David Rubenstein on Patriotic Philanthropy and the Value of History

Ryan talks to American billionaire businessman David Rubenstein about his new book The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream, learning from past historical figures' successes and from their mistakes, his original concept of patriotic philanthropy and giving back after coming from a middle class family, his thoughts on finding enough and finding peace in success, and more. David Mark Rubenstein is an American billionaire businessman. Former government official and lawyer. A Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest and most successful private investment firms. Mr. Rubenstein co-founded the firm in 1987. Also the host of The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations on Bloomberg TV and PBS. Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show. DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping. Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com /stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow David Rubenstein: HomepageSee 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?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am just digging myself out of the backlog from the Courage is Calling launch, trying to, you know, Marcus Aurelius talks about when you lose the rhythm, try to revert back to yourself, get back on to it when you're jarred by circumstances, you know, get back on track, basically. And that's what I find happens on book launches. Like, it's just this thing that consumes so much of your time and energy, just like been recording several hours of podcasts every day. I had to travel for it, had to sign all the books, had to oversee the books getting out, and there was disaster after disaster after disaster.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  Got through it, so honored and grateful for all the support and help. And I do hope you like the book. I've heard great things. If you did like the book, please leave an Amazon review. It makes a big difference, helps people understand. I don't care if it's positive or negative. I really just care if you say what you think. And the more in-depth you go, the better. People really benefit and take seriously those reviews that are a couple paragraphs, not like a two-sentence thing, "It was a great book," or "I hated it." But just like, really say what you think. Say what you liked, what you didn't like. What I could have done better, what you loved about it, what you got out of it, some of your favorite parts, all of that would help a great deal. But anyways, I'm trying to get back on track, trying to get back to writing my,

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  the rhythm of writing the sequel, which I was at a pretty good clip on. Ironically, it's a book about self-discipline. And so I'm having to follow my own advice, get back on track. And I'm doing okay. I've had good days, bad days, but I'm working on it. And that brings me to today's guest, someone I was really excited to have on. David Rubenstein is an American businessman, one of the richest people in the world. He's a former government official and lawyer. He worked in the Carter administration. He's the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, which you might have heard of. It's one of the world's largest and most successful private investment firms in the world, worth many hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  And he co-founded that firm in 1987. He is chairman of the boards of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Economic Club of Washington. And if that weren't enough, if that wasn't success in business and politics and philanthropy enough, he is also the host of the David Rubenstein Show, Peer-to-Peer Conversations on Bloomberg TV and PBS. He's the author of The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians, which was published by Simon and Schuster in October 2019. How to Lead: Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs and Game Changers. And his new book, which came out September 7th, The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream,

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  features interviews with some of our greatest living historians and thinkers. Jill Lepore, Madeleine Albright, Ken Burns, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Elaine Weiss, John Meacham, Walter Isaacson, David McCullough, John Barry, whose book I have raved about, if you haven't read The Great Influenza, you should. John Barry, Winston Marsalis, Billie Jean King, Rita Moreno, and many, many more. It's a great book, an instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. I was grateful. That David came on the podcast and we talked not just about America, not just about the story, not just about the power of learning history, but also about our obligations once we're successful to contribute to the common good. I was fascinated by, and this

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  pertains to his idea of the American story, the American experiment, this sort of type of philanthropy that he has pioneered, which he calls patriotic philanthropy, which really connects to our sense of history, our shared great moments and landmarks of America, whether it's the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution, or the houses of various founders, or the Washington Monument. We had a great talk. You can go to davidrubenstein.com. You can follow him on Twitter as well. One other related book and interview that ties

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  into this idea of patriotic philanthropy, which I recommended to David in the interview, is one of my favorite books of the year, How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith. I had Clint Smith on the podcast recently. We talked about some of those patriotic but poorly understood moments of American history, whether it's Monticello, or the Whitney Plantation, the place in Galveston where the Emancipation Proclamation was read, which set off the new federal holiday here in the US, Juneteenth. Another great book, but an important part of understanding the American story, which I hope you will check out along with David's

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  books. And I hope you enjoy this interview, and we'll talk soon. I was thinking about the titles of your two books, The American Story and The American Experiment. But I was thinking that even calling it The American Experiment is a version of The American Story. It's a way of seeing America.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Well, yes, this is my third book. One I had was on, in between these two was on leadership. How to Lead. On these two, you know, you always have to come up with a title that hasn't been taken and isn't confusing. And I thought for a while, The American Experience. But in the end, The American Experiment seemed to be the best because in the end, what we have here is an experiment in representative democracy that at times has worked pretty well and times hasn't worked so well.

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  Is that sort of your version of the American story? You see it as this sort of ongoing generation to generation experiment? Or what is your version of the American story?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Well, my view is that we, the founding fathers, so-called, created a government that had never existed before, a representative democracy with no aristocracy or things like that. And that was an experiment that Thomas Jefferson didn't think would last very long. He thought maybe 20 years and then you'd come up with another form of government. At least that was his initial view. And obviously, it's lasted 250 years practically. Nobody would have thought it would have lasted that long, anybody who was a founding father. So it's an experiment in the sense that we still haven't really given people all the rights and other privileges that they thought they might have if they just listened to the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence or the rhetoric in some parts of the Constitution.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  So it's an ongoing experiment in democracy. It's worked pretty well at times. At times, right now, I think it hasn't worked as well.

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I like the idea, too, that it is an experiment because it puts, you know, it's that famous Ben Franklin line about, you know, it's a republic if you can keep it. The idea that there is some generation to generation obligation and that it's not a static thing strikes me as an important way to see one's relationship.

• 8:12Ryan Holiday?

  To the government, although I'm not sure if most people see it that way.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Well, remember Darwin came up with the origin of a species and the theory of evolution and Darwinian kind of progress. That's what, that same principle could be applied to governments as well. I mean, he applied it to nature, but you could say that governments are evolving all the time and every so often they, they come on with a different, better improved form. But sometimes you might, just like a, a human or an animal gets sick and, and in some cases dies, sometimes the government can get sick and while it doesn't die, it can come close to it. And I say in my book that we've had some stress tests that have been really, really serious. Obviously the civil war is the most serious stress test, but we went through two very serious ones just the last year or so.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, a- and it seems like maybe a way to see the new book is, is that if America is itself this experiment in representative democracy, then there have also been these sub experiments, whether it's on the expansion of civil rights and voting rights, whether it's experiments in innovation or technology, even, even, I don't think the founders would have seen America originally as this sort of, sort of haven for immigrants. These are all sort of ad hoc experiments that we've posted on to the original experiment. Some have worked really well, others not as well, but.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Look, for example, today, as I say, when I describe the genes that I think are part of our body politic, one of them is diversity.

