Jon Ronson on Empathy, Culture Wars, and Finding Community

Ryan talks to author and filmmaker Jon Ronson about how to balance empathy and compassion with finding the truth, the importance of policing your side of the street to fight radicalization, the lack of connection in modern culture, and more. Jon Ronson is an award-winning writer and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of many bestselling books, including So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, The Psychopath Test, and The Men Who Stare at Goats. His latest work is a Radio 4 and BBC Sounds podcast series entitled, Things Fell Apart, which covers unexpected human stories from the history of culture wars. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn, Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Jon Ronson: Homepage, Instagram, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  I just, I love John Rothstein's work. I've read a ton of his books, and I've recommended his books to a ton of people. He's just, as I talk about in today's interview, he's just got a delightful tone and style and voice, and he manages to pick the most interesting subjects and make them accessible and eye-opening. His book Them: Adventures with Extremists is unfortunately quite timely as he studies conspiracy theorists and why they act the way they do. His book The Men Who Stare at Goats was turned into a delightful movie with George Clooney.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  His book The Psychopath Test, also very, very good. But of course, I think his best and most relevant book, which is one I also carry here at the Painted Porch, is So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which looks at our online culture, why we react the way we do to people, why we gather in mobs, back to the Stoics times and to the online times. Why we shame, why we bully, why we struggle so much with forgiveness and empathy, and most of all, grace.

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  John just does an incredible job in this book. I know Billy Bush, who I've had on the podcast, read it. A number of people I know who have been sort of in the midst of these massive internet sensations turned to this book. I tend to find people will read my first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, and then So You've Been Publicly Shamed. I think they come at a similar problem from very different perspectives. But I remember when I read So You've Been Publicly Shamed, I thought, fuck, that is a good book. I wish I had written it. But I don't think I could have, or anyone could have, written it as delightfully and thoughtfully as Jon Ronson did. And I was very excited to have him on the podcast. He writes in many different publications, including The Guardian.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  He's made several BBC television documentaries. And he's the host of a new podcast, Things Fell Apart, which looks at the conflicts of the culture war with that same lens. So he doesn't get bogged down in who's right and who's wrong, what it means. He's focusing on how this issue came to be what it is, and the mistakes that were made, and the generalizations that were made, and the lack of sympathy that was made, and the nuance that was missed. And I'm just so excited about this podcast. And I hope it can do for these interminable, destructive culture wars we are in, what Jon managed to do for the subject of online shaming, which I think we've gotten a tad bit better about.

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  I was really excited to bring this interview. You can go to jonronson.com. You can follow him on Instagram, @jonronson. That's Jon with no H. You can follow him @jonronson on Twitter. If you haven't read So You've Been Publicly Shamed, you should. And you can pick it up at The Painted Porch, thepaintedporch.com, anywhere books are sold. I don't know if he reads the audiobook. I hope he does, because he has a delightful accent. And check it out in any and all formats and enjoy this interview with Jon Ronson.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  I think what I've always been struck by in your books, and I thought this before you wrote So You've Been Public Ashamed, although it was the penultimate example of this, I feel like in all your writing, the one theme that runs through it is you manage to find a remarkable amount of empathy, or compassion, or in some cases even understanding for people, either people that have screwed up, people who are batshit crazy, or somewhere in between. Where does that come from in you?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Getting older and feeling more fragile and vulnerable myself. And the more of a battering life gives you, the more you feel empathetic to other people.

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  In my earlier... I was just reading Conspiracy, which I like a lot. I think you wrote a great book. But it's interesting, you talk a lot about manipulation. And the older I get, the more... I was never into manipulation at all. I've always been like, I've always found it something to avoid. But the older I get, the more I feel that way. And so if you're approaching somebody as a writer, you're wanting to tell their story, the opposite of manipulation, the opposite of tricking people into somehow becoming

• 5:43Speaker 01

  an ingredient in your preconceived agenda, is curiosity and empathy. And I just found over the years that the more I leaned into that aspect of things, just the better it was in every way.

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, in that book, I talk about the famous Janet Malcolm view of journalism, that it's this inherently exploitative or vicious thing, because you're taking someone's life, and then you're turning it into material for what you do. And it's like in the way that a woodworker cuts down a tree and uses that tree to make something that benefits them at the expense of the tree. There is an element to that in journalism and writing. And I think internet journalism compounds it. But yeah, there's a thoughtfulness and...

• 6:36Ryan Holiday?

  It's not even unbi- it's like, I think being objective would be one thing, and you're kind of letting the people hang themselves. But even in your, your stuff on, on pornography, you really just try, I feel like you really just tried to understand who these people were and why what they were doing or who they were made sense to them.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just try and, try and see the world through other people's eyes. Just try and get to the, to the heart of people. Which, yeah, doesn't mean that I'm, I'm grudgesless. You know, I have, I have beliefs. I, I fall somewhere on the ideological, on the political spectrum. But I, I just feel, well, as Janet Malcolm said, I can't remember the exact quote, but it was something like, you know, every journalist knows deep down that they're a con artist.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  And I think that really has to weigh heavily on us all. Because we're in a, you know, we have, we have, we have power when we're telling people's stories. So, so, yeah, there are also, it's just such a great relief to tell stories where you want to be empathetic. Which I'll say, doesn't mean that I'm, that I'm uncritical or, or I've lost my rationality or reason. I think you, you take all of, you bring all of those things to, to the thing. If somebody is doing something that hurts other people, then you have to point that out and you have to let them guess that and, and not give them an easy ride over it.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  But at the same time, you want to try and understand what's going on inside people's heads.

