Andrew Sullivan on The Classics, Independence, and the Human Experience

Ryan talks to Andrew Sullivan about his new book “Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989-2021,'' the common culture that we find through ancient and classic texts, the fine line between truth and being out of touch with reality, and more. Andrew Sullivan is one of today’s most provocative social and political commentators. A former editor of The New Republic, he was the founding editor of The Daily Dish, and has been a regular writer for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Time, Newsweek, New York magazine, The Sunday Times (London), and now The Weekly Dish. Andrew is the author of several books, including “The Conservative Soul,” and '”Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality.” He lives in Washington, DC, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. For a limited time, UCAN is offering you 30% off on your first order when you use code STOIC at checkout Just go to UCAN. CO/STOICNovo is the #1 Business Banking App - because it’s built from the ground up to be powerfully simple and free business banking that Money Magazine called the Best Business Checking Account of 2021. This year, get your FREE business banking account in just 10 minutes at bank novo.com/STOICNew Relic combines 16 different monitoring products that you’d normally buy separately, so engineering teams can see across their entire software stack in one place. Get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100GB of data free, forever – no credit card required! Sign up at NewRelic.com/stoic. Try Surfshark risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/STOIC. Enter promo code STOIC for 83 % off and three extra months free! As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Andrew Sullivan: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a la edición de fin de semana del Día Stoico. Cada viernes nos traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, algo que os ayude a vivir los cuatro virtudes estoicas de coraje, justicia, temperance y sabiduría. Y aquí, en el fin de semana, nos enteramos más profundo de esos mismos temas. Intervemos a filósofos estoicos. Exploramos a largo plazo cómo estas ideas estoicas pueden ser aplicadas a nuestras vidas reales y a los problemas desafiantes de nuestro tiempo. Aquí, en el fin de semana, cuando tenéis un poco más de espacio, cuando las cosas se han detenido, asegurados de tomarte algún tiempo para pensar, para ir a caminar, para sentarte con tu diario

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  y, lo más importante, para prepararte para lo que puede traer la semana de adelante.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  Para mí, el trabajo de un escritor es hacer que la gente piense, es desafiarlos. Y respeto a escritores y pensadores que no siempre están en la parte popular de las cosas, que claramente piensan por sí mismos. Cuando entrevisté a Peter Thiel para mi libro Conspiracy, y Peter es un individuo complicado con el que no estoy de acuerdo en muchas cosas, Peter dijo que a menudo se ve como contraria, lo que la gente equivoca. Ser contraria no es algo tan impresionante, es simplemente tomar lo que otros piensan y hacer lo contrario. ¿Pero qué pasa si la gente está correcta? Ahora estás equivocado por la naturaleza de reaccionar contra eso. Dijo, mi trabajo, es lo que trato de hacer, es pensar por mí mismo, pensar independientemente.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  Y realmente admiro a escritores, pensadores y líderes que hacen eso. Piensan independientemente, traen sus propias opiniones, no están unidos a una parte o dogma o estilo de pensamiento. Esto los hace originales, iconoclastas si se quiere. También los puede hacer categoricamente, preposterosamente equivocados, muy fuera de lugar en ciertas cosas.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta take the good with the bad, though, right? Because it's hard to get original thinking if you're not an original thinker, if you don't think for yourself. So that's why I like Andrew Sullivan's writing. Again, I don't agree with all of it. I often disagree with him. I watch him work himself into rabbit holes or go down what seemed to me to be blind alleys at best, complete dead ends in other cases. But he has challenged my thinking in a lot of ways, and he has made, opened my eyes to things that I wouldn't have considered otherwise.

• 2:46Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I grew up in a pretty conservative household. And Andrew Sullivan wrote in 1989, when I was two years old, the first national cover story in favor of marriage equality. And then in 1993, for the New Republic, he wrote a piece on the politics of homosexuality, which was an enormously consequential piece of writing in the gay rights movement. He was also one of the first political writers to champion the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. And I think he was early on predicting some of the dangers and risks in the rise of Trump. He's a fascinating writer, and now he's one of the sort of big voices on Substack.

• 3:31Ryan Holiday?

  I get his weekly Dish newsletter. I'm a paying subscriber. I've gotten it. I used to read him when he was writing for New York Magazine. He's just a fascinating writer, and I had a really great conversation with him. It was so fun. We had some technical difficulties while we were doing it. It dropped out for a while. I thought I lost him. This is in the middle of a freeze we had here in Texas that I recorded in, and I could tell it was affecting some power and broadband issues. But anyways, he stuck around. He came back. I think we had a great conversation, one of the ones I was very much looking forward to. And I think you're gonna like it. He's a provocative, social and political writer.

• 4:15Ryan Holiday?

  Commentator, has a great podcaster, great newsletter as well. He's the founding editor of The Daily Dish. He's written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Time, Newsweek, New York Magazine, The Sunday Times, and now his Substack, The Weekly Dish, can be found at andrewsullivan.substack.com. You can follow him at Sully Dish. I think this was a great conversation. I was, I'm excited to bring it to you. And remember, my job here on this podcast is to bring challenging voices, is to talk to people who you might not have heard from otherwise. And it's to also, remember, I love this from Tyler Cowen, "I have the conversations that I want to have," right? You, you get

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  to listen to them. You don't have to listen to them if you don't like them, right? You don't have to like everyone that I talk to. You don't even have to like how I have the conversation. This is free, after all. So if you don't like it, don't listen to it. But I think you're gonna like this one. It was an interview I was very excited to have. We talked about the classics, we talked about a little bit of politics, talk about thinking for oneself, talk about the dangers of social media, and a bunch of other great topics. You can check out his new book, truly an anthology of his best, most consequential pieces. It's called Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989 to 2021. It was released late last year. His other books, The Conservative Soul and Virtually Normal: An Argument About

• 5:43Ryan Holiday?

  Homosexuality, are also available. He lives in Washington DC in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Of course, follow him on Substack, andrewsullivan.substack.com. Enjoy. You and I have had very different paths, but as far as the classics go, ended up in a similar place. I thought maybe we would start there. I assume your introduction to the great texts of the Greeks and Romans came, came through school? Or did you, were you more of an autodidact?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  No, I was um, I was, I I did Latin all the way up through Oxford, actually. Um, so my first reading of, and this sounds, I've, I can't believe I'm, I'm so mu- I'm so much dumber than I used to be, but I used to be able to be given a passage of English and translate into Latin in the style of Tacitus, Cicero, and Livy. So that's, and I was seventeen when I was doing that, and I am so much dumber today. Uh, and we weren't really taught holistically in high school, anyway, my grammar school,

• 6:59Speaker 01

  about the texts themselves, so I only really read, uh, them as in in graduate school and political philosophy, which is really my fundamental orientation to the classics.