• 9:47Ryan Holiday?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  That wasn't one that the founding fathers actually focused too much on, you might say, right?

• 9:51Ryan Holiday?

  Uh-uh.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  I mean, they weren't even focused on giving any rights to women, let alone people of different colors. So, you know, sure, things do evolve and I would say the principles that are what I call the genes today have evolved over a period of time. The founding fathers, they had many different ideas about many different things than we do today, but that's how, you know, people evolve and governments evolve as well.

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's sort of the ultimate irony of Thomas Jefferson is how his words are sort of used ultimately against him to do things he probably would have found completely abhorrent or impossible. And I think the genius of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. is to take the sort of literal words of the founders and use them to tell completely different stories than perhaps they were intended to mean, but for the better of both the country and the people.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Look, the most famous sentence in the English language was what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the preamble. But what he really meant was all white Christian men who have property are equal. Now, he wasn't a gigantic fan of slavery. He thought of maybe it should go away at some point, but he wasn't going to use any political risk or power to get rid of it.

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  Or give up, or at any personal cost to himself.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But so all white Christian men was really what they were focused on at the time. It wasn't people who were of color, people who were Jewish, wasn't for women. But the rhetoric was so kind of not specific that later other people took that rhetoric and said, it applies to me. And as you just suggested, Martin Luther King, among others. But Abraham Lincoln did it as well. In the Gettysburg Address, the first sentence really refers back to the Declaration of Independence and saying all men are created equal. Well, obviously, Jefferson really didn't think blacks and whites were equal.

• 11:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, you know, I was thinking about this recently. I wrote a piece for The Economist about the Statue of Liberty. And obviously, the Statue of Liberty adorns the cover of the new book. But that, you know, the Statue of Liberty, given as a gift from France to America, was intended for sort of one set of symbolism. It was about freedom, freedom on the march. It's kind of about the eradication of slavery. It's about a bunch of things, pretty much objectively not about immigration at all, or immigrants. And then it's only in the fundraising for the Statue of Liberty, a fun fact that it's basically the first First successful crowdfunding campaign. But this poem gets written by someone who happens to be very pro immigration.

• 12:31Ryan Holiday?

  And she's working, I think, with like Jewish refugees at the time. She writes the Lazarus writes the the poem, which gets is put up as part of the statue. But it in the process, because of the power of story, totally redefines what this symbol means, not just to America, not just what America means to itself, but what America means to the world and what the statue means to the world.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  But remember, of course, as you obviously know, when the statue was dedicated, we didn't yet have the the immigration law that we came up with in 1925 that essentially said to people, if you're Jewish, stay away. If you're from Eastern Europe, stay away. If you're from Asia, stay away. And we had that for about 40 years. And so we really weren't welcoming that many people for a long time.

• 13:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a there's that line about how like the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. Maybe you could argue that some of these stories or these ideas, they're there. The problem is they just haven't quite taken hold, either politically, culturally, or like sort of in the consciousness, they're just not evenly distributed yet.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  So you're right, absolutely. Now, so when I you're you sound from your voice to be much, much younger than me. So so when you went to grade school or you went to junior high school, you probably had some American history. And I don't know how they're teaching it these days. I assume it's much different than when I went. But what I'm trying to do is to get people to kind of recognize that American history is not quite what we were taught in grade school many years ago. It's much different. And the stories about Native Americans, African Americans, the founding fathers, while they all had their warts and so forth, is we should know about it. We should know the good and the bad. And the experiment is ongoing and we should recognize we haven't lived up to the rhetoric. And your example of the Statue of Liberty is a perfect example of it.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  The Statue of Liberty is seen as a symbol of welcoming of people, but it really wasn't intended for immigrants to come there and and evolve races and and ethnicities and be welcomed.

• 14:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I want to talk more about the statue with you because I'd love your opinion on the thing I was proposing. But but you raise a really good point, and I I think it's important what you're doing and and. It's sort of shocking to me that people have such a hard time with it. But what is this sort of snowflake fragility we have about history these days where like it's somehow not like, like I, we, we haven't been teaching history properly for a long time. I think most people can accept that. It's been often sort of covered over or outright disingenuous. And now, even if people are over correcting a little bit, what is this insane sensitivity people have to, to, to their kids being taught that Thomas Jefferson

• 15:18Ryan Holiday?

  was a hypocrite? You know, I don't get why, why we can't like, history shouldn't make you comfortable. It's not clean cut. And if you expect it to be, you're probably not studying history. You're studying propaganda.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Well, it goes back to the concept of 19, as I, I think I say in the book at some point, in 1960, when John Kennedy was elected president, 90% of the population of this country was white, 10% not white. The world has now changed. So roughly 40% of the country's population is not white. Those people that are white see their power going away, the myths that they've grown up with going away, their ability to earn a job or to get the kind of benefits they might want from society going away. And some of that is reflected in the way they want their children to be taught history, which is to say that the white men were really great at everything they did and they didn't rape and pillage

• 16:14Speaker 01

  the Indians and so forth. And I think it's difficult for some people to let go of what they grew up with.

• 16:20Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting. Yeah, that's a good way. I, when, when I hear people get, you know, I, I live in Texas and when I hear people get mad about like critical race theory, I go, I'm not sure, even if critical race theory was totally wrong and had no historical merit whatsoever, I'm not sure it's any worse than, you know, Confederate hero day still being a, you know, a state holiday or, or, or, you know, this sort of lost cause mythology they're being taught. That's also inaccurate propaganda that people have been taught for hundreds of years. There's this idea that like the way we were doing it. Before was was correct or, you know, effective. It's just not the case.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Look, critical race theory has its challenges, obviously, as well. But because of it, a bill now in front of the Senate and the House is stalled. There was a bill to provide a billion dollars to the 50 states to help educate people about history and civics and so forth. Now it's stalled because critical race theory is now said to be the thing that people are going to be teaching. But I guess if you did a survey of people that's that oppose critical race theory, or I'm not saying I support it. But and those people that haven't been vaccinated, you probably find a hard, a large correlation between the unvaccinated and those who don't believe in critical race theory.

