Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan Holiday & Tim Ferriss Discuss "Alive Time vs Dead Time"

Ryan speaks with Tim Ferriss, the author, podcaster, and investor. Tim has written five New York Times best selling books, including The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. His podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, has over 400 million downloads on iTunes. He has been an early investor in over 50 companies, including Uber, Facebook, Shopify, and Alibaba. Tim writes a hugely popular blog and has spoken in front of millions of people, whether on TV or to organizations like Google, MIT, Microsoft, and Palantir.(4:57) - How Stoicism has helped them deal with COVID-19(21:30) - How do you process anger about the response?(32:08) - Fear - how do you defend against it? what do you tell someone who is overwhelmed by it?(41:23) - “Turning alive time into dead time”(51:16) - What can people do to help? This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. It tastes great and gets you the nutrients you need, whether you're working on the go, fueling an active lifestyle, or just maintaining your good health. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic and receive 20 free travel packs with your first purchase. This episode is also brought to you by Leesa, the online mattress company. Each of their mattresses is made to order and shipped for free right to your door. All mattresses come with a 100-night trial and a 10-year warranty, so you can feel confident in your investment in a good night’s sleep. And Leesa's hybrid mattress has been rated the best overall mattress by sites like Business Insider, Wirecutter, and Mattress Advisor. Daily Stoic listeners get 15% off their entire order with the code STOIC. Just visit Leesa.com and get your mattress today. 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 Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, this is Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So Tim Ferriss is someone I've known now for going on 13 years. I actually met him here in Austin before the Four Hour Work Week came out. I was just a kid, basically. I hadn't done anything. And he was nice enough to sort of connect with me and talk to me. And one of the things we shared, one of the things we sort of connected over was Seneca and Stoic philosophy. And we've become friends since. He's actually published the audiobook of The Obstacle is the Way, and He Goes the Enemy. And one of the things that I've always respected about Tim is that Tim is a doer, right? Tim makes things in the real world. So yes, he's into philosophy.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, he thinks about these things, about Stoic philosophy. But what he really does is apply the philosophy in the things that he does. And I think his response to COVID-19 has been a great example of that. That's why we're going to have him on the show today, why I had a bunch of questions about applying Stoicism to these uncertain times. But we've talked recently about, like, look, we're living through history, but this is a time to embody philosophy. This is a time to be heroic. And we talked about this in our interview. Tim was one of the first people to push for South by Southwest to close, to not happen in Austin in March of 2020.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  A lot of people were making fun of him at the time. They thought he was overreacting. But if you look at the number of cases in Austin versus the cases in New Orleans, which went ahead with Mardi Gras, you know, there's a real argument to be made that Tim saved many thousands of lives and potentially, you know, reduced hundreds of thousands of people from being exposed. He contributed to preventing an event with 400,000 people swooping in on this town and having, you know, what, what kind of impact. But even just more personally, like, you know, Tim reached out to me. He pushed me to, to pull my kids out of school. He pushed me to stock up on stuff. Tim and I happened to share the same assistant and I could hear from her what, what Tim was doing. And so Tim had a big impact on, on me taking this seriously,

• 3:07Ryan Holiday?

  on keeping the people that I love safe. He had a real impact. And to me, that's what philosophy is about. It's epicurus, that vain is the word of the philosopher, which does not heal the suffering of man. Well, Tim, in some of the things we're talking about, in applying them, actually really did have an impact on alleviating the suffering for me and for other people, which was really great. And so we're going to talk about that. Can't think of anyone better to talk about philosophy with than Tim Ferriss. You can read his awesome books, Tools of Titans, Tribes of Mentors, For Our Work Week, For Our Body. I've been lucky enough to contribute and work on the marketing for some of those books. And I was one of the early guests on Tim Ferriss's podcast, which is also amazing, enormous force in the world. So check it out. Really hope you

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  like this interview and stay safe out there and listen to Tim. He knows what he's talking about.

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

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

• 4:09Speaker 01

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

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

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

• 4:43Speaker 01

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

• 5:28Speaker 01

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

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Marcus Aurelius and so on, as ideals that I, on some level, strive to emulate. And I think the word ideal is important because it is very easy to beat yourself up for not being stoic or resilient or calm enough, which in and of itself is very unstoic. So it can turn into this spiral of self-loathing related to not being, one could say stoic enough, or simply calm enough. And so the first is to really recognize that these are ideals that I'm striving for,

• 6:14Speaker 01

  but that they are not a pass fail hurdle. Sure. In that respect. The second is I've been doing a lot of rehearsal. So premeditatio molorum, rehearsing of the worst case scenarios.

