Afghan groups, what US soldiers call green on green attacks, and attacks on US forces by Afghan soldiers, violence known as green on blue. Trapped in a conflict both savage and contrived, Aziz struggles to understand his place. Will he embrace the brutality of war or leave it behind and risk placing his brother and the young woman he has come to love in jeopardy? It's just It's a great book. This is a great interview. Elliot Ackerman is not just the author of 2034, and this book also Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark and Dark at the Crossings, as well as the memoir Places and Names on War, Revolution, and Returning.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. His writing appears in Esquire, and The New Yorker, and The New York Times, where he is a contributing opinion writer. And he is both a former White House Fellow and a Marine. He served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C. You can go to his website at ElliotAckerman.com. You can follow him on Twitter, @ElliotAckerman. And enjoy this interview. It was an eye-opening one, and we really nerded out.

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm looking forward to having him back on, which should happen here shortly.

• 5:25Ryan Holiday?

  So when did you... Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? Or walk me through the tension, or I guess complimentary nature of soldier/writer as part of your journey?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Sure. I'm probably hardly the first to combine those two. But you know what? I always grew up, you know, I liked books, reading. My mother was a writer, so I grew up around knowing other writers. So it seemed like something that was possible. When I was in the military, I sort of suspected, I was having experiences that I expected, you know, maybe at some point I might wind up writing about these, but I didn't really know how to do it or operationalize that.

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  And I think, actually, psychologically, I wasn't in the place where I could do it either. Like, I actually tried once or twice to write while I was in the military, and I maybe got like two sentences out, and I was like, this just feels weird. But once I left, I think that created the psychic break I needed to start writing seriously.

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  I'm jealous that your mother was a writer. I've talked about this before. I think I, I, when I grew up, my father was a police officer, my mom was a school principal, and I don't think I knew anyone, I certainly didn't know any writers. I don't think I knew anyone who didn't have like a job. Like, I don't even think I knew anyone that like had their, their, any of my friends' parents like didn't work for somebody. Like, I don't think I knew anyone that like was an entrepreneur. I didn't know anyone who was a comedian, anyone who was a movie producer. Just like, they were all regular people. So that would have, must have been interesting to see your, your mother write, and you're like, oh, this is a thing that people do, and you don't have to be like some special genius to do it.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Right. And all, you know, she, she started as a journalist, and then, uh, so kind of went through, went, went that route. Um, but, uh, you know, but that, you know, all that being said, when I, when I started writing, uh, my, you know, what was my, my first book, which was actually never published.

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  This one?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Not that one. That's actually my, it's my, that's my first published book. Um, but, um, I felt very silly to like say, I want to write, you know, I had nothing to show for it. It felt like saying, you know, I want to dance, you know, like, you know, I'm not going to say this to anybody until I feel like I've got something to show for it. So I kind of was writing for, I don't know, a couple of years almost, just sort of quietly. I didn't tell anybody I was doing it, um, until I felt like I was kind of had enough, you know, just success or validation where I could kind of say, you know, tell people what I was doing without feeling like I was setting myself up for some type of massive disappointment or, you know, sense of embarrassment.

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think ego can be adaptive there, right? Because like, you, you sort of have the confidence to say, oh yeah, I'm a writer, even though you have no, uh, right to say that. I, I was more in your camp. Like, I, I wrote my first book. I didn't tell a single person I was writing it. I remember I moved to New Orleans to write my first book because I thought like that was a writer, really city to live in. Um, and I remember when the announcement came out, um, a bunch of my friends were like, oh, like the people that I'd met in New Orleans were like, oh, we didn't know you were writing a book. And it occurred to me that They thought I was just a bum, basically. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I was like, what did you think I was doing all day? Like, I assumed they knew. And, but, but I do feel like you need that period to figure it out.

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  Because if you think you just get it by declaring it yourself, you're probably not actually going to put in the work to be any good at it.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Certainly. It's, as you, as you aptly noted, it's a fine line between being a writer and being a bum.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  But, but you listen, I think writing, you know, writing unlike other art forms, one of the things that I think recommends it is that you can fail private, pretty privately as a writer. Like, for instance, I've watched many for actors. You know, if you're an actor, think, you know, first of all, you know, you're just trying to get roles. And for many actors, there's sort of that horrible, not horrible, you know, there's a lot of time they got to, they got to spend. You know, I was, I was classically trained at Yale, you know, in Shakespeare, but I'm, you know, I don't know, on like the dumbest show on television because I got to take this role because I got to make it happen. And everyone sees me, you know, in whatever, you know, low budget movie. I'm acting and it's not a very good role.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  So, you know, so one of the things that's nice about writing is, listen, I mean, you, I think you do, you do have a great deal of agency, for better or worse, in terms of the work that you are at least trying to do.

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  No, you, it's, it's a great creative field in that sense. When I interviewed Matthew McConaughey, we were talking about this. Like, even someone like him, he doesn't have any control of what the other people do. He doesn't have final cut on the movie. He doesn't control the marketing budget, right? He doesn't control the direction of the public relations campaign. So, like, you can do amazing work and they can still make it terrible. And you have no control over it. The one, the other nice thing about writing, not only have agency, but you have a lot of creative control over it. So, it's like, you can make it good and other people have relatively little power to ruin it for you. You have a certain amount of, of power that way.

• 10:51Ryan Holiday?

  You can, you can will it into existence to be whatever you want it to be. The downside is then it's all on you, whether it's good or not. But, but you, you also have the power to just shape your own destiny in that sense.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  For me, transitioning out of the military, that was, that was sort of... An interesting component of it. And in many ways, my writing life and my military life couldn't be more diametrically opposed to one another in so much as obviously when you're serving in the like you have something you you know I have no agency but you do have very little agency you know like what unit you get assigned to I mean you know you can say this is what I want but it's you know you always have forty nine percent of the vote as to where you're going to be sent and what you're going to do and who you're going to work for you know you don't get to pick your boss you don't get to interview at a company like oh I like this guy I'm gonna go there. You know I actually remember when I when I transitioned out of the military and I was

• 11:46Speaker 01

  worked over at CIA for a couple of years doing very similar work but I was now you know Mr. Ackerman not Captain Ackerman and I remember the first time I was going in there to sort of get my deployment orders and being told where I was gonna go and they said all right well we've got you you know you're gonna be deployed for these two and a half months here and then you'll come back and you'll be gone for these months here and at the end of that they sort of said does that work for you? I was like what do you mean does it work for me? And they're like well does it work for you just like going on I was like I it took me a long time to get my head around the fact that I could say no uh this doesn't work for me and I'm a civilian and I don't have to I don't have to I'm not legally obligated to do what you tell me to do I mean I should go along and and be a team player but it took me a long time to get my head around that you know and then additionally well one of the things that just obviously is so different about writing is you know it's

• 12:30Speaker 01

  a credibly lonely endeavor not necessarily but you know you you know I'm sitting here it's I'm on the east coast it's uh two twelve in the afternoon today I have seen my kids as I shuttle them off to school and I've seen my dog.

• 12:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  And that's about it and those are probably and that's I think those are the only people I'm gonna see today and that's not that's how many many many of my days are and I'm and I'm fine with that but.

• 12:53Ryan Holiday?

  It's a lone wolf profession.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Sure and in the military I mean I was you know with forty of my best friends twenty four seven you know around the you know we were always together and that was great too so I just think it's you know you're engaging with different facets of your personality at different times in your life.

• 13:08Ryan Holiday?

  I remember I gave a talk at Fort Bragg several years ago to go to your point about agency and you know it was some it was it was for veterans transitioning out of the military or something and and there were these you know officers or whatever that were you know part of the event and and you know they said something like thank you to all the volunteers you know who came out and I was talking to one of them and I said oh you know what made you agree to do this or whatever and he said I'm not a volunteer he said I was voluntold to be here and I was like that is that is the perfect expression for most of what life is where you have agency but actually you you don't have any agency.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah sure absolutely.

• 13:52Ryan Holiday?