• 17:39Ryan Holiday?

  I, yes, and I would also say that if you had to poll what percentage of people have strong opinions about, strong negative opinions about critical race theory and ask them to define what it was, you probably would not get particularly impressive answers either.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  I think that's probably the case, but, yes. So it sounds like you know a lot about history and you've written a lot about it, right?

• 18:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I, I love it and I, I've, I find that the, the fact that history is complicated is where all the lessons are, right? Like if Thomas Jefferson is a perfect person, or if the founding fathers were not morally complex, not only would it be boring, but I'm not sure it would challenge us as individuals to, to be and do better in the present day.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you look, as famously said, nobody's a hero to his valet, right? When you get to be close to somebody and you see the warts, you realize everybody's got their problems. Presidents of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize winners, they all have their challenges. And the founding fathers, as we examine them more, we see that they are challenged, not only in their personal lives, but in their views about racial issues that today we, we accept as a given that people are going to be treated equally and they didn't think of that way. But, you know, it's often difficult to go back and apply today's standards to the, to the 100 years ago or 200 years ago period of time. I think you have to use some discretion. In assessing it, for example, if somebody principally known because he or she was a slave owner,

• 19:10Speaker 01

  and that is what they're famous for, or they principally known because they wrote the Declaration of Independence, or created the University of Virginia, and they were a slave owner as well, you should let people know that. But I don't think you should get rid of the Jefferson Memorial, simply because he was also a slave owner, as many people were in those days.

• 19:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, there's a, I've talked about this a bunch on the podcast, I'm sure my listeners are excited to hear about it again. But there's a Confederate statue down the street from my office that I've done a lot of work trying to get down. And as I talked to the state historical commission, I went down and spoke in front of them. And I was saying like, look, your instinct about preserving history is great. But this statue is not only not history, it was explicitly put up to obscure and tell a lie about history, right? The purpose of the Confederate monument wasn't put up by orphans and widows, you know, grieving in the aftermath of the Civil War, it was put up in 1910 as a way to tell a different American story,

• 20:11Ryan Holiday?

  you know, to white southerners about what their heritage was and who was in power, and why they were raising a giant middle finger to the federal government. So this thing is not history, it's actually, you know, white supremacist propaganda that happens to be old. And does that mean we throw it into the river? Probably not. But do we maintain, do we use public funds to maintain it on the grounds of a county courthouse? Probably not.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Look, I'm about to go down this weekend to film something at Stone Mountain in Atlanta. And Stone Mountain basically was used to carve things saying how great the Confederacy was, in effect.

• 20:54Ryan Holiday?

  In the 30s, right?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  I'm sorry?

• 20:56Ryan Holiday?

  In the 30s, right?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  That's correct. And it was done not right after the Civil War to honor those who fought for their states, but it was really as a symbol of the Confederacy, which was really a symbol of racism to some extent, I think. So I think you have to distinguish between a monument that might have been put up on the College of Washington and Lee to Robert E. Lee, because he was the president of the university. From a statue of Robert E. Lee that's put up in 1950 to be against Brown versus Board or something like that.

• 21:28Ryan Holiday?

  Right, yeah, and then something with Stone Mountain, it's tricky because it's like, it's also a feat of sort of engineering and artistic genius. I don't mean that as far as it's merit, I just mean like it was hard to do. And what does that mean? Do you obliterate it like the Taliban? Or do you, you know, what do you do with it? That's a tricky question.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think in some cases, it's good to keep things around to remind people of what people thought and to say, let us tell you how bad this was, but here's a symbol of what people thought of, rather than blowing up the mountain.

• 22:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, right. That's, yeah, it's an interesting thing. Let me ask you, so what is your, obviously, as a successful business person, as a philanthropist, as an investor, you could spend your time on a lot of things and a lot of causes. Why choose history? Is it because what you're interested in? Or do you feel like that that's something that's underserved? Why the focus and dedication to history?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Okay, I am involved in a lot of philanthropic projects and organizations, so I wouldn't say history is the only one. But it's interesting. I would say of all the money I've given away, probably 10% is relating to history or civics or what I've called patriotic philanthropy. But it gets 100% of the attention, just because so few other people are relatively speaking doing it. So if I give $50 million for pancreatic cancer research to Sloan Kettering, it's a nice gift and maybe it'll help some people. It doesn't get any attention because everybody's giving money to medical research and hospitals. Not that many people are, you know, when I was shocked that when I put up some money to fix the Washington Monument, it got all this attention. And every time people talk about the Washington Monument, they often mention me. And, you know, it wasn't that much money. And it's just that no one else

• 23:11Speaker 01

  seemed to be doing it. But the reason I am interested in history is that, one, I understand it better. I don't understand physics. I don't understand chemistry. I'm not good in the sciences and so forth. And also, there's a little bit of a gap there. There was a need maybe to do some things there. But also, in any philanthropy, what you have to do, and my standards in philanthropy are, find something that you can start that wouldn't otherwise get started. Find something that you can finish and otherwise wouldn't get finished. A third would be find something you're intellectually interested in so you can actually stay with it more than just write a check and help with your time and energy. And last, you can see some progress in your lifetime.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  So global climate change is a wonderful, I wish we could, we could solve it. I don't have enough money or I'm not going to be around on the earth long enough to have an impact. I just, I'm not a big enough person or wealthy enough to have an impact on that. And, and I just don't think I'm going to see the progress in my lifetime. So I'm letting other people who have more money and more younger that need to work on that. I'm trying to find things where I can make a difference in the little money I have relative to what Bill Gates and others have and, and have the time available to do these things. That's, that's how I look at it. And history is one of those areas. I understand it reasonably well. I like reading history. I, I think people should learn more about it and that's kind of why I'm focused on it.

