Author Ron Lieber on Money and Values

Ryan speaks to author Ron Lieber about the key Stoic virtue of temperance, how money can be a great tool for teaching, how parents and kids should approach college and gap years, and more. Ron Lieber is a bestselling author of several books and has been a New York Times columnist since 2008. His newest book The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make released in January 2021. This episode is brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked. This episode is also brought to you by FitTrack, the best way to calculate your body’s composition accurately, reliably, and consistently. Every FitTrack smart scale uses advanced algorithms to offer insights into 17 different metrics indicative of bodily health. The Dara Smart Scale syncs with the free FitTrack App so all of your health insights are saved in one place. Go to getfittrack.com/stoic to take 50% off your order, plus get an additional 30% with code BUILD30 at checkout. This episode is also brought to you by Blinkist, the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Ron Lieber:Homepage: https://ronlieber.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ronlieber Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronlieber/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ronlieber See 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom, designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Guess this was like eight or nine years ago. I got this email from someone I knew in New York City, and they said, hey, we're having this dinner party. Do you want to come? You've got to make your way out to Brooklyn, but it should be awesome. And it's quite a crowd. Gretchen Rubin is there. Susan Cain is there. A whole bunch of bestselling authors and newspaper columnists, they're all there. And that was a nice surprise. The more surprising surprise was I was the speaker at said dinner. I was invited to the dinner, but I was invited not as a guest, but as the entertainment for the night.

• 1:08Ryan Holiday?

  And so I scrambled together and I threw a quick talk together. It went great. And one of the other upsides of it is the friendships that came out of it. And my guest today was actually at his house, Ron Lieber. He's the Your Money columnist for The New York Times. He's an award-winning writer, and he's an author of two books, one of which has my favorite title, "The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money." And his new book, "The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Roadmap for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make," is now out. I was so glad that Ron reached out. It had been forever since we talked. We've gone back and forth. But this is a great interview.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  We talk about this really key Stoic idea of temperance, moderation, what's the right amount, and how money is and can be a great metaphor and a great method for teaching and embodying and learning about that.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  Critical virtue. So here is my interview. You can check out Ron's website at ronlieber.com. R O N L I E B E R. You can sign up for his newsletter. You can follow him on Twitter at at Ron Lieber. Of course, check out the new book, The Price You Pay For College, and the other book, The Opposite of Spoiled.

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  I was thinking about your, not your most recent one, but your last one, because you and I both tried to do something. Actually, I feel like I did this with my book Stillness, and I was doing this with ego. Sometimes, as a writer, you're trying, you're trying to define the absence of something or the opposite of something, and there's not really a great English word for it. So like with ego is the enemy. I was really trying to write a book about the absence of ego, but there's not a great word for that. Like humility is kind of it, but also confidence is kind of it. And it's sort of a combination of those. I just love the title of The Opposite of Spoiled, because it perfectly captures how we want to be as people and what we want our kids to be like.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  But there's really not a word that communicates what it is that you're talking about.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  I struggled a lot with this, and I actually made one of those word clouds that you used to see, like on Instagram or in people's presentations in, you know, 2003. And I, you know, I had this circle of things like modesty and prudence and thrift and patience and perseverance and generosity and curiosity, and all those things added up to something, right? But it's true that there was no word whatsoever. And so I had to write a book to try to define it.

• 4:02Ryan Holiday?

  Right. It's like you had to write a book that was probably, what, 70, 80,000 words to really capture what ideally could have been captured in a single word.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  I wish. I mean, maybe the big idea should have been to actually invent that word and attempt to like inject it into the English language. A couple of years ago, some Twitter bot was invented, I don't know who's behind it, that goes and grabs for every single word that is published in the New York Times every single day. And if there are any words that it grabs that have never appeared in the New York Times before, and usually they are invented words, it then tweets them out. And then there's a different bot that was started by somebody else that grabs the original tweet and quotes the context and links to the story. I spent years trying to get into this thing, and I finally made

• 4:54Speaker 01

  it, not once, but twice, a couple of weeks ago. And so I am now firmly in the business of inventing words and trying to put them in the newspaper at my day job.

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  Did you know that there is a word for the invention of new words and that Thomas Jefferson is the one who invented it?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  No, what is the word?

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  Nillagism. I may be mispronouncing that, but that is the act of creating a new word.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  So am I a nillagist?

