ESPN's Paul Kix - How Anyone Can Change Everything

On today’s podcast, Ryan talks with Paul Kix about the French Resistance (the topic of Kix’s first book), what we can learn from historical events and the people who made them happen, and more. Paul Kix is a writer, editor, and podcaster. Kix is a deputy editor at ESPN who both writes and edits articles. He has written for outlets such as The New Yorker, GQ, and The Wall Street Journal. Kix’s first book, The Saboteur, discusses the wartime exploits of a French aristocrat who fought against the Nazi occupation of France. This episode is brought to you by Fast Growing Trees, the online nursery that delivers beautiful plants to your doorstep quickly and easily. Whether it’s magnificent shade trees, fruit trees with delicious apples and pears, privacy hedges, or beautiful flowers, Fast Growing Trees is the best place to buy your plants. And their 30-day Alive and Thrive guarantee means that you’ll be happy with whatever you buy. Visit FastGrowingTrees.com/stoic now and get ten percent off your entire order. This episode is also brought to you by Warby Parker, the online vision care boutique that delivers glasses right to your front door. Warby Parker has an amazing selection of the most stylish frames for your glasses. And with their free Home Try-On program, you can try out five of your favorite frames for five days before you make a purchase, with no obligation. Whether you’re looking for stylish sunglasses or blue-blocker glasses for your computer, Warby Parker is the place to shop for your next pair of glasses. Try five pairs of glasses for free by visiting warbyparker.com/stoic.***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/dailystoicFollow Paul Kix: Homepage: https://www.paulkix.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/paulkixInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulkix/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/paulkixauthor/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 weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I don't know if you saw, but earlier this summer, ESPN wrote a piece about Stoicism in sports. And that article, titled "The Ancient Credo That Fuelled the Patriot Way, Inspired Nick Saban, and Helped Ryan Shazier Heal", was written by Paul Kicks, a deputy editor at ESPN The Magazine. He's written everywhere for The New Yorker, and GQ, and New York, and Men's Journal, and The Wall Street Journal. Anyways, a great guy who I've gotten to know, not just in the course of reporting that article. You know, it was cool. He interviewed everyone from CJ McCollum to Ryan Shazier, Michelle Tafoya. He interviewed Lane Kiffin, who I've gotten to know.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  Anyways, it was great, not just to see him talk about all those other people, but I got to have a bunch of conversations with Paul. And as a result, I read Paul's book, which I loved. It's called The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando. It's this fascinating, totally true story about one of the leaders of the French Resistance in World War II. He's like this daring commando who does all these behind-enemy-lines raids.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  He's captured, he escapes a bunch of times. It's just an incredible book. I really liked it. One of my favorite genres to read is this, this genre. We call it sort of narrative nonfiction. I feel like this book fits perfectly in that. And then to know, obviously, that the author ended up being a fan of and inspired by Stoicism makes the whole thing very serendipitous. And so, anyway, it was great to have Paul Kicks on the podcast. He's got a great newsletter you can check out if you go to paulkicks.com. He's a great writer and gives all sorts of tips on becoming a better writer, a bunch of articles and books that he recommends. Just a great stuff. Check it out, paulkicks.com. You can follow him on Twitter, @paulkicks.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  And then, of course, you can follow him on Instagram as well, @paulkicks. It's been great to talk to him over the years. And I think this interview is a really good one because it's important that people realize that the heroism of something like the French Resistance was not nearly as widespread as one would have hoped, right? You'd think there'd be nothing more clear cut than resisting the Nazis, right? Has there ever been a clear example of good and bad, right and wrong? What our moral obligation is than when the Nazis invaded France and then occupied it? And the truth is, at the time, it wasn't as clear to people, or it wasn't as clear as it obviously should have been.

• 3:37Ryan Holiday?

  And so, I think what's so fascinating about Paul's book and then, and then the discussion that we have is, well, what holds people back from doing the right thing? What leads them astray? Why are they scared? Why don't they act with that sort of courage that we say Stoicism demands? And, you know, I talked a little bit about this in, in, in the new book, Lives of the Stoics, as well, right? Cicero sees the rise of Caesar as, as something objectionable and undesirable, but in some respects inevitable and ends up sort of ultimately kind of collaborating, sort of sitting on the side, waiting for the winner to, to identify themselves. I talked a little bit about this with Annie Applebaum in my episode recently as well.