• 24:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was just thinking like you're not writing books about innovation or climate change or, or other issues that you could write about, but you've written these three books on, I, I think the leadership book qualifies also as a book about history because it's still, still historical.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can look, the, the people seem to like the books because they're relatively easy to read. This isn't Principia Mathematica or the Origin of Species I'm writing. I'm basically doing a kind of an overview of the subject matter and then doing interviews and you can go from interview to interview. You don't have to read them in a certain sequence and so forth. And so people seem to like, it's an interesting thing we're doing. Right now you and, you and I are having a conversation, you can call it an interview. But this interview format is relatively new in society. We don't have any interviews of William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Henry the eighth. We don't have these. Why? Because people didn't do interviews then. We didn't even have interviews of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. People didn't publish interviews.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Now, in the last, I'd say 60, 70 years, the interview format on television and now radio and podcasts has become something very popular with people. Why? Because you can have a back and forth with somebody. You don't have to read a long book to make the point. So in other words, if you were to read a book on history, you might not get from the start to the finish of 400 pages. If you can read an interview, it's relatively easier to digest and, and so I think people like reading them, also listening to them. And that's why I think the interview format podcasts have taken off.

• 25:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the only sort of historical precedent I think that might be there would be like some of the philosophical dialogues that survived to us from Greece or Rome.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yes, Socrates, yes. But interestingly, those dialogues really, they kind of went in abeyance because, you know, in the Middle Ages or even first couple hundred years of this country's history, you didn't see people doing interviews.

• 26:17Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  And the only time you would see Socratic dialogue was in law schools, when law professors would kind of engage in Socratic dialogue with the students. But I think when the late night talk shows, maybe when Steve Allen started and then Jack Parr and later Johnny Carson, all the rest began in daytime talk shows and so forth, people began to see interviews as a form of not only information but entertainment, and it became more and more popular.

• 26:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, if you think about, I was, I was looking at the American Storybook and I hadn't read all of them, but I'd say 80% I'd read those sort of epic works of history, the historians that you recommend. And, you know, I was trying to do some loose calculations, it's like tens of thousands of pages. And, and I think you're doing important work in the sense of like, you know, the average person is probably going to be intimidated to read 4,000 pages on Lyndon Johnson. But when you, when you hear the enthusiasm of a Robert Caro and the depths, the insights that he pulls out of a life that you might not think you'd be that interested in, it does sort of suck you into why you should

• 27:26Ryan Holiday?

  maybe sit down with, if not the whole series, at least one of them.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Well, as I said in the, in the beginning of the, the American Story, this is really an appetizer.

• 27:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  If you, if you like it, go read the, eat the whole meal. But everybody might not want to read a 400-page book, but you can learn a little bit about it. If you like more about it, you can read the whole book. So it's, it's kind of designed to educate people a little bit.

• 27:49Ryan Holiday?

  There is something special about those books. Last year, or the year before, I read the Taylor Branch series on Martin Luther King. And it's like, again, I thought I understood the civil rights movement. I thought I'd learned about it in school. And I'd read some biographies and books about Martin Luther King. But there is something about just the sheer depth that an author like that goes into. And you realize, I was reading the acknowledgements of the last book in the series, and he talks about how he started the first book, like, as his son, as his wife was pregnant with his son. And then his son helped him as a college undergrad with the research for the last one. And you realize, oh, this

• 28:27Ryan Holiday?

  is 25 years of someone's life that it might take you, you know, three months to read. But you are getting sort of distilled history at such a, you know, high concentration that there's really nothing like it.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  I agree. I mean, his books, the first one, won the Pulitzer Prize, and the other two are extraordinary books. But think about, he basically gave a large part of his life to working on this. And you often find, most authors don't really realize that they're going to do that. Take Robert Caro. He's now worked for 35 years on Lyndon Johnson. And he never thought he would be more than like, maybe one volume initially.

• 29:07Ryan Holiday?

  And he's not even through the Vietnam War yet.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  I know. I asked him, what's your view on Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War? He said, well, I haven't written that yet. I said, but can't you tell me? He says, no, I can't talk about anything until I've written it.

• 29:18Ryan Holiday?

  Wow. Yeah, I was worried during the pandemic. I was like, please, God, spare Robert Caro. I want to read the rest of the series.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. As you know, a lot of people were upset that he wrote that other book about his life in between finishing the last volume. People said, what are you writing another volume for? Finish the Lyndon Johnson thing already.

• 29:37Ryan Holiday?

  It's so, it's so good. I mean, I was talking to another author, a friend of mine, the other day, and they were talking about the cuts that they had to make to their book. And I sort of use this example all the time. I was like, you know, Robert Caro cut 250,000 words out of The Power Broker. And that book is still like 1,200 pages. But, you know, 250,000 words, as you know, as an author, is like, that's like three or four books just in itself. And so you think about the depths that that guy is willing to go to explore something. It really humbles you.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I agree. Like, in my own books, I compare myself with him. But I've had a lot of people I've interviewed, and they call me up later and say, David, how come I'm not in your book? And I have to say, well, the editors didn't want you in. What am I supposed to say? In fact, in the most recent book, some of the people asked me about one of the interviews that actually got cut at the last minute. I think some pre-publicity publication about the book said there was going to be an interview with Paul Simon in there. And I had to, for a lot of legal and other reasons, I had to take that out. So it actually isn't in. But people were asking me about the Paul Simon interview. I didn't want to tell them it didn't actually make the book.

• 30:42Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, man. Well, so what's your, what is the definition of this idea of patriotic philanthropy? That sounds interesting, but I'm not quite sure what it means.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Okay. I coined the phrase, and like most phrases, they are a little misleading. All philanthropy, in my view, is patriotic.

• 31:00Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  So what I meant by it was philanthropy that is designed to remind people of the history and heritage of the country. So you could call it historical philanthropy. I call it patriotic philanthropy. But whatever the reason, I used that word. It just seemed to fit. But what I mean is, what I do is I buy historic documents, put them on display to remind people of what was in these documents and to hopefully encourage people to see them and learn more about them. Or to fix monuments, like, or fix homes like Amonticello or Montpelier, or things like that, to fix them up so more people will go. The theory of what I'm doing is that if more people will see the originals, they'll learn more about history. For example, why preserve the Magna Carta? We know what's in the Magna Carta. Who cares about having the original?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Well, the theory is that if you go, if I preserved the Magna Carta, and it's the only one in private hands, it's on long-term, permanent loan to the archives, people might go visit it. And when you go visit it, in anticipation of it, you're likely to read about it. When you get there, you're going to have a curator tell you about it, and afterwards you might read about it. That's different than seeing it on a computer slide. Because the human brain doesn't yet equate seeing the words of the Magna Carta on a computer slide with actually seeing the Magna Carta. The same with Mount Vernon. If Mount Vernon has been preserved and you go visit it, it's a better experience to learn more about it than if you just look at pictures on a computer. So that's why I try to preserve some of these things.