  What what made you enlist in the first place did you also have service members in your family and you saw both sort of avenues or was that was that actually the more rebellious untraditional career path?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Um so no I don't I don't come from a I don't come from a what I would consider a military family I mean you know my my grandfather served in the Navy for a couple years in World War II my you know my dad would joke with me you know he was in the New Jersey National Guard it's a typist clerk during the Vietnam War and he made it to corporal and he got busted down to private for sneaking out one night to go to a movie I mean you know he sort of laughs about his his inhospitable military career so but I I grew up overseas so I grew up I when I was I was born in Los Angeles I moved to London when I was nine and I came back to the States when I was 15 so I just think having even though it was the UK having that experience of sort of being outside the US gave me you know kind of a perspective of many of the things that were great about the US and the

• 14:49Speaker 01

  desire to want to give back I wanted I think a job coming out of college where whether I was good at my job or bad at my job really matter so I want a lot of responsibility at a young age and I couldn't think of anywhere else where you know 23 they you know as an officer that would put you you know as a marine infantry officer they put you in charge of 45 people. And then the last thing I was like, I was like that kid who never stopped playing with the G I Joes. Like I always sort of had this innate fascination with the military. It's like you combine those three elements, you know, it led me into the Marines. But I, you know, I did, I did ROTC in college and I started that program in, I guess, nineteen ninety-eight. And then nine eleven happened while I was at school.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  So sort of the peacetime military I was sort of going into and my expectations for what I would do. And I was like, oh, I'll do five years in the Marines and who knows, maybe I'll like go on one deployment and, you know, maybe we'll evacuate an embassy somewhere. That would be exciting, you know, skewed radically and, and, you know, I got, you know, I got all that I bargained for, you know, and then some. I had a very positive experience in Marine Corps. That's sort of what drew me into it.

• 15:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's interesting. You, you did get, you did get more than, more than you bargained for. When did you, how old were you when you enlisted and what year was that, would that event?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  So I, I started ROTC when I was eighteen, so it was nineteen ninety-eight. So, you know, the big thing going on in the world then was like Kosovo.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And the Marine Corps, you know, there was very little combat experience in the Marine Corps.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  And nine eleven happened sort of when I was at the end of my college experience. But even then, it's, you know, the trajectory of a war is really interesting. Every war I've, the, the two wars I've fought in, each one that I showed up to, I showed up and I felt like I was late to the party. So like I showed up in Iraq in two thousand and four and I showed up in Afghanistan in two thousand and eight. And I was in and out of Afghanistan from two thousand eight to two thousand eleven, both. So both showing up in those wars and Iraq in two thousand and four, the vibe early on was very much like, well, the war was the invasion in oh-three. And we're kind of all here doing peacekeeping duty and, and that changed very quickly. And now amongst like Iraq war veterans, you know, I'll bump into Iraq war veterans. And saying to them like, oh man, when were you in Iraq?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, you know, I was in, I was in Fallujah back in oh-four. I mean, that's like the equivalent of Vietnam guys like, yeah, I was in, you know, I was in Nam in sixty-five. Like they're like, those were the early days. And then the same thing with Afghanistan, you know, now you talk to guys, oh, well, you were in Afghanistan or you were a Marine. Were you in there two thousand and ten, two thousand and eleven, twelve? Like, no, they're back there. I was back in oh-eight. And it's so crazy that you could be considered at the beginning of a war. So when I showed up in Afghanistan, the war had been going on for seven years. I mean, like, of course, we were at the end of it.

• 17:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, little did you know, they would be quickly and tidily wrapped up after you showed up.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, not so much.

• 17:46Ryan Holiday?

  So was it, what I found so fascinating about Green on Blue, and I mean, I've read a lot of books by soldiers. I've written a lot of, read a lot of books about war. I don't know if I've ever read one where the soldier was effectively writing from the perspective of the, of the enemy, right? In quotes, because I know it's somewhat loosely defined, but was that the point of view you got from your mom's journalism background? Was it like, like, how did you, not how did you come to write the book? I'm just, I'm making up that, that that's a perspective that I can't imagine clearly because of how the wars turned out.

• 18:29Ryan Holiday?

  That's not a perspective, an empathetic perspective that was, was particularly common.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  You know, like, Green on Blue is the story of an American who is killed by an Afghan. But the entire story is told from the perspective of the Afghans. And I think that came, I mean, the desire to tell that story came from a place of just recognition that, you know, the wars for those who fought in them were defining events. Unlike previous wars, you know, I think we're about the same age. They were not generationally defining events. So when I look at the people that I feel like I have the most in common with, you know, in my generation, I mean, obviously it's, you know,

• 19:20Speaker 01

  veterans who are Americans, you know, we have tons in common, but it's also like Afghan veterans who fought alongside us. But then you take it one step further, and you know, I also work as a journalist, so my own journalism, it's Afghans who fought on the opposite side. It's members of Al Qaeda in Iraq who are now my age. I mean, I, now I went up writing a, a long piece of journalism. It's in a, it features in a book I wrote called Places and Names. It's basically a series of conversations with a guy named Abu Hossar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor to ISIS. And he and I met in a refugee camp in Turkey and kind of sat around for hours and became friends, basically talking about our war. So we fought on opposite sides of it. So with Green on Blue, I mean, that's sort of what was driving this, like this desire,

• 20:05Speaker 01

  like, I want to explore the other side because I know, coming out of the wars, like the war, it's like being in the war, you know, you're, it's like you're in a shadow dance with your adversary. You know, you go out on patrol, you're on missions, you can feel them pushing against you, just as you push against them. But you never see your partner in this dance. And you get to the end of the dance, and you just, you know, you're thinking about that experience. I mean, it's very logical, you start thinking, well, who is this partner I was dancing with? Like, who is this person? And that book is, you know, my attempt to kind of really imagine and put myself in the shoes of that person.

• 20:37Ryan Holiday?

  Is it inherently that they don't, they don't want the, you know, the rank of soldier that you were thinking about that because it makes it harder to do the job? Or is it, I think when I interviewed General McMaster, he talked about, and I know he's written about this idea of strategic empathy, like actually thinking about the perspective of the person on the other side. Is it, is it that that wasn't common enough? Or is it deliberately, they kind of don't want you to think about the person you're shooting at because it makes it harder to shoot at them?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Well, I don't, like, I don't think there's some they here, right? There's no, like, collective they.

• 21:12Ryan Holiday?

  Culturally.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, culturally, yeah. Um, no, I would say, listen, we're inside the military, like, you know, people sometimes will, I think it sometimes surprises folks that people who come out of the military, like even write books, like you would be, I think you would be surprised, like, military, at least, at least, you know, officers and list senior enlisted, folks who really do this as professionally, it's a pretty intellectual group. And so

• 21:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I gave a, I gave a talk to the Marine Recruiting Command once, and they were like, they were like, what you need to know about us is like, we are trying to steal kids from Harvard and Yale. Like, they're like, that's, that's who our officer corps is, is people who would, they're, they're, we're wanting to go after the best and the brightest with a much less compelling proposition. So it's a, it's a specific type of person, for sure.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, um,

• 22:05Speaker 01

  And that being said, so you know, you're, if you're in the military, you spend a lot of time, obviously, thinking about who your adversary is and like, okay, I'm fighting against this person. I need to be thinking about who they are, how they're going to react to what I do. So you're spending all this time trying to put yourself in your adversary's shoes. I mean, that's not like a new thing. That's, you know, go back to like, you know, Alexander the Great, you know, he's sitting there trying to put himself in, you know, the, you know, the Persian Emperor Darius's shoes.

• 22:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  So if you spend your professional life doing it and then you get to the end, uh, it's not that much of a jump to be doing what I do, which is sitting there trying to imagine the thoughts of others and how they react in certain situations.

• 22:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I just felt like in the book, it was, it was more than just like, well, what's my enemy thinking? It, it's a very humanizing portrait.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 22:49Ryan Holiday?

  And you, you go, oh, this isn't like some evil awful person. You're like, oh, this is a, and this isn't just, oh, somebody responding to incentives. I mean, he's effectively the hero of the book, right? In the way that, that someone could have written the exact same book, but you would have been the hero, right? It's, it's a-

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Well, he's a tragic, he's a tragic hero, I think.

• 23:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yes.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Cause it doesn't, it doesn't work out well for him. But listen, that's, you know, that's something I think, you know, I, I can tell you, you know, many, many a time, you know, in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, after being out all night on a raid and the sun's coming up and we're leaving the target and, you know, and these things are tricky and messy and, you know, we're going back to base. And I was kind of looking at each other and be like, hey, I get it. I get why they hate me. Like, you know, if someone came to our neighborhood and was trying to roll up all the bad guys in our neighborhoods, like, you know, we all know every American that, you know, that, that we're in touch with will be putting IEDs on the road and shooting at us with their AR-15s. I mean, it's not like you can't get it. It's very obvious. Um, and so there's sort of, I think, you know, you want to explore that complexity a little bit, if you want to understand the experience.