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I, I was reading something about Joan Didion and she, and I remember reading this in one of her essays, but she was talking about how because she was little and pretty and unassuming, you know, she would get in the room with people, particularly big, powerful men, who would just sort of take her for granted. And, and she was like, I'm not your friend, you know, like, I'm not here. She's like, I'm here for me, and if destroying you is good for my story, I'll do it. And, but I, yeah, I just feel like in your stuff, like, you're, it's almost the opposite of that.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and I love Joan Didion. It's not like, you know, I'm, but yeah, I just think. There aren't that many people, I guess, approaching it the way that I'm approaching it. So for instance, I just made this series, Things Fell Apart, which is about the history of the culture wars. And the very first thing I thought when I decided to do that was I want to make a show about the culture wars that doesn't become a part of the culture wars. And how do you do that? How is that possible? And the answer is you tell human stories. And humans are nuanced and complicated and good people do stupid things and vice versa. And if you're honing in on a person and you're telling just a human story,

• 9:31Speaker 01

  then all the ideology can kind of take a backseat. And you can start thinking about the culture wars and how we got here in a different way, through curiosity and humor rather than getting very upset.

• 9:49Ryan Holiday?

  Well, how does one find the balance then? Because this is something I've experienced, I think you as well. But in this line of work, and then if, depending on what you write about, you can find yourself in the room with people who have either done bad things or been accused of doing bad things. And then, you know, you sit down with them, you talk to them, they tell you their story. It feels very believable. They feel like human beings, as you're saying. Like, something hit me a while ago. This is, again, I think, a weird confluence of the things I've written about and my public relations background. I realized that I've probably been in the room with, like, at least a dozen different people who've been like me-toed on like a national level, right?

• 10:34Ryan Holiday?

  And every single one of them

• 10:40Ryan Holiday?

  told me a convincing story about how they were totally and completely innocent, right? And at an individual basis, you know, again, if you're trying to be compassionate, empathetic, see someone as a human, that, like, if you're looking at it a sample size of one, it makes sense. And then I was like, they can't all be innocent, right? So how do you balance empathy and compassion and not being sold a bill of goods?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Right. You know, in my case, the answer is you keep going. My my relation, other than in particular circumstances, normally with my stories, they unfold, they twist and turn. And so if I'm if I'm with, I'm I'm rarely with someone for an hour and I believe what they say and just move on with the story. Instead, maybe they'll say something that triggers me to think, okay, I'll go off and and explore over there or have an adventure over there. So they're still in my life, they're still in the backgrounds. And I'm going off another adventure. And then maybe six months down the line, I go back to the person and say, I've just learned this thing. And then,

• 11:50Speaker 01

  so you know, you you try and so what you're doing is is balancing empathy and curiosity with with investigative journalism. The two things go hand in hand. It's, I think, a lot harder than to be to be duped.

• 12:05Ryan Holiday?

  Trust but verify.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And and be curious, keep going. Like, if they say something, it always surprises people when I say that I never have a I never ask, I never have a list of questions in front of me.

• 12:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Um, but it's because, you know, you have to listen. And then if you haven't got a list of questions in front of you, then you're much more likely to pick up on something that that person says in the moment that might entirely change your narrative. It might take you 180 degrees. Whereas if you've got a list of questions in front of you, then you're not really listening to to what the person's saying because you've got a safety net.

• 12:40Ryan Holiday?

  Isn't that the tricky thing, though? Like, it would it would almost be easier if bad people were like, yeah, I'm a piece of shit. I don't care about other people. Right? Like, almost always, and I think this goes to Socrates, he says, nobody does wrong on purpose. Everyone always has a reason. They always have an explanation. They always have a almost always seem to have, and I know you talked about psychopaths too, but even them, very rarely are they like, I'm a psychopath, right? Like, they manage to convince you.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Well, I was thinking about psychopaths while you were saying that, because one thing I did learn, I learned a little tip when I when I. When I was writing the psychopath test and I went on there on Robert Hare's course and learnt about the checklist and obviously, one of the um main items on the checklist is lack of empathy. Yeah. And I said, let me tell you a story really quickly. Uh, after I finished writing the psychopath test, so this isn't in the book, I was interviewing this spy. Uh, this this spy who had worked for the for the Russians, um, but he was British. So I'm talking to this guy and I noticed that he was um not listening to any of my questions, just just monologuing at me for a long time.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  And I hope that this is more of a kind of conversation, we're listening to each other, which is an empathetic situation. But this guy didn't have that. So I thought I remembered another item on the checklist, early behaviour problems and best things to do with childhood. So I said to him, like, when you were, when you were a child, uh, were you a bully? And he sort of looked twinkling and he said, oh, yes, yes. He said, I was a, I was a terrible bully. I used to, I got a pile of bricks and I put them in my bag and I hid behind the tree. And then I'd jump out and and hit the other kids with with this bag. And he said, but it was always like other bullies, you know. Yeah, sure. Or that's what he said. So I said, I said, how did that make you feel? He said, good.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  And I said, and looking back at it now, sixty years, seventy years later, how does it make you feel? And he said, uh, he said, still good. So I said, so you're not really the sort of person who feels empathy? And he said, ah, you've really got to the root of it there. Uh, he said, you know, all, all, uh, he said, you know, if a dog dies, who I, you know, if my pet dog dies, I feel incredibly upset. I cry for days, but all the people who I've hurt, I I just feel nothing. Uh, so the, so if you, if you're, you can um get a psychopath to really get to the root of it.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  And I've had similar conversations with one or two other um psychopaths too.

• 15:29Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, and what I mean is like when you talk to, you know, somebody who spreads misinformation or conspiracy theories, the tricky part about them is that they, it's not like, I think some people go, they know deep down, it's BS, but they don't, they believe it, right? That's, that's often the tricky, like, I think what's so tricky is that they are deceived by their own deceptions in a way. And so it makes it really hard as a, as a person to, to know kind of who and how you're dealing with someone.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Well, one of, you know, one of the questions I'm asked more than any other question is Alex Jones.