• 32:23Ryan Holiday?

  Have you read this book, How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith? It just came out, uh, maybe like six months ago.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  No, what is that?

• 32:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's really good. I had him on the podcast. He's, he's, uh, he basically, he tours, uh, it's sort of a travel memoir, but it's about sort of historical sites in America. He goes, he visits Monticello, he goes to the Whitney Plantation, he visits Angola Prison, uh, Confederate Cemetery, uh, Galveston, uh, island where they read, uh, the Juneteenth, uh, ex, uh, Declaration, uh, and, uh, and then he visits, um, some island in, in, uh, Africa where, where the slave trade originated.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  I, I haven't done that, but I am working now on a PBS series that'll come out in about a year where we're visiting some historic sites like the Galveston, uh, wharf where, where the, the, the, uh, uh, the, the kind of, uh, Galveston flag was, when they put together, or at least it came from there, uh, to some extent after Mr. Galveston. But, or visit the Stone Mountain or things like that. So I'm visiting historic sites and try to educate people about them and ultimately it'll be on TV, but it sounds like he's done the same thing and I'll have to go read his book.

• 33:29Ryan Holiday?

  I think you would like it and his point is just that these sites, which, you know, people sometimes see as sort of roadside tourism or, or whatever, are really the way that Americans learn history about themselves. Like he's, he's at Monticello and, you know, it's, it's him and these sort of two white ladies and, and they're just sort of like surprised that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Like they just sort of not thought about it.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Well, when I put up the money for Monticello, I, I did tell them I really thought that the slave quarter should be built out, which they did. And the same with Montpelier, we should tell the slave story, which they now have now done very well.

• 34:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And it's really interesting. I guess there's one in Louisiana called the Whitney Plantation, which is sort of a plantation, but it's not the history of the white people who owned it. It's like the history of. Slavery and what it actually looked and felt like, because we do, it's tricky, right? It's easy to celebrate the fun stuff historically. It's hard to celebrate the dark moments. I mean, there's a reason that Hitler's bunker is a parking lot in Berlin, because it's easier to obliterate it than it is to wrestle with it. Not that I'm questioning that decision. I'm just saying, there's a reason people want to have plantation weddings, not walk through a Holocaust museum.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  That's true. There's no doubt about it. You don't want to, you know, have a wedding and then ruined by discussions of slavery, right?

• 34:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Yeah, I found it really fascinating. It was a great book. So, the reason I was interested in patriotic philanthropy is the piece I was writing, it's something that struck me the first time I read it, and I didn't quite know what to do with it until I got this opportunity to write this piece. But in Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl throws out this idea coming out of the Second World War, that America ought to put up a sister monument to the Statue of Liberty on the West Coast, that he calls the Statue of Responsibility. The idea that with liberty and freedom is also obligation, duty, and

• 35:36Ryan Holiday?

  responsibility, and that these sort of two things can't be separated with. And I was sort of writing a piece about how this idea caught, you know, got a lot of attention, and then sort of faltered off, and that we've struggled. In fact, before they turned Alcatraz into a tourist attraction, that was where they were thinking about putting the monument.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 35:56Ryan Holiday?

  And I was just really interested in this idea that we don't do a great job, we have a lot of discussions about what monuments shouldn't exist. And as you said, there's some controversy or debate about which ones to preserve and how to fund them. But I'm not sure we do that great of a job of sort of new patriotic monuments or statements that celebrate the versions of the story that we aspire to be like.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Well, we don't do that so well, and it's hard to get monuments built these days. Even the people that are, you know, famous for being famous for a long time, like John Adams. We don't really have anything that's a monument to him in Washington. After David McCullough's book came out, people said we should have a monument. And that was like 20 some years ago. We still don't have that. There are very few monuments to women in Washington DC. You think about all the prominent women have been part of our history. Very few women have are memorialized in monuments here. And, you know, and so many other people have done great things for the country, but they aren't political figures, so they sometimes don't have monuments to them.

• 37:00Ryan Holiday?

  Is it a financial thing? Is it a bureaucratic thing? Is it a cultural willpower thing? Why, like, why does it take so long to get an Eisenhower monument? Or like the Martin Luther King monument's only like 10 or 15 years old, which is pretty incredible.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Well, it does take, there are a lot of government entities that have to approve these various things. You have to get money from Congress sometimes, or if you don't get money from Congress, you have to go out and raise the money. The Eisenhower one was controversial in part because of the of the design. But it does, it is amazing how long it takes to get these things done. Look, Abraham Lincoln died in 1865. His memorial opened in, you know, what, 1922 or something like that? So George Washington, he died in 1799. His monument opened in 1888.

• 37:48Ryan Holiday?

  True. Takes a while. Yeah, it, I guess it's, it's, we got a lot of problems in the present day. It's hard to prioritize time and money to erect statues. But as you said, these things, they do, they do make a difference. They teach us things, and if they go away, you know, whether it's a copy of the Constitution or the Magna Carta, or a, or a, you know, a monument of Abraham Lincoln, there is a hole there left behind, I think.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yes, and but there is no one group in the United States, no organization whose main thing is to say, who do we have we not memorialized appropriately? Maybe there should be, but there isn't anything like that right now.

• 38:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you know, Trump, Trump was sort of laughed for it, but didn't you want to put like a sculpture garden in the White House of statues of great Americans? Putting aside whatever his actual motivations were, that does strike me as a pretty good idea.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  He wanted to do it, and it wasn't in the White House, but it was in the mall. And the controversy was that he named some of the people he wanted to put in there, and some of them might be people who you would say might not deserve a monument.

• 38:54Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, sure. No, I like the idea probably more than the than the execution.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Not a bad idea. And of course, trying to figure out who to put in those things, it's complicated, but we'll see.