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  Well, what are the two words that you inserted into the New York Times?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Well, the one that I'm most proud of appeared in a piece that had been on my list of stories that I wanted to do for more than a decade. I had, for a long time, been, you know, collecting these Bed Bath & Beyond 20% off coupons, as one does, right? You know, if you like that store. And I'd always thought that I would one day do a stunt piece where I would try and go to the store and see what I could figure out in, like, if I walked through the store for eight hours, what's the largest dollar amount I could save off of any item in the store? Because one of the games they play with the fine print there is that there are all these brands, often very expensive things, very desirable things, that are excluded from the 20% offer. So I always thought I would go and figure

• 6:13Speaker 01

  it out. But then I took a step back, and I thought, Ron, why? What is it about? These coupons in particular, and a coupon of this size or potential value, but indeterminate value in general, that turns you on so much. And then, you know, when we started to see all of these oral history story forums pop up more and more these last couple of years, it finally hit me. Ron, you've got to do the oral history of the 20% off Bed Bath and Beyond coupon. And when I did, I tracked down, you know, the people who were there at the beginning. And there was a lot of conversation about why it's big and why it's blue. But one of the people who came in very early on said that she had a different word for it because it wasn't really a normal blue.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  She said it was blurple, B L U R P L E. And as soon as she said it, I thought, I am getting that word into the story and I'm going to get onto that goddamn Twitter bot if it kills me. And now the coffee cup commemoration of being on that Twitter bot is on its way to me in the mail as we speak.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  Wow, that congratulations. That's quite an accomplishment.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  There is something to, I mean, blurple is describing a thing that you immediately know exactly what the person is saying. And, and obviously that the word captures it perfectly. But like, I felt like, like, so in my book Stillness is the Key, that word stillness, like you immediately know what it is, but also you have no idea what it is. And there's like dozens of other philosophical concepts that come close to expressing it, but none sort of perfectly do. So it's almost like the really important things kind of have an ineffable-ness to them and that you get that, but that, that famous quote from the, the chief justice of the Supreme Court about, you know, I don't, I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's like you sort of, you just, when you get it, you get it.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  I love it. So what is the opposite of spoiled? If you, what, as you did that word cloud as your, because I, because I think obviously your book is primarily sort of about parenting and particularly about finances with your kids. But I feel like that's also like, if, if you were like, Ryan, describe how you want to be seen as other, by other people, the being described as the opposite of spoiled is, is just a pretty good, that's a pretty good bar to, to, to cross when you're old, too.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, this was the thing that literally took me years to figure out with that book was I, I knew that there needed to be a better book out in the world about how to teach kids about money, something that was more modern and something that just felt like it would appeal to me and people like me, not even so much a demographic, but, but a psychographic. And

• 9:11Ryan Holiday?

  Also a good word.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:13Ryan Holiday?

  I could agree.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Right? You know, I, I mean, I think about that. It's funny, you know, I, I've been thinking about that a lot recently because I've been doing a lot of work at the Times, helping people like kind of drill down on the granular specifics of precisely the right way to get a vaccine appointment without killing five billion brain cells over four weeks in the process. And the people who are good at that are their own psychographic, right? They are people who know how to work the frequent flyer mile system and get the free seats to Asia. These are the people who were on the line at Rose Records in Chicago

• 9:54Speaker 01

  with me outside of what was then Ticketron in 1985, getting the journey tickets. These are people who know how to beat the system without going over any ethical or legal lines, right? So like, that's, those are, those are my people, right? I want my people to be of above average, you know, consumer fluency and of below average profitability to the companies that they deal with, right? And so when I was thinking about the psychographic for what became the opposite of spoiled, it was before I knew what the title was, right? But I wanted people who, I wanted to find readers who cared. About the value of money, but also the values inherent in spending it well.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  And so how was I going to do that exactly? Right? So, you know, I thought about something that my mother used to say to me, which is that, you know, when people would ask her what her like highest and best hopes were for her children, she said, well, I, you know, she said, I, I don't care about any of it, but like, I don't want them to be average. Right? Like, what's the worst possible thing they could say about my kids? That they're average. Right? It's like such a Jewish mother thing. And, but, you know, when I thought about it, I thought, well, no, that, that's, that's not really it. But it's like a thought exercise for me in trying to figure out what that book was supposed to be out.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  I thought about the, the worst possible thing that anybody could say about my one daughter at the time that would make me feel like I failed as a parent. And right away, it was clear to me, the first word that jumped to my mind, like, I would never want anybody to call her spoiled. So what's the opposite of that? Right? If the opposite of that is winning as a parent, then, then what is the opposite of spoiled? And then it became clear to me, right? Because the list of words that I came up with, you know, modesty and prudence and thrift and patience and generosity and all of that stuff, every one of those values and virtues and character traits could be taught with allowance.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  And as soon as I figured that out for myself, it all began to click into place. And I knew that the book should be called The Opposite of Spoiled. And yeah, it was going to be a book about money, but it was really a book about values. And if you learn to talk about money the right way and practice with it the right way with your children, they will in fact learn good values almost automatically.