• 23:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's a, that is the weirdness of those two wars where it's sort of like, even culturally, I think we're, I mean, obviously we're not all on the same page, but we're sort of like, yeah, we, we get it, but it doesn't actually change the policy, right? It's like, we get it and then we just kept doing it anyway.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I mean, you know, we get it. And then there's also like, listen, I think there's, um-

• 24:19Speaker 01

  I'll just be for myself, you know, I think there's also just a bit of fatalism that goes into being a soldier. I mean, at a certain point, you're going to say, listen, I think this is worth doing. You know, I have a whole host of reasons like why I wanted to be, you know, wanted to be in the wars and most of them were local. You know, I sort of felt on a very personal level like, hey, these wars are going to be happening, whether I want them to happen or not, because there are forces that are far larger than me pushing us to Iraq and Afghanistan. So that being said, I'm in my early twenties. I am like a young man of a certain age and there's a, my generation has a war. So the thing I can control is, am I going to fight in it or not? You know, when I'm an old man and I look back, am I going to want to, well,

• 25:04Speaker 01

  I feel like I should have been there and should have, you know, participated. And everyone can make their own decision about that. My decision was like, yeah, if there're going to be 45 young Marines out there and they need a platoon leader and I've, you know, come from this, had all this opportunity through my family, I've gone to go to great schools, like, you know, I want to spend my early twenties, I feel like it's the right to like be a platoon leader. I don't want to go to Goldman or I don't want to be a lawyer or like this is the thing I want to do. This is what gives me meaning. And I very much got that. But that's not like a policy decision. That's not like me saying like, you know, and ergo, 20 years of war in Afghanistan was a great idea.

• 25:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Do you still, do you still feel that, is that personal feeling hold up for you? Or do you go, if I could do it again, I might have done my twenties differently?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  No, totally. It absolutely holds up. Because it's not, because it's not an abstraction. When I was going in, it was a little bit of an abstraction. Now that personal feeling are like my, my dearest best friends who were corporals, you know, they were corporals in the platoon that I was a lieutenant in, or they were, you know, the staff sergeants and gunnery sergeants in the special operations team where I was the captain and the team leader. And we talk every day, you know, we talk all the time, we swap text messages, like these are my, I mean, not to be hokey about it, these are my brothers. So, so the idea of being like, do I want to push a button and be like, oh, I never would have met you guys and we never would have gone through what we went through together, like, and there would have been, you know, Schmeliot Schmackerman would have been your team leader. Like, no, I'm glad I was there.

• 26:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Let me ask you this. I was reading something recently and you might be the perfect person to ask about this. So obviously I write about Stoicism and so sort of one of the heroes of Stoicism is Admiral Stockdale. And I read this article, they were, they were sort of pushing back on the idea of Stockdale as the Stoic hero. Because, not because of how he performed in the prison camp, that's sort of unassailable, but lesser known about Stockdale is Stockdale was in the Gulf of Tonkin during the incident, right? And he would reflect on it like he was like, no, no, no, we were shooting at nothing. He's like, I knew it was made up. He's like there on the ship at night, basically watching

• 27:15Ryan Holiday?

  the pretext for a war get created from whole cloth that, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of people would ultimately die from. And so they were sort of pushing back on this idea of, of what you kind of expressed there, that you're like, look, the war is going to happen regardless. My job as a soldier is to be there for the people next to me. When you think about an incident like that, or a moment like that, where effectively this guy watches this thing happen and then still serves in the war, you know, doesn't say anything about it, you know, still sacrifices so much, gives so much of himself in, you

• 27:59Ryan Holiday?

  know, what in retrospect was a less than justified thing. How do you, how do you think about one's role or obligation in that sense? Was that a betrayal of his ideas or ideals? Or was it falling short? Or is it the, is that just part of being a soldier that you're like, all that stuff's above my pay grade. I just go where they tell me?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  I think it depends. I mean, for me, I like kind of, I often will think of, you know, the serenity prayer, right? You know, God, you know, God give me the, you know, and I'm going to butcher it here, but you know,

• 28:31Ryan Holiday?

  I do it all the time.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. The wisdom, the wisdom to, you know, accept the things that I can't change, you know, the patience to, you know, or the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference between the two. And so it's sort of like, you know,

• 28:48Speaker 01

  The the delta here like in explaining that is like, okay, but who was Admiral Stockdale in the Gulf of Tonkin?

• 28:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  You know, was he an admiral?

• 28:57Ryan Holiday?

  Commander Stockdale.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Right, or whatever, like, what's his job? What could he change? Like, there's something like, no, if Stockdale had done X, Y, and Z, the Gulf of Tonkin never would have happened, or we wouldn't have gone to Vietnam. It's like, well, yeah, I think you should, one might be more critical then. But sometimes we have, you know, we, we kind of, you know, yada, yada, yada that bit over and just assume he's someone who had he like been like, not on my watch, the whole war wouldn't have happened.

• 29:19Ryan Holiday?

  He should have called Johnson and...

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Right, and called it like, like he had him on the red line. I don't think he, I don't think Commander Stockdale had the president on the red line. So he's sort of doing the best he can in the moment. And, and also, I mean, does he know this is what Vietnam's gonna become? Like, we're, we're imperfect, you know, we're seeing the world narrowly. I mean, so, um, so do I think that, like, when I look at myself, you know, as a 23, 24-year-old college graduate, do I make more of a difference, you know, participating in the war, uh, or, I don't know, protesting it? I mean, I, you know, like, you know, sure, I, I've, you know, people's conscience tells them they should protest the war, great, protest the war, like, good on you.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  My conscience told me, like, there is something I know I can affect here, and I can be a good leader for these folks, and I can, you know, and I can make my contribution that way. Um, and I don't think there, and I also don't think there's like a moral equivalence between, and this is the thing that's been crazy, watching through the end of Afghanistan, been frankly, very dispiriting to me. You know, people are saying that we never should have been in there in the first place. What was that war, you know, with those Arabs about? You know, like, all right, first of all, like, they're not Arabs in Afghanistan. Like, second of all, it's like, I guess, you know, I guess I'm just old. Like, we went there because of 9/11. Like, everyone forget, like, like, we went because of 9/11. Um, and...

• 30:41Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, after 9/11, there was no way we weren't going into Afghanistan. Like, it was a righteous war. Now, I can track, you know, in 2 and in 3 and how we take our eye off the ball, and then how the Taliban resurges, and it's probably more than you want to go into on this podcast. But like, that story is a much longer story. But there's been this sort of like, conflation and folding of time. It's just like, it's like, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, all one word. They, you know, we don't care, it was all the same thing, throw in the trash can. And I feel like that does a big disservice. So, um, everyone has to, you know, everyone has to make their peace with, uh, with the decisions they make over the course of life.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  And I think that, um, you know, inaction is also a decision. I mean, there's a whole swath of my generation that never dealt or thought about these wars. You know, and that in and of itself is a choice.

• 31:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, and it's very easy to be glib about profoundly personal and moral decisions that individuals have to make at the point they were in their life with things that were going on, with the information that they had, inherently, as you said, uh, blindness to the inevitable outcome of that, that thing. You don't, you don't know what it's going to become, and you also, as you said, don't control what it's going to become. You just control what you do for the, the small group of people that, you know, you're, you're associated with.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, or if you're someone who assumes a larger position of power, then you're, you know, then you're on the hook if you can change things and can influence things if you decide not to, or you make the wrong call. Just 23 and 24-year-old me, that, that wasn't, that wasn't where I was. And so, uh, I've always felt like very good about that decision. I'm very proud of, I'm very, I'm actually very, I'm very proud of, uh... My service in Iraq and in Afghanistan, I mean, not like, no, I don't say like I'm proud of myself, I just mean like, I think of that time and I think of who I was with and I'm very proud to say I was with those people and I'm proud of, you know, I'm proud of the work that we did together.

• 32:51Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I certainly don't mean to imply that you should not be proud of it, I just wondered.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  I know you're not, I know you're not, I'm just saying, I'm just affirming that.

• 32:59Ryan Holiday?

  Because, because I could also imagine a scenario in which one is proud of how they individually comported themselves, like, there was that, that officer, officer on January 6th, who someone, you know, said like, hey, what do you think about the people, the protesters who were, who were helping you after you got hurt? And he said, well, it was nice, but fuck you for being there, you know, like, I could see an argument where you're, you're proud of your individual service, but still feel upset or resentful, or whatever the word is, for the fact that you were ultimately in the position that you were in. I could, I could see that being a, a, a point of view as well.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, although I think there's like, you know, I'm not saying you're doing this, but I would be like, very hesitant to equate our, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with like, a debacle on the order of January 6th.

• 33:56Ryan Holiday?

  Sorry, yes, I meant the logic.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  I know, I know.

• 34:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the logic of that, yes, but I think that, that people, what I've experienced, people like, quickly are very, I, I have found in this weird sort of now post, you know, forever war moment, there's sort of been this quick desire to categorize, okay, this is what the wars were, we need to put them in a box and put a bow on them, and we just sort of go back off, you know, lazily to, well, it was either a good war or a bad war, and we've only had one or two good wars, and the rest of them are all just, you know, mashups of, you know, Vietnam or some other atrocity, and we're just gonna throw it in the corner and say how horrible it was and forget about it. And I don't, and I don't think that is a fair accounting of what happened in Afghanistan, you know, or Iraq, which is, you know, a war that was fought on, you know, pretty bad pretenses.

• 34:45Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, you look at, you look at Iraq, you, your point about inaction being a choice, also, you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, let's say you somehow turn, turn back the clock and America decides not to be involved in either country.