• 39:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, if if one monument is hard, I got to imagine a collection of monuments to different people is is like herding cats or something.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 39:18Ryan Holiday?

  So I'm curious, like, when someone finds themselves in your position, you've been successful, you've climbed to the top of, you know, your profession, you could obviously continue to focus on that. You could you could also just kick back and relax. What keeps you focused on this, among other things? Like, is it a sense of obligation? Or?

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Well, look, I came from very modest economic circumstances, and I got successful in part because this country enabled somebody with my last name and and so forth to to rise up. So I want to give back to the country. That's one thing. Secondly, I I enjoy what I'm doing. You know, the hardest thing in life is to find something you enjoy and then have time to do it. I enjoy these kind of subjects and talking with you or talking about history, writing books. It's my pleasure. I don't really like playing shuffleboard. I'm not good at relaxing, and so so it's a pleasure for me. And third, you know, I'm now 72 years old. And, you know, I would say 80% of the people who were born when I was born are not alive now.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  So, you know, a lot of people will, my age and, you know, older, will probably not be around forever. I don't know when I, I could get a bad disease tomorrow. I could die from COVID. So I'm trying to get things done that I, you know, sooner rather than later. I call what I'm doing sprinting to the finish line. As you all know, you know, there's some part of your brain and some part of your body that will give out at some point. You don't know when it's going to happen. Sometimes it happens when you're young. Sometimes you can go to ninety or a hundred. And I'm just trying to get things done before my brain isn't working or my body isn't working. So, and while I enjoy what I'm doing. And my theory is if you enjoy what you're doing, it's pleasure. And people that are doing pleasurable things will probably live longer.

• 41:09Ryan Holiday?

  Do you feel a sense of urgency day to day with the idea of, of sort of life?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  I do.

• 41:14Ryan Holiday?

  Inevitably coming to a close?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Well, because of COVID, I realized people my age were dying. We lost six hundred and fifty thousand Americans. And many of them were my age or older, but some were younger. And, you know, so sure, and I know people that died from it. And, you know, if I got lucky, I didn't get it. But my children and grandchildren got it. And so they survived. But, you know, I could have, I could have gotten in and could have died. But it also made me think I need to get things done before it's too late. Both of my parents died when they were in their eighties, but they died very unexpectedly on something that happened that they never expected to happen. And so you never know when bad things are going to happen. And when you're in your seventies or eighties, bad things can happen more readily. So I am racing to get things done and I don't take time off to do very much else. This is what I love doing.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And so I hope my children will ultimately, you know, think I'm doing something useful.

• 42:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's nothing quite like a deadly virus floating through the air, sort of indiscriminately picking people off to remind us of that ancient idea of memento mori that none of us have forever and that life is short and outside of our control.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, obviously, that's what arose. That's how the idea of heaven, I guess, arose. People didn't like the idea that they would be gone and if they're expiring of time. And, and think about it, right now, the average life expectancy in the United States, you're born in the United States, probably 80 years old or so. And when you're, if you're born in 1900, it was probably 50 years old. For most of organized history, and I'd just say 1,000 years ago or so, the average life expectancy was maybe 20. 400,000 years ago, when people came out of caves, probably 20. So, we've extended life from 20 to 80. And, but, but, but that doesn't stop people from worrying about what happens when they go. And they, more and more people are gonna have to spend time in that.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  As people live a little bit longer, they'll have more time to think about it. But when you go, you know, we don't know if there's a heaven or not. We'll find out soon enough, I guess, right?

• 43:13Ryan Holiday?

  What do you think of some of your peers who spend their philanthropic efforts on, say, like radical life extension?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  I, you know, it doesn't obsess me. I mean, it upset me that much. I mean, everybody, the good thing about this country is you, you can do what you want with your money, more or less, if you pay your taxes and so forth. So, it doesn't bother me. I don't think that, that we're probably gonna, in, in, in the next 100 or 200 years, I don't think we're gonna have very long life extensions with the same pleasure of life. In other words, it's one thing to live from 80 to 100 with the same abilities as you have at 80 or 100. But I don't know if that'll happen anytime soon. It might, but not anytime soon. It's not something I'm focused on. I kinda think I had a good life so far. And if I die tomorrow, I'd be content that I did the best I could within my abilities. I suspect my children will then sell off all my, everything I, I, I collected over the years.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  And they will just say, okay, now, how much money's left for us, if any?

• 44:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, I'm not criticizing how they, how they spent the money so much from a policy standpoint. It just, it just does seem like, some people seem to think that the solution, instead of a sense of urgency, is like, sort of moving the finish line back further and further. But it strikes me, it still leaves you with the same problem, which is like, how are you spending your time day to day?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, every day is a time that you should find something you're doing that you think is useful and that your time on the planet Earth is used productively. And just lounging around doesn't strike me as productive, but some people like to do that, and maybe that's fine. I'd like to get things done and try to do something with my brain while it's still working.

• 44:53Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so I read about the Stoics, and what I think is fascinating about the Stoics is that as far as philosophers go, they were probably the more involved in the actual like sort of running of the empire, the actual life. Seneca's a philosopher, an investor, a playwright, and a, you know, sort of power broker, etc. But one of the things they talk quite a bit about is money. You know, these are, it's interesting, most of what survives to us from philosophy, although there's, you know, there's your Diogenes's and such, it's usually sort of rich, privileged people, but they're kind of always fascinated with like, you know, the upper echelons of Roman society. I'm always fascinated when I talk

• 45:35Ryan Holiday?

  to someone who's been extremely, extremely successful. Like, what does that, what does that feel like? What does it feel like to make more money than a human being could possibly consume in hundreds of lifetimes? Like, especially, as you said, coming from modest circumstances. I'm sure that wasn't something you were used to.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't have any money growing up. Of course, my parents were blue collar people. You know, Felix Row, who was a famous investment banker, was once asked, how much money does it take to feel financially secure? And he said, exactly twice whatever you have. So, you know, I know some very wealthy people that were worth, you know, $10 billion, now they're worth $5 billion, and they feel poor. And then I know some people that, you know, now make $300,000 a year, and they never made more than $100,000 a year, they feel wealthy. So it's all relative. In the end, you know, today, I don't, I don't feel myself extremely wealthy compared to some of the wealthy people I know, but obviously

• 46:37Speaker 01

  many people would laugh at that because of, you know, the amount of money I am said to have. But, you know, I don't, I don't run around bragging about my net worth or anything like that. And I, I don't know that many people that do that. I think you just adjust to the situation you find yourself. When you grow up poor, you don't say, I wish I was rich, I gotta go be rich. You just adjust to the situation you have and make the best you can of it. You grow up rich, you say, okay, there's some burdens with being rich, but it's probably better to be rich than not rich. Um, but there's obviously a lot of challenges with being rich as well. So I don't view it as a unmitigated blessing to have money.