• 16:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, who you wrote about years ago, right?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, like in the nineties, does he mean, does he believe at all? Or is he a showman? And so that thing that you just said is of enormous interest to people. Do they mean it? I think because the thing that people hate more than almost anything else is hypocrisy. So the idea of Alex not meaning a word of it

• 16:32Speaker 01

  would, would be worse, I think, for people than the things that he says.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  But I think the answer is really complicated. I think especially if you're narcissistic, meaning it and not meaning it, bullshitting people. It's, it all sort of blurs into one, you know? If you don't have those ethical guidelines, it just all blurs into one.

• 16:56Ryan Holiday?

  Right, no, I think that makes it trickier.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:59Ryan Holiday?

  It makes it trickier to tell fact from fiction with these people because they're not one camp or the other.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  It's very hard because they, they slip from exactly from one thing to the other. It's, it's really hard and it's frustrating. And it's why there haven't been that many really great things about QAnon.

• 17:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  The, I thought the HBO documentary that got, that found, you know, the guy, I've forgotten his name. What's the young guy's name, the son?

• 17:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I forget, but I know who you're talking about.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I thought that was really good because that's kind of all we really do need to know. We, because we want like, we want something solid. Like if you're just trying to talk to conspiracy theorists about their conspiratorial beliefs, it's just like, it's almost like asking someone to describe a dream. So you need something solid and what's solid is like, who is doing this?

• 17:51Ryan Holiday?

  And why are they doing it? And how can you? I think that that is the tricky part of our age, which is we we seem to believe that if we just get the truth out there, if we if it's like, if I can just show you factually why you're incorrect, you will change your mind. And that's not how it works.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've long ago realized that's not how it works.

• 18:17Ryan Holiday?

  So.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:18Ryan Holiday?

  Go ahead.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Well, you have to lead them to to a place where they want to come to that realization themselves, or not even lead them there. You just have to let them come to that place. And.

• 18:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you just have to leave them to sober up, basically. Or not.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Or not.

• 18:35Ryan Holiday?

  So so going back to to sort of this journalistic approach with empathy, what I think what why it strikes me as so remarkable is that, or perhaps what makes it possible, is it does seem you spend large amounts of time in person with the people. You contrast that with Gawker, who I was writing about. It's like they're doing this through the a computer screen, so it's disintermediated and or it's intermediated. And and as a result, they're able to act like it's a video game. Is it is it harder for you to stick the knife in someone because you're like, I just spent eight hours with them. I know they're a human being. I can't fool myself about that.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  To be totally honest, the the only reason why I travel and meet people is I need for narrative for writing, I need I need the sense of a journey. I actually think so, you know, probably the best interviewer in America is Terry Gross on Fresh Air. And I believe that she like never meets them. It's always done down the line. It's always done via SDN. So actually, I think the answer is I would. Things fell apart, the show I just made, that's about to come out all over the world. I did that remotely. And it's a great show. So but I so for me, the reason for travel isn't to be in the room with the person.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  It's because I need, you know, I need a journey. I'm getting off the plane and I'm getting going into the hotel and then a funny observation and then another funny, you know, so that that's just kind of how I write.

• 20:14Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting. Yeah, I. I just wonder how, like, I think part of what you talked about in So You've Been Publicly Shamed, what makes that possible is that we've reduced human beings to these sort of avatars or bits on a computer screen, whereas when you actually had to see this person or you knew them, you might not be so quick to reduce them to a caricature.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  You know what? Saving publicly shamed is the big exception to what I just said. I couldn't have done, well, there's no way I could have done So You've Been Publicly Shamed any other way. And the most emotional things that I saw were things that I saw. So one of the, so for instance, Lindsay Stone, she, she, she got piled in on for making a joke about the silence and respect side at Arlington Cemetery in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Anyway, when I finally went to her house, it's funny, of all the, all the things that I did for that book, this is kind of my first memory. And it's

• 21:22Speaker 01

  not like wild, but it's, but it kind of gets to the heart of it. So I go to her house, she lives in this cabin in the woods with her parents, you know, just very nice. She told me that when the media doorstepped her, they came out of the cabin with the dog, like with their German shepherd or whatever, and one of them was smoking. And as they were talking, they noticed the camera went down to the dog and the cigarette. They were immediately forming this narrative about them being, you know, mountain people.

• 21:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  So, so I go in there and she showed me the desk, like this little desk in the corner with a little old desktop on it, where she would sit night after night, reading every comment, and believing every word of it, because she wasn't a public figure. She had, there was, she had no practice. She was a carer. She, I'm just believing every word. And I, and you had, you'd have to see that. You'd have to be in that room with her and see her and, and because.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  If I was going to write a book about public shaming, it would have to be kind of like the Blair Witch Project. It would have to make people feel horror, because you want to feel the horror of what you do to other people. Because we all think, oh, they're fine now. You know, we told them about it, they're fine now. But we have no idea, because we've just moved on. And one of the things I wanted to show in that book was the intense psychological trauma that it does to somebody. And, you know, Lindsay Stone, like many people, were having suicidal thoughts. They became insomniac, agoraphobic. And this is when we used to go to karaoke every night. And so, yes, I had to be in the room with her.

• 23:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that suicidal component has been the thing for me as I've, you know, because my first book, and then because of some of the stuff I've written, I just, people just email me, they're like, hey, you know, insert person in the middle of the headlines for this thing, their career, their life, whatever just happened. And they either want my advice, or they, sometimes they read some of the other books, like Billy Bush, who I've had on the podcast, was like, you know, he read my first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, and he read The Daily Stoic, as his life imploded. And I remember talking to him. And one of the things I took out of some of those conversations is like, there's plenty of people that are going to hold this person accountable, right? Or there's going to inflict the consequences,

• 23:54Ryan Holiday?

  rightly or wrongly, for what happened. And there's almost always a deficiency of people who will just talk to or be there for that person. And I don't know, I just, I just feel like, if you turn away from that role, and something happens, you're responsible. Do you know what I mean?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think things are balancing out a little bit. I think when I wrote, say, being publicly shamed, I described people on Twitter as being like toddlers crawling towards a gun. And I think things have matured quite a lot since then.