• 35:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's not like the last 20 years wouldn't have also been tragic and devastating and costly in lives and pain for all sorts of different people. Do you know what I mean? It's not like those were, we went into, we broke something that was working.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Right, and I think that's, you know, and I think that is a fair point. And it's, I think, a little bit foolish to, you know, the case of Iraq to, and I've seen this sort of logic that like in a, in a desire, in a desire to putiate the US war in Iraq, there is this proclivity to paint Saddam Hussein as, as some type of benevolent leader who was leading his people, you know, in a healthy way, which is like, I'm sorry, that's not the case. Like, there was suffering that was occurring in Iraq and would have continued to occur in Iraq had the US not come out, had not invaded. Now, I myself wasn't, I didn't, you know, I mean, again, I was all 23, so it didn't really matter what I thought, but

• 36:04Speaker 01

  like, I was not a fan of the Iraq invasion at 23. And I remember having a conversation with a Marine captain at the time, who was a mentor of mine, and we were, we were both missing the Iraq invasion, like, wow, you know, we're gonna, we're missing this, you know, we're Marines, like, we want to be where the action is. And we both looked at each other, and this was like in early April of 03, as the Marines were blitzkrieging towards Baghdad, and this was a shrug, and I said, I mean, there's at least a 50/50 chance that there's gonna be an insurgency. Yeah, and we were right. And I've always had to direct, like, the criminal thing there is that the only plan was, but we'll be greeted as liberators. Okay, well, what if we're not? And there was no backup plan for that.

• 36:37Ryan Holiday?

  Which goes back to the, the thing about strategic empathy, like, really actually understanding how one's actions or presence is going to be perceived, not just by people, but, but by different forces and, and, you know, what's the opposite reaction going to be that the act, to the action you take that requires a certain amount of self-awareness that those years of American foreign policy seemed to lack on a fundamental level?

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Right. And I think this, you know, it's interesting to me to see how...

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Empathetic impulse that is cultivated with many people I knew who served starts to manifest now that they've taken off the uniform, or frankly, even amongst many of my colleagues who still wear the uniform but are sort of older now. I like to give you sort of a parallel example. So before I joined, when I, sometimes people will say to me, you know, Elliot, it's like, it's, you know, it's so odd that you, you know, were a Marine and then you became a writer, you know, because, you know, you're sort of in an artistic profession now and most Marines don't do that. The people who've known me the longest knew me back when I was a skater punk in like my early teens.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  That totally defined who I was until I was around 16 or 17 years old. And, and the ones who've known me the longest always said, Elliot, it's so odd to us that you became a Marine seeing as you were like this artistic skater punk kid. And to go back to that idea of sort of how does this empathy kind of bubble over, it's been interesting to me to see my friends who when I was like a skater growing up in London now, who are all grown up, have like, to a T, are all in these artistic professions. Like, one of them's a very accomplished painter, there's a couple photographers who've come out of the mix, one is a filmmaker, like to a T. It's like, nobody wanted, no one became a lawyer. And, and it's caused me to look back on that experience of like when we were skaters, from like, oh, like, we all thought we were a bunch of skaters, but like, we all gravitated to that sport

• 38:35Speaker 01

  because we sort of had these like generally creative artistic dispositions. So that's how it's manifested on our lives here. And I would say with military folks, it similarly kind of manifested, I see with many of my military colleagues, in this sort of just deep intellectual curiosity into like others, like who is the other? But that's an other I fought against, or just like a person who is on, across a cultural divide that seems unreachable broadly? And it's manifest in lots of ways, but it's definitely a through line, that curiosity.

• 39:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, Jerry Seinfeld has a good bit about skateboarders. It's like, you know, about how he's like, you see these kids trying to figure this thing out over and over again, willing to fall, willing to get hurt, willing to sort of crack this puzzle. He's like, those kids are gonna be all right, you know? And it's like, I think you think of the the reputation of skater, because I didn't skate, but I was really into snowboarding. It seems like kind of a stonerish like thing, and it's actually a, it's like a puzzle that you're trying to to crack. And it's not that different than trying to figure out your way into a book, or an article, or an argument that you're making. It's, it's a physical, the the manifestation is physical, but it's, it's an intellectual pursuit, first and foremost.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  And a big thing I took away from that experience, too, is you actually learn like great leadership skills, because not that you're, you know, but, you know, you snowboard for the same thing, like, like, skaters like run in, you know, crews, and I think a crew is just like another word for like, a very aggressive clique. And so like, you had to figure out, like, where you were in the crew, and how you kind of maintained yourself in that crew, and the interpersonal dynamics. I think one of the things people miss about the military is they feel like, oh, well, it must be easy to lead the military, because it's a hierarchy, and just tell people what to do, and they have to do it. It's like, nah, like, that is not how it works. I mean, you know, watch a movie like Platoon, which does a great job of showing the unspoken hierarchies. Barnes

• 40:31Speaker 01

  and Elias, and neither's in charge of the platoon, and the lieutenant is, but he's weak. And, you know, that stuff's always going on, like, who's really in charge in a unit? And, you know, who are the big personalities? And that's stuff that I had to deal with in every unit I ever went to. You know, you show up, and you're the new lieutenant, and how are you gonna earn everyone's respect? So you carry the authority you need. And, you know, I first sort of learned how to do that as a skater.

• 40:56Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think people think they're jealous of the idea that you get to give orders. I think, like, an order is, is feels so, like you said about the civilian world, you know, like, they're asking if you want to do it. I think in the civilian world, we make up that people in the military get to order people to do things. And that seems much clearer than how we get to do things, even though in my experience, I found that that's not actually how it was, I'm sure.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I mean, my experience was it was the people who are the most effective

• 41:30Speaker 01

  often, you know, led would give their orders in very gentle ways.

• 41:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  And they were the most effective because they were like deeply respected. So, you know, when the Colonel, who everyone loved, or the Captain, who everyone, you know, knew was a badass, would just sort of, you know, make their suggestion and say, I think maybe we should do it this way. You know, everyone would would execute. And the people who are running around screaming, you know, I order you to do this, and I order you to do that, usually weren't getting much done because nobody respected them.

• 41:57Ryan Holiday?

  To just because I'm a big fan of your work to circle back. I wasn't trying to say, fuck you for being there. I was saying, I could see your point of view being, fuck you for putting me there. Do you know what I mean?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I'm not saying it that way. I'm just, I'm, yes, for sure.

• 42:11Ryan Holiday?

  Um, yeah, the idea, the stereotype of of of military people not being writers is an interesting one in my experience because I feel like I've met like, I feel like all the ex military people I've I've met are writers or want to write, want to write books. It feels and and very good ones or start companies. It seems like this generation of military leaders learned a set of skills and also just generally have a kind of togetherness that actually functions quite well in whatever this economy and life we're in now, where

• 42:53Ryan Holiday?

  you're like, you sort of have to figure out your own stuff. It's not like you go into a company and you just work at GE for 30 years. Like now, it's sort of like, no, you're your own, you're your own little team over here, and you got to figure out what, where, where and what you can contribute. It seems like a lot of those attributes have actually carried over particularly well into civilian life.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the two observations I would make is that I think that people underestimate how entrepreneurial being in the military can be, you know, like when I worked in special operations, you know, I was part of a team. There were 14 of us. We were leading 800 Afghan commandos. We were about 70 miles away from our nearest adjacent US unit. And, you know, we had a budget that was in the millions. I mean, we literally kept, we had a locker full of cash to do what we needed to do. And, you know, we were all like, the oldest guy was in his early 30s. I was in my like, I think I was 28 back then. So. So people, I don't think people always understand that, that there is often a very significant entrepreneurial side of being in military. I think one other observation

• 43:59Speaker 01

  I've just made is, then you also have people who come out of the experience, particularly coming out of the wars, and you've been, you know, you've spent a good chunk of your life proximate to like a lot of, you know, just destruction, wars, destruction and loss and death and all those things. And I think it's actually very natural that then people kind of come out of that with like this really strong craving, after being proximate to some destruction, of wanting to then create. Create, create, create, I want to create. And I felt that myself. And, you know, and I know, I know others who, you know, who've said they've felt similarly, who've gone into creative fields, either in, you know, business or the arts or whatever.

• 44:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and, and I've got to imagine dealing with uncertainty and instability are two skills that you are forced to acquire very quickly.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Yes, and I would say, you know, it gives you a good perspective, you know, you learn not to sweat the small stuff.

• 44:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. Or, and to go to the serenity prayer, to just focus on what you control inside of a chaotic or dysfunctional or overwhelming situation, whether it's a pandemic or a, you know, a company that's spiraling towards the drain, you learn where to get to work.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Actually, yeah, and I would actually, you know, I, I've been listening on Audible to this biography of Napoleon by Andrew Roberts.