• 47:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's, uh, there's that Roosevelt line about how comparison is the thief of joy. Some of the, you know, extremely wealthy people I've met, as you said, objectively, you'd be like, oh, this person has a lot of money. And you don't realize that they're, they're of course comparing themselves to the, the person three spaces above them on the Forbes list.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Well, look, um, many of the most tortured souls I know are the wealthiest people I know.

• 47:38Ryan Holiday?

  Why is that?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Well, because you, if you make five billion, you feel I should make 10 billion. If you make 10 billion, you say, how many people telling me, I should, why shouldn't I win the Nobel Peace Fries? I, I want to do something more than just be known as a rich guy. So everybody wants something different, it seems. Nobody's ever happy with what they have. Uh, I'm pretty happy with where I am, but of course I'd like to do more with my life. I wish I had accomplished more, but you know, there are some people who feel that unless they are recognized for every, by everybody is, as being universally brilliant and talented and, and deserving all kinds of awards, their, their life isn't going to be pleasurable.

• 48:12Ryan Holiday?

  Do you think part of it is that also sort of tortured people who have some kind of thing they need fulfilled? It's also what draws them to like, let's say, make a lot of money or try to be the best quarterback in the world or the most famous singer in the world?

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, to be successful in anything, as I was saying in my leadership book, you've really gotta put in the time, you gotta work hard, you have to drop other things. And that can make you a person that's so unidimensional that, you know, you're not attractive to a lot of other people. They don't want to deal with you. And so after you make all the success, people say, well, I don't really care that you're that successful. I don't really like you. You're not a very likable person. I know some very wealthy people that nobody likes. People don't like certain wealthy people. There are some wealthy people that people really admire, but some wealthy people have made it in ways that people don't want to do anything with them, unless they just take their money as a philanthropic gift, but otherwise they don't want to socialize with them or see them at all.

• 49:07Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and if you were an easily satisfied person who was happy with, you know, little, you probably wouldn't have like, if Michael Jordan was just happy with being pretty good, he wouldn't have been Michael Jordan, and thus that also makes it hard to enjoy being Michael Jordan.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  I agree. I mean, Michael Jordan, I don't know him, but I assume he's probably not as happy as when everybody was waking up every day looking at his box scores. He's not as big a deal as he once was, though he's still a big deal. But, you know, when you're not in the newspapers every day for what you're doing, and you thrive off that, you may feel that you're not as big as you once were, and therefore you're not as happy as you once were.

• 49:48Ryan Holiday?

  There's a, there's a story I've told a couple of times. You're probably familiar with it, but Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut are at a party of a billionaire, and Vonnegut's teasing Heller, and he says, you know, this, this guy made more money this week than your books will make in their lifetime. And Heller says, yeah, but I have something he'll never have. I have enough. Do you, do you find, you meet certain people that just, nothing is ever enough? Like, no amount of success, no amount of fame, no amount of money will ever make them feel content?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Well, what's the title of Mary Trump's book?

• 50:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you're right, you're right.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  So, yes, there are certain people that are never going to get enough attention and praise that they are going to be satisfied. And there's no doubt that psychiatrists are very busy dealing with those people all the time. Yes, it's a challenge, because if you're a driven person, you're just never going to be completely satisfied unless the world tells you you win a Nobel Peace Prize every day and you're President of the United States or something. And that, that doesn't happen, of course.

• 50:54Ryan Holiday?

  And for people who don't know the title of that book, it's Too Much and Never Enough, right?

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:59Ryan Holiday?

  Is that something you've had to work on yourself? I imagine you were, you know, very driven, very ambitious, very unsatisfied with just being good enough, because you wouldn't have created your company had you, had you had low standards. But then, once you get to the top, have you had to work on that in yourself?

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not sure. I would say I got lucky in a lot of the things I did. So my business was luck and I had good partners and so forth. And I got involved in a lot of nonprofits and I became the chair of a number of the boards and that was luck. Maybe other people didn't want to be the chair. I don't know. I had a lot of luck. I would say I'm pretty happy with where I am. You know, nobody's ever completely happy with everything, but I'm pretty happy with where I am. And, you know, if I died tomorrow, I would feel I've led a reasonably happy life. And, you know, what can I do?

• 51:49Ryan Holiday?

  Let's say you are looking back reflecting on your life, just because I think it's an interesting thought exercise that might provide some clarity for other people. What accomplishments do you think would strike you as the ones you're most proud of? Is it business, family, philanthropy? How do you look at that?

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Well, I think everybody's legacy who has children is ultimately their children. That's probably the most important legacy. I have three children. They're all in private equity, pursuing the highest calling of mankind, as I like to say. But they're all, you know, well educated, adjusted, they're on their own. They're not, you know, depending on me to die and get a trust fund or something. So I think, you know, they're reasonably good shape. Second is my mother and father lived to see what I was able to achieve. And so when I do interviews, you may or may not have noticed, but I always like to ask famous people, did your parents live to see your success? Because what can be more thrilling for a parent to see a successful child or a child to see the parent be happy with what they achieved? And my parents lived to be in their mid 80s and they were pretty happy

• 52:53Speaker 01

  with what I achieved. I didn't say to them, I should have done much more. I wish I had accomplished more. I just said, you know, I'm happy that you're happy. And so that was an accomplishment I was happy about. But I think probably the most important thing that people talk to me about now is that I've given back to the country. And it's an interesting thing. I, you know, I've done this patriotic philanthropy and some other things and giving back to the country. And people seem to think that's a good thing to do. And I'm glad that people think that.

• 53:20Ryan Holiday?

  How did that start for you? Like, what was the first thing that you felt compelled to do in terms of patriotic philanthropy?