• 12:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you know, I was thinking of another word. It's sort of an important Stoic concept that's sort of close to what you're talking about, but also not quite the perfect word. So for the Stoics, the four cardinal virtues, and this is also the four cardinal virtues of Christianity, are courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And temperance is one of those words that because of how things evolve, when you hear the word temperance, you think, you know, sort of, don't drink alcohol. But really, temperance means sort of moderation or the right amount. And what you're, you know, to me, when I think of that, I think of Aristotle's concept of the golden mean, you know, the sort of the right amount of the right thing at the

• 13:12Ryan Holiday?

  right time. That's also, to me, is maybe a good definition of the opposite of spoiled. Like, they're the right amount of things, not too much, not too little. Spoiled is the extreme end, but also, you know, a kid who's deprived and is, you know, doesn't get anything probably is going to have their own issues. You're trying to get right in the middle of the right thing.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting that you put it that way, right? Because when people ask me about the right amount of allowance, they expect me to answer with some kind of dollar figure, right? But I don't know your family. I don't know where you live. I don't know whether the kid needs bus money or lunch money. I don't know if there's a car involved and if the car is there in part because the older kid drives the siblings around. So, you know, I can't dictate for you what the allowance is, but I can give you a concept for it, a framework that is in fact rooted in temperance. And the answer is always, for every family, just enough so.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  The child can do some of the things that they want and get some of the things that they want, but not so much that they don't have to make a lot of really hard choices. Trade offs, right? Because trade offs are what we grownups do with our money every single day, often dozens of times per day, without even really thinking about it. It's mostly subconscious, unless it's a, you know, a bigger decision and if there's like maybe a spouse involved or an ex spouse, right? And so we want our kids training in that and doing it deliberately and doing it on our watch, right? So that's a form, that's a form of temperance, certainly.

• 15:02Ryan Holiday?

  And, and actually how I sort of tend to, like when I'm talking to younger audiences or young people about temperance, if I'm listing the virtues and I don't want to get into a whole philosophical discussion, I'll say courage, justice, wisdom, and self-discipline, right? Because I think that's a great way to define temperance, because it's, you know, temperance because you've been deprived of something or you don't have enough is kind of a false form of temperance, right? Somebody who's an alcoholic and goes to prison and, you know, is sober during their time in prison is not actually sober, they just haven't

• 15:42Ryan Holiday?

  drank for a while, right? Like, you know, I'm thinking, you know, the pandemic, there's bad habits I have that have been curtailed because I'm not traveling or doing things, right? I'm not, I'm not, I have fewer options, right? I'm not as overcommitted during the pandemic because there's fewer things to commit to. So it's what we're really trying to talk, talk about, and I think probably get to, it's like, it's some place of self-discipline, where you're, you're trying to give them the allowance so they can do some of the things, but not all of the things, and they have to choose what those things are and own the decision and learn from it.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly right. And the challenge for grownups is that we ourselves never truly master this. It's nearly impossible to do so because there's always some new temptation. There's always some external force. And quite often, there are internal forces in the family. If you have a spouse, and then if you choose to have children, right, their influence, their needs, what you perceive to be their needs, and then their wants, you know, grow ever larger as college approaches. And the decisions feel like they're becoming more and more consequential.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  And so you're asking yourself questions where the answers involve ever larger amounts of money. And it becomes more and more complicated because it becomes more and more emotionally complex.

• 17:19Ryan Holiday?

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

• 17:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was, I think it was maybe Malcolm Gladwell's book. Was it, is it Outliers? Or maybe David and Goliath, where he talks about, you know, successful parents have to struggle with the idea of not, we can't, but we aren't going to do that. And that is also self-discipline, right? That self-discipline that also extends to, you know, the discipline that you exert over your family. But, you know, just because you can do something, just because you can afford it, like, you know, my son is like, oh, well, we'll be do it, we'll be out for a walk or something. And he's, Dad, you know what you should do? And I'll be like, what? And he's like, you should buy me this thing that he saw on TV or something.

• 18:09Ryan Holiday?

  Like, he's suggesting that I buy him a present just for the, you know, for the hell of it in the middle of the day. And, and, you know, it'd be nice to be able to say, I can't do that. Like, I cannot afford to do that. Although I probably wouldn't express that to a four year old. But the reality is not that we can't. It's that that's a bad idea. So we won't. Because that if you get everything you want, you become spoiled.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Right. Well, then you have to answer the why question, right? And so, you know, much depends on the age of the child. But, you know, one of your jobs, one of our jobs, first and foremost, is to teach them about a, well, you know, the sociologists have a term for this, right? I mean, when I was asking and about and looking into, you know, families who are lucky enough to have more than they need and can can afford nearly everything they want. It's like, how do you decide exactly where to set limits? And, you know, the sociologists who look at parenting have a have a term for this. They refer to it as a as a form of like sort of forced deprivation or artificial deprivation, you know, where you set limits where you don't have to.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  And it makes sort of intuitive sense to parents, but to kids it makes no sense at all. Right? Because very early on, they know almost innately kind of what you're capable of. And the older they get, the more nuanced their understanding is, right? So, you know, trying to explain the won't is difficult. But, you know, I think part of, part of the job as a parent is to come up with the right script where you say, I, you know, I know we can do this, but it would not actually be good for you right now. And here's why, right? Because I do think they're entitled to ask why. I mean, I want my kids asking why all the time, right? I mean, that's the only way that they can learn about the world and how to be in it.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  So I feel like they're entitled to an answer, but, you know, it isn't always fun trying to find the right words.

• 20:08Ryan Holiday?

  But the can't and the won't are kind of everything in the sense of, I was talking to this poet recently on the podcast and that one of the, one of the ancient Stoics talks about how one of the beauties of poetry is that there's constraints, right? It has to rhyme, it has to be a certain length, you know? Obviously, there's flexibility in some of the constraints, but the the purpose of a poem is that there's some Structure or system that it's logic that it's operating by, or else it's not a poem. It's just a random collection of words, or it's prose, I suppose. But it but it's that because of the fetters, he's saying the the the constraints, it creates the art. And, you know, if you get everything you want, if you have no discipline or temperance,

• 20:52Ryan Holiday?

  it seems like that would be quite wonderful. But in fact, it's quite awful. And it's almost as if by the lack of boundaries or direction, you're everywhere and nowhere. You get everything you want and somehow, in the long run, you get, you don't get the big thing you want, which is to be happy, right? Like, you know, you you you think getting every toy you want would be fun. But actually, getting every toy you want means that you don't enjoy any of them.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  I love the idea of constraints being a form of art or a way to inspire art. And, you know, I'd not quite put it together that way in my last book, but it reminds me of a story that somebody told. There's a friend of a mother of an old friend of mine who started this, you know, it's basically like an annual birthday tradition with her grandkids. And every year she would take them to, you know, some random dollar store. Every year they went to a different one in Chicago. And she would hand them out dollar bills according to their age. So the five year old would get five dollars. And this was like the greatest thing in the world to these kids who, you know, were reasonably affluent, lived in a nice house, had toys.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  But this idea that they could have this, you know, constrained amount of money, but could do absolutely anything they wanted with it. Keeping in mind that the constraints are, you know, everything in the store costs a dollar and you can only have five things if you're five years old. This was like the greatest thing for them. And they would come back with the most unbelievable, like kind of random assemblage of things, right? And it, you know, makes you think of those cooking shows too, right? Where you only get four ingredients and then you have to literally make culinary art.

• 22:38Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Right? It's the same thing, except with except with birthday presents.

• 22:43Ryan Holiday?

  Well, what I love about this discussion about money that I think is interesting is you're really talking about values. And so this thing the Stoics talk about is sort of like, what are the values that you want to be? Like what Marcus Aurelius calls them, epithets for the self. Sort of what are your like, you know, what are like the, if you were describing yourself, or someone was describing you, what are like the handful of words you're using? And one of the things my wife and I did when we first had kids is we sort of wrote down what some of those words were, like how you would want to describe. So not like, what is a successful kid look like in that, hey, I want them to have a great job and be a professional athlete. You know, often we get associated with very

• 23:25Ryan Holiday?

  superficial things. We're thinking more like, sort of what are the character traits or the values? And it strikes me that sort of the through line through your work, whether you're talking about money, or you're talking about college, or you're talking about, you know, any of the sort of dilemmas and tricky things you navigate as a parent, what you're really trying to do is use those as a way to discuss values.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  That's right. And, you know, even something as basic or simple as three jars, right? A save jar, a spend jar, and a give jar, right? They stand in for so much that's important. Because the spend jar for, you know, purchases that you sort of make on a whim or in passing, that's always a limited amount of money, right? So it's a recognition that it is fun to buy things on a whim, but you can and should only do it so often. And so you have to think hard about what you want those to be. You know, the save jar, well, that's

• 24:32Speaker 01

  patience and perseverance, right? And it's thinking about things in the long term, and also checking in with yourself and feeling the satisfaction that comes from that jar getting overstuffed with dollar bills. And I will never forget the first time my older daughter emptied the save jar. We were going to Lollapalooza in Chicago and she was, I don't know, you know, maybe six or seven years old. She'd just gotten her ears pierced and we had a sense that there was going to be a sort of vendor's row there. So, you know, she had her, you know, this sort of ball of like $14 or something. And I will just never remember, I will never

• 25:16Speaker 01

  forget the amount of time she spent going up and down vendor's row with all of this money in her hand. She was so proud and finally picking out like just the earrings, right? And taking that little all and like handing it over, you know, to the hippie in the patterned skirt. And it was just like the cutest thing. And she was just beaming with pride that she had done it. Right? So like, that's not, that's not money. That's meaning. Right? That's, that's, that's values. Right? It's converting a value to values. And obviously, the same thing's true with the charity jar, with the gift jar, right? And, you know, so you can use, again,

• 25:56Speaker 01

  there too, I find it really helpful to ask the kids to take the money and actually hand it over to the recipient organization, right? If you can arrange that, if there's one near you in your neighborhood or your town. A lot of kids like giving to the zoo, right? So you can bring the whole jar and you can sort of dump it out on the desk of the development staff. And they're actually used to this happening. It happens, you know, a handful of times each month. And they'll take a picture and they'll put your kid on Facebook if you want them there, right? And the kid feels amazing, right? So, you know, we're cementing values through the accumulation of a currency that has value.

• 26:34Ryan Holiday?

  When you, how did you and your spouse come up with what those values were? Is it an intuitive thing? Is it, is it based on philosophy, religion, psychology, a mix of all the above?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  It was more instinct than anything else. You know, it just became obvious as we made this list of things that added up to the opposite of spoiled, that, you know, so, so many of them could be, could be taught just through, you know, saving and spending and giving. And then having conversations out loud about, you know, why we do the things that we do. And so, you know, one that came up early on for reasons that we, we never really were able to figure out, but, you know, at a very young age, like three or four or something, you know, she piped up from the backseat at one point and said, hey, you know, she said, mommy or daddy, she said, why don't, why don't we have a summer house?

• 27:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's a good question. Why don't you?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Right. And so, you know, I had to really stop and think there, right? Cause it's like, I played Dr. Money in the newspaper at the New York Times and there's this kid in the backseat with, you know, a clearly pressing question that's been eating at her. And I had no earthly idea what to say, right? And so it was obvious to me that she was, she was puzzling for something. She was trying to like, figure out where she stood and we stood in the firmament, right? She was trying to stack us up against other people. She was trying to figure out how the grownups in her lives made decisions. She had a hunch that it was something that we had chosen, I think, as opposed to something

• 28:24Speaker 01

  that was not going to be possible for us. Now, we live in New York City, right? And we are lucky to have the three bedroom condo that we have. I think at this point, you know, if we wanted to have a little cabin, you know, in the Adirondacks, we could probably pull it off financially, but like, back then it wasn't really in the cards, cause, you know, we were just trying to kind of make do with what we had. And, and so, you know, if we, if we could not, as opposed to did not want to make that choice, I think she was sort of curious about that too. Cause one of the things that kids worry about when they're younger is like, do we have enough?

• 29:01Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  You know, they overhear parents. Saying, you know, they catch snippets of conversations and sometimes they misconstrue what's being said and they think they're like about to be put out on the street or something, right? And so, you know, you have to sort of explain that to them too. And, you know, that felt like a moment where our choices, not just our words, but our choices had meaning because they were modeling something. And, you know, and I think what they modeled, and what I, what I know they would model now is that they model a certain form of trade-off, right? So, you know, we live in a relatively small place with no other outlet

• 29:44Speaker 01

  that we own, but we spend a lot of money on education. We spend a lot of money on saving for education and we spend a fair bit of money on experiences that will be memorable, where we spend time together as a family unit. And so that is, that is what we stand for. You know, it's funny, I was reminded the other day when I was looking at my desktop, it's perched on top of Bill Bennett's book called The Book of Virtues. And I remember reading it, you know, Bennett's kind of a controversial figure, at least in liberal circles. And, you know, he said some not so nice things and some, you know, fairly

• 30:27Speaker 01

  judgmental things over the years. But, you know, there's something about your actions standing for a set of virtues and a set of values that I find attractive. And even though I haven't cracked that book in a while because it's sitting under a computer, just looking at the spine reminds me that every family stands for something. And if you are not having a conversation about what those things are, right, the index cards on your table when, you know, you were making your first baby, then you might actually be doing it wrong.

• 31:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you know, I think what you're saying too is that the best way to teach values is not, what's that, there's a, some pope said it, it's like a sort of preach, preach constantly, you know, use words when necessary.

• 31:15Ryan Holiday?

  You're supposed to teach by examples, right? Ultimately, we teach by examples and, you know, you teach by, by, by your priorities, which, which, which strikes me, which strikes me as interesting, given, you know, your most recent book and, and sort of where we are as a society where, you know, obviously there's a lot of individuality and relativity about what values we want our kids to have. Every family is different, every group prioritizes different things, but it does seem like as a general universal rule, the current college system and how it operates and what it costs

• 31:55Ryan Holiday?

  and what it demands of parents and what parents consent to do to operate inside that system pretty much violates every single one of those values that we would want our kids to have. We are, we are instructing them on the exact opposite of how we want the world to be.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  And how would you drill down on that? Like, what are the values that are in violation as we attempt to value what the experience is worth, if anything?

• 32:24Ryan Holiday?

  Did you read Unacceptable, the book about the college admissions crisis?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  I did.

• 32:29Ryan Holiday?

  I thought it was a fascinating book and I thought sort of captured, you know, captured the extreme end of where we are, but, but was decently representative as well, which is basically, parents are in a runaway sort of status competition with other parents. To me, the, the most illustrative line in the whole book is that super rich parent who goes like, "I just can't have my daughter go to University of Arizona," you know? Where, where it's sort of completely unmoored from, from, you know, the sort of the reality of, of the world, you know, it's, it's, it makes the kids miserable. And it's preposterously expensive. I mean, it struck me when we had our first

• 33:14Ryan Holiday?

  son that right now that the University of Texas throughout Texas has a program where you can prepay for your kid's education now. So you can buy four years of, you know, University of Texas education, which is a good, great education. But that that bet, you're essentially betting that college prices will go up faster today faster than 18 years of compounded market returns, which is an insane admission to be making, but probably not irrational.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Gosh, where to start with that? I mean, I'll start with the last part first, which was that a bunch of those prepaid tuition plans actually had to shut down several years ago, because several years before that, they made the wrong assumptions about just how much tuition would go up. And they were in effect overly generous and they had to shut it down before the state legislatures would have to rescue them. Because things had gone up at like literal double digit percentages, especially 2008, 2009, 2010, when everything hit the skids. And one of the easiest ways for states to cut their budgets was to just stop giving money to the universities and force the parents to, you know, pick up the

• 34:36Speaker 01

  slack. Right? And so there's a school of thought that says that, you know, those, you know, if that ever happens again, the people who have prepaid tuition.

• 34:47Ryan Holiday?

  They got a deal?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, could have get a deal. But, you know, but then you're locking yourself into a system that, you know, you may find problematic for whatever reason. And, you know, there are also people who think that the whole system is is going to come apart at the seams. I don't happen to be one of them. But, but those people are out there. So, you know, as far as status goes, right? I mean, hearing you talk about this makes me think about two things. First, one of my favorite illustrations that has ever appeared in the New York Times appeared in the Sunday opinion section years and years ago. And I'm not even sure I remember what the piece was about, but it, you know, it had something to do with college and the

• 35:30Speaker 01

  decision making around it. And it was just a picture of a sweatshirt. And all it said on the front. Was better than you. Better T H A N U. All one word. And I just thought, well, that that's just about perfect. Right?

• 35:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  And right. So it's like, it's so, you know, it's like, my kid can't go to the University of Arizona. So there's a whole chapter in my new book about elitism and snobbery and the way in which those emotions can affect and infect our decision making when it comes time to figure out what to do with our kids after they turn 18. And so, you know, I'm right there with you on on that one.

• 36:24Ryan Holiday?

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

• 36:30Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Plutarch has this great essay, you know, written thousands of years ago about, you know, how to raise kids and how to educate children. And he has this great line that I think, I think a lot of parents are sort of obsessed about college and, you know, I got to prepare my kid for the world. You know, if they, if they don't get into this school and then this school and then this school, then, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna fail. It, you know, he talks about how he's like, there's all these, these, he's like, we, we develop these like, you know, complicated estates and wills so that, you know, our kids don't fight each other after we die for our estate, you know, that they're, that, that, that, you know, there's enough money doled out for them over a long period of time, blah, blah.

• 37:14Ryan Holiday?

  And he's like, but all of which is to miss the thing that's, which is, you know, you're essentially trying to create a legal mechanism that will operate after your death, which is an extraordinarily difficult thing to successfully pull off. And he's saying, what's much more in your control. It's just raising fundamentally decent children who will not, you know, blow up their whole family to get a slightly larger piece of your estate. You know what I'm saying? And so I think a lot of parents focus so much on getting their kid into, into the right school and the right way and paying for it and all this. Instead of, instead of actually doing what we were talking about earlier, which is, what are the values that you're hoping they emerge from college with?

• 37:59Ryan Holiday?

  And let's focus on those values now as much as possible. And therefore, wherever they end up going to school, whatever path makes the most sense, it's likely that, that they'll be able to maintain those values and those values will be, you know, will, will, will compound there rather than the opposite, which is, you know, to me, what, what unacceptable is really about.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  You know, my hats go off to any parent who is so sure of themselves that they can get their kid to 18, 18 year olds being, you know, not fully formed adolescents, whose brains continue to develop in strange and unpredictable ways over, you know, up to, you know, at least another eight years. Right? I admire any parent who can get to that point with confidence that they are shopping not for the delivery and installation of good values, but only the reinforcement

• 39:02Speaker 01

  of values that have already been implanted without any fear that whatever it is that goes on at the college could somehow replace the installed values with new ones that are lousy. Right? So good on you if you can get there. But, you know, my-

• 39:23Ryan Holiday?

  But to me, that's, that's the job, right? I mean, here's, here's one of the things that struck me about unacceptable. And, and as, it's not the book, the, the crisis in, the scandal in general, which is that these parents seemed to be very convinced that-

• 39:40Ryan Holiday?

  Like, what is the value of college, right? It's what you learn, but it's also the connections. It's also the pedigree, right? It's the access, all these things. What I found so funny about that assumption was these were already rich, connected parents who, by nepotism alone, their kid was likely to be successful. So it seems like we often overstate what college could possibly do for a child. When really, I mean, I think 18 years with someone should give you a better shot at instilling values than four years of your kid at some school along with 30,000 other kids.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Sure, but I feel like you're being entirely too high minded about this. You, you are assuming too much good in the minds of these people, right? Because you are right that privilege and connectedness comes from being in a family that's from the 1%. It's just about all of those families, and unacceptable were. So the, the getting into college is, is not about the kids in that instance, because the kids are going to be okay. It's about the parents. The parents want the prestige. The parents want the Facebook sweatshirt reveal.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  The parents want the bumper sticker on the back of the car that says better than you. The parents want the gold star, right? So if you think that those parents were thinking about their kids, I, I think you maybe need to rethink it, because I don't think those parents were thinking about their kids at all. I think they were thinking about themselves. They didn't do a very good job of being honest with themselves about that ahead of time.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  But I, I think some of them eventually figured it out later in a prison jumpsuit, right? And so, you know, I always encourage people, like, not just when it comes to figuring out what to pay for college and what's worth paying for, but just in, you know, in, in any, like, avenue of life, and certainly, you know, when thinking about their, their finances, when I do it for the newspaper, you know, I always want them to ask two questions, right? What is the definition of success here? And how much is enough?

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Because everything kind of falls from that.

• 42:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  No, no. As long as you're honest with yourself, emotionally honest with yourself.

• 42:06Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I think you're right. And I think it ultimately wasn't about the college at all, which is sort of the point is, so it's like you have to, you have to ask yourself, not what am I, what am I saying to my kid, but what, what, what, what words are my actions speaking? And you're essentially telling your kid that, you know, a bunch of really bad lessons when you sort of get up, when you get caught up in this sort of status trap that college has become for a lot of parents. But I like your idea of going to, what is, what does success look like? That's something I, I talk to authors about when I work on their books. It's like, sort of what does, because, because what does success look like for you is a question that you have to really come up with a good answer

• 42:48Ryan Holiday?

  for, is as you know, success for a lot of authors tends to just be, well, what are other authors doing? I want that. And, and taking the time to go, here's what success looks like for me. Here's what, here's what a successful, you know, graduating student would like, here's what I want my son or daughter to look like four years from now. That requires you to actually sort of get personal and specific. And, and like, I thought it was fascinating, like, I think it was Felicity Huffman, uh, was, you know, ends up cheating on her daughter's SATs, but her daughter wants to go to Juilliard,

• 43:29Ryan Holiday?

  where you don't even need SATs. So she gets caught up in this whole competition that's actually completely irrelevant to her family. And so, but that's what happens when you don't really think about what you want and what your kids want and what success looks like. You just end up racing against other people who happen to be in totally different races than you.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, you know, I don't know if that framing would have worked for all of those families, because I'm not sure. Any of them, or at least many of them, were emotionally intelligent enough or emotionally honest enough to say to themselves, well, actually, what I want is to be patted on the head myself for having raised a kid who gets in, you know, to a relatively selective school. Um, you know, a really good college counselor or an excellent therapist might be able to pull that out of them. Um, but you know, it's a hard thing to, it's a hard thing to get to on your own, but you can't, you can't do it. You certainly are not going

• 44:34Speaker 01

  to succeed if you're not asking yourself the tough questions, right? And so, you know, I, I hope people who are doing it, um, you know, with a second parent are pushing one another on this question. I hope they're pushing their kids on the question. I hope that college counselors who, you know, guidance counselors who work in high school and independent counselors are pushing parents and, um, you know, I'm trying to be pushing myself, uh, you know, with my journalism and with the book because if you're not asking yourself the right questions, I mean, how do you expect to get to an answer that's going to be sensible and not put you a hundred thousand dollars in the hole?

• 45:14Ryan Holiday?

  That's the main thing is I think people don't like, taking the time to figure out what you want is, that's the whole, that's the whole game of life right there, right? What do you want? What makes you happy? Where are you trying to go? And it's funny that, you know, I think about this, like, so I ended up dropping out of college and, and that's, but it was in college, I really sort of honed in on being a writer, but there was nothing about the college experience. I don't think that, that I, was the reason I discovered that. I probably could have discovered it earlier, but no one was really forcing me to ask those questions or pressing me to ask those questions. So like, let's say I was doing it the exact same way. Again, I was going to college, I was going to spend two years there, but I knew at the end of two years I was going to leave or I had some

• 45:59Ryan Holiday?

  idea that that was a possibility. I would have done, I still would have gone to college. I just would have done college better, right? I wouldn't have, I would have, the way I did it, I did all my general ed stuff first and then, then the last two years I was going to do the more advanced classes, which basically means I just did six years of high school. Um, and so, uh, it, it seems so strange and unfair.

• 46:23Ryan Holiday?

  That we ask kids to like, we go, college is where you figure out who you want to be, what you want to do. And we say, by the way, it costs, you know, a thousand dollars a day while you're there. Like that, it's like an incredible, like, like, it is important to figure out what you want, and you need time and space to explore that. It, that just seems like the exact opposite of what you want to do as you're racking up the only form of unforgivable debt that we have in our modern society.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, what, what an enormous waste, right? To send the average 18 year old for higher education at, at 25 to $80,000 a year, all in without discounts. It makes absolutely no sense. And I figured this out as an undergrad, the same way that you did. You know, I managed to finish, right? But in the middle of college, I was there with a friend of mine who had taken two years off after high school, but before college. He showed up as a 20 year old freshman, and I was a junior who had just stopped stumbling around and had, and had sort of seized on, you know, on, on some decent ideas about what to do with himself. And, you know, he shot the lights out of that place as a freshman

• 47:37Speaker 01

  in a way that I never could have imagined. And we had this revelation, like, oh, right? Everybody should think about taking a year between high school and college, and they should think about it just as hard as they think about going to college. And if like, half the people who went to college at 18 instead went to college at 19, college would be so much more awesome. And those people, and people in general, would be so much more awesome. And, you know, it felt like at the time, you know, when the most expensive colleges, you know, back when we, when, when we wrote that book were, you know, $100,000, it already felt like it was insane that people were flushing $25,000 into the system each year, you know, for teenagers who had no idea what they wanted to do or who they actually were.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Now it is truly bonkers, right? University of Chicago, $80,000 a year is the cost of attendance all in. And, you know, that's a damn fine education, but I am not going to spend that on my. 18 year old and she's already figured it out. You know, she, she already knows not just that she's going to take a gap year, but what she thinks she wants to do. And, you know, I could not be prouder of her.