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  It's kind of remarkable, I mean, that what you just described is is insane to me because I I had no background in any of that, but as remarkable is hearing someone had that today, to think that, you know, a hundred and fifty years ago, anyone who was educated had that, you know, like you read about like settlers on the frontier, you know, reading uh, they're reading Plutarch in Latin, and it just sort of blows your mind, the intimacy uh, and the intellectual power that these seemingly simple people had as far as, you know, a handful of texts go.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and for me, they were introduced to just familiar features of a civilized education. I was a bit of a nerd. I really loved Latin. My biggest regret was that I chose to do, study German rather than ancient Greek uh, at the same time. I would have, I really wish I'd learned ancient Greek, because to read the Gospels in the original would be just, it's just, it's, it's, how can one? You know, how come I'm really be a Christian without having that experience in a way? But um yeah, and I would uh I know I was a super nerd. I was I was I was I was trying to avoid all social interaction as a little shy gay boy.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  But I would I added my own extracurricular translation of The Idiot uh by myself for no one but me. I uh I was just interested in how you could translate um um basically a prose poem into a similar kind of thing for English. Now, of course, my education as an English schoolboy in the seventies compared to someone from the eighteen seventies would have been pathetic.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  They mastered the ancient world. It always was uh fascinating to me that at Oxford, where I went, did modern history. Modern history begins with the end of the Roman Empire. Uh they which is incredibly just just demarcating that is incredibly helpful thing for a young mind, because it just makes you begin to see a little bit of perspective. So this whole the whole two thou two millennia that we've lived in since Christ, you can take that again all the way back since before Christ, and you still wouldn't really be a Plato.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Uh so it's it's just uh it's just fascinating.

• 9:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, we we kind of we kind of maybe it's because American history is so short that we at least Americans do kind of compress that whole ancient Greece, ancient Rome period down into a like a you know, maybe a couple centuries. It struck me a few years ago, I was reading a passage in in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations where he cites this um this line from Euripides that I didn't recognize. So I was looking it up uh is this from a lost play. And so the thought occurred to me, you know, how how long between Marcus Aurelius and Euripides, right? And it was longer than Shakespeare and us, right? And so when you get a sense of how ancient, even ancient, history was,

• 10:31Ryan Holiday?

  it kind of humbles you just how how far the past stretches back and that this period, these empires, were not as brief as we like to think they were.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  No, and more mind blowing to me, I mean, that was a, an early sign of the need for humility in understanding the world because we live in this this cult of contemporaneity in which whatever is newest is necessarily better than anything that has come before. And I never, I would never bought into that partly because of my Catholicism, but the other thing is the fact that people with brains like ours, you know, basically people that would be recognizable

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  to us as humans have been on the planet for a hundred and fifty thousand years.

• 11:25Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  For me, uh, I remember watching a a show once that was about cave art.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  And they were going through these various caves and looking at it from different eras. And one thing they noted, and this is, I'm just the gist of it, so forgive me if I get a detail wrong, but they noticed that the paint style in one bunch of caves was identical in the way it was done, in the pigments it used to another one, and they were 10,000 years apart.

• 12:03Ryan Holiday?

  So basically, all of, all of the history that we understand, just the difference between those two paintings.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yes, and but equally, a sense of a human culture that did not change.

• 12:18Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  That is, that is the, the other mind blower, which is that, is that we forget that not only do we have a cult of contemporaneity, we have this absolute pathological pursuit of change. Uh, and that, of course, has just sped up and sped up and sped up until we are currently in this kind of frenzy of liquid modernity, which is, I think, why, to be honest with you, someone like Marcus Aurelius feels so necessary.

• 12:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Feels so welcome, feels like this wonderful, uh, calm breath of sane air.

• 13:01Ryan Holiday?

  But yeah, even, yeah, you go to the founders and, and their sort of obsession with those classic texts, how Weirdly similar their lives were to those ancient people. You know, even even down to the institution of slavery, right? Is this historical constant for thousands of years? You know, the fragility of human life is constant. The the, you know, plagues, disease, all these things that now to us seem antiquated, were really not antiquated even 100 years ago.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. The other, the other, the plagues you mentioned, well, plagues, they are a modern phenomenon. They do not stretch back more than a few thousand years. Because

• 13:50Ryan Holiday?

  There's not the

• 13:51Speaker 01

  others, they really didn't move enough and they didn't congregate in big enough numbers to facilitate epidemics of disease. So that's another thing. We think of plagues also as ancient. No, plagues are quite recent. The humans have existed and constructed meaningful lives and communities, which I think is probably a better way of putting it because they weren't all civilizations as such, forever. We just have no ability to grasp that continuity and that length of change anymore. And we, the classics did use to have that purpose, perspective before anything else.

• 14:32Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think one of the other things they do provide that that we struggle with, and I certainly am sympathetic to the arguments that that, you know, it is for a large, a large extent, a bunch of old white guys, although it's more diverse than people think and the perspectives are more diverse than people think. But there is some value in a shared intellectual culture where everyone, it almost doesn't actually matter what the texts are. I mean, I think, I think we chose widely with the classics, but the idea that everyone was taught from a handful of texts and thus it's capable, you know, like even in the 1800s, when Lincoln is making allusions from the Bible or from the Odyssey or from these classical texts, even these, these ignorant farmers.

• 15:18Ryan Holiday?

  You know, are familiar with the notes that he's striking, you know, that the his, his texts are powerful to us today, but it would have. You, you, if you had heard the second inaugural in person, it would have resonated with you even deeper because everyone would have from an early age. Heard those phrases and those texts and been familiar with them in a way that you're not when. There is no sort of educational consensus about what the great texts are.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yes, it provides what one might call a common culture. I mean, and, you know, you're right that we can't understand Shakespeare if we haven't fully. Understood the sources that he was reading. And those span from obviously the ancients to someone as recent as Machiavelli. All the way in which these ideas, we're unaware of how these ideas have have sort of saturated themselves to such an extent. That you're not even aware of the antecedents. So it's like a joke about. Someone who goes to Hamlet and is asked afterwards, what did you think? And he said, well, it was just full of so many quotes.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  That he didn't realize that he, he knew Hamlet, he didn't realize it. Or in England. The Book of Common Prayer was something that became this iconic. Part of the English language and English literature. And that creates.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  A verbal universe and a literary universe in which you can assume certain touchstones. And then play with them. You know, that the modernity can play with these, but only if you know them in advance. Afterwards, they become gibberish. Or you read someone like Montaigne in the 16th century. And literally almost every essay of his is, is packed.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Full of classical references. In fact, it's sort of like he's, it's almost like a scientist referring to studies. He constantly refers to ancient texts and

• 17:25Ryan Holiday?