• 6:33Speaker 01

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

• 7:14Speaker 01

  I don't know, let's call it 70% in value in certain cases. And I had a good line of sight into coronavirus and its growth quite early on and began writing about it publicly in, I want to say second week of February, but had been tracking it prior to that. So I was able to sell a portion of my stock. Let's just call it February 2021, whichever was the closest weekday, trading day. And then I decided to hold the rest. Now, that could prove to be a terrible, terrible, terrible decision, right? This could be the worst financial decision of my life, could be.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  But after lots and lots and lots of discussion and lots of number crunching, lots of thinking about it, I decided to, to hold on with the belief that, and in this case, I'm referring to Uber. That I was an early advisor to. So it represents a disproportionately high percentage of my net worth. Now, this video will be trapped in the amber. So people will go back and say, what a fucking idiot. If it turns out poorly, but the decision making process I felt was reasonable. I felt like it was defensible. Now, at the time, the stock was trading around $40 price per share. And the, well, I was talking to this much more experienced investor and he said, if you're going to hold this,

• 8:44Speaker 01

  you need to commit to yourself to hold for at least five years. And you should expect that the stock will go down to 20 or $15. Now, at the time, it was about 40. And this seemed not necessarily inconceivable, but probably far off in the distance.

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  And he said, when it hits 20 and 15, you are going to want to sell more than you do now. And you need to prepare for that. And that's what I did. So I really mentally committed to holding

• 9:18Speaker 01

  for an extended period of time. I prepared myself for $15 a share. Little did I know that something like two weeks later, two and a half weeks later, would actually hit $14 a share or close to it. And that is the, I have had many struggles throughout this coronavirus experience. And considering the ramifications, not just for me, but for my family, I have family members in the service industries. For instance, for the economy, for people who are far less fortunate. And I've, I've, I've struggled a lot in certain areas, but the areas where I have not struggled are the places where I have rehearsed to the extent possible, what might happen.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  So I think that has been one of the most powerful stoic practices that I've been using in the last certainly two months.

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

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

• 10:57Ryan Holiday?

  oh, life goes on? Like I'm, I'm talking to you from my office and I, my office was built in 1880, I think. So like this office got through, you know, the Spanish flu, the first world war, the second world war, you know, the Cold War. And you know what I mean? I think like part of one of the things I think the Stoics would ask us to do is like zoom way out and sort of be reminded that like, hey, as bad as it is, like history does go on. There's no guarantee you and I will be a part of that history, but like, you know what I mean? Like we'll either get through it or we won't. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm curious about the, the stock market thing, cause that's something I was gonna ask you.

• 11:39Ryan Holiday?

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

• 12:23Ryan Holiday?

  Struggling with is like regret, you know what I mean?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 12:27Ryan Holiday?

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

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's the nature of all decisions, right? I mean, as I understand the etymology, the word to decide, a decision is like an incision. It is a cutting away. So, once you have cut away, now that could be some fake attributed to Mark Twain

• 12:58Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Abe Lincoln type quote, maybe Oscar Wilde for on the internet. But nonetheless, that's, that's what I've, I've been told before. So, all of our decisions are irreversible. And at least temporally speaking, this is something that I didn't grapple with until reasonably far after the COVID-19 and coronavirus came on to the main stage, so to speak. So, when I was campaigning in part for the cancellation of South by Southwest, which brings 400,000 plus people to Austin. And it was be, I was just attacked by almost all sides and viewed as an alarmist,

• 13:45Speaker 01

  as fill in the blank. I did not have trouble with that because I felt like the data were on my side. But I was so focused, and I think rightly so, on my household, on my family, on my girlfriend and her family, and ensuring that everyone were prepared. That I did not, I really wasn't looking at, say, investment as, as an example. So, part of the reason I'm not beating myself up is that I, at the time at least, in retrospect, I was beating myself up for a while. Then I realized, well, do I even have the toolkit to have taken advantage of that effectively?