• 24:33Ryan Holiday?

  We're aware it's a gun, that social media is a gun.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, what I meant by that analogy, a toddler crawling towards a gun, was just, we just, we have no idea of our own power. We have no idea of the consequences of what we're doing, the power of the weapon that we are utilizing. And I think things have changed now, and I think there's there's more of I was really encouraged. Did you did you see the Anasali incident happen a few?

• 25:00Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Okay, it was another dog park racist moment in a dog park, some of which was captured on video.

• 25:08Ryan Holiday?

  So yes, I do remember this. Yes.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so similar to Amy Cooper, but with some very big differences, not to go into it in too much detail because you can just read about it if you want to.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  There was quite a it was gentle, but there was a sort of

• 25:23Speaker 01

  firm backlash against the person doing the shaming from leading progressive voices.

• 25:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Which I thought was interesting. They were saying like, I'm not sure this is a good use of your of your platform. And they were they were arguing against the things that, you know, we've been arguing about for for for, well, you know, seven or eight years now. You shouldn't judge somebody on a fragment of of information and so on.

• 25:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you know what what struck me in So You've Been Publicly Shamed when I first read it was I was roughly the same age as Jonah Berger. We had the same age. Oh, Jonah Lehrer, sorry. Yeah, Jonah Berger is an also an amazing writer. Or is an amazing writer who's not gotten in trouble. So sorry to drag him in here. No, no, Jonah Lehrer, roughly same age, same publisher, same speaking agency, sort of. He was a little bit more prestigious in the circles he was in. But I just remember thinking like, not that it could happen to anyone, but that it would be so easy to

• 26:33Ryan Holiday?

  go down that road that you know what I mean? And so I think what I took from your book was was not just a sort of compassion, but just because I understood it, because it was sort of it struck closer to home. I was just like, I don't I I the lesson from that should not be, oh, what a piece of garbage he is. The lesson should be.

• 26:55Ryan Holiday?

  You could end up in a similar situation if you are not careful.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny with Jonah Lehrer, the thing that made me a little bit paranoid was one of the things that he was accused of, but never, but actually he sort of wasn't done for this, but it was, but it was like the first slap before the real transgressions came out, was self plagiarism.

• 27:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's not a thing.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  And I thought, well, you know, like, if you tell a joke in a column in The Guardian, that no one congratulates you for, and then five years later, you think of another way to use that same joke, and this time everyone's like, that's the best joke I've ever heard. That's a win. So I'm like, so I'm like, I think, fuck, you know, are they, it just felt like we were on shift. When I read that, I thought, I felt like I was standing on shifting sands.

• 27:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think a lot of people in many, many different ways over the last few years have thought, we're standing, we're standing on shifting sands.

• 28:03Ryan Holiday?

  No, to me, that's something to be very empathetic about, right? Because oftentimes, what someone goes down very hard for, they may have just been ahead of the curve, right? And so like, I think Jonah, Jonah, as someone who wrote for a lot of different media outlets and was very prodigious in his output, was sort of on the front line of now that's what writing is. You publish in all these places, you're on all these different platforms. And so of course he was remixing and moving stuff around. It's not the same as, as David Brooks recycling his columns, you know, it's a different, it's a different mode and style of writing.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Well, other stuff was, yeah, well, I mean, it's been a while, but to be specific, there was fabricated quotes.

• 28:50Ryan Holiday?

  That's a problem. Yes.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. So one of the most famous ones, but just kind of stupid. I mean, he, he, he quoted that very famous Bob Dylan line from Don't Look Back, where Dylan's reading about himself in the paper and he goes, you know, he, he smokes 60 a day. And Dylan like looks up in the paper and goes, well, I'm glad I'm not me. And Dylan, and Jonah Lehrer quotes that, but adds, I'm glad I'm not that. I'm glad I'm not me. I'm glad I'm not that. And so then when Michael Moynihan started investigating Jonah.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  He said to Jonah, where did the I'm glad I'm not that come from? And Jonah said, oh, I had special access to extra tapes that I got from one of Dylan's managers. So just digging and digging and digging. But it's like, why, why even write, I'm glad I'm not that. Why even do that? So that was the sort of, that was the kind of thing that he was being done. But I mean, of course, when you compare that to, when you compare that to the kind of lies that are all over the media right now, that it seems pretty minor. But, but of course, you know,

• 30:01Speaker 01

  there's a line in So You've Been Publicly Shamed where I say that our shamedworthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world. And Jonah's space was big. And that was his problem.

• 30:18Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I, I also think it's interesting when we talk about cancel culture, which I wanted to ask you about, is one's vulnerability to being shamed also depends on how dependent you are on other people or institutions or public favor to do what you do. Right? So if you write for The New Yorker and for Wired and blah, blah, blah, and you are sort of, you're, you're dependent on these big outlets to get your stuff out in the world. You are much more cancelable than someone who writes directly to their audience. Right? Like a Joe Rogan, people have tried to attack and I don't need to get into why or whether it's deserved or not.

• 31:03Ryan Holiday?

  But Joe Rogan basically only has him and Spotify, you know, between him and the audience. And so people have been frustrated by their inability to, to sort of hold him accountable, and I'm putting accountable in quotes. But, but I think, to me, one lesson from all of it is like, as you said, to be honest and true and not try to present yourself as something other than you are. But also it's like not depend on other people or other platforms to put your work out in the world.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I guess that's going to happen less and less. You know, by the time of the apocalypse, everyone will be on Substack.

• 31:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  And then, and then does that mean, I guess that means that a true meritocracy happened. Is that what that means? I don't know.

