Jessica Lahey on Self-Efficacy and the Virtue of Temperance | Whatever Will Be Will Be

Ryan reads today’s meditation and talks to Jessica Lahey about her new book The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence, how a Stoic should measure their success, the discovery of our genetic predisposition to addiction, and more. Jessica Lahey is the New York Times bestselling author of The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed. She has written for The New York Times and The Atlantic and has taught middle and high school for over a decade. This episode is brought to you by GoMacro. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50. This episode is also brought to you by KiwiCo. KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. This episode is also brought to you by Talkspace, the 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. This episode is also brought to you by Ladder, a painless way to get the life insurance coverage you need for those you care about most. 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.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic Follow Jessica Lahey: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jesslaheyInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/teacherlahey/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jessicapottslahey/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, this is Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I don't, I give a lot of talks, but I don't go to many talks. But about two years ago now, I made sure I went to go see today's guest speak, when she was speaking to parents and administrators at a small private school here in Austin. And Jessica Leahy was spectacular. I love her book, The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed. And she talked about something that I think is sort of part and partial of Stoicism, which is that stuff happens, and we have to figure out how to

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  respond to that. And life is, you know, can you respond well to the adversity and difficulty of life? And the problem is, a lot of parents, a lot of people, never learned how to respond well, because they actually don't have that much experience with failure or difficulty, because they had snowplow parents, or helicopter parents, they had people who got in the way of that learning opportunity. So I've had Jessica on to speak about The Gift of Failure, but her new book, The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence just came out, and I actually think is perhaps more relevant to Stoicism and relevant

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  to you whether you're a parent or not. We started to figure out that addiction, there's some inheritability in addiction. We can inherit a predilection for addiction. Maybe it's a gene, maybe it's epigenetic. I don't know how it works. But the idea is that if your parents were addicts, or there's some history of addiction in your family, you are much more likely to become one yourself. And yet, this isn't, it's not like a death sentence, right? It's not a guarantee. So what separates the people who don't go down that road versus the one who does? And a lot of it has to do with things you pick

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  up early on, but also just general coping strategies. And this idea, I love this idea of inoculating oneself against addiction, or the culture of dependence that we live in. So I wanted to have Jessica in to talk about this. And we really get into it. And again, although I'm a parent of young kids, mostly I was talking about things that I'm struggling with, and how I apply this stuff in my own life. Because this stoic idea of temperance, moderation, but also abstaining from things that really shouldn't be consumed

• 3:25Ryan Holiday?

  in any quantity, or for those of us, because of our certain predilections, just don't have the luxury of consuming those things. To me, it's very relevant. I really enjoyed this interview. Every time I talk to Jessica, I learn so much. She's awesome. And I think you will really like this interview. Check out The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation. I carry The Gift of Failure in my bookstore here, The Painted Porch in Vashup, Texas, because it's great. And I believe we will soon be carrying The Addiction Inoculation as well. So you can check out Jessica's books. You can also go to jessicalahey.com.

• 4:06Ryan Holiday?

  She co-hosts the AM Writing Podcast with two bestselling authors. She lives in Vermont. There are two sons and a lot of dogs. Check out my interview with Jessica Lahey.

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  How is putting out your second book? What's different for you sort of emotionally, spiritually going into a second book? I think this one's much more personal than your first one. So I'd be curious how you're feeling about it.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  You know, what's really interesting about this is that it is a lot more personal. Some of this stuff is a little scary. I've been trying to be, I'm trying to be protective of some of my family members and that's part of it. I did hire a publicist this time around, Nicole Dewey of Dewey Decimal Media, and she's ridiculously amazing. I just, you know, I spaced things out differently. I've been doing interviews for five months about this book and they all sort of landed at the same time. There's a little bit of a difference this time around because the New York Times Bestseller list that allowed me to be a New York Times Bestseller last time around don't exist anymore.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  So. Was there a parenting section before?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Education and parenting. I was on both of those lists and they're both gone now. So, you know, making it on the straight up nonfiction bestseller list is just, you know, it's so difficult. And so.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  And actually, would you be on the best, would you be on nonfiction or would you actually be in advice?

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Advice, how to, yeah. Probably advice and how to, yeah. And, you know, the good thing, however, that's been really good because my goals for this book, you know, as much as I loved Gift of Failure and as much as that really was for my kids and my students, this is, feels just a lot more urgent to me. I have really specific goals about changing the way we teach some of the material in this next book. And it's really, it feels more urgent and yet a lot less important for me to have the accolades of the, of the lists and stuff like that. Plus, you know, I'm in this wonderful situation. Once you've got it, they can't take it away from you. So that sticks on your name no matter what, the New York Times bestselling thing. So it's there and I don't ever lose that. So that's good.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  But really.

• 6:18Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it is, it is interesting. So, you know, I think people who are on the outside of any profession, right? Whether it's, it's being an author or, you know, being an artist or, you know, being in finance, from the outside, you can have this. Impression that things are very clear cut, that they're very meritocratic and that it's sort of very fair. And then I think, and even when you get started, a lot of your goals are attached to those things because you think like, oh, to be the best seller means you sold the best. And if I'm going to do this thing, I want to be the best, right? Nobody's like, I want to be an Olympic athlete, but I want to come in 16th, right?

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  So you have this sense of it. And then this is something the Stoics talk about, the more you sort of are exposed and the more you see and the more you experience, you realize actually, a lot of this criteria is not only completely arbitrary, it may be fundamentally unfair. And a lot of people who do garbage work in one form or another regularly make it to the top of said system. And so I think the healthy response to that is to care less and less about these externals that are outside of your control and more and more on what you said, which is like, this book is important to me. This is, you know, I already, I'm already, I've already won, so I'm playing with house money. But that is a hard place

• 7:43Ryan Holiday?

  to get to. And people, I think people also think it's the logical place to get to. But a lot of people just, you know, they just, they just stay on the treadmill forever.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I host a podcast called hashtag am writing and all three of us can have bestseller next to our name. But one of my, one of my co-hosts, Serena Bowen, she is a Yale-trained economist. She has worked on Wall Street. She is so brilliant. And she writes contemporary romance. And she's so good at it. Like, she really raises the bar. And she self publishes. And she has sold so many more books than probably I will ever sell. And she will never in a million years be a New York Times bestseller. They just don't, they just don't, those things aren't included in. And yet, so her vision of success, you know, comes down to, as a

• 8:34Speaker 01

  writer and a publisher, comes down to, yes, numbers. But

• 8:39Speaker 01

  It's been really interesting to watch her and look at her metrics for what she considers something to be successful and fulfilling and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, it's been a good education. I think I've learned so much over the past eight years, so much, so much that I did differently this time. I'm also, you know, now I've also figured out, thanks to you, I mean, reading perennial seller has been so good for me because The Gift of Failure, my first book, is selling as well now as it did in its first year. And there have been periods of time, especially, you know, if I get like a celebrity shout out, where it's selling better than it did at release. So as long as that continues to sell and as long as this book continues to find a place in communities and with schools

• 9:24Speaker 01

  and with people who have a hand in changing the way we educate kids around substance abuse, I think I think I'm in good shape.