• 14:24Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  And by take advantage of that, one might be talking about shorting the market in some fashion. Well, it turns out it's very easy to get your face ripped off trying to short the market. And it's very, very easy to lose that game, or at least those bets. And so, I have, I do have friends who are Career investors who have the toolkit to take advantage of something like this, I gave them a heads up that I gave them a preview of what was coming early. So let's call it late January or early February. And they missed those opportunities and they are beating themselves up because they do have the toolkit and the experience and yet they didn't take the actions.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Whereas you have, say, some people who did, like Bill Ackman at Pershing, who, I don't know, made $2.6 billion from short positions or something like that. Yeah. Not bad. And I feel as though my perspective on that specifically has been honed, if I could use such a dignified word, through a lot of the startup investing I've done in the sense that it doesn't matter how many opportunities you miss. It matters how many opportunities you take advantage of. Sure. Does that make sense? Totally. Just like, if you're putting together a book or a podcast or a fill in the blank, it doesn't matter how many people don't get it.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  It matters how many people get it. And, and by that, I mean, if you are really waiting for the fat pitches, as Warren Buffett would say, not necessarily with his style of investing, but if you're, if you understand where your core competencies are and can focus on the most appealing opportunities, you can miss a lot of opportunities and net, net still do very, very well. So I try to keep that in mind. And as you said a little bit earlier, to zoom out and not look at this as a, an anomaly of a few weeks. So it could be, it could be that a year from now, we look back

• 16:38Speaker 01

  and the lowest low was in fact, whenever it was. I can't remember when the lowest low was, March 12th or whatever it was.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  That might be off, but some, early March, something like that, 2020.

• 16:54Speaker 01

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

• 17:35Speaker 01

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

• 18:14Speaker 01

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

• 18:56Speaker 01

  advantage of? Where do I have unique domain expertise or an informational advantage? Right? So maybe that's, I'm making this up, right? But maybe that is real distressed real estate in Austin, let's say, since I'm here, right? Maybe that is.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Any number of other things, but it's probably not going to be figuring out whether Google or Berkshire Hathaway is going to move one direction or another and how much they're going to move. That is being a sucker at the poker table, I think. So that's maybe a very long-winded way of saying it, but my belief is there are times when I make very fast, good decisions, but I almost never make good rushed decisions. So if I feel rushed to make a decision because, oh, my God, it might go up, it might go this, it might go this, it might do that, the likelihood of me making a bad decision is very high.

• 19:54Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 19:55Speaker 01

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

• 20:15Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I think for me, it's, it's, it's less like opportunities I didn't take advantage of and steps that I should have taken to protect myself.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 20:25Ryan Holiday?

  And so that connects to another emotion. I think a lot of people are feeling that I'd be curious your sort of stoic take on it. Given like the South by Southwest example is a great one. So you and a handful of other people campaigned, they shut down South by Southwest early. Who knows how much impact that had, probably a significant amount because it was so early. And then government officials in Texas and all over the country, basically, and this goes back to when it was first coming out of China, sort of sat on that time. It's not like we used that time and built a bunch of ventilators and, you know, so, so how, how are you processing, or maybe you don't have any, but for someone who has a lot of anger

• 21:06Ryan Holiday?

  about how this went, or is feeling anger, how do you suggest sort of, what do you think the Stoics say about processing that anger? Because I do know that the Stoics did not tend to see anger as a productive or healthy emotion.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  I'd be curious to hear your take on that. So maybe I'll turn it around. I my default gear for decades was anger. Yes. But right now, my focus is related to my locus of control. Yeah. In the sense that my sort of sphere of control has been constrained down to the family effectively. Sure. And my closest friends and ensuring to the extent possible, those people are safe and prepared. And financially capable to to cover their expenses and so on.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  I am more active, as you know, on the national level as well, but I suppose, I mean, and this is maybe cliched, but it's I would think of the Serenity Prayer. And you probably have the full text somewhere, but you know, in essence, the sort of strength to act on the things that you can act upon. And the wisdom to know that which you cannot act upon or influence. And I don't think that the time bought by canceling South by Southwest was used optimally. Yeah. But just in having that time and delay, there was a huge benefit.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Right. So it wasn't used optimally, but I I'm satisfied with that outcome. Because it has allowed us to see case studies like New York City that then spur local and state governments to do more so that they do not become the next case study. And also, in retrospect, looking at, for instance, Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I was just gonna say that. Spring break in Miami and Florida. I don't think those are uncorrelated to those two locations, among a handful of others, becoming the next hotspot.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  So I'm very confident in the benefits of South by being delayed. Anger, let me think about anger for a second because I am a somewhat, I'm a connoisseur. You know, I'm like a.