• 45:29Ryan Holiday?

  I've had Andrew Roberts on.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Oh, you have him on? Okay.

• 45:31Ryan Holiday?

  It's an incredible book.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, okay, that's great. One of the things Roberts writes about is he writes about kind of Napoleon's mind and how people would say, one of the things Napoleon was incredible, when you would watch him at doing, was compartmentalizing himself.

• 45:43Ryan Holiday?

  The drawers.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  I think, the drawers, yeah, yeah, exactly, the drawers. And, and so... Our society, like we, we compartmentalization is, has like real negative connotations that, you know, you're, you know, like you're going to compartmentalize and somebody you're just going to lose it and like your desk is going to fall apart, you're just going to have a big lump of papers. But I think there's something to, there's something to be said for compartmentalization. You know, as long as you're, you're opening all the drawers, you know, as often as you need to, um, you know, the ability to be like, okay, uh, that just happened. That's very upsetting, but you've got to deal with this right now. And I have the ability to refocus, deal with this and I'll get back to that. And, um, and so it was interesting to kind of, when I was just reading that, that really resonated with that thing about

• 46:27Speaker 01

  the drawers. I feel like that's something, um, that I, you know, I, I, I learned in the military, uh, as well as that, you know, just the ability to, you know, take things as they come.

• 46:37Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think generationally, that's a problem where I feel like a lot of people I know are very all or nothing about things. So if like they don't like this, they're like, I can't focus on this until this is made to go away. Or, you know, like, I think politically, we're, we're very, you know, we want people to be all good or all bad or things are totally broken. And, and actually life is really complicated and people are complicated and, and you have to work with different people on different things. And you have to accept something for now, knowing like, okay, I don't like this. It's not okay, but I got to deal with X, Y, and Z first, and then I'm going to come back to this later. Um, yeah, compartmentalization is psychologically probably not super healthy, but as far as like dealing with life, very essential.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  I remember when I was, um, when I was in college, I read, uh, this memoir, maybe you're familiar with it. It's called, uh, it's by Ernst Junger, who was a German writer in the first world. He was in the first world war and then he's a very well-known German writer. After it's called the Storm of Steel and it's memoir of the first world war. And like unlike Eric Marie Remarque or, you know, some of these other writers, like who, he wrote All's Quiet on the Western Front, like.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Ernst Younger fought in the trenches from 1914 until 1918 as a stormtroop commander with the Germans. It's like it's a miracle this guy survived. He was wounded like 14 times. And he has this part in his book, it's a very mundane thing, but he says, you know, after we would go and do raids in the trenches, we would come back to our trenches and I would have everybody, I would have, I would always order all of my men to eat. Everyone needs to eat. And, um, and he said he would do that because by the physical act of eating, it would like prove to them they were alive still. Cause some of them couldn't believe, like after everything that they just seen, they're like, you know, it was so disoriented, psychically disoriented, they needed to like reconnect with their body. And I sort of put that into thing. It's like the compartmentalization. It's like, okay, this just happened.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Now you need to go do this to continue moving forward. Cause at the end of the day, we all, you know, yes, we've got to take care of ourselves. Well, we also have to move forward. Like, you know, I remember, um, when I was in Iraq, I fought on Fallujah. I remember I'd been, my guys do the same thing. It's like, we're going to eat now. Everybody needs to eat. Uh, and we would just sort of watch each other eat. Um, and I remember moments in a kind of a mantra in our platoon, for better or worse, where people would start talking, maybe what had happened that day, man, he did this and he went that and blah, blah. And people would be getting into it trying, cause they're trying to like make sense of psychically of everything that they'd just seen. And we kind of had this discipline. We'd be like, listen, you're going to have the, we're going to have the rest of our lives

• 49:13Speaker 01

  to like sit around in bars and tell these stories and understand them. But like, this is not the time. Like, we need to focus on the next thing right now and just put that in. So that's got to go in the drawer and we can, and you know, and we have since, like we've gone to that drawer many times, but now we gotta go forward.

• 49:28Ryan Holiday?

  Speaking of strategic empathy, I actually just read, uh, do I have it here? Um, maybe I went through it already. Um, I just read Andrew Roberts', uh, biography of King George, uh, which is fascinating to think about, like I, I obviously being an American, I, I've read many, many books on the American revolution. I never read like the British take on it. And to see it, you're like, oh, this guy was like, Kind of doing the best he could. And like also, Thomas Jefferson was like a fucking liar. Like, like, he goes through the Declaration of Independence, which, you know, I've read. And then he's like, you know, there's like 28, like, causes of of complaint in the in the in

• 50:10Ryan Holiday?

  the Declaration of Independence. He's like, all of them are a lie. Like, he's like, literally everyone, except for like, these two have no basis in reality whatsoever. And you're just like, oh, yeah, like, this makes a lot of sense. And it was, it was just to, after all this time to experience a historical event, I thought I knew from a different perspective. It was just like, it was very liberating and refreshing. And I actually really enjoyed it.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm glad to hear you said, actually, I have that book on the show. Great title, The Last King of America.

• 50:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, it's long. It's, it's a lot to sit through for someone who you don't actually care that much about, like, who's not that interesting. But it was, I, that was the, I don't remember a lot of the specifics, but that was the main thing I took about it. I was like, no, this guy was, if this guy was a tyrant, he probably would have won the war. It's that he wasn't. That was the problem.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting, you know, we kind of get, because, you know, we get, you know, we get served up and we think of the American Revolution and many of our wars, we often will epic wars, we, we disconnect them from the ones that come before. Like, I mean, like, I feel like too rarely is the connection or not, the connection between the American Revolution and the French and Indian War is not made often enough.

• 51:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Had there not been the French and Indian War, which, you know, strained the purse strings of the British, then we wouldn't have been screaming about taxes because the British were trying to tax us. And we're like, you know, that kind of precipitates the American Revolution. It's like the same thing. Look at the American Civil War. The American Civil War, you know, we talk about it's about slavery. And yeah, yes. But like, we don't talk about how the Mexican American War, which was fought right before, the territorial acquisitions from that war is what precipitated the crisis that led to the American Civil War, and how all the personalities are the same. I have always found this fascinating as, you know, just thinking from the veteran perspective, like, you look at George Washington. At the end of the French and Indian War, George Washington is like a relatively kind of failed military officer. He surrendered once to the French. You know, he's not in

• 52:14Speaker 01

  the best position. And he becomes like this, you know, so I would like almost kind of like a disgruntled veteran. And he like becomes the founding father of America. You look at like the American Civil War, you know, at Appomattox, when Lee surrenders, this is one of like my favorite historical anecdotes. Lee walks into Appomattox courthouse and he's wearing, you know, his like his best uniform, his saber is glimmering and he was, he had fought in Mexican-American wars as lieutenant colonel and was like a rising star in the US Army at the time. Grant walks in to accept Lee's surrender and he's like not wearing boots, he's wearing like, like a pair of beat up shoes.

• 52:49Ryan Holiday?

  Covered in mud.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Covered in mud and you know, and Grant, they're doing it and Grant one moment looks over to Lee and Grant had a far less distinguished military career. I would say he was like a disgruntled veteran, buddy of the Mexican-American war. He looks at Lee, he's like, you know, we met once before in Mexico. And he looks at him and says, oh, I'm so sorry, I don't recall ever having met you. You know, like I just like, that's, that's, you know, it's great, but there's so often like we don't make those emotional connections of how the central characters in these wars, like the most seminal experience from their youth was the war that precipitated the one they were defined to fighting in.

• 53:23Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and then geographically, we don't think about it enough too, right? So one of the, one, I think this is Bruce Catton's book on, maybe it's A Stillness at Appomattox, that I never really thought about before, but he was like, we think of the Civil War as North and South. He's like, but actually Grant is coming in from the West, right? And that this is actually the West conquering America. So it's, it's effectively a new kind of America that's not really North. It's not like Grant is some military officer from Boston, right? Like he's, he, this is the frontier. This is a new version of America coming through from that. And then even reading the, the, the King George book, you're like, oh, this was like, Benjamin Franklin predicts at first, but he's like, America will outnumber Britain

• 54:08Ryan Holiday?

  in population like by this year. He's like, it is a certifiable fact. And so it was either America was going to break off or Britain, America would become the capital of the British Empire. It was one of those two choices. And, and so, yeah, to think about it geographically is also this other layer on it because we, yeah, we so often think about it as personalities or we think about it as who had the most troops. But it's, it's always layers upon layers.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. What you said, I couldn't agree more. It brings to mind a favorite Shelby Foote quote of mine when he talks about Gettysburg and he says, "I'm even gonna do my Shelby Foote impersonation."

• 54:49Ryan Holiday?

  Please.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  At Gettysburg, the North came from the South and the South came from the North. You know, because, yeah, don't forget that the whole reason Gettysburg was fought was because the South decided to invade the North.