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, whereas Cato sort of does have that moral clarity. He does assert himself. He does fight for what's right. He sort of is the greater Stoic in that instance. This is later the tension with Thrasse and Seneca. You know, do you collaborate with Nero? Do you resist Nero? How far are you willing to go? How much are you willing to lose? Anyways, I think these are all very timely ideas to be thinking about, which makes Paul's book great, this discussion great. And I think you'll get a sense from Paul just what a thoughtful guy he is. You know, he's fascinated by that quote from Marcus Aurelius. I'm fascinated by, we opened the interview with it. So it's worth opening this intro with, waste no more time arguing what a good man is like.

• 5:02Ryan Holiday?

  Be one. And I think that's the imperative for all of us today.

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  So I was, I was thinking about your book this morning, actually. The David Brooks column in the New York Times was basically about, what would you do if Trump doesn't leave in November? So the idea being sort of a thought exercise. If Trump isn't reelected, but somehow challenges the legitimacy of the election and sort of violates constitutional norms about the transition of power. What do you do? And it struck me, having read your book, The Saboteur, that if France is any precedent, most people will do nothing.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, most people will do nothing. Yeah. And maybe that's not even necessarily like, it's really a question at this point, because I've given this a lot of thought myself. What is the appropriate response? My wife and I, since 2016, have thought about this a lot in our own lives, in our own ways. We were like, all right, we have three kids, right? And it's like, how will they remember us? And it's one thing to tweet, but you know, that accomplishes nothing. So what, what actions will you do? It's actually, you know, you and I have talked about this before. The, one of my favorite lines from, one of my favorite lines from Aurelius, and you're going to know this word for word, but it's basically like, Don't just talk of being a good man. No, I already screwed that up. It's like, don't,

• 6:30Speaker 01

  don't just think about being a... Oh, what is it, Ryan?

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  I have it, I have it as a poster on the wall in my office. So it's, it's waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Be one, yes. And, and that's very much guided our actions over the last four years. So at the extent of this sounding like self-serving or even virtue signaling, like, we decided around the time of the Muslim bans to work with an area mosque to basically create this sort of like Christian Muslim solidarity pact about like, what would it mean if he actually tried to ban Muslims? That was like in 2016, 2017. We've also been very active in resettling a family from Myanmar. Why did we decide to resettle these refugees? In large part because the Trump administration has greatly reduced the number of refugees that can enter the country. You know, for basically from,

• 7:23Speaker 01

  oh gosh, post-World War II until four years ago, something like 100,000 refugees were let into the country every year. It's actually, when you think about it, it's one of the most amazing aspects of the American experiment, right? Because it's like, we are the country that will bring in the immigrant, we are the country that will bring in your poor huddled masses. It is not just something that's on the Statue of Liberty, right? We are, we are being the good citizens. And this was true across Republican or Democratic administrations. In the last four years, that number of, of refugees that can enter the country has been reduced, reduced, and reduced again. And right now, I think it sits at something like 18,000 who are let in. And I think that number is going to go

• 8:06Speaker 01

  down again in fiscal year 2021. So, you know, it's, it's, for us, it's sort of like, whatever we can do, however we can be helpful, however we can leave a legacy in an imprint for good, is the thing that we should do right now.

• 8:22Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and look, I can already sort of feel some people of different political persuasions sort of having an immediate negative reaction to this. And so what I thought, let's take it back. The reason I'm...

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Was thinking of your book when I read that piece is that historically, we have, your books about sort of one of the heroes of the French Resistance in the, in the Second World War, but we have this weird historical narrative about the French Resistance, which is basically that it was ubiquitous, overwhelmingly popular, and that most people supported it. And that's not true at all. No, no, I mean, very few people in France supported the Resistance. In fact, it was something like, I mean, some scholars have contended it's as few as 2%,

• 9:15Speaker 01

  perhaps as much as 10%. And that 10% includes both those like Robert, the subject of the Rebook, who were part of the active Resistance, the ones who said, "I will, you know, I will literally fight for my freedom." And then it includes as well that 10% figure, the more passive resistors. And those would be the ones who during the occupation were misdirecting the Nazis. They were, they were hiding guns for the Resistance. It was just basically small, everyday acts that in their own way, started to add up to something that would benefit the more active Resistance. And a lot of times, those passive resistors