• 23:33Ryan Holiday?

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

• 24:15Ryan Holiday?

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

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. And what I've also been trying to do, and this, this actually came out of an interview I did some time ago with Bozema St. John, who is an incredible woman. And she, her, one sort of philosophical tenet of hers, as she underscored, was applauding what you want more of, not just berating what you want less of. And I think the internet has.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Enabled a lot of things, including the dominance of the noise that is just bitching and moaning without any clear proposal for solutions. So I have been spending the majority of my time reinforcing particularly politicians.

• 25:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Who are in the game. Everyone's playing a game.

• 25:58Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 25:58Speaker 01

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

• 26:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  If they are better late than never decisions. And that's coming from someone who, I mean, has had a lifetime of anger. So I do think the, certainly the Stoic philosophies and philosophers and writing has had a tremendous impact on my intellectual understanding of why anger can be counterproductive.

• 27:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  But it's really been getting on the playing field and trying to get shit done that has reinforced how imperative it is from a practical perspective. It's one thing to understand logically why anger is counterproductive.

• 27:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  And it's, it's quite another to not just keep your anger in check, but to sort of sublimate it into a different area that you can strengthen. And I'm not the paragon of this. I still get pissed off, but.

• 27:40Ryan Holiday?

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

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. You're allowed to feel angry. Look, I get pissed off. And it's not so much a question of suppressing anger. It's, it's more of a question of, I think, taking notice of what angers you so that over time.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Fewer things hopefully anger you. And one thing that's been very helpful to me also, and this is, well, I do remember one quote from Krista Tippett, who has a podcast called On Being, which I believe, I'm going to paraphrase it, but that anger is fear shown publicly. And so I try to, at least as an exercise, if I'm really angry, to journal or sit and just think about for a moment, if this were traceable to a fear, what would the fear be?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Right? So that's presupposing that it's accurate for the sake of a thought exercise.

• 28:47Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 28:48Speaker 01

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

• 29:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  This is da, da, da, da. And I get on my high horse. What was that?

• 29:21Ryan Holiday?

  That phrase, how dare they, you know?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get.

• 29:24Ryan Holiday?

  How could you do this?

• 29:25Speaker 01

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

• 29:56Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 29:57Speaker 01

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

• 30:04Ryan Holiday?

  I'm curious about fear because obviously you have your fear setting stuff, which you talk about in your TED Talk, which is probably very timely for people right now. But you know, having sort of two young kids, you get this sort of pit in your stomach. And I'd be curious, well, there are two things. One, I'd be curious what you say to someone who is afraid. And then the other thing, which maybe you want to riff on, I was trying to think of, so I was born in 87. So I was like, what scary things did my parents go through with kids? Which is actually really helpful. So it's like, you know, Black Monday, there was obviously 9/11, there's the tech bubble bursting, there's the financial crisis, there's the end of the Cold War.

• 30:46Ryan Holiday?

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

• 30:59Speaker 01

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

• 31:44Speaker 01

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

• 32:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  That causes, has caused me quite a bit of fear and anxiety. And there's very little I can do, and I can do a lot. And I have very good contacts, and I have very good contacts in New York itself. And to an almost complete extent, there's next to nothing I can do if they get sick.

• 32:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  And that has produced a sense of...