• 55:00Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I thought of, I almost did my Shelby Foote impression earlier because as you were talking about the "I get it," there's a line in the Ken Burns documentary where he said, it's probably not true, but, you know, some northern soldier asked the southern soldier, "Why are you fighting here?" And he said, "'Cause you're down here."

• 55:18Speaker 01

  "'Cause you're down here."

• 55:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. That's not how the Civil War actually happened, so it's a historical nonsense, but it makes sense.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Well, I think one of this, it gets sort of innovations, and I think, you know, we look at our own Civil War and people still, you know, hotly debate with great emotion today what the Civil War was about. And with all sorts, bringing all sorts of freight to that question, I just always thought it's so remarkable that like, you know, that there's some belief that eventually we're gonna argue our way to some consensus about what that war was about. The fact that there was no consensus about what the Civil War was about was the reason you had to fight the war.

• 55:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  If everyone agrees what the war's about, you don't fight the war.

• 55:58Ryan Holiday?

  One of the greatest novels I've ever read is called "A Theory of War," and it's not actually about war. It's this weird, fucked up, dark novel that you would love about a white slave in America, like basically a poor white kid that gets sold. Anyways, she has this great line in the book, the author's Joan Brady, I think. She's saying, you know, Groun Clausewitz said that war is the extension of politics by other means. And she said, "But the converse is also true, that politics is the extension of war by other means." And that's shaped my understanding of history going forward, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, like, the South loses the Civil War, yes, but then

• 56:38Ryan Holiday?

  immediately because of the concessions we make, the South immediately becomes a political force in America once again, because they're like immediately accepted back. A lot of the same people hold office. And so effectively, the South just continues to wage some version of the Civil War via normal politics, right? They still replace black people. And so essentially, the war stalemates out for 100 years afterwards until the Civil Rights Movement with the South fighting.

• 57:09Ryan Holiday?

  In with gangs and politics and all this stuff. And I've just come to realize that these wars happen. And then there's still this energy, this dark energy from whatever one of the opposing sides was, and it just moves around. It continues to exist.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  And they win the peace. But I think it's interesting, we want to take it all the way further as we're talking about Iraq. You know, one of the, now looking back at Iraq, the Iraq war. The consensus is one of the greatest strategic mistakes that was made during the Iraq war was the debaffification of Iraq and the disbanding of the Iraqi military. How could we have been so stupid to have done that? It's like, okay, like, I'll tell you how we were so stupid to have done that. We, when we invaded Iraq, had this sort of sense that we'll be read as liberators, kind of as we were in the Second World War. And one of the things that was critical to do in the Second World War was to denazify Germany.

• 58:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  So we, just as we denazified Germany and then rebuilt it, because we had to do that, you know, we're going to denazify Iraq. So you can make the, you know, so you can, and I would agree that it was a total disaster trying to de, the debaffification of Iraq and the disbanding of the military. We're fighting all the same people again. But you can flip that just the other way and be like, okay, well, let's say, you know, let's say, you know, we're sitting in 2003, well, what happens if we don't, you know, debaffify Iraq? Well, you're just going to have like reconstruction, you know, it's going to be this failed reconstruction. It's just going to be like our civil war. It won't work. And then the Ba'athists will win the peace and this will all bend for naught. And it's so, it's so difficult. So it's like for every, for every historical narrative as to why you should do something, like there is also the opposite argument that can be made.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, it's bedeviling to try to find the, you know, the right, the right example on what's going to work.

• 58:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, we do this with everything. We're like, well, why didn't Pete Carroll just give the ball to Marshawn Lynch and have him run it through to a touchdown? Right? And it's like, you know, he thought about that, right? He might've made the wrong decision based on the results, but he did consider, like, it's not like he was unaware that there were a handful of different possibilities for what he could do. He just made the decision based on what he thought would make sense. And if he was right, you, you would have agreed with him.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Right, and so it sort of comes to this like, and to go a little bit full circle, it comes to this like, the serenity prayer. You know, like, it's tough, like, the, you know, I mean, come on, like, no, imagine if you're the person who's making that call, do we or do we not deba-, you know, do we or not, do we or do we not engage in the debauchification of Iraq? Do we or do we not act punitive to the South after the Civil War? You know, or do we act like, you know, do the Lincoln malice towards them? Like, what is the right course of action here? Um, I don't think those are easy questions, because, you know, it can, it can always go either way.

• 59:56Ryan Holiday?

  No, and if you, if you think they're easy questions, you're, you're probably wrong.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm terr-, and I, and I am terrified of you if you think they're easy, if a person thinks they're easy questions.

• 1:00:08Ryan Holiday?

  The, the argument is probably that we weren't, I think, the thing we could all agree, we didn't necessarily have the best people make, in, in the position to make those decisions. Do you know, we, we weren't necessarily putting the most qualified accountable individuals in the position to weigh those two terrible variables, or, or possibilities.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Right. But it's interesting, you know, like, it's again, and it's one of the, you know, listen, one of the reasons that Lincoln is, I think, remembered so fondly as a president is because he didn't have to preside over Reconstruction. So if Lincoln had lived and presided over a failed Reconstruction, is he still Lincoln?

• 1:00:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. No, there's a great novel I read called The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln. I'm forgetting who it's by, but it's from the perspective of Lincoln survives the assassination attempt and then is impeached by the radical Republicans for not being extreme enough in Reconstruction. It was, it's fascinating. It could have gone so.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Essentially, and people forget that at Appomattox, one of the things Lee, you know, Lee was confronted before that by his generals, who were like, no, let's keep fighting, we can, you know, we can, you know, we can wear them down in a guerrilla war, we know we can. And like, and frankly, They very well might, the South very well might have been able to do that. Like if you go back 50 years, because we're talking about the Andrew Roberts Napoleon book. You know, you look at how Napoleon did in Spain. You know, it was a disaster for him. So could the South have done that? And, and Lee is the one who's like, we're not going to do that. Like, we're not going to destroy America like it's done. We're done. I'm telling you, I'm using all my credibility to say where, you know, at least this part of the war ends here.

• 1:01:42Ryan Holiday?

  Or maybe Lee was thinking he'd come back like Napoleon a few years later and try it again.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Maybe, you know, yeah, who knows?

• 1:01:50Ryan Holiday?

  No, I, I do feel like that, that dark energy thing, the more I think about it, the more it holds up Iraq and Afghanistan being a good example, which is like, yeah, you do this, but you don't address the underlying issue. And so it just goes over here. And it feels like we're kind of like so much of the 21st century is us convincing ourselves we've solved some problem, but really we just shoved it down and now it's popping up over here. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's funny, I've had many a conversation with the different, you know, just, you know, friends who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I was like, I wonder how our wars will be remembered. And I think, you know, a general consensus, I would say, I've heard from many of them is, you know, I think in the grand sweep of history, we're going to kind of be remembered like the veterans of the Boer War. Like, we were part of this thing that was sort of like a, a kind of a niche war, but that presaged some bigger thing. That was sort of fought, you know, as we were entering a new age. And I don't know what that bigger thing is, but you talk about like that dark energy. Again, it's like, you know, you look at the end of the First World War, you know, that war ended and there was a lot of dark energy that got thrown off of that and, you know,

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  defined the entire 20th century, you know, through the Second World War and the Cold War that followed.

• 1:03:10Ryan Holiday?

  What do you think of the argument that one of the tragedies of the, the sort of 20 years of, of the global war on terror is that we, we went out to fight radicalization and terrorism abroad? And on both sides, it, it, we manifested a lot of, or neglected the, to combat that kind of growing extremism and radicalization at home?

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I think Spencer Ackerman had a book, I think that came out late last year that kind of deals with this directly.

• 1:03:50Ryan Holiday?

  No relation?

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  No relation. But the, I don't think it's like we went to those wars and those wars caused the radicalization at home. I think you're seeing a, although I do think the way these wars have ended and the civil military divide that has been created is something like, it concerns me, particularly as we go from like contested election to contested election. I think it's worth keeping in mind that like when you wear the uniform, you know, who the president is, it's not just like, you know, the president you vote for, that's your commander in chief. So all of your orders flow from that individual's authority and legitimacy. So if you wear the uniform and someone's saying the president's not legitimate, like we've got real problems in the chain of command.

• 1:04:34Ryan Holiday?

  That'd be a head fuck.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, we're setting our, you know, we could be setting ourselves up for some type of a crisis there where, you know, because people in uniform have got political beliefs or just a culture of omerta when you wear the uniform, but you get pushed hard enough, people will say what they believe. We have not done enough, you know, to do radicalization or polarization at home. And I think, listen, I think the greatest, I think hands down the greatest national security threat that faces the United States today is our polarization and dysfunction at home. Hands down, no question.