  Without even citing them. It's just, hey, here's a Latin phrase, and I assume that you, you not only speak Latin, but you will remember what, what, what book from Virgil this is referencing.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  And then when you go back, which, which I did in, in college, and check those original quotes, and you realize he's making a joke, actually. It means the opposite. There's irony here. It means that he's cut off that last bit, or that it's a pun. There are so many things that you're missing because of this fundamental, uh, lack of, of civilizational knowledge. And you say dead white men. I mean, I don't, I really just, they are dead, and they were men. But white is such a weird thing to say about, about people living in the, you know, the, the, the Eastern Mediterranean.

• 18:21Ryan Holiday?

  Right, no, the Epithecus. Seneca's from Spain. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's an, because I think the problem is, we think Rome, so we think this city in Italy, right? Instead of, you know, basically all of Europe and the Middle East in one country known as Rome.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Augustine was African. I mean, he was living in North Africa. I mean, this is, and you ask the average person, they would, Augustine's this sort of white guy with a, a long white beard. Yeah, and I, that's also fascinating, too, because of course, we haven't selected them because of the race of this, the nature of their race. We haven't selected, we just selected them and abandoned lots of others, by the way. They were really awful, because the test of time, that's all. I mean, and, and that is ultimately the test. We read Augustine today, and it is simply shocking

• 19:23Speaker 01

  how contemporary he feels. And that, for me, has always been the thrill of the classics, that suddenly we understand the psyche of someone. I remember reading, uh,

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Livy, no, it's not Livy, it's, um, God, why am I blanking on this? Pliny, Pliny the Younger. Now, Pliny's little letters and notes about being a provincial governor. He has a little thing about watching dolphins. He, you know, you, you just suddenly enter this rather sort of upper middle class life of observations and notes. I remember it because my Latin teacher, who is a bit, let's say flamboyant, just said one day, you know, Pliny, Pliny's such a poppet. It's like, I was like, really? Oh, then the other thing is that, you know, some of the stuff like the Nickepian Ethics,

• 20:22Speaker 01

  the Aristotle Nickepian Ethics, which are, really is worth plumbing. Because when you first read it, it kind of feels banal. There's the famous anecdote of when Churchill was asked to read it and then asked his response. And he said, well, I knew all that already. And some students of Leo Strauss regard that as a sign of Churchill's intense gravity. But I think it's, uh, it's more a function of the fact that these notions of virtue that Aristotle outlined are actually incredibly insightful about human nature.

• 21:02Ryan Holiday?

  And how practical it was actually meant to be. As I understand Nickepian Ethics, it's like a father speaking to his son, right? So the problem is, I think so many philosophers discount the most practical of the philosophy because it feels practical, because they fancy themselves, you know, intellectuals or college professors or sort of, you know, explorers of big abstract ideas. But most of what your parents tell you, you already did know. But you needed to be told it again and again and again. And it's only with age does the profundity of that very simple advice also really begin to sink in.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, it's, uh, it's, this is a strange analogy, so bear with me. But there's a point at which, if you do psychedelic drugs, Michael Pollan has this point, that you're sitting there and you're suddenly aware that all you, quote unquote, all you need is love. Now, it is a complete hollowed-out truism that means basically nothing. But, under the right circumstances, drain it of all that. It's a husk right now, but when you actually feel it, it's true. It's true.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  And I think the classics, the best classics resonate with us because they seem true. They tell us stories that profoundly reflect what we understand to be true about human nature. That's why Shakespeare is still compelling, because the psyches and the stories and the consequences and the misjudgments, they're all ours. And, and there is no time limit on that question.

• 22:54Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's right. And when I say it's all white guys, I think if you, if you cap it at the Greeks and the Romans, it's a pretty diverse group. If you extend the definition of what, you know, what we call the classics up through the Enlightenment, or the, you know, maybe you cap it at the Declaration of Independence, it does start to get weighted to, towards a very specific kind of rich European male. What I so love about the Greeks and Romans is not just the diversity of geography, but, you know, the diversity of class, right? They weren't all, you know, successful. Some of them were at the lower end. You know, we have, we have Epictetus, we have Terence. You know, you have this great slave literature even.

• 23:38Ryan Holiday?

  And that's specifically what I love about the Stoics. The two great Stoic philosophers are Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Could not be more different as far as their, where, how they experienced life and what the hand that fate has dealt them. You know, you could probably put Seneca right as the mean between the two, but just how vastly different their experiences were. And that's, I think, obviously, our focus today on race as the primary lens through which we look at things is misses just how radically different and diverse the experiences of a lot of these ancient thinkers would have been.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  But also diversity should include the past.

• 24:21Ryan Holiday?

  Uh huh.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  That that obviously, when you think today, for example, of a, let's say of a contemporary twenty five year old African American and contemporary twenty five year old Asian American in grad school together. I mean, yes, you could say they have different, but compared to the difference between each of them and and Plutarch, I mean, it's the the look at diversity in its biggest and deepest and profoundest sense. Same is also true, of course, of the Gospels, uh, which are in some ways among the most profound texts, the the classics that we have inherited. And again, there's so much of our discourse of literature that simply takes for granted

• 25:04Speaker 01

  certain biblical references, uh, certain phrases from the Gospels that you that are clearly, you know, designed to evoke that memory and you and today's, you know, audience will just look at you as if they have no recognition of these things at all. Um, it's kind of amazing that, uh, the how few people who weren't brought up as Christians, however, read a Gospel from beginning to end.

• 25:34Ryan Holiday?

  That that that is something I think people need to do, and it there there was a really good translation I read a few years ago. I I forgot who did it. Uh, some professor at Yale, uh, Tyler Callen recommended it to me. But but he basically approaches the New Testament as like a newly discovered classic text, like he sits down and translates it with with essentially no religious, uh, predilection. And and then you go, oh, yeah, this was written at the same time, I don't know, Seneca was walking around or like the the if you if you can see the Bible as another classic text. Um, I think it, uh, first off, I think it potentially opens the door to appreciate it as a spiritual text, but it also just allows you to, uh, appreciate it as a work

• 26:18Ryan Holiday?

  of classical literature, which is, you know, Lincoln is probably an atheist for most of his life, but but was clearly deeply familiar with the Bible because he read it like he read any of these other books that he checked out from the library.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Yep, absolutely. I I mean, uh, and I do think that if you don't have any common culture. I mean, you can criticize however loaded this common basis of Western civilization is. But if you have nothing in common, then you can't really construct a conversation. You can't really construct a civil order, which is one of the things that our culture is having a real hard time doing. It's as if there are almost separate epistemologies now at war. There are separate texts at war. There are people brought up entirely in a certain range of thought that simply have

• 27:16Speaker 01

  no awareness of those outside of, for whom the idea of reading a classical text would be close to meaningless. Because after all, how is that going to help dismantle white supremacy? And if that's the core goal of our time, what is reading Plato to do with that? In fact, a lot to do with that. But you wouldn't know.

• 27:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it is interesting, too. A lot of these questions that we're wrestling with today, they were also wrestling with in the ancient texts. I mean, that's what you, when you read even a Thomas Jefferson, he knows he's a raging hypocrite. He can't figure out how to get his way out of it. And he comes up with some hackneyed, ridiculous explanations for it in many cases. But he's well aware of the contradictions. And he's also aware that classically, this debate goes all the way back. Can a person own another human being? What rights does the, do the powerful have over the powerless? All these things, it's not like any of these are new questions. We've always been asking ourselves the same questions. It's just our answers have been different.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Or indeed, the Gospels for that matter, slavery. I mean, it is about the liberation of souls. And there is no way that Jefferson was unaware of that horrifying cognitive dissonance. But I think what I learned from that is not that Thomas Jefferson is an evil person and we shouldn't think or read him, but that what morally cognitive dissonance am I living with today?

• 28:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  That he helps illuminate. Because we're... Again, this is the cult of contemporaneity. Because we live now does not mean in and of itself that we're somehow morally different or superior to people. However much it seems in the past, their attitudes seem terribly anti-Diluvian, reactionary. Well, they're not reactionary because they're before the reaction. But, but in fact, we're all in that. The human culture is often in that zone. And finding a way to understand it without any fixed alternative is very hard to do.

• 29:33Ryan Holiday?

  When you, you talk about this, I think it's one of the newer essays in this book. Because you, I, I remember reading it as part of your, your email. But what Martin Luther King does so brilliantly is he, because of his deep understanding of the classic texts and the founding documents of America, he's able to make a very, a very classically based argument. He's able to use the words of the founders against themselves effectively. I think he says in the March on Washington, you know, "We're here to cash a check," you know, that Thomas Jefferson wrote. And, and I think for the people who want to reject the classic texts,

• 30:17Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I can see that as a potentially, you know, a potent political argument. But it seems that historically, the most effective one for now thousands of years has been to take the words that these people wrote a long time ago and say, "Let's actually make them real." Not, "Let's not write them off for being hypocrites." But how do we get a little bit closer to realizing what they actually talked about? Frederick Douglass being, you know, Martin Luther King's predecessor in this regard. Again, he so understands these classical ideas that, that he, he helps bring about actually realizing them as, as opposed to tossing them out.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Or to, to mention another essay in the book, Alone Again Naturally, which is about homosexuality.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  So what I do in that, and I'm trying to address the core arguments that often come from Christian sources, whether they be Catholic or evangelical. So the way to do that, to actually address it, is to go to the texts. So I would go to Aquinas, I would go back to natural law, and I would ask, because he also recognized the problem, for him, of homosexuality in existence. So he comes up with this formula that he himself understands is really unsatisfactory,

• 31:40Speaker 01

  but it's the best he can do, that somehow homosexuality is in nature, but it's unnatural. He can't quite grapple with that, because clearly he saw, for example, hairs, which was, they were apparently the randiest and gayest of creatures, as well known as a symbol of the hair, is often in ancient iconography referring to homos. And this is the paradox we're still arguing with, with people. And, and I went to Notre Dame, I went to Boston College, I went to Jesuit institutions,

• 32:23Speaker 01

  and I went through the natural law arguments of Aquinas and tried to point out that they don't actually make sense, and he acknowledged it, inverentually. And if you were to make them fully make sense, gay people couldn't be dismissed the way they are. So for example, if the core analysis that Aquinas makes is not natural, because we're not procreating, then infertile couples cannot be allowed to marry either. Right? If you follow these arguments back, you actually can truly move the argument forward.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  And by talking to people whom you might be in disagreement with, using texts that they themselves have embraced, you have a much better chance of persuading them. And I think that's what we really did do in the eighties and nineties, we really did do that work of persuading people. And that's exactly what MLK is doing, when he talks of the promised land, when he talks of this dream, when he talks of the mountaintop. You know, you know, the average secular person today hears the mountaintop. They don't talk about a mountaintop. No, this is deep, deep, deep, deep, deep. It's part of your life. It's been woven into every sermon. It's in so many spirituals.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  It is, it has been the source of your comfort. And here is this man disintering it, bringing it to life again, pushing it into the contemporary context. That is, to me, always has been, always will be thrilling. The idea that humans, all the knowledge we have is just learned in the last 12 months is so insane.

• 34:11Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Lincoln does that too, right? Lincoln makes a very Christian argument and, and logical argument against slavery. And, and again, the idea that he wasn't particularly Christian for most of his life makes it more impressive that he's able to figure out, you know, what is the frame of reference that these people are viewing the world through? And how can I convince them there as opposed to merely believing myself morally superior and smarter than them? And then, you know, bullying them into changing, which as, as we know, does not, does not tend to work very well.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Even though it's still a very popular way of, of doing it. Well, I, again, you know, it's, it's a question of persuasion as opposed to just coercion, a question of engagement as opposed to, you know, yelling at people.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  And yeah, that's, that's, well, I think also of John Locke, whose essay on toleration actually tries to say we support toleration because we're Christians, even though up until then, obviously, we didn't with the not tolerating was the point of Christianity because the importance was the sincerity of the personal conversion to Christianity, which of course you can root in the Gospels. In other words, things are only made new really through a reinterpretation, understanding of the old.

• 35:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  And, and you can't, and this is sort of a small C conservative Burkean argument really, which is that you can't mess with that stuff too much or you lose something extraordinarily precious. You lose perspective. You lose a sense of principle and you lose a sense of common culture. And I think that is a problem we have, I really do. I think the one way, one reason for our descent culturally into these warring tribes of separate forms of information, separate essentially value system, separate epistemologies,

• 36:18Speaker 01

  which makes a common civilization impossible, it also makes a common politics impossible.

• 36:26Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, yeah. If half the population is religious and the other half isn't, and they're on different sides of the political party, then that religion becomes a political weapon as opposed to a shared understanding of the world that allows compromise and collaboration and all that.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Yes, you could, you could see that not so long ago, there were similar proportion of Democrats and Republicans who understood themselves to be Christians. Now it's increasingly fewer and fewer in the Democrats and more and more among the Republicans. That's, that's, it's just hard to get through, once that has happened. It's hard to, so for example, if you're gonna have a look at discrimination differently, because the Christian, Christian is gonna understand this as a question of everyone's individual soul and not judging another person's soul by a superficial characteristic that

• 37:26Speaker 01

  you shouldn't, because it's unfair and unjust, as opposed to a post-Christian view that essentially everything is structural and systemic and there are no such things as individual souls, there are just forces that oppress individual bodies. Now how do you, given those two core epistemologies, how do you even have a conversation?

• 37:49Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  It's really hard to have a conversation. And... I think because I've, you know, I have in my own life have a foot in both camps. That particularly excruciating for people like me, and there are more of us than you'd think, but people who have an attachment to the deepest principles and texts of our civilization and pride in them, but also want to address the world as it is, to to render it less unjust in ways that make sense.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  And we can't be intelligible in some ways to the people we're trying to persuade. And and and so I I feel deeply conflicted. But I think that is also a symbol, a symptom of being in modernity, that you we because we no longer have this common civilizational inheritance, we don't, we lose the capacity to debate, to deliberate with others and to operate as citizens in a liberal society. That is, that's my deepest worry.

• 39:06Ryan Holiday?

  How has that been for you? Because I imagine it's strange. You you pretty much find yourself the enemy of both camps on a on a regular basis. I mean, that's one indication that one is thinking independently, but it's also, I imagine, exhausting and disorienting. How do you know when you're right? How do you know when you're wrong? How do you think about that?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  I think there's, you certainly shouldn't regard independence as necessarily a sign of being right. Sometimes you're being the odd one out is because you're dumb. You've got something completely wrong. So, but the truth is, there's no comfortable place. There isn't any way, there shouldn't be for any of us, because we should be constantly subjecting what we already believe to new doubt.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  But personally, I just.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Honestly, try to figure out, I know this sounds, and this is profound in a way, but I really do think, I'm trying to figure out what I would call the truth. The truth is not some God-given eternal verity, and it's, but it is the best I can do right now in figuring out what is real in the world. And I do believe there is something real in the world, that there is an objective reality, that I am by virtue of being human, capable of only perceiving partially, and in ways that are, you know, not divine.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  But again, think about that, the core Christian understanding that reason, there's human reason and there's divine reason. If there's no divine reason, how do you critique the individual human? You know, how do you, how do you acknowledge the limits of our reason?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Anyway, I'm not, I'm, there is a, there is a difference between being a total nihilist and being a skeptic, that nonetheless is perfectly aware of his or her own biases, blindness, blind spots, lack of knowledge, but also is not prepared to give up entirely on possibility of a common meaning.

• 41:32Ryan Holiday?

  I, I remember when I was writing my book about Peter Thiel, he was, he, he sort of bristled at the, the label of being a contrarian. He's saying, because, you know, that just means I take what everyone else thinks and I do the opposite. And he was saying, so when I'm saying independent, I, I think I was referring to it in his sense of like, no, I try to come up with my own opinion on each thing, instead of inheriting an ideology from a, from a tribe, or a religion, or a political perspective, or just, you know, what do people like me tend to think about this issue? Which makes sense, it's also exhausting in its own way, because it means you have to think for yourself about every goddamn thing.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Well, that's one reason I decided to put this book out there, because I was often accused of being contrarian, or he's off again, or he just changed his mind, or now this is fashionable, now. The truth is that, I think when you actually look at the whole book, and I haven't I didn't rig it, and so I tried to select what I thought were the best and the most contemporary. I think it's actually pretty consistent with one obvious shift, which occurs after the Iraq war, during the Iraq war, where I have a shift my views about American

• 42:52Speaker 01

  foreign policy and how we should be interacting with the world. Even though, actually, if you go further back, there were moments where I had a lot of that in me as well, and I just sort of went through a slightly utopian period in my late twenties and thirties. But I do think, I see things, I try to see things as clearly as I can, offer up all my doubts about it, but nonetheless try and take a view. And my hope is that the book actually shows a certain amount of consistency, a certain

• 43:35Speaker 01

  amount of commitment to doubt, commitment to conservatism in the small C sense of the word, and a commitment to liberal democracy.

• 43:49Ryan Holiday?

  It seems like one of the things we're struggling with, and I think you and I know some of the same people, it seems like one of the tricky things about getting this, I might be mixing too many metaphors here, but you get out on a limb, right, and you find yourself with some strange bedfellows, right, people who are out on the same limb for very different reasons, right? And so how do you think about that? I mean, how do you think about, yeah, maintaining your independence when you might agree with someone, but you got to the same conclusion for very different reasons? Or you might disagree with them on pretty much everything else? You know, I'm just sort of leading this towards some of the ideas of audience capture.

• 44:30Ryan Holiday?

  You know, I just noticed so many independent thinkers who I used to like have become radicalized over the last couple of years, and they're almost unrecognizable from their earlier independent-thinking, generous, kind, rational self. They're just motivated almost by a kind of anger or spite or outright craziness.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Well, I used to call it the neocons slide, which is a weird thing, which is that, and I was referring back then to those who had the original neoconservatives who had started out on the left and then through a series of personal epiphanies and policy judgments moved towards the center-right, but then seemed to be unable to stop there. Yes. And just keep going. And because, two things, I think, one, there's people reward you, you know, for this and you're a social being too.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  And especially in the network world of intellectuals, journals, you know, there is inevitably a kind of universe and no one wants to be completely left out. But also, you just fall in love with your own arguments too much. And you get a slight thrill from it. And social media, I mean, this was always true of human nature, so it's not new as such. Yeah. But I think being in a context in which, in which you're not really, you cease to try and persuade or explain and are just yelling at this point, you, of course, you end up bitter and angry and your emotions get the better of you.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's very human to see people go down this route. But I think the important thing for me is that I'm not institutionally captured, or have never really been institutionally captured. From the get-go, I was always an outsider within liberal journalism and an outsider within conservative journalism, so that I have a pretty rare lack of institutional coordination with one tribe or the other. And have been treated with

• 46:53Speaker 01

  support and contempt by both over depending upon the moment, but I think you just have to ask yourself, well, what am I, why am I doing this? And, and I'm lucky enough, I think that I don't want this, this sounds too much, but I think I have enough talent to survive without that.

• 47:09Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's a good point. I think the less talented people are more easily captured. And yeah, you might contrast institutionally captured, which definitely happens with sort of algorithmically captured, which is the spiral. I think people get in, especially if you've kind of been obscure or not super interesting. Maybe you talk about really wonkish policy stuff. And then all of a sudden you're right in the heat of the action. That's a, that's an addiction and you watch people go from being mild mannered to, you know, insane.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes. I think insane is not a complete misnomer. I mean, I, you know, you, you, I just, I look in horror. But at the same time, you're aware

• 47:55Speaker 01

  that you're vulnerable to that too. And you're human too. And one thing I do with the weekly dish, as you know, is every week I publish the best arguments against what I wrote the week before, sometimes in a way that makes me squirm, to be honest. And sometimes I effectively rebut them, sometimes less effectively, or I have to concede a point. And the point of that is to make sure that I am not sequestering myself.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Or that I'm not immune to self criticism. Now, it's, it's just hard, you know, it's just hard to maintain that balance. I'm lucky as much as I've been doing this a long time. I am not, I, if I get on the new TV, I'm, it's, it's, it's, it's fine, but I'm not super, super psyched, isn't changing my life suddenly overnight, everyone knows me, whatever. I've gotten to the point where I, I really do seek less publicity. I mean, with this, with the book, I really felt I needed to, but I, I don't go on cable news. I really try and, and, and keep my writing now also to the weekly dish. Of course, I'm susceptible to Twitter. I really shouldn't.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  But I go on there partly because that's where a lot of this stuff is happening.

• 49:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  If I'm going to keep up with contemporary arguments and debates, you have to read it at least, you know, once a day.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  And sometimes in all the hustle and bustle there, people will throw up old papers, old arguments, old pieces, or obscure studies that you'd never have found otherwise that really help you in some way.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  And I try and have a feed where, you know, I have lefties and righties as well.

• 49:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think that one of the things I like about the newsletter business is that financial independence is the wrong word, but it does make, it does create a little bit of a buffer where one is not living and dying based on, you know, that publicity game. And so I do, I do love being in a place where I can say what I want, you can't cancel me, but also I don't need to go get attention as the driver of the engine, because I already have the audience, right? I think the dependency on virality is, to me, the thing that has so driven our culture in an insane direction because only certain kinds of thinking and arguments go viral,

• 50:34Ryan Holiday?

  and it's almost never the sort of nuanced empathetic ones. It's always the opposite of that.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  The key thing to remember is that we now have data. We never had data really. I would put out The New Republic every week, roughly a hundred thousand copies, about maybe like 25 pieces a week, something like that. I didn't know who was reading which article.

• 50:59Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  I had a pretty good idea that no one's going to read that 8,000-word piece on the farming methods of medieval jury.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  And I had a feeling that they're probably going to read Mike Kinsley's TRB first. Uh, but I didn't know.

• 51:18Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Suddenly, all of this is laid bare. And inevitably, because as individual writer gains audience, they do gain leverage. And in fact, part of what happened to me in the early, the first decade of the 21st century was that I built that independent audience and then was able to leverage it to get more money and better deals from these bigger companies. So it's, but I always did that as a sense of, well, both to be paid what I thought I was worth. Uh, but secondly, uh, because I, I could pursue a strain of thought with, with the least amount of un, un, let's say unjustified intervention.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  You always want to be an editor, but you don't want to feel, as I began to feel at New York Magazine, for example, that I dare to write this, I can't write that sentence. If I use that word, I have to go through an ordeal. The editor's going to be embarrassed by this. My editor is going to be anguished that he has to present this to others. It's just awful.

• 52:21Ryan Holiday?

  That's the institutional capture, for sure.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Institutional capture where there's no way out. You were, you're slowly, everyone folds, you become this pariah. Uh, and just the human experience, even if you're not in, physically in the same space, the experience is one of profound alienation and demoralization, as it is intended to be.

• 52:45Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and that ties into one of my favorite essays from you about your sort of struggles with, with, you call it sort of an internet addiction. It's probably a, it, it's the, the, the internet addiction and then something I've dealt with myself was sort of a work addiction, because, because the internet and the work are the same place and you're getting the instantaneous validation for the work. But sometimes when I pull up Twitter and I, I see some of these people, I go, you just, like, you think this is about whatever this political thing you're talking about? Really, you're just, you're in a, in a sort of a manic spiral from, from the. Like, you need, you need to get married, you need to have some kids, you need a more balanced

• 53:26Ryan Holiday?

  actual life in which your phone and checking Twitter is not like the totality of your existence. And I mean, some of these people are married and do have kids, so it shows you how overwhelming that addiction can be. But I just, I just feel like a lot of this stuff isn't coming from healthy people.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  No, it isn't. And also, we have to remember that everyone else in this culture is playing video games or is on their iPad, that this is, this is a function of, I think, a function of humans having trouble to begin with in integrating a new technology into their lives. I think we are at the phase where we realize it's killing us, it's making our lives much worse, we need to do less, and that it's actually clearly designed consciously as an addictive product. And we have to be aware of that, either not partake in it at all, or to have

• 54:26Speaker 01

  some regiment of strict limitation, or you are going, your mind is going to be taken over by this. It's, it's, it's like being susceptible to, I don't know, to cocaine or to any other kind of addictive activity. And again, the fact, and I would link this to what we were saying before, the lack of a common civilization means we have a lack of common meaning that is provided to us all. We all have to find it ourselves. Most people have nowhere near the resources, or the time, or the depth to do that. That's why we have inherited civilizations, which we help inculcate in people. If they don't have that, everything

• 55:10Speaker 01

  is a will to power. The world seems depressing. Escapism via these addictive processes is entirely rational decision. Just let's get, let's get out of this. I don't want to be part of it. I don't want to think about the news. Or if I do, I want to turn it into this kind of weird psychotic one-upmanship. So you end up, we haven't mentioned any names so far, but, but, and it's a tragedy in a way. Some people start out With really good minds and have done good work and leave them in that horrible stew of incentives and they end up miserable and angry and irrational.

• 55:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you talked about this earlier when we were starting about how you used to be able to take some passage and translate it in the style of three different Latin thinkers. You think about what it takes in the way that a baseball player has to cultivate or basketball player has to cultivate a certain mind and body to perform at this high level, to do what they do. And then that's to be an intellectual or a writer or thinker, you have to cultivate the ability to think about big ideas, to do deep work, to read, you know, to understand nuance and all of that. And so it's like you train your whole life to have your brain work a certain way and

• 56:34Ryan Holiday?

  then culture is like, yeah, but 240 characters written on a phone in as short a time as possible responding to current events that just happened. That's the arena that you're supposed to compete in. I mean, it's just a utterly different way of functioning cognitively. And I think it not only all the old muscles atrophy, I think it's like a sort of fundamentally an unhealthy way to live and be. And I think people are, it's almost like we have the bends from transitioning from one kind of environment or atmosphere to another.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  It's a profound source of our collective unhappiness, I think. And again, it wasn't just reading books rather than tweets. It was reading books slowly.

• 57:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  It was mastering a language and then absorbing the texts in that language. That takes huge amount of time, concentration, slowness and prestige attached to that kind of activity, which requires places which are not about productivity, not about efficiency, but literally spaces close to spiritual kind of places where you go to wander around in ideas and your own thoughts for long periods of time. Like when you enter an Oxford college.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  It is like entering, I mean, my old college, Maudlin, I mean, you enter a 14th century monastery. The, the sound goes quiet. You are suddenly told, you're in a different place here, this is timeless. And we're patient. And the goal is excellence. That's not rushed. And yet, of course, most people go into college there to get a quick degree, to earn more money for specific purposes.

• 58:35Ryan Holiday?

  Under crippling debt to do so.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  And the humanities, which were the key

• 58:42Speaker 01

  place where this long perspective was sustained and preserved, have all been turned into a sub, a subcategory of really, uh, of, of, of Marxian critical theory. So that you, you, the idea that you're reading Aristotle because you're interested in the truth is itself a racist thing to say. Because the whole idea of the truth is a function of white supremacy, which is a function of your race, and it just turns everything into boring mud. Um, and so inevitably, the science has taken over, the humanities have committed suicide.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  And we're left. My, my hope is that, in fact, is simply this, that I'm right and you're right, that these texts are much better than others. At some point, people figure that out. The tedium, I mean, if you force me to read three pages of Judith Butler, or compared it to reading, I don't know, Freud or Socrates, I mean, it's not an easy, it's not a pretty easy choice.

• 59:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, it is funny, these sort of, uh, I was thinking about this a, after the killing of George Floyd and all these sort of anti-racist books become, you know, immensely popular. I know a lot of people that are buying them, I don't really know anyone that's actually reading them and talking about them. And then I went and I reread Ellison's Invisible Man, which is about all of those things, right? There's a police shooting, there's a race riot, there's Marxists, I mean, there's all of the things that are happening right now in that book. But it's also a beautiful provocative work of literature from a person who loves the classics, written in 1956 or something like that.

• 1:00:28Ryan Holiday?

  And, and I do, I think that's a good, good, a good hope that ultimately the better texts survive. And there's a reason they have survived for so long. And they've waxed and waned in popularity, certainly. I mean, there was that little thing called the Dark Ages. It's not like they have been universally popular and widely dispersed. And so perhaps we're just in a, in a little bit of a dip, but ultimately they, they win back out.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  I'm confident of that. I'm confident the human mind gets bored easily. I'm confident that ideologies particularly bore easily. I'm conscious that the constant attempt to make reality fit your pre-existing view of the world is doomed to failure. And so we just wait patiently for these, these things to be. Meanwhile, however, you talk about the Dark Ages, we're not allowed to call them Dark Ages anymore because they kind of weren't. But one thing that did typify them was my ancestors, sitting there in the west coast

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  of Ireland scribbling down the gospels and, and, and copying and copying copies of the ancient manuscripts to, to build this and to see this inheritance. I mean, think of that, you know, that vision.

• 1:01:52Ryan Holiday?

  You know, one thing I was thinking, this thought that maybe you might have a reaction to, I was driving in Texas yesterday. We were talking about how, how hard it is for people to find their identity or whatever. And I saw now all over Texas, there are these like roadside stops that sell flags, right? Like, not like American flags, but all these political flags, like, let's go Brandon, Trump 2024. It struck me as how new and strange, like, that, that, like this political identity on a flag that you fly around. I mean, obviously pride flags were probably one of the first examples of this, but it struck me as such a weird political development that maybe is not positive.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  No, it depresses me too. I mean, you're right that in some ways it's just a reflection of what the crazy left is doing. I mean, we no longer have a rainbow flag. We have a, we have a trans flag. We have a gender queer flag. We have a, a, you know, it just goes on and on and on. Um, and they're all, of course, at this point, including most of these made up gender identities, are just essentially performative tribalism. It, it, they're not really making arguments. They're just saying, they're doing what flags always did, which is showing which tribe you belong to. That's what it is.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  It's like medieval armies with, it's like Game of Thrones at this point. We're the House of Lannister and these are our various gimmicks. Um, and we even have our own slogans and, you know, on the one hand it's let's, let's go Brandon. On the other hand, it's trans women are women. Uh, all caps. It's just exhausting and boring and tedious. And you, I, you know, when I was in, and this, what happens is it also metastasizes because, so for example, in the rainbow flag, which used to be the pride flag, then got replaced by this new diversity flag,

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  which had black and brown stripes added to it, plus pink and blue and white for trans people. So that went up, which it looks like some hideous licorice all sort. It's just vile. And if a gay person designed it, they should have their gay card taken away from them. But there it is. But once one person put it up. If you keep the old rainbow flag on without these things, you're basically a white supremacist. So the pride flag becomes a white supremacy flag pretty damn quick. It's it's a bit like, you know, Basov Havel's story about the greengrocer who puts

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  the the the poster in the window that says, "Workers of the world unite." He doesn't do it because he's basically in favor, because if he doesn't, then the authorities will more likely to investigate him. And I watched this happen in which people became more and more wedded to the more and more crazy stuff, because to confess any doubt about it would cast you out of the community.

• 1:05:20Ryan Holiday?

  Whenever I see stuff like that, I think of Paul Graham's favorite favorite or famous essay about identity. Basically, he was saying that that the more identity or the clearer your identity is, the stupider you are. Basically, that identity is a form of stupidity, right? When you identify with a thing or with a tribe, almost immediately, you're constrained. And that that does strike me as the through line between this book and a lot of your writing is, obviously, you have different identities, but you seem to always be in the process of challenging and reflecting on and perhaps contradicting those identities. And that is what's produced, not just, I think, interesting work, but a but a lot of, you know,

• 1:06:05Ryan Holiday?

  groundbreaking ideas or potentially, you know, you know, breakthroughs, as in the case of, you know, your writing on gay marriage.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Well, the only thing I'd say about that is that in some ways, yes, I have tried to think things through. On the other hand, I just tried to make the, you could argue that I just tried to find a place for myself in in the world that I arrived in. And in so doing, it turned out lots of other people don't have a place for themselves. But my view is not about finding a place, it's about finding your place. And your ability also to hold different things in your, different ideas in your own mind at the same time. To accept that you have multiple identities that at times are clashing, at times utterly not clashing,

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  and in fact, supporting one another. Uh, but the point is to be you. And I always said this about the gay rights movement. The gay rights movement was never about encouraging people to be gay. It was encouraging people to be themselves. And if they are themselves, not to have the world persecute them for it, which is so. For me, you know, I am at some deep level an individualist. I, I think that at some level, that's the baseline unit of human affairs. Uh, obviously the family is important and the clan and then the society and so. But as a Christian, that's the individual soul is what matters really.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  And, and enlarging a little bit the space for a different kind of soul to exist does not mean overturning society. It does not mean, uh, dismantling anything. It means adjusting a little bit. It's what I used to call a, a very gradual change we can believe in. That's, that's really Burke's and conservatism's motto. Not no change, not react against all that's happening. But let's, let's nudge the change to make it the least disruptive and the most constructive

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  it can be within the, within the civilization that we are lucky to have decreed upon us. Um, and I think that's also helpful when you read the classics or you read the ancients. You begin to realize that this, these last few decades of Western liberal democracy, extremely rare in human history to have this kind of open society. Um, and deeply hostile to lots of things in human nature, uh, which liberalism really fights. Uh, and not eternal, obviously absolutely mortal.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  You know, you can't read about Socrates without understanding that he was executed for, for being a freethinker, nor can you read the Gospels without also understanding that Jesus himself was executed for, for denying that power is greater than truth in part. And so that's, that's where I, that's where I, I kind of come out in the end.

• 1:09:34Ryan Holiday?

  I love it. You had to quote another dead white guy, who again shows just how insufficient that term is. You know, we contain multitudes, everyone does, and we're complicated and contradictory, and we have to figure out, we have to figure that out for ourselves and then also, I think, be tolerant and understanding and patient with other people as they participate in that same, same journey. But yeah, as you said, society and the world is better when we make places for those people and.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  And when you look at something like Socrates or Jesus as models, the one thing you find most of the time in them is that they, they respond to questions with questions.

• 1:10:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  They're always inviting you into the discourse. Jesus also invited people in just by actions, simple actions. So these are, you know, it's, it's, and if you read Socrates, you, you also see there is something joyful in this exploration.

• 1:10:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's an acceptance and an intellectual humility. And to go to what you said earlier, I think in both of them, there was also a profound love for human beings and for the unfortunate and for the confused and for the, for the process of discovering the truth as well.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the great quote for me is always, Elliot, actually, that we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  That to me is what's going on. That's what the classics are about. That's what that's what a life of learning will do. Eliot, Eliot is a very important figure for me, also someone you can't read and understand if you do not understand the gazillion references like Auden, who. But, you know, at Harvard, I actually dramatized the four quartets, created four different speaking parts within them, and then orchestrated it with

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Messien, Olivier Messien's Quartet for the End of Time. Both were written in 1941. The world was ending. As the world was ending. Bombs were landing in London. Messien was in a prisoner of war camp. Eliot was in the Blitz. And they both wrote these two extraordinarily eternal pieces of art. And I just, I wanted to combine the two, which led to a rather

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  long two hours, but at the same time, a lot of everybody stayed awake through the whole thing. But, beautiful. And I began the performance with an air raid siren. Wow. So people knew the context in which these beautiful things were doing. That transcendence is what scholarship can really do for you. And that's why I find so much of contemporary critical theory discourse so, because there is no transcendence there. There is no truth. There is only power and there is only now. And anger. It's anger. Well, anger and resentment too. Yeah.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Resentiment, very much there.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  But the stuff that we love is just better. We'll always be understood to be better because humans can make that judgment over time. And it doesn't depend on the color of your skin or your sex or anything else to appreciate this. So many people of every different background have come across Homer or come across Shakespeare or come across Marcus Aurelius and just are blown away because it's the human experience, not the specific contextualized contingent historical moment, which is so, at this

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  point in time, hellish in your way. So I have to spend my life partly on beginning to question whether I should do that, but it's hellish.

• 1:14:28Ryan Holiday?

  Beautifully said, beautifully said. Andrew, thank you so much.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  So great to see you. Please, if people found this interesting, please let them know about The Weekly Dish every week and Out on a Limb, the book, my collection. I'm sure people, there's a lot in there. I hope people will enjoy it.

• 1:14:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'll let you go because I'm looking forward to getting it tomorrow. So I won't stop you from writing the newsletter.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Okay, I will, I'll get back to it.

• 1:14:58Ryan Holiday?

  I do have one book recommendation for you. You might have already known it, but since you mentioned Elliot in The Blitz, in 4142, right before he committed suicide, Zweig's last book is a little biography of Montaigne. And so it's a man in exile. He wrote it in South America. It's him in exile, writing about Montaigne's exile during the Reformation and the Civil War there. And it's one, I read it in 2016 and it was so helpful and calming and also terrifying at the same time.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  I just found it. I am, I'm gonna get that and, and The Swerve.

• 1:15:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Book recommendations. You know, I read. I studied Montaigne in the original when I was at Oxford. That's how I read in French lit. My special subjects were Pascal and Montaigne.

• 1:15:53Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Two amazing, amazing writers and stylists.

• 1:15:58Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you'll like this. You'll like this little bio. It's very short, but it to me it was, it reminded me of, of, yeah, just this moment so much. Two people fleeing the craziness of the world and looking inward to find truth and contentment and, and peace.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's definitely the four quartets. If you let me listen to the last, the last section of Quartet, The End of Time is just one of the most, just find it, put it on, sit down, listen to it. It's like seven minutes. It's.

• 1:16:31Ryan Holiday?

  I'll do that right now.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  All right, Ryan. Nice to see you. Thanks.

• 1:16:36Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pokile, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic Meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth bound edition of our Best of Meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts.

• 1:17:19Ryan Holiday?

  And this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic Courses and Challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two week trial totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.