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Feeling helpless or hopeless or unable to help that I'm very unaccustomed to. Yeah. And what I've been telling myself and might be helpful to others is number one, it's okay to feel afraid. Like that doesn't make you flawed. That means that your sort of evolutionary machinery is intact and there's a lot of value to that. Right? And so I would say that you're not alone, you're not flawed. Millions of people, tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions are feeling the same thing right now.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And there are reasons to be afraid. It doesn't mean there's, it does not mean there's nothing you can do. You always have options, right? You always have options. That's the other thing I would say, and this is what I'm saying to myself. It's like you always have options. You may just not like those options. Right, right. Sure. Right? So for instance, if you look at the plight of some workers right now who have gone from kind of getting laid off from one job to say, delivering groceries for fill in the blank app or company and want more personal protective equipment in order to do that job.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  It's a very, very difficult situation to be in because number one, no matter how much those companies would love to give you personal protective equipment, right now, healthcare workers don't even have enough PPE, personal protective equipment. So you have then, you, you might be inclined in such a position to say, I have no choice. You do have choices, they just may be very unattractive, right? So you could stop working for a period of time. You could move in with your parents, you could ask a friend for a loan. You could sell some of the belongings you have that you have great sentimental attachment to, or maybe your only car, or whatever it might be. I'm not saying these are all viable, I'm just brainstorming. Or that they're fair.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Or that they're fair. Yeah, you have to. I mean, for me, I just take fair out of the equation. I think I don't think fair, except perhaps under the law, as equal treatment of citizens. I don't think fair is a very, I don't think it's an enabling concept.

• 34:51Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:52Ryan Holiday?

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

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Right. So if I were trying to train a group of 1,000 people to be a really effective, like autonomous army, like benevolent army for handling, like whether, not just weathering, but benefiting from the crisis.

• 35:28Speaker 01

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

• 35:35Ryan Holiday?

  Put on an operating system.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  There are certain concepts and questions I would remove. I think that unfair is, as true as it may be, subjectively or even objectively, it is a disabling word that even if you are a victim, puts you into the passenger seat of life where you feel like you do not have options, nor should you take actions. And that is paralyzing, and it's just going to compound your fear. So I would remove that. And then there are questions, right? And I alluded to this a second ago, and I were probably straying from the Stoics, but I feel

• 36:18Speaker 01

  like I've been so infused, I don't know if you've heard of any of these large trees in the Pacific Northwest that have like 30% salmon DNA from salmon being dropped off bears and so on. They become these hybrids. I'd feel that's maybe too long a story to explain now, but I believe the Radiolab has a good episode on this, but the Wood Wide Web, if you want to look it up, W O O D. But the point of that extremely confusing sidebar is that I feel like Stoicism, from having read it and ingested it and ruminated on it and reread it and so on over the years, has kind of infused my thinking.

• 37:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 01

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

• 37:15Ryan Holiday?

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

• 37:27Speaker 01

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

• 38:02Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 38:03Speaker 01

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

• 38:22Ryan Holiday?

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

• 38:25Speaker 01

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

• 38:59Ryan Holiday?

  No, those are the stakes.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Those are the stakes, right? I mean, there are 85 refrigerated, double wide trailers that were just brought into New York yesterday as temporary mortuaries, right? I mean, this is real. And I have relatives in a number of hotspots. So these, these are, these are stakes.

• 39:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Now, what I'm trying to ask, since I have checked off, at least for the time being.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  The lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yeah. And not, and not everyone is in a position to do that. Nonetheless, I do think this question is really worth asking. And I owe my girlfriend credit also for reinforcing this because she's very good at this. And that is, how can you make the next three to six months? Some of the most enjoyable or productive of your life? Or, or if that's too much pressure, right? You can phrase it different ways, you know? How can you make the next three to six months? Something you look back upon as a sacred time that you really treasure? Not just survive, right?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And it was kind of like, and look, I'm not whatever. I'll use it, but I heard a Nelson Mandela story once from Tony Robbins, actually, who asked, he asked Nelson Mandela during his time in prison, how did you survive? Something along those lines. And he said, he said, oh, I wasn't surviving. I was preparing. And I think that that type of question, not how I can survive. How you can survive? In a sense, is sort of like extreme frugality. And I've, I've had my cup of coffee, so I'm off to the races. But it's kind of like extreme frugality in the sense that if you're trying to find financial

• 40:51Speaker 01

  freedom through one tool, and that is extreme frugality, you have a finite ceiling to that. Yeah. Right? Like you make, let's just call it for simplicity, a thousand dollars. I'm making this up, thousand dollars a week. And you can cut from that. You may make some Faustian bargains and got things that materially detract from your quality of life. But nonetheless, the most that you could possibly subtract is $52,000 a year. Yeah. Right? This is ignoring taxes and everything. Whereas if you're building a business, you have, or you have income generation and you're also focused on that, you have a much broader scope of options. Sure.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  And similarly, if you ask like, how can I survive? Like survive is a binary pass fail. Yeah. And I feel like that places a ceiling on the options that.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Are visible to you, if that makes any sense.