• 31:49Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, maybe, maybe, yeah. Uh, it's a, it's a strange. The, the, the cancel culture thing is interesting because it's become this whole thing. And I, I remember actually I said this to someone, who, who, who had been canceled. And I said, uh, the problem is that, that, uh, cancel culture, like it, it exists. Most of the people who are canceled deserve to be canceled. Right? That, that's the tricky part. Like it is problematic, but then oftentimes it's, it's to get rid of, uh, get rid, but oftentimes it is deserved. So it's this tricky thing of, of like the difference between shaming and canceling.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, one of the main problems is the phrase itself.

• 32:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Because so many wildly disparate situations are described as part of cancel culture. Everything from Lindsay Stone, a private individual being, being wildly disproportionately punished for a, for a joke that came out badly, which is kind of where, so you, you've been publicly shamed to set in that world of private people being disproportionately punished. Then you go to the middle and you've got like agent provocateur newspaper columnists.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  And the pushback can be ferocious and can frighten people into silence. But there's also the fact that when you put yourself out in the public eye, you should be held to a different set of standards than the kind of people I was talking about in my book. So that's, that's the complicated middle ground.

• 33:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Uh, then at the other end, you've got, you know, politicians who've committed sexual assault, who say, I'm being canceled. So it's a, it's a, it's a maddening, uh, phrase.

• 33:35Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, you have Josh Hawley, who, who encourages and encourages and incites an insurrection on the United States government, loses his book deal over it and calls it cancel culture. Uh, you know, that's not what, what cancel culture is.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's so, and it's a problem for so many reasons. Uh, obviously he is politicizing it and cancel culture and the culture wars are. Going to be a big part of twenty twenty four and, you know, they're all laying the ground for that. Then, but then, you know, the problem is also that you have people on the left who look at that happening and say, you know, and say, see, there's no such thing as cancel culture. And then people like Lindsay Stone slip through the cracks. When you say there's no such thing as cancel culture, it's just accountability culture, then the private individuals who don't deserve it, who are, I probably, no, no, I was about to say they're the bulk of cancel people, but, but they're not. But there's a lot of them. And, you know, what about them? So the whole, the whole thing becomes a mess.

• 34:35Ryan Holiday?

  How much do you think is rooted, I was thinking about this, it's, it's almost like it's rooted in kind of impotence or the, the deadlock of our culture. So like, if, if, if Josh Hawley was held legally accountable for what he did, or if Josh Hawley was held politically accountable by his own party for what he did, I imagine there would be less pressure on his book publisher to cancel his book. Right? So sometimes I feel like the, the sort of vehemence and anger and destructiveness of our online culture is really rooted in the fact that our politicians and our other cultural and business institutions

• 35:20Ryan Holiday?

  are not operating as efficiently or as justly as they should. And so people feel like that is the only lever of power that they have in a dysfunctional, unfair world. So they're like, this is where I can affect change. It's, it's a very inefficient, cruel way to enact change, but it, it's the only lever that feels like it's working.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's true. And, and I, I started to hear that. My book got only a small amount of pushback, but when it came out, thank goodness, but that was the pushback. Public shaming is one of the few weapons of the marginalized. And so if you're attacking public shaming, then you're attacking marginalized people. And it's a, it's a valid thing to say. In my case, I just don't, I think I was very careful at drawing distinctions. So I don't, I don't think it was, it was a fair criticism of my book, I don't think. But, and I, but I'd say it's valid, it's a valid point.

• 36:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like if you want to reduce cancel culture, just start policing your side of the street, you know? And then I think some of that goes away.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And which maybe is starting to happen in terms like the MS Ali thing. I was very encouraged by that. I mean, she had, I think, very severe consequences. I think she was fired from her job and then she moved to a different part of America. But certainly on social media, the way it was being lashed around felt felt quite different to to previous similar shamings.

• 37:06Ryan Holiday?

  I I know you're you you spend a fair amount of time on Twitter, not too much. Have you been as sort of dismayed slash like cautioned by what it feels like Twitter has done to the brains of a lot of the media class? Like, if to me, it feels like it's consumed their life and broken their ability to think compassionately, long term, rationally. It it doesn't feel healthy or happy.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, Twitter is the worst thing in the world. It's the world's worst. It's the world's worst information swapping service. It thrives our brains because it's because it's all created by libertarians. Episode five of Things Fell Apart looks at how libertarians created the internet and how we're all living in a libertarian utopia that's driving us all insane.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  So, and yes, that's where it all started with the fact that people who were ideologically enamored with the idea of unencumbered free speech could built the internet and controlled the internet and effectively still does, although things I think are changing and have been changing for the last three or four years. It's interesting that Peter Thiel, who obviously you wrote so well about in Conspiracy, he said, you know, when when he was starting out, Silicon Valley was libertarian. And the reason why he left and moved to Los Angeles a couple of years ago was because it no longer felt libertarian.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  So, yeah, that's so that's a big part of it. This is what happens when you allow libertarians to to run the party.

• 38:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, isn't that the Aaron Sorkin joke that these social networks were designed by fundamentally asocial or unsocial people who don't actually understand human dynamics and how relationships work and aren't capable of that empathy?

• 39:14Speaker 01

  That's so true, and that's the world that we all live in. Those are our Robert Barrens, right? Those are our Rockefeller's.

• 39:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  I know, right? And the consequence of it, it's to do with the algorithms, but it's just to do with so much else, is, yeah, we retreat to our corners. My friend Adam Curtis said something really interesting to me about this. He said, "The internet is designed by engineers, and what do engineers like more than anything else? Stability." So that's why when a destabilizing force enters our world, like somebody who said something that we don't agree with, it's like the machine spits them out to maintain stability.

• 39:59Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah, it's very strange, the world that we're living in, and then that people could sort of see these things happening and go, "Oh, it'll work itself out."

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's certainly what people always felt about public sharing. I remember when I was writing "Save the Public," I shared it with Justine Sacco. I remember asking Sam Biddle from Gawker, like, how it felt to have started the onslaught against her, and he said it felt delicious, and then he said, "But I'm sure she's fine now." So, which I felt like, for me, it felt like a moment of cognitive dissonance. He didn't want to, he just didn't want to think about, maybe that she wasn't fine.