• 1:05:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, you look at, I was, I was looking at a study of like pandemic responses and the, you know, America at the outset of the pandemic is predicted to respond best to a pandemic, you know, now currently has the highest death rate of any developed country. It's not access to the, you know, the remedies, it's not any of that stuff. It's, it's almost entirely rooted in the low levels of public trust. And that, that, that's really what's responsible for the, you know, the failure of the vaccination effort, the failure of, it's, it's that other countries were like, their government was

• 1:05:53Ryan Holiday?

  like, hey, this is what we should do and here's why we think we should do it. And more or less, everyone got on the same page. You can't solve, you can't solve difficult problems with a 50/50 majority, you know, like. You can't, you can't. You need more people on board.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  You do, and I think we'll be interested to see, I mean, I imagine you've had these conversations, I've had them in the past, you know, pre pandemic where people are like, wow, we're so polarized. What's it going to take to get everybody on the same sheet of music, kind of how we were after nine eleven? Uh, you know, then we got hit with the pandemic and it led to, you know, the most divisive year, I would say, in American history, or in American political history in recent memory, which is 2020, at least since like 1968. So, um, so the question becomes, when faced with an external threat, can, you know, America like, you know, two fists like we've been able to do in the past, even if, you know, most of the time we're kind of like jazz hands and everyone's doing their own thing. Uh, cause if you go into a fight like jazz hands, you're going to get punched in the face.

• 1:06:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  And, um, and I don't, you know, I don't know if like some type of

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  essential third party nation state threat would cause us to all get on the same sheet of music again, unlike a pandemic, which is sort of faceless, but I don't know. I don't know. And we, um, and it's, again, that's why I say it's the greatest national security threat we face. It's like, we can disagree, you know, but we can disagree to a point. And, and we're reliving in totally diversional realities.

• 1:07:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  And I'm, and by the way, I'm not like saying this as a partisan, because I'm frankly, I'm a, I'm an unabashed both sideser. Uh, I think they're both fucked.

• 1:07:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Uh, excuse me if I go and say that on your podcast, but like,

• 1:07:30Ryan Holiday?

  I've already said it many times.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Okay. I'm not a fan of either of these parties. Um, and I think they're, they're stoking division in order to secure our rage. And through our rage, you get our votes. And I mean, it's just, it's, it's not, it's not taking us in a good direction. So what's the, what's the solution for that? It's difficult to know because I think it's a combination of, uh, how our politics are organized these days, how we consume our media, how we live our lives. Um, you know, it's really stress testing our republic.

• 1:08:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so you and I got connected. Obviously, I read your book. When did when did Green on Blue come out? I read I bought it right when it came out. I heard you on NPR and I bought it. And I really enjoyed it.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Thank you. 2015.

• 1:08:13Ryan Holiday?

  2015. So I've known about you. I've known you for or known about you for a while, but we got connected through Daniel Barkov and Veterans for Responsible Leadership. He and I talked about because you and I have talked about, you know, writers from the military and then we're just talking about polarization and then veterans and going out in the world. He and I talked about Eric Greitens because I know him a bit. I did the marketing for one of his books. That's been an interesting thing for me to watch. I want to say a cautionary tale, but it's been interesting for me to watch, like, when you just watch someone you know just change. And you're just like, what is that? What what what forces are acting on a person that makes them become a very different kind of person? I was curious if

• 1:08:56Ryan Holiday?

  you had a perspective on that, both being White House fellows and writers and veterans?

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think people want people want to hold on to what they got, right?

• 1:09:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  I mean, and to and how how how how are they willing to contort themselves and compromise themselves to hold on to it? Um, you know, and it's like it's it's can be disappointing and sad to see. Um, so I think, yeah, listen, I think there's this idea that, you know, if you're if you're a citizen of our country like ours, citizenship comes with certain obligations. And and, you know, if someone is really willing to compromise those obligations

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  to advance themselves over the collective, and if that becomes like the organizational culture of the nation, of the nation, a nation of true narcissists, it's very difficult to

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  To hang together.

• 1:10:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I'm always.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  And I fear that's where I know I fear that's like where we're at, or at least not all of them. But you know, at least our political class, it seems like there's a very healthy majority that like, that's where they're at. I'm not and I'm not saying everyone, you know, like I, you know, I have, you know, friends I know who hold office, who I really admire and think are doing a good job in a very tough situation, but they're certainly, it seems like a majority now who kind of are have gone the other way.

• 1:10:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I'm always interested. I think it's a helpful exercise when you, when someone has a very similar background or history than you, and then you see them go in a very different direction. I try not to be judgmental. I try to go like, how could that happen to me? Like, what are the, what, how does, how does one prevent that from happening? Right? And so he, I just, it struck me that you guys have similar backgrounds, but have gone in very different directions. And I think that there's a, there's a few sort of avatars that I have for people with different backgrounds than me. And I just, I, I try to be a sort of a there, but for the grace of God, go I kind of a take on.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Sure. Sure. Yeah. Just like at a certain point, it's like, I don't know. It's just like, come on, man.

• 1:11:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's weird.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  I don't know what to say. I'm like, come on, man.

• 1:11:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Like, you know, you know, not to do this.

• 1:11:19Ryan Holiday?

  Is it, is it power? Is it greed? Is it fear? Is it desperation? I can't quite figure out what compels a person to go that way.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  I think it's a desire to, you know, to people cling to power. I mean, and it's not even like insane power. I mean, hey, look, like if you're, like if you're a congressman, you know, it's a good gig. And it's, you know, and, and it might, you know, and it might be the only gig you got. And you can't believe you like bag this thing. You're the congressman. You know, you this, yeah, oh, my God, I won.

• 1:11:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  You know, and, and you like that. And, and then you're told, you know, well, you won, but you got to do this, you got to do that, you know, and. You know, the compromise is accrue. So again, I'm not like saying this with judgment. I believe like people like the problem, and I don't, I firmly believe that the problem that we're dealing with in a country isn't that we don't have good people. Like, I think you get people individually like, but there, I don't think like the majority of these people who are behaving this way are bad people. I'm sure some of them just are like horrible, icky, but I think the majority are actually pretty good people. They're just like stuck in a system that is like, this is not a good, this is not a healthy system. And we've, we've got issues, whether it's, you know, whether it's from the way our social

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  media and all of our media, it rewards outrageous behavior and rewards rage, the way politicians have to earn money and constantly be, you know, going after, going after money, raising money. I mean, all of it, it's, it doesn't, it's not leading to, to positive outcomes. I sort of hate that because I feel like it's such a cop out, like, you know, it's the system, but like, it's sort of like there are parts of the system that, that are creating the outcomes that we get. Um, and yeah, I'm, I'm worried about it. The one thing I will say that again, I kind of touched on this before, that worries me the most is I feel like we have this civil military divide. And like, you're not talking about the 500 pound gorilla in the room when we're like

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  saying that someone's a Russian agent and no, you know, you're not legitimate and this person's not legitimate and you're not, the president's not an American citizen and like all this crazy stuff is like, you know, and people, you know, and I've seen there's this sort of been, you might've seen this, like this spate of like, you know, American Civil War books that came out, uh, late last year, like what would it look like? And I read a couple of them. And the thing that kind of struck me is like, there was always, always one scenario or they're always like, well, you know, the right wing will have an advantage because they'll have the most AR-15s and they're the most heavily armed and like, that's a refrain. I think that's a foolish refrain. It's like, listen, if this thing were to go, you know where all the guns are going to come from? It's not going to be all the people with their AR-15s. It's going to be our massive, you know, more than 1 million strong military and all of these

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  bases, like AR-15, put an AR-15 up against a Bradley fighting vehicle, see what happens. And when these things, you know, I covered the war in Syria as a journalist, like the thing that sent the Syrian civil war high order, because it started as airstream protests, was you got about three or four months into those protests, and that military, which was also had a divide of, you know, Sunni Shia divide, the Sunnis, after however many times of being told to crush these protests, were being told, open fire on the protesters, and a bunch of them finally said, enough, like, we're not doing this. And oh, by the way, we're not doing this, and where do you want our tanks and our troops, protesters, because like, you have a right to protest, and where would you? And, you know, we go contested election to contested election, and, you know, again, I'm talking to you from DC today,

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  like, in 2020, like, DC was boarded up. Like, had Trump won the election, there would have been protests. And had those protests happened, they would have equaled what happened in the summer of 2020, and you probably would have had, Tom Cotton probably would have penned another op-ed saying, we got to, you know, call the, you know, evoke the insurrection act, send in the 82nd Airborne Division. And like, what happens if you send those guys in? And what happens if at a certain point, one of them is like, I'm not opening up on these protesters with rubber bullets or CS, I'm not clearing Lafayette Park a second time in the same year, no way. Do it yourself, Mr. President. I don't know, like, that's the stuff that scares me.

• 1:15:23Ryan Holiday?