• 9:55Speaker 01

  never acknowledged to even their family what they were doing. Certainly the active resistors didn't. But sometimes even the, the passive resistors, they would sort of, like there was this guy named André Bouy, who helped Robert. It's the most amazing story. He, he actually, he ran a hotel that the, that the German, that the German army first occupied and then basically frequented throughout the whole of the war. And, and it was during that time. While the Germans were doing that, that Andre was working all the time for the Resistance. And he actually felt that the best cover that he could have possibly had was to work in the open

• 10:38Speaker 01

  because nobody would suspect somebody who was that outwardly a collaborator of actually being a part of the Resistance. That begins to get at sort of the messiness of the French Resistance as well. It's, it's, to me, it's like, World War II is often portrayed in movies as these very clean lines between good and evil. And I think that in, in some measures, yes, when you're looking at actual battles, that can be true, although when you think about just the alliance between the Americans and the Soviets, you start to really wonder, you know, about that.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  But particularly to France, everything was so gray and nuanced about it that I just found it endlessly fascinating because it's like, like, the point of the whole book was like, what was it like to live there, day in and day out? And I wanted the occupation to be this living, breathing character of the book. Like, I wanted it to feel like this almost tactile presence in the book. And I, I thought if I could do that, then the book would succeed, regardless of the exploits of Robert.

• 11:49Ryan Holiday?

  No, I, I think you definitely do. And, and I think even when you talk about gray area, what I found to be so fascinating, and I, I followed your book up, I read the, the Julian Jackson biography of de Gaulle, a, a certain idea of France. It's so good, so good. And a, a big source in my next book. But, but even, you know, your phrase, the occupation, right? Like, a good chunk of people didn't, I mean, if you think about what happened, right? France signs a treaty with Germany and basically constitutes a new France. So, so to the resistors, there was this occupation. But to a certain kind of ruling elite, um, and, and people who sort of clearly preferred

• 12:35Ryan Holiday?

  their self-preservation to any sort of notion of what their country was, this, this wasn't an occupation, this just was the new France.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the new France. And I, some- You know, so that day to day reality of the new France was one thing, but when you couple it with what had preceded that occupation, which was a world war less than 20 years ago, major battles of which were fought on French soil, you had this strange emagglomation of sometimes even World War I veterans who said, and this was like one of the more chilling lines that I came across in my research, rather servitude than war. Like, World War I for so many men and women and children in France was so horrific that they thought

• 13:27Speaker 01

  we would rather be, you know, kneel before Hitler than have to go through that again. And I think that is part of the, the sort of lasting, at least, American impression of what happened in France during World War II, the capitulation. That's a big part of, of the American understanding. It's not entirely wrong, but it's also not nearly anywhere near the whole truth.

• 13:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and I think it's, the reason I want to discuss this is we, we have this sense that like someone is either entirely brave or entirely a coward, right? And I think what France illustrates there and why this should be such a cautionary kind of eye-opening field of study for people right now is like, like it was France's greatest World War I hero who not only leads the capitulation, pushes for it, sort of strikes down anyone who thinks that France still, I mean, de Gaulle is, is tried by the Vichy regime in, in, in

• 14:34Ryan Holiday?

  his absence and, you know, sentenced to death. Like, no one would argue that Patten was, I don't know how to pronounce it, Patten, Patten, whatever. No one would argue that he was not an incredibly brave person. I mean, his track record up until that point had been one of unparalleled courage. And yet, in this moment, he breaks under the, the, the threat or the challenge and, and a lot of people follow him.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  A lot of people do. Like, it's, so if you take what What those scholars say to be true, that perhaps as few as 10% of citizens, either actively or passively resisted. France's population at the time was 40 million, so we're looking at perhaps 2 million people in some ways doing something. Then you have on the other end of the spectrum, the open collaborators. And this was like jaw dropping when I started to read about some of the World War I veterans who went even further than Pétain in the way in which they supported the the Vichy regime and then by extension fascism. There was a, there was a French daily at the time called Je suis partout, which translates