• 9:30Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's a tricky, it's a tricky business and there's, I always try to tell authors when I, when I work with authors, I don't do it as much anymore. I sort of go, what race are you trying to run? And, and what does it take to win that race? And making sure that you're not, because what you can't do is simultaneously run multiple races, especially multiple races that require totally different skills, right? So like, Michael Johnson can run the 400 and the 800. But I remember they did, that someone was asking like, what, what kind of mile time could, could Usain Bolt do? And his like coach came back and they said, I don't know. But what I can tell you is that Usain Bolt has never

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

  run a mile. Like, and it's like, oh, right. It does, these are totally, like, he is, he is, for all intents and purposes, playing a completely different sport, even though they're all running around the same track. And so, yeah, your friend who's, who's doing, you know, self-published romance, for someone who's doing nonfiction, for someone who's doing children's books, for someone who's doing, you know, ebooks or audiobooks, it's, it's all different. And you have to ask yourself, what are you trying to accomplish? How do you measure your success? And I think ideally, you always want that to be rooted in the elements of. That you control the most.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:51Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, and, and it's just, but it's just very seductive because we're human beings. We want things to be clear cut. We want numbers and we go, well, where am I on a list compared to other people? But it's like, what if I told you that the person who's two spots ahead of you on the book, on the list, used a ghostwriter, you know, purchased, uh, you know, 40% of the copies themselves? Or what if the success in that book ruined their marriage? Or to tech, to connect with the topic of your book, what if they relapsed on, you know, uh, opioids in the process? Like you, you have no idea what it took and what race these people are running. And so you, you have to only compare against yourself.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Well, and the thing that's been really helpful for me is the reason I wrote this book is that I found that the more I talked about being in recovery, when I was on stage talking about gift of failure, the more people talked to me about their concerns, worries, going into recovery, being in recovery. So now what I'm getting is emails every single day thanking me for having written this book. And for me now, that's my greatest measure of, you know, helping. And, and I'm doing some work on the side that really is about talking to people one-on-one and helping with their education around their kids and stuff like that. And I really have come to terms with the fact that that's why I wrote the book. And the frustrating thing, the hard, and I don't, the, speaking of running different races,

• 12:12Speaker 01

  I don't think people understand fully how, we talk about it all the time, but how intense the publicity and marketing of a book is. And this is all I have done for the past six months. And I have a book proposal that's pretty much done. I have not been able to touch it in months. And so I'm just getting really excited to work on my next book. But I have to continue to do this as long as people will have me because that's a part of what it takes to get your book out there into the world. And, um, I think, you know, gone are the days when you can sort of, you know, book releases and you're like, okay, what's next? Let me write my next book. And, and I, it's been really interesting to talk to other authors, especially through our podcast about.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  The decisions you have to make about how how far you're going to go with your publicity. Because you can go all in.

• 13:00Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Two years straight. You could spend all your time for years just doing that. And it's hard, it's easy to get lost in that. It's really, really easy to get lost in, wait, I have to do all the podcasts and all the interviews and everything that anyone will ever let me open my mouth in front of a microphone for. I have to do that. And it's really hard to pull back from that and say, no, I need to get back to work and write some more.

• 13:22Ryan Holiday?

  Well, this is where the ego thing comes in again, because on the one hand, it's a chore and everyone complains about it, but.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  But it's amazing.

• 13:29Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Doing a podcast is inherently more ego gratifying and validating than sitting in front of a blank page. It's always easier to bask in the glow of your existing project than to sit in the shade of your future project.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't, I don't fully agree. Like for me, in terms of not so much the ego stuff, but the, the stuff that really gets turns my crank is like the research. I mean, I get excited. I can feel it. I start to, you know, my heart starts to race when I'm, I'm like, oh, a new book I haven't started yet. And this is really going to give me some ideas for this topic. And I'm so excited about the next book that I'm just raring to go. And yes, facing the blank page is hard, but the thing that gets me really excited is, is learning new things and not talking about stuff I already know.

• 14:20Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, it's, it's more, it's certainly more rewarding and enjoyable. But what I'm saying is it's like, you know, one thing is hype, but like when you're like, okay, you were planning on writing this morning and then the, then you look, you know, you get the, hey, do you want to come on, you know, this NPR affiliate?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:40Ryan Holiday?

  Middle of nowhere that probably seven people are listening to, you know. It's very easy to go, of course, I have to do this other thing. And, and, and you can always end up to, it's like, it's like, you know, you get a hundred dollars in your paycheck, you know, if you invest it, it will be worth more, but you're like, but I have it now. And so it's, it's kind of this marshmallow test of, of your, of your willpower. I would say the other interesting thing, because you make up, you make a good point about marketing, which is its attention, right? Like, I remember someone sent me like a, I don't know why they sent it to me, but they sent me a very unpleasant internet thread about me. And someone was saying- So why, why, why do people do these things?

• 15:24Ryan Holiday?

  I know, I know. But so someone was like, the person was like, you know, Ryan Holiday, he's just a popularizer. He's a marketer. So he just, all he does is know how to write his books. So they sell the most amount of copies. And I was like, okay, number one, why would that be bad? Like, that's literally the whole point of writing is to reach an audience. If you weren't trying to reach an audience, you would never publish it. But two, it was silly because it's like, look, if really I was just in this for the money, I wouldn't be writing books. And I definitely wouldn't be writing books about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. Like, I remember I did this New York Times interview where, you know, she was, she was saying like something about Stoicism in my marketing background. And I said something

• 16:06Ryan Holiday?

  like, look, like if I was just into using my marketing skills, I'd be, I'd be just, I'd be marketing cryptocurrencies. And I think I said this like in 2016. So it, it, it's true. I'd be a multimillionaire from cryptocurrencies alone, if that's what I'd focused on. But I chose this. But there's this tension, right? Where people pick a thing and they think just being right about it and caring about it and doing a good job, you know, writing the book or, or, you know, launching the company or whatever it is, that that's enough. In fact, like, if you don't go pound the pavement, if you don't bring it to an audience, that, if you build it, they will not come. So there is this, like, yeah, maybe in the ancient world

• 16:48Ryan Holiday?

  when philosophy or, or, you know, whatever was, was occupied by like, the elite few who had slaves to tend their estates, you know, you could get away with just having interesting ideas and hoping they spread it to the ether. But, you know, in this day and age, like, it's a street fight to get attention. And if the author or the creative or the business person isn't willing to do that hustle, to me, that's a sign that you don't actually believe in what you're talking about. You think you're too, you think you're too good for it.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Well, the other thing that's really, I also have made some interesting choices. I mean, I'm writing about a topic that like, who wants to talk about, you know, substance abuse in kids? It's scary. It's, you know, it's not, and this was actually when I first started writing the proposal for this book, and I knew I was writing this book no matter what, even if I had to self-publish it, and, you know, luckily I have an expert nearby to help me. And my agent said, are you going, do you really want to write this book if your editor says no? And I said, yes. And she said, because there's a chance she's going to say no. And I said, oh, I get it. It's a really hard topic, but yeah, we're doing this. So I wrote the full proposal, the full 85-page proposal, knowing that if she said no, we were going to turn around right away and send it out to other publishers.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  And knowing that, and, you know, I know that I can write an article about, I said this on Twitter recently, I can write an article about rich white kids and it can go viral, but the minute I write an article about like, how states are failing kids because they're not following the rules about the, according to the Prison Rape Act, and so kids are getting raped in prison, like, seven people read that article. And yet, what I'm saying in that article, I think, is a little more important in terms of my interests and what I want to say in my writing. So, you know, the fact that I'm, I have a three-page spread in People Magazine to talk about kids and addiction, I mean, that's, I've hit the jackpot. I mean, it's really hard to get press to talk about some of the more difficult topics. And so I'm grateful for all of it.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  So I guess, you know, if I really, really wanted to have it a little easier, I'd write about things that weren't like, you know, substance abuse and prison rape.

• 18:52Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. No, no, it's work, right? When you pick the thing, like, you have to, of course, you have to find where your interests and, you know, some vague interests from the world overlap, but like, very rarely is like, the thing you're passionate about, or the truth that you think needs to be said, very rarely is that sort of willingly accepted. I forget what scientist said it, but it's like, don't worry about people stealing your idea. Like, if your idea is at all good or revolutionary, you're going to have to ram this down people's throats. And, and that, that requires sort of perseverance, and commitment, and intensity, and creativity. And, yeah, if you just think like, you know, oh, I'm a writer, I get this literary life, and I, you know, I bang out on my typewriter, and I release it in the world, and then I

• 19:36Ryan Holiday?

  go to my book party, like, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Well, we always say on the podcast, unless you're really excited to spend two years with your project, at the very least, then don't write your project because, you know, there's just, it's not worth it. It's, it's so much work. But it's, you know, when it's, oh, man, when it's, when it's clicking, oh, my God, it's so good. It's just so good. And, you know, it's, it's just, I can't, and I think it's a little like the childbirth thing, you know, if I had to, you wouldn't go through it again if you remembered exactly what it was like the last time around. But I'm, I'm raring to go, I can't wait to work on the next thing.

• 20:12Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Yeah, the, the, you know, Stoics talk about rationality, but there is a certain benefits to the irrationality of, of the human mind, which is, yeah, you're, I remember when I sold, maybe it was ego, or maybe it was stillness, my editor just emailed my wife to apologize. You know, she was like, congratulations, also, I'm sorry. Because like, it's, it's a grind, and it takes you to a place, and you have to, you have to be a little bit foolish, and a little bit silly, thinking like, it's gonna be different

• 20:52Ryan Holiday?

  this time. Because it's never different. It's all, it, like, it's, it's hard. It's, you know, you always think it'd be great to go for a run, and then, you know, three quarters of the way through the run, you're like, oh, this is so hard.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Well, I also have an attention, I also have an attention issue, anyway. And so when my husband knows I go to this place where I've got that middle, middle gaze, sort of middle distance gaze, and he knows I'm not hearing anything, I'm not hearing that the dogs are barking to come in, because I'm thinking about, oh, how can I get chapter two to work with that narrative angle that I've got going on there? And, you know, he just, he has to sort of give me space there. And then also, pub week, you know, pub month is just insanity. So, you know, I don't know, it's, it's pretty great that we get to do it. And yet, in the, when you look at it up close, and sort of go through it, it's just a weird existence. My plumber asked me yesterday how book publishing works. And I'm like, look, dude, I am paying you by the hour, and we do not have the time to

• 21:50Speaker 01

  talk about how book publishing works, while I need my faucet fixed, because I'll be paying you a lot of money.

• 21:56Ryan Holiday?

  The answer to that question is just not well. It doesn't work well.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  It's really a weird, weird business. It is very strange business.

• 22:04Ryan Holiday?

  So let's talk about addiction in the new book because I was thinking, I was actually thinking about your book. I was listening, it's maybe two weeks ago, we can have a go. I listened to Marc Maron's interview with Hunter Biden. And I don't think we needed to get into the politics of it, or, you know, all insane reactions that people have when they hear that name. But what struck me about it was interesting. And it made me think of your book because basically what Hunter ends up saying is that Joe Biden has never took a drink in his life. He's been a teetotaler his whole life. Actually, interesting that two presidents in a row that were teetotalers. But that basically what Biden had saw was he saw how alcoholism had ripped through his Irish family for generations, and he chose not to drink.

• 22:49Ryan Holiday?

  But it struck me as where we are now. Like, that was, that was, that's a relatively recent understanding. The idea that addiction is hereditary, and that, you know, maybe you inherited a certain predilection, and that you got to be careful, right?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:05Ryan Holiday?

  And it struck me that he had, it's like he had gotten halfway, and your book is the second half, which Biden never seemed to think of, or still now this generation of parents is thinking about, which is, he didn't think, well, then how do I prepare the next generation? It's not just about abstaining from alcoholism, or from alcohol, but, but how does one try to break the cycle permanently by creating practices and a framework and parenting in a way that sort of counterbal, like, if your kid, if your kid had a reading disorder, you would take the following steps. It's not just a lottery. Like, you get the

• 23:47Ryan Holiday?

  gene, you don't get the gene, and you're, you're an addict or you're not. To me, the premise of your book is like, look, whether you're predisposed or not, you have no idea where this, you know, sort of dice is going to land. You got to actively be thinking as a parent, how do you set your kid up not to? Be an addict.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's and there's so much that goes into that, that, you know, the book sounded fairly simple when I started and realized that how complicated it got as I got into it. And part of it was, you know, look, I was raised by an alcoholic and one of my parents was also raised by an alcoholic and so on and so on and so on. And in my husband's family as well. It's all over his family tree as well. My husband drinks like a normal person and I can't. Although I did try to do, you know, I was mostly abstinent until my 40s and then it just snuck up on me. And, you know, my story's a little different than a lot of them, but it snuck up on me and suddenly, you know, I realized just I, you know, I had a real problem on my hands. And the minute I got a hold, the minute I admitted to my problems, got into recovery,

• 24:51Speaker 01

  immediately all of that energy gets focused on, okay, well, crap, we've had generations that over and over again, that not just go either end up as alcoholics, but end up like trying really hard to not go the same path as the parent and yet somehow ended up there anyway. So this has to stop here. And my kids are predisposed or, you know, have this genetic predisposition, which is, we think around 50 to 60% of the risk for substance abuse. So I can't afford to ignore it. And at the same time, I was teaching in an inpatient rehab for adolescents. And so I'm constantly thinking about, how on earth did you end up here? How like, what could anyone have done differently?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  You know, what's going on with you and your life and where you came from and what you experienced that you ended up here in my classroom? So all of that sort of, you know, became, as all of my writing usually is, is something I become really curious about and I need answers to. And so I have the best job where I get to just spend two years being a complete recluse and reading everything I can about it and then, you know, writing it for, for other people. But really, I'm writing it for myself.

• 26:02Ryan Holiday?

  Right. So walk me through this moment, because maybe someone is there. How does one get the understanding that, hey, like, I do have this predilection? I have lost control. I love that expression that addiction is when you realize you have lost the freedom to abstain. Like, you are no longer able to abstain,

• 26:27Ryan Holiday?

  and you've got to do something about it.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Well, and the problem is, you know, there's that, here's the problem. So the reason that Holly Whitaker's book, Quit Like a Woman, has done well, is that the first section of it really is about the fact that if we stop needing to attach a name to it, like, okay, I took the test. Am I an alcoholic? Am I not an alcoholic? That kind of thing. But that's not useful, that if we just worry about whether or not it's getting in the way of our lives, then that would be a lot more effective than having, you know, it would help more people get to that place, maybe, of whatever. So, you know, and I guess at work, Chrissy Teigen, you know, is tweeting all over the place about the fact that she read that book, and now she's going to, you know, stop drinking. For me, it was, I knew I had a problem for like, a decade, and, you know,

• 27:13Speaker 01

  whether, there were a bunch of places in there where I was like, you know, hi, this has just slipped loose. It is, it's no longer under my control. And for the last couple of years, it was getting pretty ugly. But then, 2013, I sold Gift of Failure at this huge auction. You know, it was a huge deal, like, 14 publishers bidding for the book. It was a ton of money. And it was my chance. It was my shot. And I knew I was gonna blow it, if I, because I can't drink and write at the same time. I just, I can't. I can write short things, but I can't write a book while I'm drinking. And then I, and then I went to my mom's birthday party, and I got really sloppy. I don't remember it, so I guess that's good or bad. I don't know.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  But my dad came up and, you know, to the guest room the next morning and sat at the end of my bed, and he was raised by an alcoholic. And so he said, Quote, "I know what an alcoholic looks like and you are an alcoholic." And at that point, there was no saying, "No, you're wrong," or, "Oh, it was no big deal," or whatever. It's just, I had nothing. I immediately said, "You're right," and I went straight to meeting that night. But I don't know, you know, if he had said that to me a year before, I probably would have said, "You don't know what you're talking about. I'm fine." But whatever it was, that moment was so, I was so done. I was so tired. I was so exhausted from all of the stress of it, of drinking, that it was just a relief to let it go.

• 28:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think that that self-awareness is a key element, and maybe it's a key part in sort of either avoiding it entirely, or just, you know, it's also, maybe it's a little bit like the response to COVID, which is like, put it off. Every day you put it off is a day you're not. Like, for me, like, I got some sense early in my life. I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was just like, I just can't, I just can't do certain things the way that other people, or I can't have the same relationship to things that other people can have. Like, pretty much anything you give me, or I do, particularly, like, I don't want to say anything fun, but let's say, anything in

• 29:19Ryan Holiday?

  the sort of vice category, I will do compulsively. And I'll do a lot of stuff that's not in the vice category compulsively. So if it's soda, like, they're actually a podcast sponsor, but like, I got these mints that like have caffeine in them, and like, I just, I'll just take them all the time, you know? And so like, I just have had to sort of go like, "Look, this is..." Like, someone who's like, "Look, I don't handle heights well," or, you know, "I don't like closed spaces." I think there needs to be, your point that like, just because there's no name for it, doesn't mean it's a problem. And we said this, I realize this about temper too, like, just because you don't have an anger problem,

• 30:04Ryan Holiday?

  doesn't mean anger's not a problem for you.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Right. You actually sound a lot like Penn Jillette. In Presto, and in some of his podcasts, he's talked about the fact that he never drank ever, not because either of his parents did, they were teetotalers, it's just that he knew. That he would, and he actually made the analogy to masturbation, that like, he, he knew that that's all he was going to do if that was his thing. And so drugs and alcohol just, he just knew himself really, really well. I think that's an incredible insight into yourself. And I think that's something that most people don't have. I'm really amazed by that.

• 30:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, and it requires, I'm not patting myself on the back, I'm saying, but it requires a certain amount of courage and restraint to be able to go like, to, to say like, I'm going to trust myself on this one. I'm not going to extrapolate it out to its natural conclusion. And only when I have the overwhelming evidence, am I going to listen to it. Do you know what I mean? Like, like I've probably missed out on a bunch of wonderful experiences and tastes and things that like, you know, if I decided to get into wine, or if I, you know, smoked weed with friends, or like, I've been in cool situations where that would have been a lubricant, or a, a

• 31:20Ryan Holiday?

  window into something that I, trusting that impulse, had to go no to. But the upside is, it also prevented me from going down the darker trap door that I think inevitably it would lead to, because that's just the set of genes that I was given.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Something that really hit me was well before I got sober, Gretchen Rubin had just come out with her, she was writing her book about the four, her four tendencies book. And she was talking about the difference between someone who can be, who is a moderator and someone who's an abstainer. And for her, what she does is, once the fall starts, or once the holiday season starts, she says, no sugar until the new year. Because for her, it's easier to just let it go completely. It's like, and for me, that's what it's been as well. To know that alcohol is off the table is such a relief to me. It is such a relief. It's like, oh my gosh, I don't even have to think about that anymore. It's such a relief to me. And Gretchen, in fact, I told Gretchen after I got sober, I said, you know, I have to credit you with part being a

• 32:23Speaker 01

  very big piece of this puzzle for me. That was one of the last pieces that dropped into place, which was, you know, I think I'm that kind of person. I think it would be easier for me if it was just not an option at all. And that's absolutely been the case.

• 32:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I think generally just being suspicious of, and like I'm even, I was talking to Steven Pressfield about this, I'm suspicious even like I can't not write. And I think the Stoics talk about like sort of question anything you're a slave to, right? And the fact that I can't stop writing, like, look, generally of the, of the sort of things to choose from, that's one that, you know, if you had to pick your poison, I'll take that one. But anything you can't not do compulsively, that's something I think you need to explore. And then what I was gonna say, and then I think this segues nicely more into the book directly, one of the problems, like, so I just kind of had this vague sense, and then maybe it worked

• 33:20Ryan Holiday?

  out this way because I had this role model, or that role model, or I, you know, was it, you know, happened to just, this is just the random people I bumped into, and so I never, I went this way instead of that way. But I think one of the things that parents don't do, it sounds like your dad did it, but a little late, is like, it was only, it's only been in the years since that I'm starting to understand my, a little bit more of my family history, that you're like, oh, you know, what's that expression in recovery, like you're as sick as your secrets?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:51Ryan Holiday?

  Families do a really bad job not giving their kids, particularly when they're young, when this decision can really make a difference, not explaining all the context that would, like, I remember, I remember as a kid, and so, obviously didn't give me the full story, but I remember my grandmother telling me like, that her brother went out swimming one day after lunch and drowned, and that's why, like, you shouldn't eat, you know, you shouldn't go swimming after you, it's like, I would bet my life, like, this is, that sounds like a drinking accident, you know what I mean? And then as other examples, a different members of my family extended, and otherwise, you're like, I wouldn't say we have like a pronounced

• 34:34Ryan Holiday?

  family history of addiction, but like, we have, we have more than, than not having it, right? And, but the desire not to talk about it, not to judge, not to make it a big thing, prevents, it would have been a clearer, easier decision for me to make earlier on, if I'd been more aware of the, of the context in which I was making that decision.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the book, I talk, I quote Susan Cheever, who talks about the elephant in the room, that, you know, you've got to spend all this energy avoiding talking about this massive thing in the middle of the room. And that's how I grew up, you know, not being allowed to talk about the fact that one of my parents was drinking too much. And I have to say, I have to give my dad a ton of credit. I think one of the reasons his words landed the way they did is that he was raised by someone, by two people who never, ever, ever spoke about the drinking problem in his house when he was little. And then, you know, as a major enabler himself, you know, the fact that he was calling me on this thing had 10 times the impact that it would have had if it was someone who's in my face about stuff

• 35:41Speaker 01

  all the time. This is someone who is conflict averse, hates conflict so much, and the fact, and hates criticizing me, and he adores me, and he hates it when I'm upset with him. So the fact that this person was the one who had the courage to come and say something to me made a huge impact. And that shame and secrecy stuff, I think that is something that we have absolutely banished from the house. You know, we talk about everything in this house. We talk about substance abuse constantly. It's just not something we can afford to have be a part of our family, simply because it's what I think made me sick in the first place.

• 36:22Ryan Holiday?

  No, and that goes to that, that line I quoted earlier, like, you lose the freedom to abstain.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:28Ryan Holiday?

  You've lost, like, because of your background and decisions and things that have happened, you've lost the luxury of not talking about it. Your family, because of the card, just in the, in the way that certain families have to be worried about heart disease, other families have to be worried about certain kinds of, you know, systemic injustices, like, whatever, no one's saying it's right, but the reality is, you don't get to not talk about it.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Right. You know, a friend of mine has a kid, they have diabetes all over their family. And so for them, sugar is a very different topic than it is in our house, where there isn't a history of that. And, you know, it's just, I think, the thing about this book that I don't want it to be, and also what I didn't want Gift of Failure to be, was that sort of like, oh, great. Ten more things I have to do in order to be a good parent. Or the thing that's hard about this book is that, you know, what I'm talking about are risk factors and protective factors. And the more risk factors you have, and I picture it like one of those old timey scales of justice, the heavier your risk side, the heavier your protection side is gonna be and some is gonna have to be. And some of those risk factors are things that are really hard to hear.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  You know, divorce and separation, adoption, a whole bunch of stuff that is difficult to talk about. Not only is substance abuse hard to talk about, but then you gotta deal with the fact that, okay, well, among girls, for example, sexual abuse is one of the biggest risk factors for, you know, their eventual issues with alcohol or drugs. And so we're talking about a whole bunch of stuff that's really scary to talk about. And somehow I have to make people want to read about that. So it's, it's, it's a bit of a challenge, but it's also, I hope, empowering. Because I managed to look at a whole bunch of stuff that I inadvertently did to my kids, that I did because I was acting on the best information I had at the time. You know, I'm raising two kids right now, actually with very different attitudes about substances.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  My 22-year-old, we had a permissive sort of, you can have some sips of wine. You can have your own very small glass of wine. And my 17-year-old, we have in our house a very clear and consistent message of no, not until you're 21. Because the research shows that, that it's that messaging that it makes it much less likely that he'll have an issue with substance use disorder during his lifetime. So that must feel really unfair to him. I happen to know it does. But I'm modeling for him exactly what I want to see in him, which is that you do your best based on the information you have. And if you get better information, that you do a mea culpa and you change based on that better information.

• 39:00Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and that, that adults aren't afraid to have Adult conversations. Like I talked about this on the Daily Dad podcast where I noticed that one of the things the pandemic has been good for me is like, I'm not like really a confrontational person like in person. And like, I'd rather like if something's uncomfortable or weird, I'd rather just endure it and then like never subject myself to that again. Like, let's say, let's say someone's like, I don't know, that I would just, I would just like put up with it for as long as I have to put up with it and then do like never again. But, but COVID is so like, no, no, what matters is like right now. Right? Because like, so, so you don't get a, you don't get a like a do over, right? And so it's been

• 39:44Ryan Holiday?

  like, I remember, so I have this bookstore here in Austin and in Bastrop. And this-

• 39:50Speaker 01

  I am so excited for you about that, by the way. I am so excited for you.

• 39:55Ryan Holiday?

  Like, some, some person had came all the way out. I was, you know, very honored or whatever, like right when we opened. And, you know, they came up as a stranger and they're like, can I, they like went to give me a hug. And like, I don't want to hug anyone under any circumstances that I don't know. That's just who I am. But like, I would, I would imagine like a year ago, I just like have put up with this unpleasant thing and then been like, that was weird. Don't do that. I don't want to do that again. But it, you know, it was much more like, whoa, whoa, like back the fuck up, you know, in a nice way. But like, you, I think what COVID has reminded adults is like, you're in charge of your family. And just because something's unpleasant, or uncomfortable, or weird, or makes you look stupid, or what, like, you have to show your kids like, no, no, no, no.

• 40:40Ryan Holiday?

  If you don't take care of this, if you don't speak to be heard, if you don't state your preferences, you're going to end up in situations that are not good, not comfortable, not safe. You know, I think you even see this in like, it's tragic, like every, you know, college sexual assault or story begins with a person being in a situation that they were uncomfortable with from the minute it started. Right? And you, and, and you have to be able to learn how to be like, I'm not going in your room. Like, no, I don't care if you don't like, you know, like, I think, I think what you're talking about is teaching your kids like, we lost the freedom to not have these awkward conversations. So we're going to have this awkward conversation.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Well, and so much of that is at, you know, what's at the heart of this book is one of the biggest protective factors for kids is a sense of self-efficacy, a sense of agency, a sense of, you know, getting, banishing all of that sort of learned helplessness. But self-efficacy is so important because I was thinking just

• 41:43Ryan Holiday?

  Can you define those two words?

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:44Ryan Holiday?

  Because I think those are very important concepts that people do not understand.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Self-efficacy is really cool. And I like to think of it as sort of the intersection of competence and hope. So Shane Lopez, who died a couple of years ago, good little late, great Shane Lopez, he worked for Gallup and he has a wonderful book called Making Hope Happen. And he defines hope as the belief that your world, that your life or the world can be a better place and that you have the power to make it so. So there's hope, there's optimism, and then there's the second half of it, which what happens to be about the self-efficacy to make it so, the ability that when you make a decision or you take action, that things will change based on that.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  And a lot of the kids that were in my rehab classroom were kids who had no sense of self-efficacy because they had no control as kids. They had been either moved around a lot in foster care, they were being hit from the time they were little and they couldn't do anything about that. They were raising their sibling because their parent was drunk all the time and nothing they did would change that. So they've been, they've learned, they've developed learned helplessness. There's all kinds of cool research on learned helplessness. And it turns out that when you, when you feel helpless, when you feel like there's nothing you can do to change the situation, that the way you sort of diffuse that instinct is to, the way you sort of short circuit that is to have more control.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Like if we have a kid who's exhibiting learned helplessness, they're like throwing themselves on the ground and they're like, I'm never gonna learn how to ride a bike, ever, ever, ever, I'll just walk everywhere. That the way that you give them some control back, or the way that you get rid of that learned helplessness is by giving them some control, giving them little wins, giving them some evidence of their own competence. And the reason that self-efficacy is so amazing is that it's, it also assumes a whole bunch of other things like self-advocacy and the ability to tell people what you want and need. And, you know, a bunch of that comes into the whole recovery picture too, which is things like asking for help. I was talking to I was being interviewed on a recovery podcast and someone said, you know, what if

• 43:58Speaker 01

  you do all these things and then, you know, one of your kids ends up, you know, with abusing drugs or alcohol anyway. You know, the cool thing about substance use disorder from my perspective is that, you know, in terms of understanding it ourselves, like looking back at our own problems is, I picture it like a, picture like a 100-piece puzzle. I got really lucky and my dad was that 100th piece that clicked into place. But there were a whole bunch of other pieces, like Gretchen's comment about abstaining versus moderation. She was like piece 98. And if 1 through 98 hadn't been there, I wouldn't have gotten as quickly to 100. So a lot of what I'm doing right now is putting in

• 44:41Speaker 01

  a lot of those pieces of my kid's puzzle. So even if they do have a problem later on in life, they're not starting at piece zero, they're starting at like piece 57. Because a lot of people talk about, you know, you're not, in recovery, they say things like, you know, you're not ready till you're ready. And about how it's so much less fun to get hammered, to get high, when you've got recovery already in your head, it really harshes your buzz. So when people leave recovery and go back out and get drunk, they're like, man, that was so not worth it, so not fun, because I had all that recovery speak in my head the whole time. And it was really just not as fun. So I'm hoping that even if my kids, you know, make it to 21 and then go out and start drinking too much, that

• 45:24Speaker 01

  they'll have some of the things I've been talking to them about, that's prevention, but also some of those pieces of the puzzle that they're going to need to get to where I got with piece 100, a little faster.

• 45:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, you know, the Stoics have this exercise that everything has two handles, right? This is what Epictetus says, every situation has two handles. And we have to, like, you can choose the one that says, you know, I'm an addict, I've come from a family of addicts, so like, it's hopeless for me. That would be one handle. The other handle would be the, because of this, my response is this, and therefore I'm going to be better, stronger, break the cycle, have something to work on, have knowledge because of their past failures. So to me, agency is really like, agency is, and hope, I guess, are related in the sense that, yeah, it's a belief in a better future and your ability to make that so. And it, I think it's unfortunate.

• 46:20Ryan Holiday?

  There's an earnestness to that that I think sometimes people find cheesy in 12-step groups or cheesy in self-help. But to me, it's so much better than the alternative. You know, like, let's say that your nihilism is true. I mean, what's, what's, why try then? Why would you do anything? Like, the earnestness is, is a key variable.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  That lack of hope, that lack of self-efficacy has very real impact on your ability to function. I mean, I had a student once that I asked them to write an essay, two essays, and this was at the rehab. One essay about how they see, you see yourself, and then the second one was how other people see you. And we were going to have a whole conversation about that. But it, what it turned into was one kid saying, no, I'll write the one about how I see myself, but I won't write the one about how other people see me. And he started to get agitated. And of course, I've had to do a lot of like, trauma-informed teaching practices where, you know, the blow up that a kid is having is not about the thing you'd think it is. It's about something different, something deeper. So we tried to get to like,

• 47:24Speaker 01

  why he's being so belligerent with me and won't write this thing. And finally, he just starts to weep. And he said, well, why would I write that essay? Because what people would say about me is that every man in my family has gone to prison, so I'm just going to go to prison. Why would I write that? And that was what he believed about himself. And that had a huge impact on his life, his goals for the future, his ability to stay sober. I mean, so many aspects of his life were just derailed by the fact that he had no sense of self-efficacy at all. That his life was pretty much laid out for him from the moment he was born, just by virtue of the fact that everyone else had set an example that, and there was no escaping from that.

• 48:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And I think what the Stoics, the Stoics would say is that life has paired you with a strong sparring partner, right? Your addiction, your legacy of addiction, your crappy parents, you know, the, whatever the spiral you went down. And the question is, are you going to get stronger for wrestling with this sparring partner? Or are you You going to let it win? And that's how I kind of think about it as is like I'm I'm wrestling with, you know, whatever the the bits of obstacles or adversity that that I felt, which are fundamentally different and obviously much less severe than different obstacles that different people have

• 48:49Ryan Holiday?

  felt, but but that I'm going to be better for what I've experienced. And I think that's that's what I also want my my kids to be. And that's kind of how I've been thinking. You know, I think both your books sort of pointed me in this direction, which is like, you know, you hear all these parents who are talking about how, you know, this is the last year or how damaged their kids have been because, oh, my God, they had to study on Zoom for six months. And it's like, have you ever talked to someone who survived the Great Depression? I was listening to to an interview with Tom Jones, the singer, and he apparently got tuberculosis when he was 13. He had to quarantine in his house for two years as a kid in England. Like, like, look, like,

• 49:32Ryan Holiday?

  stuff happens, and you can say that this is this has disadvantaged your kid, or you can say your kid is better for having experienced it and having you as their parent to help them with it.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  There's actually a really interesting book that just came out called Thrivers. It's by Michelle Borba. She's a wonderful person and a parenting expert. And that book is all it's sort of the culmination of all the work she's ever done, which is about, you know, what makes it so that some kids thrive in situations that other kids wouldn't and or that other kids can't even survive. And I'm really wary of talking about it as strength, you know, and I get where you're coming from with that. But I also think that there's it has a lot to do with who your allies are and who's around you. You know, there's all that research that shows that, you know, when a kid who has really like, let's say, tons of adverse childhood experiences and big T trauma, as long as they have one person, one adult who they can trust and who believes in them and supports them,

• 50:31Speaker 01

  they're much more likely to do well. I think that there's yes, yes, I'm proud of myself for getting sober, and I'm proud of myself for being proactive and talking about it. But I don't know that it's all about strength. I think a lot of it had to do, just frankly, with desperation and a need to escape something that really

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Had the potential to, you know, continue on down the line in my family and I just, I just couldn't let it do that.

• 51:04Ryan Holiday?

  I would argue it's not strength, the strength is not that was, was not what allowed you to do that. The strength is what you have now.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good point.

• 51:14Ryan Holiday?

  That, that like post-traumatic growth is the same, PTSD, post-traumatic growth. Trauma is the same. The question is, do you focus on, and I'm, I don't mean at all to make light of people who have trauma. What I'm saying is that, is that you can also choose to be like Hemingway talks about how, you know, life breaks us. And he's, and he says, you know, the people who, who will not break, life kills. But he says, but we can be stronger at the broken places. And I think that's what we're talking about. And to me, that's such a beautiful way of thinking about it is that.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:51Ryan Holiday?

  We all go through stuff, but then are you stronger for, for breaking? I went, I went through and have been going through a family thing that I won't get into that, that's been really hard and really painful. But as a result, my marriage is stronger and my relationship with my kids is stronger. So the, there was desperation and pain and break over here. And this isn't just some magical trick where you go like, and it was all positive. No, that still remains a clusterfuck that is not resolved itself. And I'm not sure it ever will, unfortunately. But over here where I do have some agency, that's where I've made an improvement. And that's where I've hopefully broken the cycle a little bit.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Well, to bring this back around, I think part of what you're also talking about is, so what, what this book comes down to, like if I had to still it down to one central point, I borrowed something from Chris Heron, who was a Boston Celtic and he's from Massachusetts, same as me. And I got to hear him speak a couple of times and he just, he's mesmerizing to listen to and kids are just captivated. All these kids are weeping. He's just amazing. There's a really great, a really great documentary you can watch, you can stream online called First Day with him. And he talks about the fact that, you know, for For ki-, you know, we do a lot of talking about the worst day of drinking,

• 53:17Speaker 01

  you know, that blackout at my mother's birthday party that was just so disgusting and horrible. But what we don't talk a lot about is the first day. And yet, the first day is really, really important because at its essence, this book, my entire career, has been about helping get kids to a place where they feel like they deserve to take up space in this world. They have a voice to speak up for themselves and that they are heard and seen and known for who they are. And so often with kids, what we have is a situation where they take that first drink or that first drug because they don't feel like they're enough as they are. Or they're hurting because someone or something has happened to them and they're medicating that trauma, that pain.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  But that idea of helping someone feel like they can be in a place where they can speak up for themselves, where they can be in a place where they can be stronger at the breaks, that is in and of itself the way we get kids to a place where they feel like they don't have to take part in, you know, drinking or drugging in order to be enough in this world.

• 54:18Ryan Holiday?

  So what other things do you feel like parents need to be thinking about? Like as far as, as far as sort of setting up?

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:28Ryan Holiday?

  Or at least reducing the odds? Because it doesn't, you're not saying, here's this magical formula that instantly. This isn't like a vac-, even though you say inoculation, it's not a vaccine. This is probably closer to like social distancing and being aware of how COVID spreads. And so you don't go into closed, windowless rooms for extended periods of time with random strangers not wearing masks?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Actually, inoculation in the title comes from inoculation theory. It's a field of social science that talks about the fact that, and it's a really powerful part of helping kids build up their refusal skills, but it's also part of self-efficacy, which is, so, starting at the beginning. Talking from the time a kid is really, really, really young, and I'm talking like nursery school, kindergarten, talking about like, you know, why you spit the toothpaste out instead of swallowing it, why we wash our hands, why we don't take pills that don't have our na-, you know, prescription pills that don't have our name on them. From a very young age and I like there are tons of scripts in the book that tell you what to say and stuff like that. And then it moves up developmentally with kids and there are other things you can do like, you know, research shows that families that have dinner together.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  The kids, um, the more nights you have dinner together, the, the lower their risk of substance use disorder over their lifetime. There's a causation correlation issue there, but whatever. Um, so talking, listening, communication. Giving kids refusal skills and this inoculation theory stuff, which is so cool. Because it's inoculation theory says that essentially when you give kids sort of a weak. You know, if kids can rebut sort of a weakened version of, you know, come on, everyone's doing it. Or we can't be friends if you don't try this.

• 56:10Ryan Holiday?

  Right. The, uh, hey, kid, you want to try the drugs?

• 56:13Speaker 01

  I know. I was absolutely positive that they were going to like push me in a locker and make me take cocaine the minute I walked into high school. But if we, if we give kids refusal skills and there's a huge list of them in, you know, things kids can say and still save face. If we give them the, this feeling of empowerment that they actually know what they could say back if they don't want to partake in something. And that's any risky behavior. That could be sex before they're ready. That could be getting in a car with a drunk driver, that kind of thing. Then not only are they more likely to refuse that thing, to be able to speak up and refuse that thing. They're also more likely to talk to us about it and inoculation, research on inoculation theory shows that it generalizes.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  There was a great paper out of Dartmouth College. There's a sociologist there who found that when you use inoculation theory around, for example, drugs and alcohol. It also inoculates them of, for other high risk behaviors like premature sex, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's a really powerful thing and inoculation theory, you know, it's based on the same sort of thing that like, you know, vaccines are. It's just sort of a more metaphorical version of it. So I really do mean, you know, there really is the idea that you can inoculate kids against high risk behaviors. Then on top of that, there's just essentially I go into the research and I look at everything that I've ever heard might protect kids against substance use disorder. And look at all of the research, turn it over, look at all the angles.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  You know, there's stuff in there about, you know, exercise, there's stuff in there about whether or not you should have a pet, what, you know, stuff in there about mindfulness, stuff in there about the self-efficacy and the self-advocacy, looking to allies. You know, most people don't realize that one of the most powerful allies around for your kids is their healthcare provider, that pediatricians, nurse practitioners, family medicine docs use these screening tools. One of them is called ESPT, for example, Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment. So you know how like, right before your kid goes, once your kid gets old enough, they'll start getting a tablet to tap out answers to various questions on before their appointment?

• 58:20Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  And you really need to give them space when they do that, because those are, the questions they're being asked are about, you know, have you ever gotten in the car with someone who's been drinking? And this is not a test of your good parenting, this is a test of, this is a, an assessment of what their risks are. And pediatricians and, you know, other healthcare providers are really good at sort of tracking those risks over the years and talking to them as needed about some of those risk behaviors. School counselors, school nurses, those are also allies. So there's lots and lots of protections in there, some of which will be irrelevant for your family, some of which will be really important to your family. But it's a matter of knowing your kid's individual risk based on all the risk factors, and taking the preventions that work for you and your family, and trying

• 59:04Speaker 01

  them on for size. You know, like I tried mindfulness with my kid, and he was having nothing of it, or so I thought. He didn't want to do it with me, but it turns out that he has now built a meditation space in his room, but it's private, it's something he likes to do by himself. So sometimes when these protections don't go the way we want them to, sometimes they, they, they take anyway.

• 59:26Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I wanted to wrap up with this idea of temperance, which is one of the Stoic virtues, that's maybe a little, it sort of goes to your point about Gretchen Rubin, but is, it's maybe less popular, poorly understood. Because when we think temperance, in the United States, we often think the temperance movement, right?

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:44Ryan Holiday?

  Like, that no alcohol, no one should be allowed to drink. How do you teach your kid this idea of moderation? Because it feels like so uncool, and it's, in a way...

• 59:58Ryan Holiday?

  I don't want to say it's hard to teach by example because it's not, but it's sort of, it's an easy thing to miss, right?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:05Ryan Holiday?

  You notice that your parent is drinking a lot. Maybe you notice that they're not drinking at all. How do you, how do you teach healthy attitudes towards these things?

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  You, so there's so many, number one, number one, most important is modeling it yourself. So my kids have two examples. They have an example of me who never drinks, doesn't do drugs. And they have an example of their father who can drink like a normal human being. And, but the cool thing about that modeling also is that we're also modeling what, and especially he is, modeling what a really caring and empathetic relationship looks like. Because we also, if he doesn't finish whatever it is he brought home to have with dinner, he pours it out because he doesn't want me to have to think about it. You know, that's a big part of our relationship.

• 1:00:51Ryan Holiday?

  Beautiful.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  So, but we also talk about it a lot in regards to food. So I know I have a kid who, I have two kids who tend to be a little bit more on the, the black and white, sort of like either no sugar or tons of sugar or, you know, that kind of thing. So we talk a lot about it in regards to diet. But I can tell you, as a teacher who used to work in a, a school that had a really strong character education program and was very grounded in sort of classical literature, I used to teach temperance to my students by talking about, by talking a little bit about the Iliad and about Achilles and about, you know, flying into a blind rage versus, you know, being able to talk about something.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  So we're having these conversations all the time about like, the difference between reacting from your amygdala and your lower brain and the ability to take a breath and sort of think about something before you freak out. That is what temperance means to me, sort of that middle ground between the extremes of all or nothing, you know, lots of sugar and no sugar, or, you know, flying into a blind rage versus being able to, you know, have a very logical conversation about something. It's that middle ground. And, and that's, I think, the best way to talk about it, especially with kids. With little, little kids, it's great because you can talk about, from an education perspective, it's really great to teach kids about how their brains work from a very young age. So you can say things like,

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Sweetie, I know you really wanted to hit Stephen for telling you that your hair didn't look good today, but you know, can we engage our upper brain a little bit and try to talk to him and tell him how it makes us feel as opposed to just whacking him over the head with your book? Those are really effective conversations to have because it empowers kids to help them know that they can change and learn how to control those behaviors and have that temperance.

• 1:02:47Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think the ability to think about how you think, why you think about, why you think that way, and why you feel what you feel, those are sort of the ultimate skills. And yeah, I would argue, if not an inoculation against, you know, extreme behavior or addiction, it's at the very least a really good line of defense.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I hope so. I mean, again, I'm doing the best I can do based on the research that's out there and, you know, new research could come out day after tomorrow that says, look, all you have to do is, you know, this other thing.

• 1:03:25Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  And, you know, I will continue, I will hopefully model for my kids that I'm the kind of person who will listen and learn from other people's experiences and other people's evidence, and that's all I can ever ask of them.

• 1:03:38Ryan Holiday?

  And one thing I would say, whether it's about 12-step, or recovery, or, you know, sort of battling any of these demons, I tend to find there is an impulse in smart people to, like, I'm gonna look at the research and be like, oh, this isn't fully effective. You see people look for a magical solution to these problems, whether it's addiction, whether it's depression, whether it's, you know, anxiety. And look, there are definitely some, I think, decent medical solutions to these things.

• 1:04:17Ryan Holiday?

  But even the medical solutions are usually best when paired with therapy, or, you know, exercise or other, but I think almost the primary, like, Robert Greene says, the ultimate law of human nature is a refusal to admit there is such thing as human nature. I would say the ultimate feature of addiction is the belief that there, that you know better, or, like, that you know better and that's why you're not an addict.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50Ryan Holiday?

  You know you're an addict, but you know better than the generations of people who have been struggling with this demon now for decades and clawed their way back to some point of sobriety that you know better than them and that it doesn't have to be as hard or as circuitous or complicated as what they're doing and that all you have to do is take ayahuasca or all you have to do is, you know, move to this place or all you have to do is like, it's fucking complicated and hard. And if you think there's an easy solution, you are almost certainly engaging in the same illness that you are trying to fight.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  That's why the fun part for me is I have a lot of comfort with the gray areas. And, you know, the whole chapter on the, on peers, that's what that is. You know, my son became really good friends with a kid who was struggling with substance abuse. And my first instinct was, cut him out of your life. That's it. It's over. Because the, the common knowledge is if your kids, if your kids' friends, you know, use, then they're more likely to use. Turns out that there was, there's a lot, it's a lot more complicated than that. And I think, I'm hoping anyway, that it, I dispel a lot of myths, I hope, in this book. I help parents be a little more comfortable with the, the gray

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  area and with the fact that there aren't any easy solutions. But here's what we know right now that is our best practices when it comes to how schools handle their substance abuse prevention programs and how families talk about substance abuse. So, you know, again, I, best I can do with the evidence that's out there.

• 1:06:32Ryan Holiday?

  No, I love it. I loved the book. I love the first book very much, The Gift of Failure, Addiction, Inoculation. It's always awesome to talk and we'll do this on the next one when you finish.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  I think you'll like the next one. We'll have to have a chat about it. I'm really excited for it.

• 1:06:50Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference. And of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out. The crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.