• 41:51Ryan Holiday?

  No, totally.

• 41:52Speaker 01

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

• 42:36Speaker 01

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

• 42:52Ryan Holiday?

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

• 43:33Ryan Holiday?

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

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, if, if afraid is being paralyzed, right? So for instance, this could be apocryphal, but I believe based on the sources I had at the time, I have no idea what they are, that this is true. So Dean Martin, now that name may not mean much to a lot of people, but in his day, Dean Martin was the consummate entertainer, sort of top tier, top five most recognizable names in the United States, probably.

• 44:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  And he used to vomit. He would get so nervous and one could say afraid that he would vomit before every performance. Mike Tyson, same story. And the trainer who really made Mike Tyson, Mike Tyson, Customato, you can find video or at least audio of Customato saying this. He would say, "The hero and the coward feel the same thing. They feel the fear. It's what the hero does that makes him different." And Tyson was also terrified. I mean, terrified may not be the right word, but fearful before he got into the ring, one of the most dominant boxers of all time.

• 45:22Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  And if they are, if they can't get a immunity bracelet for fear, it's unreasonable to expect yourself to. And I would also say, if this is helpful to anybody, it's very specific to the United States, but the United States, at this point in time, we're recording this April 1st. Happy April Fool's Day. And New York City is the Hubei of the United States. In fact, it's the global Hubei right now, right? New York will have more cases. This is going to continue. The United States is going to be the largest hotspot.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Unless things change dramatically in Russia, it's probably going to be the largest hotspot in the world for some time to come. And prior to Pearl Harbor, well, the strategic belief on the part of the Japanese was that by destroying the Pacific Fleet, the morale and capabilities of the US would be completely Sure. shut down or paralyzed for a period of time. What instead happened when, you know, the bear got stabbed in the eye with a stick, meaning the US, is that within a very short period of time, that would have previously been inconceivable, suddenly we were producing more tanks than civilians in all of Japan. I know that's an exaggeration, but the Yeah, yeah.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  The capacity of the United States, when it is forced into a corner, or feels as though it's been forced into a corner through extreme states of duress and crisis. It's not something you want to bet against. Are truly staggering, right? And we've fucked this up so many ways. It's really hard to overstate how badly we've screwed this up in terms of supply chain management and so on. But nonetheless, I think, give it six months, things are going to look very, very different. And Yeah. Like it or not, the global economy is dependent on the US in large measure. Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Right? So not that it's too big, not that it's too big to fail. Every empire comes to its close. Yeah. But, but at this point in time, it is in everyone's best interest, the United States not collapse. Almost everyone's best interest. Yeah. So Right.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  You know, Russia has gas to sell, China has products to export, and so on and so forth, right? And so, so I am, I'm very confident that crisis will overcome incompetence, if that makes any sense. Yeah, sure.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  And I'm very confident that things will get worse. The economy is going to get sort of kicked in the nuts for a while. This is not going to be a one quarter affair at all. And the US is going to have to take very extreme, what might be seen as extreme measures to have any chance of survival economically speaking. So that gives me, that gives me a degree of optimism, if that makes sense.

• 48:41Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  That gives me a degree of optimism. Maybe it will prove unfounded. I hope that's not the case. But that also has, the example of Pearl Harbor, and it's not the perfect example. It's just a very easily grasped visual example, I think, shows, and there are many examples of this, what the US can do in times of crisis. So I'm, that gives me some degree of optimism as well.

• 49:11Ryan Holiday?

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

• 49:52Ryan Holiday?

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

• 50:33Ryan Holiday?

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

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for the question. That's a good question. I want to I want to just make an observation first, and that is, you basically have the trifecta of books for understanding and handling this entire chapter of our history right behind your head. For those people who aren't watching the video, you have, and I'll read from the bottom up. You've got The Black Swan. You have, is it the 48 Laws? I can't read.

• 51:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, 48 Laws.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  48 Laws of Power and then Mastery. So The Black Swan by.

• 51:43Ryan Holiday?

  And then, and then I have Meditations right here.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  And then Meditations.