• 40:44Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think, you know, that's Zuckerberg's statement after the 2020 election, in 2016 too. He's like, "There's no way Facebook influenced the election." You know, and like, because to think that it had an impact would then obligate him to do something, and so if he chooses to deny that it had anything to do with it, he can keep doing what he's doing.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also, I think it's that, but and also, it's this ideological vision that they have about tech. The machines must be allowed to do whatever the machines are capable of doing. It's fundamentally amoral.

• 41:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. That is libertarian ethos.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. And, you know, on a personal level, when I meet libertarians, they're really nice. And, you know, I live upstate, there's a bunch of libertarians close to where, you know, around where I live. And they're really nice people, but I just don't think it's a really good idea to to live under a forced libertarian system, which is basically what the internet has been for most of its life.

• 41:58Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think to go to your work on psychopaths, it doesn't it doesn't work when those people enter the mix.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, what happens with psychopaths, and I guess happens with every extreme personality type, I guess, is if you have a psychopath at the top of a corporation, in the psychopath test, I talk about how you're four times more likely to have a psychopath at the top than at the bottom. It trickles down. Everybody behaves a little bit more psychopathically.

• 42:33Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  So we all become a bit more psychopathic. And I've noticed that in very small ways, just in offices. Thank God I've never had to work in offices, but when I've worked for companies and so on, you know, I've noticed that kind of thing happening, everybody getting a little bit harder and more willing to be manipulative if the wrong person is in charge. I'm sure a lot of people would recognize that.

• 43:00Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's very primal. It's like, oh, if everyone in the tribe is behaving, we can pretend to be all well behaved monkeys. But then if the dial gets turned a little bit, we can go primal real quickly.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, it's funny, I've got a more humanistic explanation. You could be absolutely right. But my kind-hearted thing is maybe, you know, people are being like

• 43:31Speaker 01

  forced against their will to behave in a more exploitative way, and then they feel terrible about it afterwards.

• 43:38Ryan Holiday?

  That could be true. I think it works.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess. I guess it's I guess it's all sorts, different strokes for different folks. Officers will be will have both types in them.

• 43:52Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so I was thinking about the culture wars. I think the other thing where I think culture wars and some of the public shaming stuff intersects, it's kind of like, who cares? Like, why are people? Why do people care so much? I think to me, that's, you know what I like, I get why it's a problem. What I'm saying is the individual thing, you know, it's like, it's like people like, can you believe they did X? And it's like, no, I don't. I don't care. Like, I don't. It's not. You know what I mean? It feels like the antidote to a lot of the intensity of where we are is is the more stoic approach of like, I'm going to focus on my own stuff.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Well, that was my starting point for Things Fell Apart over the pandemic, but before the pandemic too. Like most people, I was watching Friends go insane online and caring. And it wasn't so much like what the particular culture war was, but it was the intensity with which they were fighting it.

• 44:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  It seemed so startling to me, and I wanted to try and figure out why, and that's that's why I made the show. Yeah, I think people were, and I don't, people are noticing it more and more. People are just changing very quickly.

• 45:14Ryan Holiday?

  Why? What is it? Like, what? What? Why are we so wrapped up? Is it that? Is it? So one theory I have is that, okay, 15, 20 years ago, we would have all been watching Friends together, or like the TV show, you know, like that 60 million people would watch an episode of Seinfeld. As as culture fractured, there stopped being any large things to be a part of. So these events, these culture war events are kind of the only, other than sports, they're the only mass culture left.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me think about that. I mean, yeah, I mean, once in a while, everybody falls in love with a particular meme, or, you know, Charlie bit my finger. So those kind of things, those kind of things do still happen. Yeah, I was thinking, when you were describing everybody sitting down together to watch Friends, I was imagining a room full of people watching Friends. And I think if you're the kind of person who can be easily wounded,

• 46:21Speaker 01

  maybe you've scored high on narcissism, but you're very easily wounded. If you're in a room with someone and a fight breaks out,

• 46:35Speaker 01

  people can quite easily navigate it.

• 46:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  And, you know, no one to stop, no one to pull back, they're watching. And so, you know, the most terrible thing that can happen to a narcissist, for instance, is they feel so wounded, it like becomes a permanent war for the rest of their lives. That's more likely to happen, I'd say, on social media because there isn't their personal human connection.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Speaking of which, there's one episode of Things Fell Apart where I tell the story of this man called Steve Peters. And I won't tell the whole story here, but it's incredibly moving. It's probably the most moving story I've told. And it's a story about connection. It's a story about warring factions in a culture war.

• 47:22Ryan Holiday?

  What is the, what's the culture war issue? I don't understand.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  It was AIDS in the eighties and the evangelical right's response to the AIDS crisis. And the story was just, it's so moving.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  I would encourage people to listen to it, it's episode three of Things Fell Apart. But I had so many messages that day and since, from people saying, "I was listening to that show while I was driving up the motorway and tears were rolling down my face." And the show was all about connection. And it made me think that we're dying, we're so battle weary. We're dying for connection now.

• 48:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, that's right. And maybe that's why we end up caring about things that we don't care about, we wouldn't otherwise care about, because it puts us in a community. So suddenly we're very concerned about voter fraud, not because it exists or we were a political person beforehand, but now we're in a tight knit. Unit of people fighting that part of the culture war and that's very edifying.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Right. I would say as a Brit, when I moved to America, I've been living in America for about 10 years now and a few things like really surprised me about America. It feels very much my home now more, you know, it's, it's just, it's my home. But one thing I'd say about Britain is that other than some very egregious gerrymandering in Northern Ireland during the troubles, in Britain voter fraud really hasn't been, not so voter fraud, the idea of sort of voter suppression.

• 49:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  People's names just mysteriously vanishing from roles, all of that stuff

• 49:19Speaker 01

  just doesn't exist. So democracy, obviously Britain's democracy isn't doing very well either.

• 49:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Well, the institution, certainly when I first moved to America, democracy felt surprisingly fragile in America compared to Britain. So I'm, I think, I feel part of that group. Like, I'm really worried. Like, the thing that worries me right now more than anything is this whole republic, you know, putting these republican legislators in place.

• 49:50Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:52Ryan Holiday?

  No, and to me, the issue there isn't the voter suppression or the voter counting. It's, it's what happens after, right? It's the, it's the election certifications that's the issue. I wonder too if the system, the parliamentary, the parliamentarian system encourages collaboration, whereas the American system is winner take all effectively. And I wonder if that creates a kind of war mentality.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  I've been watching Prime Minister's Questions lately. Have you ever watched it?

• 50:20Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Oh, every Wednesday. You've got to see it. It's like you're watching something from another planet. It's Prime Minister's Questions. I grew up with it in Britain. It's half an hour. The Prime Minister, who obviously is Boris Johnson, is going through the rockiest patch of his, of his Prime Ministership, because, you know, when everybody else was. Being forced to stay at home, they were just having constant parties. Uh, and now it's now it's all coming home to roost. Um, so I've been watching Perns and Sessors lately for that reason. And and it's it's the it's an unbelievable bear pit. It's all it's the most adversarial thing you can possibly imagine. It's it's performatively adversarial booze, cat calls. It's like watching something from the 19th century. You have to see it.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  It's like nothing in American politics. Um, but it's funny like so when you look at that, you just think Britain has the most adversarial system possible. Now I'm beginning to speak beyond my level of expertise here, but because I've never really studied British politics, but I believe, yeah, there's there's there are many cross-party alliances in terms of trying to get laws changed and things. I I I believe so. So there is real problems with adversary and I'm against pretty much any adversarial situation. Um, but yeah, but you could be right. You could be right. I think there's more consensus politics across the parties in Britain.

• 51:47Ryan Holiday?

  Well, just the idea of a coalition government does not exist in America. That's like a phrase that doesn't make any sense in American politics, but it it does make sense in Israel or Britain that that's it's possible in your system.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't I I was I don't think it went very well when we when we had that most recent one, but but we did have one.

• 52:10Ryan Holiday?

  Um, yeah, I I um, there's a when Peter Thiel spoke at the Republican Convention in 2016, which is I I think he would probably likely admit was a mistake. He did say something that was interesting that I think about a lot. And I don't know if I'm I'm, you know, changing the meaning of what he said, but he said something he was like transgender bathrooms. Who cares? Right? And I I think what I took from that is if people want transgender bathrooms, they can have transgender bathrooms. What do I care? It doesn't it doesn't negatively affect me. Right? So so and and to me, that's I think something that we struggle with that would solve some

• 52:51Ryan Holiday?

  of the publicly shaming stuff, some of the culture war issues is is that response. Who cares? Right? Like if we cared a little bit less, we could give people a bit more grace.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  And also.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  The best thing about social media was that, well, one of the best things was that it gave a voice. When I started out on social media and I was pretty early on Twitter, I was like two thousand and eight, I think, or two thousand and nine. And it was a very different place. When did you join Twitter?

• 53:20Ryan Holiday?

  I was at South by Southwest in two thousand and seven when it launched.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:25Ryan Holiday?

  And I thought it was the dumbest idea in the world and it would it possibly work? So what do I know?

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Well, I had a couple of friends who said to me, you've, you've got to join Twitter. It's like nothing else on the internet. There's no fighting. Everybody's, everybody's supportive of each other. It's a place where you can just be yourself and talk, just talk openly. So that's kind of what it, what it was at the beginning. And then it, I can't remember, I was going somewhere with that in response to your question, but I've forgotten what your question was.

• 53:58Ryan Holiday?

  Who cares?

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Like, oh, who cares? Yeah. So one of the things I loved so much about it back then was that it was giving a voice to everyone. It was giving a voice. And I was particularly struck as somebody who, you know, has various anxiety situations in my life. I was particularly struck by people who were so anxious that, you know, if they had to go to a party, they would be mute. They'd have selective mutism. And those people were being like really eloquent on social media. And I'd meet people who were so socially awkward in real life, but on, but they shone on social media. So I thought, you know, Twitter's, so the best thing about

• 54:39Speaker 01

  social media is that it's giving a voice to voiceless people. And now I think, maybe sometimes, you know, just because we, everybody now has a voice, doesn't necessarily mean that you need to like use it all the fucking time. Like, because look what happens when everybody's screaming all the time. Look what's happened.

• 54:58Ryan Holiday?

  We, I've always found it illustrative, like what the empty box on Facebook or Twitter says, right? It's like, what are you thinking? Or like, what do you have to say? Right? So it's, it's almost like this, this machine that's prompting you to have opinions about stuff that if you didn't, if you weren't prompted, you would say nothing and probably be happier and kinder. One of my favorite Marcus Aurelius quotes, he says, always remember that you have the power to have no opinion. But I think we've kind of relinquished that power to the algorithm.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I've I've often felt that the tyranny of needing to have an opinion about everything, the tyranny of certainty. Uh, yeah, I I embrace uncertainty.

• 55:45Ryan Holiday?

  Or silence.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, you know, the funniest thing, like prisons, like I've done quite, I've been to kind of a lot of prisons and and I've done a lot of stories in that world. And obviously, why, and you know this from every prison drama, like the way you're judged when you're a new inmate is like, everybody yells at you and how well or badly you respond to being yelled at is, you know, is basically defines how well you'll do in prison. But I think that's like such a weird way to judge someone. It's so arbitrary. We're, uh, like, I respond very badly to being shouted at, like, very badly. I go into my shell. But that doesn't mean I'm like worse than than

• 56:31Speaker 01

  someone who responds well to it. Can't we come up with a new way of judging people? Uh, like, I don't know, through like jigsaws or something, Wordle.