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Well, yes, I did work in the White House when I was very young for four years. I thought that was giving back to the country. But of course, we got inflation to 15%. So people didn't probably think that was such a great contribution.

• 53:39Ryan Holiday?

  But maybe we can beat that record now.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  It's a hard record to beat, believe me. I would say that If you hire McKinsey or the equivalent of McKinsey and say, "Give me some ideas of how I can do something useful for society," you know, you'll get some good proposals. But I didn't do that. I stumbled into it. As many good things in life happen, they happen by serendipity. I happened to go to a viewing of the Magna Carta and they told me it was going to be auctioned off the next night and was probably going to leave the country and was the only one in the country, the only one in private hands. So I just said, "I'm going to go buy it." And so that led to my buying other historic documents and that led to me fixing the Washington Monument when I heard they had the problems and so it led to fixing up other buildings. So I kind of stumbled into it and ultimately I coined this phrase patriotic philanthropy and it's kind of evolved into other things.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  But, you know, I can't say it was a forethought. I didn't sit down and think, "How can I give back to the country?" It kind of happened by happenstance.

• 54:34Ryan Holiday?

  No, and look, I think the books are a big part of that legacy. There's something special about books in that they kind of punch above their weight, right? Like however much time and energy you spent and money spent on the books, I've got to imagine, let's call it a million dollars, I imagine a million dollars into this fund or that fund wouldn't have near the impact as, for whatever reason, a bunch of pages glued together between two covers.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Well, first, when you write a book, assuming it's reasonably literate, people will think you're reasonably intelligent. So, you know, I think that's good. I like to have people think just because you're a rich businessman, you're not an idiot just to happen to stumble into a good business situation. And two, I enjoy writing and I enjoy reading and so it's a pleasure to put them together. Also, I guess it's a legacy for my children and grandchildren. They'll see that, "Hey, I actually did something that's still hanging around." I am a collector of rare books, particularly those relating to Americana, and I have a very, very large collection, people tell me, by normal standards. And I'm thinking about, I'm buying these books that people wrote 100, 200 years ago and maybe, and nobody's not going to buy my books in 100, 200 years, but the fact

• 55:45Speaker 01

  that there's something that's still around 100, 200 years after you're gone is, you know, interesting. And so I just enjoy writing books. My problem was I didn't think of doing it or I didn't have the time to do it. To I, you know, was in my late 60s. So I wish, you know, I read about some people that have written 30 books. I don't know how they had time to do it, but they actually started earlier. And if you have a routine, you can get that done. I think my former boss Jimmy Carter has written, I think, 28 or 29 books.

• 56:12Ryan Holiday?

  Man, he pumps them out and they're all very good. I've been, I've been, I've read probably four or five of them and I'm, it's almost like he missed his, his actual calling.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  So he, you know, and other people have written books, Richard Posner, one of my former law professors, the University of Chicago, he's written about 30 books. And while he was also a judge and a law professor. So a lot of people are much more productive. Teddy Roosevelt, I think, wrote 30 books or so. I wish I had started earlier. I'm now trying to do one a year and I have a formula, formula to enable me to do it. I, you know, I have to give up other things. So I enjoy doing it. I hope my brain will keep going for a while.

• 56:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I have a little bookstore that I, that I own here in Texas and sometimes I walk through it and I'm always struck by, man, this book is 2,500 years old and people bought it today. It's just a, it's a magnificent sort of feat of human genius to do. I mean, there's bridges that from that period that, that have crumbled into dust. It's, it's kind of insane to think about the lifespan and the impact that a singular book can have.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  What's your bookstore? I'm going to be in Austin next week. What's the name of your bookstore?

• 57:25Ryan Holiday?

  It's, it's right outside Austin. It's, it's called The Painted Porch in Bastrop, Texas. I would of course love, love to have you. That would be very cool.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Where is it in?

• 57:33Ryan Holiday?

  In Bastrop, Texas, right, right, right out past the airport.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:39Ryan Holiday?

  I, or I think about, you know, you interviewed John M. Berry for, for this book, you know, you have a guy who, you know, we, as bad as COVID was, it would have been considerably worse had he not written that book 15 years ago and opened some people in government's eyes to a forgotten piece of history, which was the, the Spanish flu.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Yes, which had nothing to do with Spain, of course, really.

• 58:07Ryan Holiday?

  No, it was from Kansas.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  No, but when you think about it, what happened there was that we had, there were three things that people were told to do: wash your hands, socially distance, wear a mask. And 100 years later, the same things, really. They didn't have vaccine, they never developed a vaccine for that, that, that flu. And interestingly, politicians wouldn't talk about it. President of the United States, who caught the Spanish flu, never would acknowledge its existence because he thought it would scare people during the war and so forth. But, you know, we've learned some things from the Spanish flu, but not enough, frankly.

• 58:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, it struck me, reading that book at the beginning of the pandemic, that it probably informed me better about COVID than any news article, academic paper, report, presidential address, message from my doctor that I got over the next 18 months.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  I agree. It was a well-done book. He knows medicine and medical kind of things pretty well. And I think he did a really good job in the book. I wish more people would have read it earlier in this crisis.

• 59:06Ryan Holiday?

  His book about the Mississippi flood is pretty incredible as well.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  I haven't read that one.

• 59:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's about the Mississippi flood of 1927, which has probably got some ominous climate change implications as well, I'm sure.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  No doubt. I just haven't read that one. I did, I think he's now living in New Orleans when I interviewed him in New Orleans.

• 59:29Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think, so I think that book was so successful, the flood one, that I think he's like on the board of whatever sort of authority, like handles the flooding and whatever of the Mississippi River. He sort of just made himself an expert about a thing more than the people who actually do that for a living. He's a pretty incredible guy.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Very smart.

• 59:49Ryan Holiday?

  Well, David, this was fascinating. I'm so glad we got to talk.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Thanks a lot.

• 59:53Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks.

• 59:56Ryan Holiday?

  Remember, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave is now available everywhere. You can go to your local bookstore and pick it up. You can come to the Painted Porch and pick it up. We are still offering the preorder bonuses. We've extended it to the end of this week. So you can get that at dailystoic.com/preorder. But you can also get Audible, you can get eBooks, you can get whatever you want from wherever you want it. But I would very much like you to support the new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave.