They Have Been Misled | The Road Trip That Put Stoicism To The Test

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  They have been misled. Why do they do it? Why do they support those policies, condone such things, shrug their shoulders at such injustices? It could be because these people are evil and awful. It could also just be because they don't know any better. It could be that they don't know any better because someone told them much worse. Mark Twain grew to hate slavery and those who support it, but his mother, whom he loved and knew was a sweet and wonderful person, grew up as a participant in that system. So how did he square those two contradictions? As he reflected, "Kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for." In other words, she had been taught to see slavery as something other than what it was. The church, the government, her parents, her neighbors, all told her it was right. And like most people at that time, she found it easier to accept what everyone around her believed than to question it for herself, than to see it with her own eyes. And so it has always been thus.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  In Meditations, Marx realist talks about how people who do evil often have had their souls cut off from truth. They did not mean to be awful or evil. They were misled. We should remember this today and always, especially if our goal is to bring those people around. We almost certainly are not going to change their minds by arguing with them, and we definitely won't bring them around if we write them off as irredeemable. Instead, we should ask questions. We should listen. We should try to understand what they have been told and why they believe it. And if we want people to change, we have to give them a way to see the truth for themselves.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It is Saturday. I'm recording this. I don't know when you're listening, but just got my hair cut, spent some time with the kids this morning, hanging out. And I thought I'd record this episode. I've been meaning to do it since, since June when we got back, but we had kind of a crazy, cool experience, some Stoic lessons. Basically, school got out. We were home for a couple of days, and then we headed to the West Coast. My wife had gone out there on a girl's trip, the sort of Oregon coast last year, and she, she just had this like amazing experience. She was like, I've never seen anything like this. This is beautiful, which is one of the awesome things about parenting. When you experience something, you're like, I can't wait to show this to my kids. And so she'd been wanting to do this.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  And so I thought, when she said this, I was like, oh, well, they've been asking me to do some more, more dates for the Daily Stoic Live things. I'll tell them that that's what I want to do. Let's see what they could line up on the West Coast. So maybe some of you came out. I had a talk in Portland and then a talk in San Francisco. And then I wanted to see my grandmother in Sacramento. So that was kind of the, the loose journey we were planning. So we flew into Seattle in early June, and we drove out to Bremerton, Washington, where my wife's friend Holly lives. I'm also friends with her husband. I don't know if you ever listened to the band MXPX. Mike is the lead singer and the bassist in MXPX. I wrote about him in Perennial Cellar. We've gotten to know each other over the years. But Holly and Sam have become friends, and I'd never been out there.

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  So that's where we started. We drove out there, and it was, it was lovely. The weather was incredible. My son left his backpack on the bus as we were leaving the Seattle airport. And we took the bus, the rental car, get in the car. My wife, she's much better at like tracking all the things that we have. She goes, wait, is his backpack in the car? And we're like, five minutes down the highway. I go, what? She said to me, I said, did you leave your backpack on the bus? And he was like, you didn't get it? And anyways, it was a great thing. We tried to practice in our family. We're not perfect at it, but our thing is, we solve the problem first. We don't blame. We don't freak out about it. We just go, okay, what do we need to do? And so we immediately reroute the directions. We go back to the rental car place. We could track it.

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  You know, we could see it was like, sort of still in the vicinity. So she runs out to one of the buses. My son's kind of freaking out. I go, hey, look, we don't need to freak out about this yet. Right? Like, it may be that you lost your iPad and your stuffed animals, and that's going to be rough. But right now, we don't know where it is. We just know that it's in this vicinity. Someone could have taken it. But like, this also could be easy to solve. So we're just trying to, you know, remember this is, it's about the idea of getting regulated, about like staying in the moment. What are we going to do about this situation? So turns out, the bus driver still has it. One of the bus drivers drives my wife over to where the other bus driver is. Get it? It's totally fine.

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  But it was a, an auspicious way to start the trip. Anyways, we drove out, get to Seattle, and it was lovely. It was just absolutely lovely. It was gorgeous. There was a whale, sort of, not trapped, but back in this cove. I ran the bridges in Bremerton, which is this sort of loop. I was training for this big run, which I'll tell you about. I was out the next trip, but I got some long runs in there. And I'm writing this book about Stockdale, right? And one of the things that I have found as a researcher and a writer for the years is like, you put the confirmation bias to work for you. I don't believe in like energy, but like, we planned this trip for no reason

• 6:02Ryan Holiday?

  other than we're going to go visit these friends. Driving over, I go, what ship is that? I see like a Navy destroyer parked in this like little cove area. As there's Bremerton shipyards there. They built the longtime Navy installation. But this is like, you could tell it's kind of a museum. And I look it up. I go, oh, my God, are you serious? The Turner Joy, which is the ship that Stockdale flew over in the second night in the Gulf of Tonkin, that the incident in quotes here, that basically the

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  attack, again, in quotes, that sets in motion the Vietnam War, which Stockdale was there for. That ship is right there. I was writing about it that time. A year ago, exactly, I had started working, writing this book. And then I show up in this town, and the ship I am writing about is there. We took this tour. The kids had an amazing time. But I got all these details that I needed for the writing because we just magically were there. And that was just awesome. Two little things I'll bring you from this trip. I stopped by the Bremerton Cemetery. It's this gorgeous cemetery because I wanted to riff on something that I've been thinking about recently. Let me, let me play that.

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  There's a little memento mori lesson here for you. This, this is where we'll all end up. There is no escaping it. Everyone who has ever lived eventually ends up in a place like this, alongside their ambitions, alongside their grudges, alongside their ego. Death is the great equalizer. It is also the great clarifier. Every person who was too busy to call their parents, every person who was putting things off, every person who thought they were the exception to the rule, they all ended up here. They all ended up dead eventually. The Stoics had a phrase for this, memento mori, remember you will die. It was part of their philosophical practice. They tried to think about it constantly.

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  What they wanted us to understand is not that we will die eventually. It's in fact that we're dying right now, dying every minute. We are dying every day. A gorgeous cemetery, by the way. And then a couple of hours later, Mike said, hey, do you want to see the, my studio? I thought, of course. And he showed me the studio where they do all their live recordings, where they record their albums, where they practice. And then he and I sat down and did an episode of the podcast. Let me bring you a chunk of that. To me, writing is, I think maybe songwriting is a little bit more inspirational based than, than book writing. Like, book writing, I think, is, is more workmanlike in the sense that you're, because like, you're working on it and working on it and working on it

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  and reworking it's, I think, and it's part of a much larger whole. You know, where I think each song is a self-contained thing, even if it fits inside of an album. So for, for me, it's, it's much more about, yeah, like, the, the more uninterrupted periods of being in one place at one time in some kind of a rhythm or routine, the, the better it is. And then the irony is, of course, like, I travel all the time. I've gone a lot. So like, there's a tension there. But yeah, I like to write in my office at the same time with as few interruptions as possible. And, and the more that I allow things in to fuck with that, the more trouble I'm in.

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  I actually, I have a quote on my wall next to where I write, and it's this conversation between Johnny Cash and his manager. And the manager was saying like, you gotta have like this vault, this sort of mausoleum that like, no one can get in, not your wife, not the manager, not the press, not the fan, where you just like do your thing. And kind of my office is like, for me, that, just like the space of doing it. And I'm showing up and doing a little bit every day. And, you know, six months or a year or two years or five years later, you have something close to publishable.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:11Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I can, like, I wrote a little bit this morning, and, and I can, I wrote on the airplane yesterday. Like, I can, I can do little pieces, but like, if it's, if it's like a difficult thing or a big thing, it's like, I need to be in my space. I need to have all my stuff laid out. I'm, I'm very.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  I like that, actually. I mean, I think traditionally songwriters started out, I mean, everybody's a little different, but I started out writing in different places all the time. But I do kind of have a similar thing that you're talking about, like a space, a mausoleum, a tomb where you can go.

• 10:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  And it takes a few days to sort of, for me to like, kind of like get into songwriting mode. And, and I know Eminem's talked about how he carries a notebook on him all the time. So he's always ready to write. He's always in that mode. And because it is a mode, like, it's like a, a thought process. It's a, whatever it is, but to live in that all the time is not easy. It is not for me, anyway.

• 11:06Ryan Holiday?

  So anyways, Bremerton was awesome. We were sad to leave. We drove from Bremerton. Where did we go? I guess we went down to Cannon Beach. That was the next place we were staying. That was like just ungodly beautiful. Stayed at this, um, this little Airbnb, uh, like an A-frame Airbnb, uh, which, which the kids loved. We wake up the next morning, I start the car and I swear, when I stopped the car that night before, there was a hundred miles left in the tank. I'm, I'm pretty paranoid about this. Not paranoid, but I'm pretty good about this. Like I, my wife will take it down to, to zero. I never do that. I'm, I'm like, when it's a quarter full, I'm refilling the gas tank. Anyways,

• 11:50Ryan Holiday?

  I start the car the next morning. It says seven miles left. I could not have possibly done that. So somebody siphoned gas out of the rental car that night? I guess maybe? Or massively malfunction, I don't know. Let's say three days into the trip, we're in our second solve the problem first thing. We're like, there was a gas station five miles away. And, uh, we basically coasted in on fumes, but I sort of proud at how calmly we handled it. And then we started driving south from there. Part of the routine is I would get up early before the family. Every morning we don't have a dog, we don't have responsibilities while we're traveling.

• 12:34Ryan Holiday?

  So I would get up early. I'd go for a long run and then I would come back, right? As they're waking up, we'd pack up, we'd go on to the next thing. That was my way of, like, you gotta figure out how you regulate yourself, how you are best able to show up for your family, for yourself, when you're in stressful situations. I knew that if I would save like sort of that little me time or exercise towards the end of the trip, then there would be like pressure. I'd feel rushed. I'd also need it at the end as opposed to getting it at the beginning and then being able to carry that sort of stillness or energy, you know, with me through the difficult

• 13:14Ryan Holiday?

  days of being, uh, in a small car with two noisy kids who were getting tired and bored, who just wanted their iPads. We're stopping in the Redwoods. We stopped, saw this Lewis and Clark Park, I guess, or whatever. That was cool. Then, uh, we pulled into Portland where I was doing the first talk. That was lovely. We stopped at Powell's, one of my favorite independent bookstores. They also sell used books. And it was funny to see copies of my books used at Powell's, where I've done a talk before that had the stamp from the painted porch in it. So someone had bought a copy of one of my books from here, from this bookstore, and then resold it to another bookstore. So that was lovely.

• 13:56Ryan Holiday?

  Did the talk in Portland. Let's say attendance was a little light, but it was a beautiful venue. It's Revolution Hall, uh, which I guess was an old school, uh, but just absolutely gorgeous. So, uh, I made fun of Portland a little bit when I got there. It's good to be here. Came all the way from Austin, Texas, where it was a little warmer and drier, I will say.

• 14:19Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the slogan for Austin is keep Austin weird. You guys know this because you stole it.

• 14:26Ryan Holiday?

  Although every time I, I come to Portland, I think maybe you guys deserve it a little bit more than us. I, I looked up the actual slogan for Portland. Do you guys know what it is? It's the city that works.

• 14:41Ryan Holiday?

  So maybe, maybe Austin and Portland could trade and it'll all be good.

• 14:49Ryan Holiday?

  But, uh, my cousin was there. That was cool. She lives in Portland with, uh, her partner. But my favorite thing is, uh, Ben, who's the promoter organizer of all the talks, he goes, hey, would, could your sons help? And what do you, what do you need them to help with? He's like, I need some people to run mics in, uh, in the audience to do the Q and A. And my, my kids were so excited. They did it. So they're running up and down my halls. They got to pick. But then, uh, my son broke in and, uh, gave me some good news.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Hey dad.

• 15:21Ryan Holiday?

  Hey bud.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  I know you're invested in the basketball game.

• 15:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. What's the score?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  The Spurs won.

• 15:28Ryan Holiday?

  They did. Amazing. Oh, that's great.

• 15:33Ryan Holiday?

  That was lovely, but one of the devastating parts of the trip was, you know, we're traveling. We couldn't always sit down and watch all the games in the NBA finals, but you know, I checked my phone and the Spurs were up. And then, you know, we'd pull in right as the game was finishing, wherever we were. And then it's like just in time to watch them lose. Uh, like just a heartbreaking series. We, we went to game, uh, one of the NBA finals, which was absolutely incredible before we left on the trip. But to watch the Spurs lead in every game and have a chance to win basically every game. And to end up losing the series. It's an incredibly young team. Wemby is awesome.

• 16:13Ryan Holiday?

  The Spurs have been very good to me. Um, and I, I wrote about them in, in the justice book and the discipline book. Hopefully they'll learn and grow from this, but, but that was sort of happening in the background. Again, this feels like an eternity ago. But anyways, Portland went great. Kept going south from there. The next day we did the Redwoods, which was amazing. I've seen the sequoias, but I don't think I'd ever been that far north to see the Redwoods. And we just had an absolutely full day looking at those, you know, Seneca has this line about how the whole world is a temple of the gods.

• 16:50Ryan Holiday?

  And when you're looking up at three, four hundred foot tall trees, the date back before the Renaissance, a date back hundreds and hundreds of years. You know, it blows your mind. It, it humbles you. They, sometimes they'll, they'll have like one that's fallen and they'll show on the rings like, this is what was happening here. This is what was happening here. And you just see that the enormous time span of humanity. And how even the greatest and biggest lives, as the Stoics would say, don't last very long. I mean, it kind of makes me think of that famous passage from Marcus Aurelius. Let me find this here. I think it's four or something.

• 17:34Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, this is the one about Vespasian. Ah, yes, this is 432. He says, "The age of Vespasian, for example, people doing the exact same thing, marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office, and the life they led is nowhere to be found. Or the age of Trajan, the exact same things, and that life too is gone. Survey the record of other eras and see how many others gave their all and soon died and decomposed into the elements that formed them.

• 18:15Ryan Holiday?

  But most of all, run through the list of those you knew yourself, those who worked in vain, who failed to do what they should have and what they should have remained fixed on and found satisfaction in. And then, you know, in the next passage, he riffs on this morning, lists like the names of other famous emperors and power brokers. He says, "Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend, and soon oblivion covers it. And those are only the ones who shone. The rest, unknown, unasked for, a minute after death. What is eternal fame? Emptiness." Obviously it's a little rich hearing that from a 2000 year old book that's still relevant today, but that's sort of what I was thinking about going through the Redwoods.

• 18:54Ryan Holiday?

  There was this sort of roadside attraction where we could drive through one of them in our car. That was surreal. That was all lovely. We listened to the Odyssey on audiobook, the Claire Danes reading on, on the way down. That was beautiful. My kids are obsessed with the Odyssey as we talked about, and that's also the, um, the book club for the quarterly classics book club we've been doing with the painted porch, which I'd love to have you join us in. So that was lovely. And the Claire Danes reading was just like, just profoundly moving. I loved that. I think we stopped in Montecito, which was gorgeous, and then pulled into San Francisco, went for a long run. My friend Jeff Waldman recommended that they closed down this highway and turned it into a running trail. So I did that.

• 19:39Ryan Holiday?

  And I thought I'd sort of turn around and come back. I ended up accidentally doing like a 12 mile run, which was, uh, not great the day of a talk, but it's cool. I don't really think we saw the sun until we got to San Francisco. Like it's, it's crazy to think San Francisco was the warmest part of the trip in June. It was just an incredible escape from the heat. We didn't know how spoiled we were, you know, going to Europe a couple of weeks later, which I'll bring you in another episode, that, that it was gonna be the hottest it's literally ever been there. Jackets and pants. It was cold a lot of the mornings when I got out to go running, but just like, you know, being in forests so dense with such, such canopies that like, you'd have to take your sunglasses off.

• 20:22Ryan Holiday?

  Like seeing those Redwoods was to me like going to church. I mean, it was as holy and as moving to me as some of the cathedrals and ruins that we would see in Rome a couple of weeks later. Saw the buffalo in Golden Gate Park. And then I did the talk. My parents came. That was lovely. My aunt and uncle and cousin came. That was cool. The boys were there. Some kids I went to high school came. San Francisco was, was awesome. Thanks to everyone that came out there. It was a union theater, so my kids couldn't do the running, but I thought that was a great talk. I did a little. Riffing on my neighbor here in Vastrop, who'd taken his company public for a trillion dollars.

• 21:07Ryan Holiday?

  Let me play a little bit of that riffing, too. Many, many people are about to become millionaires because of the SpaceX IPO. That's all great. But I think when we think about justice and when we examine this life on a whole, we're going to have to look at a literal illegal immigrant who came here on an expired student visa from Canada, spreading misinformation about immigrants and advocating for mass deportations. We have to look at the fact that he treats people and employees like garbage. Musk gets involved with Doge. Like, how are we to square the idealism and the impact and the innovation with Tesla and SpaceX and SolarCity with the conservative estimates that say the cuts to USAID should

• 21:51Ryan Holiday?

  amount to something like 500,000 excess deaths this year? They think by 2034 and a half million, like literally millions of people. It is a holocaust of starvation and suffering and death that can really be traced back to one person, to a tweet where the richest man in the world tweets, "I could have gone to some cool parties today. Instead, I fed this government agency into the wood chipper." I would say that the fact that that didn't result in like the immediate expulsion from polite society, that it wasn't condemned universally by all people, like Elon Musk has talked about how he thinks empathy will be the death of Western civilization.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.

• 22:37Ryan Holiday?