• 51:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 51:49Speaker 01

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

• 51:59Ryan Holiday?

  Anti fragile.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Anti fragile, but The Black Swan or Fooled by Randomness specifically, I think, helped to explain what we are contending with and why it is so difficult for humans to grasp what is happening and properly prepare for it. So I think that is, that is worth reading. Then if you want to understand how seemingly confusingly and irrationally different leaders are behaving and how polarity is affecting our response to this in the United States and elsewhere, not just here. You look at Brazil, it's the same story. Then the 48 Laws of Power do a great job of explaining that. And then if you take mastery

• 52:42Speaker 01

  and the 48 Laws of Power combined, those can act as a possible roadmap for the abilities you want to develop in this sacred pause that is being provided to you, not inflicted upon you necessarily. I understand there are some very serious costs, but that's just a way that you could plausibly or try to frame it if you want to feel enabled, not disabled. Those are three fantastic books for the quiver. I'm just going to say that first. As far as Stoic/Civic duty, and like you said, many of these Stoics per se, if we just put aside the best known names, if we put aside Marcus Aurelius, we put aside

• 53:23Speaker 01

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

• 54:07Speaker 01

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

• 54:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  And that that is what allows the epicureanism. So it really is the precursor and necessary antecedent to those things. As far as helping, how can you help? There are two different levels of answers. The first would be my my most common recommendation, and that is, don't try to save the world, help the people around you.

• 55:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  And think of if you are fortunate enough to be in a stable financial position, even if you are suffering financial hardship, but you have time, think of how you could reach out to people and offer your support. That support could be a weekly Zoom or Skype chat with a handful of friends who are all sharing difficulties. It could be reaching out to your barber. I'm bald, so I don't have a barber, but reaching out to your barber or your local coffee shop owner or fill in the blank, someone to offer to help in some fashion, because you know they're also suffering from financial hardship. That could be paying

• 56:00Speaker 01

  them some amount of money if you have the financial means.

• 56:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, buy a big gift card and then cash it. Like buy buy six months of haircuts in advance.

• 56:09Speaker 01

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

• 56:57Speaker 01

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

• 57:41Speaker 01

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

• 58:26Ryan Holiday?

  It's called the frontline responders fund.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 58:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 01

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

• 59:10Speaker 01

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

• 59:50Ryan Holiday?

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

• 59:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, or both. So those would be a few that come to mind. And, you know, last but not least, I would say one way you can help is commit to be constructive and consider experimenting. And I'm considering doing this myself because I think right now it could be particularly valuable. Something like the 21 Day No Complaint Experiment that, that Will Bowen, B-O-W-E-N, wrote about long ago in, I believe it was his first book. But this, if you just search 21 Day No Complaint Experiment, it'll come right up.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  I do feel like complaining is easy. It's in vogue. It's seductive. It is reinforced socially and it, for me at least, is utterly counterproductive. I think that complaining and anger are similar in the sense, and I can't recall the attribution for this, but that the If there's an expression as it relates to anger that a vessel that holds acid is damaged more than anything it pours acid upon. And if you are the vessel for anger or complaining, I think it does more damage to you than that which you point it at.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  And for that reason, if you want to improve or maintain or improve your health, your well-being, and your ability to function as a contributor in society, I think a no complaint experiment goes a long way. And by the way, if you address complaining, which is easier to identify and measure sometimes than anger, there is a very significant carryover effect into decreasing anger. Very, very large carryover effect. So those would be a few things that come to mind as possible actions people could take.

• 1:02:08Ryan Holiday?

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

• 1:02:53Ryan Holiday?

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

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. I think this is a

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  You know, an unfortunate and special set of circumstances that can really foster a sense of community where community has largely broken down.

• 1:03:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:03:25Ryan Holiday?

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

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, I remember when I moved from San Francisco to Austin and my first neighbors approached me and like knocked on my door and I felt like in a karate stance.

• 1:03:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Because it was so shocking to me, since that never happened in San Francisco.

• 1:03:40Ryan Holiday?

  And Right.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  I've had more contact at a distance with

• 1:03:45Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:28Ryan Holiday?

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

• 1:05:12Ryan Holiday?

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

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:58Ryan Holiday?

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

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:25Ryan Holiday?

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

• 1:07:10Ryan Holiday?

  what we should all be focused on.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

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