  When to go to the US Civil War, what happened is the South seized those military bases, right? There wasn't, they weren't fighting with weapons that they had on their farms, right? They seized weapons from the federal armory, and then, now you had two armies, you had two United States armies that were fighting each other.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And look, in every, in every facet of our life right now, you've got someone telling you that you have to choose. What are you? Are you going to wear a mask? Are you not going to wear a mask? Are you for the Green New Deal? Are you not for the Green New Deal? Like, everywhere, everything you do, there's some political choice you're having to make. When you read, like, the US Civil War...

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Yes, some people, but many of those people, particularly the like the active duty army officers, when it happens, like, you know, the Lees and the others are, they're not like, all right, civil war, just what we want. They're like, Jesus Christ.

• 1:16:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  Can't believe it's come to this and I've got to choose. And they sat there and like they all are having like, had this like dark night of the soul. What do I do? Um, is my allegiance to my country or to my state? And oh, by the way, like before 1861, that was like a very active, you know, constitutional issue in the United States. And they all chose and they, because they had to. And so I don't say this to be like overly alarmist, but I feel like because we've just totally created this military subclass that exists in our society.

• 1:16:48Ryan Holiday?

  We take it for granted.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  It's like, we take it for granted and we're like driving drunk politically, like we have no idea that like, we've got like a, you know, a 500 pound gorilla in the car next to us who, you know, if we screw this up, could just level our society. So when I hear people talking about an American civil war and which side has the most AR 15s, I'm like, dude, you are missing the point.

• 1:17:11Ryan Holiday?

  And it's, yeah, not, not how.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Highly militarized society. It's not how it's going to go down.

• 1:17:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. No, and, and I think what's interesting about that idea of the choice though, and, and you're, you're talking about the, the system that makes a person away. I think that's again, back to the empathy that I think characterizes your work. What's also interesting about it though, when you look at someone like Eric or, or some of these other people that I think you and I both know, it's like, the system is all there. Those incentives are there, but ultimately the individual has to make the choice. Are you going to be?

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:17:42Ryan Holiday?

  Are you gonna, are you gonna be that person? Are you gonna make the thing worse? Or are you gonna go the other direction? And it is interesting to see, it's interesting and tragic and sad and also I think cautionary, when you're like, hey, some people, they, they, they just, they make the choice and uh, it's a scary thing.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. It's a very human thing, too.

• 1:18:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  So, you know, I feel like it was, it was, it was ever thus. But I don't know. Listen, I, I hope, I hope we pull out of this spiral and I, I think we can. Like, I remain optimistic about America. I don't think anyone really likes living like this.

• 1:18:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  You know, maybe, I don't know, maybe like we'll come out of this pandemic and, you know, we'll all remember that we like seeing each other. Um, you know, and that we're, you know, and that, that we don't want to go back to hating in the way we've been hating the next few years. But I don't know if it's a fait accompli. And frankly, like, I think it takes leadership. Like, you know, we need good leadership. And I don't mean just like, you know, the, our American obsession with the presidency. Like, there are many other leaders in our society who are not whoever's sitting in the Oval Office. And perhaps the person sitting in the Oval Office can't really be that leader.

• 1:18:57Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Anymore.

• 1:18:59Ryan Holiday?

  No, and that's what makes it so alarming when those lower level leaders drop the obligation of leadership to pursue personal interest or, you know, I got, I don't really believe this, but it's what I need to do to get to the next level of, of leadership. You know, that sort of abdication of responsibility.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  Well, in a sense of like, I mean, listen, I, you know, I have little, I've, I've, you know, four kids. So, um, so it's this sort of, you know, you're, you realize like you have to, you have to raise and teach people

• 1:19:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  to like love and value the country, or else guess what? They just don't.

• 1:19:39Ryan Holiday?

  Or how the country works, right?

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, how the country, how the country works and, right, for like how it works. Like, I feel like this old codger, I'm like civics, we need more civics. And who's celebrated?

• 1:19:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, for sure. Who are our heroes?

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  This country. Like, who are our heroes?

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  I mean, and it makes me sad, like, to see that, I feel like my generation, like of my kids, like, they don't have those. You know, my, you know, my son goes to school every day wearing a, a number 17 O'Callaghan hockey jersey because his hero is O'Callaghan from the 1980 Miracle on Ice team.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  You know, and the Olympics are going on right now and there's no one, he's looking at the Olympics like that's my hero.

• 1:20:23Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah. No, that's a good point. Uh, yeah. And then even your point about civics. I've read an interesting piece there like the pro- Everyone says, well, let's just teach people civics. And they're like, that might be a fantasy because we might just politicize the teaching of civics the way that we're currently politicizing critical race theory and the debate about how to teach history.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Of course. And it's, and the thing that's, the thing that's been interesting to me in the last couple of years too, is like, as I travel the country, uh, I feel like I used to travel, you know, I travel around America and like I'm in America.

• 1:20:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Now I actually, I really feel like I'm crossing borders and I go to different parts of America. And I don't say that like, I'm not trying to put one part of America. I'm just like, I'm like, wow, I'm in a different place right now.

• 1:21:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Um, you know, like, you know, I was in like Utah, you know, a few months ago and I'm like, man, like Utah is not the East Coast. And I might sound like really dumb and I'm sitting here saying this, but like, you know, I've, it's not the first time I've been to Utah, but this time when I went, it had been a couple of years. So it's like, oh man, I just like, I really felt the difference in a way I hadn't felt before, as I think our, our subcultures are becoming much more defined in this country.

• 1:21:30Ryan Holiday?

  Who, and the pandemic has turned things that ordinarily wouldn't be indicators of, of, of anything into, like, I drove from Austin to, uh, the Gulf Coast and, you know, the difference between Austin, Houston, New Orleans, you know, Gulf shores, uh, Pensacola, it was like each one of those, even in the South was, it's totally different, uh, community that, that lived with very different understandings of the same pandemic that's killing the same 2,500 people a day. It's, you're just like, wow, okay, this is, if we can't agree on this, how are we going to agree on other stuff?

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's sort of, I just think there's, there's been a real balkanization of our, our culture. Uh, you know, and that's, that's no good. I mean, culture, particularly in a democracy, like culture is everything.

• 1:22:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Well, you're a country ruled by public opinion. So if you don't have a consensus in public opinion, doesn't mean it has to be one way or another, but if, if you can't get to a majority, the whole thing grinds to a halt.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  And a real majority.

• 1:22:42Ryan Holiday?

  Right, not a four, not, not what Republicans are trying to do, which is effectively rule as a majority from a, a small tent minority.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  It's what you, I think, again, again, on both sides are, it's like either, if, if we're in elections where year to year, uh, whoever wins is winning by like three, three percentage points, and then that side rules as though like from the extreme of their party.

• 1:23:06Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  From their, you know, from their right or their left flank, that's how they rule. It's like you just have this like flip flopping tyranny of like forty seven over fifty three, then it's fifty three over forty seven, and everyone else is miserable. Like, there has to be more of, like, let me just say, when I was a kid, when I was growing up, you know, I remember, I don't know, the nineteen ninety six Bill Clinton, Bob Dole election.

• 1:23:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  I don't think anyone really cared who won that election. Like, it wasn't a big deal. You know, we were like, we were kind of good, like, country, you know, there's, now, I mean, it's, it's an existential crisis. And, you know, we swing so radically, you know, it's tough. Like, you wake up on a Monday, and, you know, you're living in Obama's America, you wake up on a Tuesday, and you're living in Donald Trump's America. Like, it's tough to get your head around that.

• 1:23:53Ryan Holiday?

  It's, uh, it's, it's nuts, man. And the system is not designed to work without a majority. And so, it's, it's, it's.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  You need consensus, like, real consensus. If you look at the major pieces of American legislation in the past twentieth century, things like, you know, uh, civil rights, the highway bill, you know, like, a big marquee ones, they were all passed with a majority of the minority party supporting the legislation.

• 1:24:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  And because of that, when the minority party took power, the majority of that minority had voted for legislation, so they didn't run on trying to, like, there's no one running on trying to overturn civil rights, or like, I'm gonna overturn the highway bill. But now, because the way we govern is you gain a super majority, and you cram through your legislation, like we see in the Senate now, you know, it's like, well, they cram it through, and then literally the next thing that happens is the other party's like, no, we're getting rid of this legislative achievement, it's all going back. And the result is like unstable governance for all of us.

• 1:24:50Ryan Holiday?

  That is, uh.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  You still don't know if you're gonna have your healthcare.

• 1:24:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's, that's not good.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  It's not good.

• 1:24:56Ryan Holiday?

  Not good at all. Well, man, this was really fun. I can't wait to talk about the new book, and, uh, will you come back on for it? That would be awesome.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. That'd be, that'd be a pleasure.

• 1:25:05Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pochyle, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic meditations over the weekend just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts.

• 1:25:48Ryan Holiday?

  And this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.