  I would say that our willingness to tolerate and accept that is the death of a moral society. That is what puts the values of Western civilization on the line. Do we actually mean them? Or, you know, if someone comes and turns them upside down, undoes generations of work and compromise and political progress? And we just accept that because we don't want to have people tweeting about us on the internet, or we don't want to piss off the richest person in the world, or we don't want to be primaried in an election? Like, we are willing to accept that. To me, that is the extinction level event that we should be worried about. So San Francisco is great again. Doing the tour dates was a nice excuse to see some places in the country that I hadn't

• 23:22Ryan Holiday?

  got to get to, to do this wonderful family time. And I'm going to be doing some more talks, I guess, in August. Where am I doing? Seattle, Minneapolis, Detroit. October, I believe I'm in Australia and New Zealand. That's going to be fun. Then we're going, and I'm doing East Coast stuff, Boston. I think there's a Nashville date in there, DC. Anyways, all that's at dailystoiclive.com, so I'll see you there. If you want to come, that would be cool. There's a couple VIP tickets left at those various shows. That was my favorite thing. Actually, in San Francisco, the CEO of Sutter Health, which is the big hospital that I was actually born in, in Sacramento, he came and brought a bunch of his staff.

• 24:05Ryan Holiday?

  So that was surreal to be like, hey, this is my mom. She gave birth to me in your hospital. That was lovely. The VIP stuff is really cool. This really nice guy gave me some picks and drumsticks from Talika's studio where he worked. I lost his name, so if he's listening to this, I would love to say thank you. Shoot me an email. That was really cool. And then, then we did the final drive down. We drove down to Sacramento. And then we went to see my grandmother, putting that in quotes. She's 97. That was lovely. It was funny, I had taken my son to see her a couple of months ago. We're just, we're just sitting there having breakfast and he goes, "You know who you're the second oldest person I've ever met?" She goes, "Really? What? Who's the oldest?"

• 24:48Ryan Holiday?

  And he started telling her about Richard Overton, who, when my son met him when he was like one or two years old, was the oldest man in the world. But the kids were amazing, a lovely time with her. And then, so we were leaving, I was like, okay, what do you guys want to do? And they were like, "We'd like to go to the cemetery." "Go what? The cemetery?" It's funny, because I'd wanted to do that when we were in Washington. I said, "Yeah, we want to go see where your grandfather is buried." Which is very moving to me. My grandfather was one of the, I think, the few people that believed in me as a sort of writer, creative person. Actually, died as I was working on my first book, like right before I, I'd sort of announced it, told anyone about it. A therapist told me once, she's like, "It only takes one person." I was like, "What do you mean?" She said, "It only takes one person to believe in you."

• 25:32Ryan Holiday?

  And he was that person for me. So it was, it was lovely to go see that. And then when we were in Sacramento, I got up and I ran around downtown and did a couple laps around Sutter's Fort and then made my way over to the house that Joan Didion grew up in, the great California writer, the great Sacramento writer, whose chair, I don't know if you can hear this, I'm sitting in right now. I record the Daily Stoic podcast at her table. I just didn't know anything about her growing up there. I don't know why no one ever told me, but it was a sort of a surreal experience. That's, again, what I like to do is find stuff that I know about, that I've read about, that I've experienced.

• 26:17Ryan Holiday?

  I try to find things that I, that I've heard about, that I've read about, that, that I have context for, and then I try to go experience them. And that, to me, helps understand it and see it from different angles. And then we went down and jumped in the water in Lake Natomas. And my kids just sang, just sang the lines from that SNL skit, "Lake Beach," as we dived in the very, very cold water. Took them to see where I went to high school. It was just a great, lovely trip. And then we, we went to fly home and were immediately delayed. We spent several hours in the Sacramento airport before flying home. That sort of scrambled the plans.

• 27:01Ryan Holiday?

  So I was getting back the next day and I was supposed to do a long run for this thing. As I said, I'm going to tell you about training this thing. And it was a little final act of discipline for me to have to reschedule and change those plans, not force something. So we had a nice, long flight home, got home very late, like 1:30 in the morning, crashed, and then back at it. So that was our West Coast trip, you know, drove several hundred miles, many, many hours, saw family, saw friends, had some issues, but I think we handled it well. You know, my rule when we travel as a family is like, it should go in such a way that you want to have another trip. You want to plan the next road trip.

• 27:46Ryan Holiday?

  You want to plan the next destination. And that's what I try to remind myself. I wrote this down in my journal, right, doing my sort of pre-Meditation Malorum, like, what could go wrong? What mistakes might I make? What things, emotions, urges, do I want to be careful of? Do I want to control? So we can do it again. So it doesn't go sideways. So even if there are problems, even if there are difficulties, even if you run out of gas, even if your gas is stolen, even if attendance is good, attendance is bad, weather is good, weather is bad, that you can handle whatever life throws you, which is ultimately what parenting is about, ultimately what Stoicism is about. And it was a lovely trip. Again, thanks to everyone that came out and supported me.

• 28:29Ryan Holiday?

  It was lovely to meet all of you and I'm looking forward to seeing you guys in the Midwest and on the East Coast and in Australia, which is going to happen very soon. All right, be well, everyone.