• 56:43Ryan Holiday?

  I would say generally, our social dynamics should not resemble the dynamics of a prison, wherever possible.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Uh, right. Yeah, I'm gonna write about this. I'm about to do a Things Fell Apart, very small stage show in Britain and what everything I just said to you, I've been meaning to write about, so I'm gonna write about that.

• 57:01Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I love that. Um, did I see, uh, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full behind you?

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but actually, I don't think I've ever read it.

• 57:08Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, man, I think it's right there on on the middle shelf.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it is. You know what? I never read it. I I bought it in a in a frenzy of enthusiasm after enjoying the bonfire of the vanities. Uh, I don't think I ever read it.

• 57:22Ryan Holiday?

  It's an incredible book. It's a it's a it's actually about Stoicism.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:28Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and now, actually, now you have to read it because, uh, one of the characters gets wrongly imprisoned and, uh, then that's where he's introduced to Stoicism.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  How interesting.

• 57:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, lovely book.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, I'll read it or or listen to the audio book. People keep phoning me. Hang on a second.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  But I know we're finishing quite soon anyway. I hope nothing bad's happened.

• 57:52Ryan Holiday?

  No, I don't think so. I haven't gotten any. My my last question for you is just as you as you've thought about all this stuff. How how has it changed your relationship or understanding of words like forgiveness or justice? Or how are those two things related to each other? Like, when someone does something abhorrent or unethical, let's say in Jonah Berger's case or Jonah Lehrer's case, or does something stupid or mean or what? How do you think about accountability, justice, and then also forgiveness?

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Well, I suppose, you know, I always you always think, has has there been a victim? Like, the thing that the person, yeah, did, is there a victim? I mean, look, like, so that's so I feel much less. I feel less forgiving of somebody when there's a victim.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  You know, on a personal level, I'm, you know, not perfect. Like, I bear grudges if people, you know, have behaved badly towards me, I'll bear grudges. So I'm no, you know, I haven't reached, I haven't reached a level of self-actualization.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  But I I but broadly, I certainly in my work and as much as I possibly can in my personal life, I and it gets easier as you get older. You are trying to be empathetic and kind and forgiving. I had a big fight with someone this morning. And I think the reason why the fight didn't escalate was because I remembered to I remembered that, yeah, I've got, you know, this is like every every self-help book, you know, but I remember that, you know, they were coming from some difficult place and that's why they were yelling. And I sort of remembered that. And then it's easier to to not retreat to your corner.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  And I think that, you know, I think that very much about, say, being publicly shamed and also The Last Days of August, which was a podcast I made about the death of a porn star, August Ames. And when somebody spirals on Twitter.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Very often, there's something else going on in their life. And I think that's that's something that we forget when we pile in on someone.

• 1:00:14Ryan Holiday?

  No, that those are two, I think those are two great and really practical questions. As you, something happens in the world and you're thinking about getting mad about it or frustrated about it, or, you know, criticizing them for it. Number one is, was there actually a victim to what happened? Or were they just being stupid or weird? Or, you know, what maybe just what they did was in bad taste? Like the the middle finger at Arlington Cemetery? And then two, you know, is that person dealing with a full deck of cards? Or is that person going through something? Or or is that person? Is it fun to be that person is the other question I like to ask.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. And what's the wider context? Have we have we discovered everything about that person? I mean, you know, the number of Twitter shamings when three days later, we found out that we got the information all wrong. There's countless ones of those now. So do we also have all the facts?

• 1:01:11Ryan Holiday?

  That's true. And then, you know, is it my place? Like, who who appointed me the enforcer on this issue?

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me, and that has to be a personal, like, I wouldn't want to impose that on people. These all have to be things that people figure out for themselves.

• 1:01:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Like, I don't want to create. I was really reluctant, and so you've been publicly shown to like, create a set of rules for people. Like, you you get that sometimes in self help books. So a few people were saying, why didn't you do that? But I don't want to be like a like a lifestyle guru. I don't want to tell people, I don't want to like, give people a set of rules to live.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  But I do think these are things that people should really figure out for themselves.

• 1:01:58Ryan Holiday?

  No, I feel like So You've Been Publicly Shamed was so powerful because it was just a mirror. It didn't, it didn't tell you what to do about it, it didn't explain how to solve the problem. It was just like, let me show you a problem and how much worse it is than you think it is.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you may not have even realized this yet.

• 1:02:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  It was, when So You've Been Publicly Shamed came out, it was so early in people's, the way people thought about the internet. People were saying to me, you know, the internet's boring and it's not the real world and nobody cares about the internet. You know, people were still thinking of the internet as, you know, a shopping bag, you know, or whatever. And, uh, yeah. And, and I don't think anybody thinks any of those things anymore.

• 1:02:44Ryan Holiday?

  Now, the internet is, is culture now.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is the real world. The people, I hope the people felt that back in 2015, 2014, whatever. It was really around 2012 that things began to change. You know, I hope there's some self-reflection from, from people who thought that this would, you know, this was going to stay self-contained.

• 1:03:07Ryan Holiday?

  I, I, I hope so too. I think that's what the best books do, is they just give you something to think about.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, Ryan, I have to go. I'm getting all of these text messages and I want to make sure everything's okay.

• 1:03:18Ryan Holiday?

  I, I hope, I, I hope nothing bad happened and I can't wait to listen to the new podcast and I, I've loved all the books and thanks for taking the time.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Thank you. And before I go, can I say so the, so the new podcast is, is, well, by January the 25th, when's this going out?

• 1:03:33Ryan Holiday?

  This will be after that, so it'll be out.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. So that's just like every, it should be on pretty much every podcast platform. Things fell apart.

• 1:03:42Ryan Holiday?

  I can't wait to listen. All your stuff is amazing. So I'm very excited.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 1:03:49Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.