• 48:49Ryan Holiday?

  But you'd never do that to an adult. You'd never be like, oh, you don't like your job? Well, you should go figure out what you want to do instead and rack up $300,000 in debt in the process. That'll really set you up for accomplishment, whatever that thing is.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, thankfully, there aren't too many people racking up that much debt as a family, as an undergrad. I mean, it's technically possible. Like, here's the thing about it, right? You know, you would think that we, as a nation, would have some understanding that we need some constraints here, some, some forced or artificial deprivation. But the federal parent plus loan is literally unlimited. You can borrow up to the cost of attendance if you want. And so it is technically possible that somebody, that some parent or a set of parents could borrow $300,000 for their kids to go to college. There's no underwriting to speak of.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  If you've, you know, if you haven't declared bankruptcy in the last couple of years, you can do this and people are getting into trouble.

• 49:56Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think the New York Times had a story a couple of years ago about the, they, they tried to find the woman who had the most college debt in the United, like, they tried to find the person who had the most college debt in the United States and it was a woman and she had like $535,000 in college debt. It was like several years of, it was a whole, she wanted to be this and then she changed her mind and started over and then did this and then did a deferment and she made some mistakes in there, but you're just like, okay, you could, you could have a house and instead you have, you know, a piece of paper and a half.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Yep. And so, you know, if you're asking better questions on the front end, then hopefully you are deriving more value from the time you spend there. And then you come out with a bigger head of steam, but also a more kind of focused field of vision that allows you to succeed in whatever endeavor you pursue in a way where the debt, if it is necessary, is not going to be a burden that sinks you.

• 51:03Ryan Holiday?

  And I also think the pandemic has revealed to some people just what exactly it was that they were paying for. And it's sort of taken some of the, some of the, the marketing and the mystique out of it a little bit.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  I'm glad you brought that up. So, you know, I spent years on the road off and on, you know, knocking on people's doors and asking them a bunch of questions when I was working on the price you pay for college. And one of the questions I would ask is, what is college for? Right? It's another way of asking the, what is the definition of success question? And, you know, people hemmed and hawed and they looked at me funny. And I said, no, I just like, really want to know, like, what do you think you're paying for here? And so when you kind of back people into a corner, they, they say some version of three things. And you actually tick them off, off the top of your head 10 or 15 minutes ago in the conversation, people are paying for three things. They're paying for the education, right?

• 52:03Speaker 01

  They're paying to have their brain taken apart by an expert practitioner and rearranged into kind of a better, broader version of itself. Right? So that's number one. Number two, they're paying for kinship. Right? You want to find your people, the people who will hopefully, you know, stay with you and stick with you through life and show up at your wedding and carry your casket at your funeral and invest in your startup and, you know, introduce you to the person who will buy your first book at Random House or whatever, right? Like all of that. And you also want to find your mentors. You want to find the older adults who can sort of take you by the hand or Grab you by the scruff of the neck, as the case may be, and like, set you straight,

• 52:46Speaker 01

  you know, and be by your side as you go forward. So kinship. And then number three is the credential, right? And maybe the credential is just a way for someone from a low-income background or working-class background, maybe first in their family to go to college, to, you know, grasp the middle-class rung on the social class ladder and hang on for dear life, right? So you get your teaching certificate, you become an accountant, you get your nursing degree, you know, these are all professions of above-average recession-proofedness, right? So, you know, you get a hold of the middle class, you stay there, or you reach for the

• 53:26Speaker 01

  kind of bla- the brass-plated sheepskin that will maybe open doors for you that you or your family might not otherwise be able to. And those are the three things, right? And what we have found in the pandemic is that two of those things have just been like, yanked away, right? Colleges all shut down, May 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 2020. And by April 1st, people were already suing for refunds, for tuition refunds, because what had happened? Well, the education had been mostly yanked, right? It's hard to have your mind grown and your mind blown in a Zoom room when the professor may not even be able to see

• 54:11Speaker 01

  you and is like futzing with the technology. And you're certainly not getting the kinship and the mentorship with everybody scattered to the winds and shutting their homes. And so it became clear pretty quickly what it was that people actually did value about the experience, about the traditional residential undergraduate experience. And all that stuff was gone. So, you know, in some ways, this was clarifying for us about what is and is not worth paying for and what the experience is really supposed to be about.

• 54:41Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend, whatever you want. We'd love for you to have a copy. I know I love signed copies of some of my favorite books. If you love a signed copy of The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic, we have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.