• 15:46Speaker 01

  to I am everywhere. And I am everywhere. It was, it was meant as like a threat, right? Like it was, it was openly identifying with the occupier and looking for anyone that didn't adhere to its very strict rules. And the things that they were saying, the pro, like they, they, they compared Hitler to Napoleon. They, they said that he was out to save Europe. It was just disgusting stuff. And there were so many people, Ryan, that bought it. Like we're talking, okay, again, estimates are today, somewhere between 10 to 20% of the populace who are openly collaborating with the Germans.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And, and by the way, within that, you know, you have the, the, the SD, who is colloquially known as the Gestapo, and they have like 45 field branches set throughout France. So during the whole of the occupation, they're everywhere. But guess what? The majority of the people that they took in for quote unquote interrogations and beat senseless, senseless or killed or whoever, or whatever, the majority of them, they were first identified by other Frenchmen. In fact, some scholars have found it's something like 5 million denunciatory letters were sent to the SD during the war from other Frenchmen. These are sometimes their neighbors. These are sometimes their brothers.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  These are, uh, uh, sometimes just, uh, you know, sometimes, sometimes it's like husbands and wives. People are just having disputes. And so, so you kind of were getting at like, what does, you were getting a minute ago, like, what is it like to live through that? And so there's this great middle, right? And it's somewhere between 70 to 80%. Of the French citizenry that is in theory doing nothing. And I think what is instead happening is they are oscillating between the two extremes. And those extremes being that of fascism. And as you, and as you get closer and closer to D day and then beyond D day, they're, they're moving more to the cause of the war. And it was so, it was so easy. It's been so easy when I've been on the book tour promoting this,

• 17:58Speaker 01

  to have the American audience just sort of sneer at the way the French would live. But it's only when you start to say to yourself, all right, well, what would you have actually done during that occupation? If you know that anything you say you could be imprisoned for, anything you say your family could be imprisoned for. In fact, one of the, one of the most terrifying techniques that the Gestapo would use were not even against a person's own body, which by the way was horrific, right? Like I've got a chapter in there that I'll actually spare you guys, any listener from now. It was, it was like, it was like one of the hardest things I had to write

• 18:41Speaker 01

  because it was just all about the torture techniques that the Germans used. But the, the most torturous technique wasn't exerted against any resister's own body. It was exerted against their family. So a lot of times what the Germans would do is if they thought somebody was a part of the resistance, they would bring in to an interrogation, that resister's brother or sister or wife or husband or sometimes child. And they would begin to beat that person or torture that person in front of the resister. And so suddenly, when I began to pose those sorts of realities to the American audience, when I was, you know, when I've been promoting this, suddenly their perceptions begin to change a little bit about like, all right, how brave am I actually?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  How quick am I to sneer at that sort of reality and that sort of lived experience? And to me, like that shows in even sharper contrast, the bravery of someone like Robert to do what he did. Uh, because I mean, like I spent like four years researching that book, man, across like five different countries. And I gotta say, like the animating question the whole time was, what the hell would I do if I was in his circumstance?

• 19:53Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think, I think this is an important part of it, right? It's not, you shouldn't be looking at these things and getting instantaneous moral clarity. And honestly, what good does it do to judge most of these people who are already dead? I think that, and Seneca talks about this, this idea of philosophy being a tool to scrape off your own faults, not the faults of others. I think the idea to look at it, to ask yourself these questions, really is to get to what you're talking about, which is what would I do? And, and the reality is, most of us, thank God, will never be in such an ethically and perilously fraught situation.

• 20:35Ryan Holiday?

  But, but, but, but it's perhaps our, the thinking like, oh, okay, what would I do if we were in, you know, occupied by the Germans? That, that allows us to pretend that we're not in our own ethical dilemmas right now.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Right? And that's really the whole point of history, right? Like, that's why, that's why I love to read it. And, and I'm assuming that that's why you're drawn to it as well, right?

• 21:00Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. No, of course. I mean, look, like, the, the same dilemma that we're talking about here with, with the, the French and the Germans, that they could have looked back and said, okay, you know, Nero sort of takes over as emperor. There's this sort of brief period of, of sort of peace and stability. They, they called it the quinquinium neronium, like basically the first five golden years of his reign. And then he basically shows himself to be deranged and insane. And, and the Stoics sort of take two paths, right? Seneca decides, okay, I've, I've already sort of been involved in this. My job is to stay involved. I, I can make more of a difference inside the system. I can try to head it off maybe a little bit.

• 21:45Ryan Holiday?

  And by the way, it's not as bad as everyone's saying, you know, the, the sort of the, let's call it the collaboration path. And then there are, and, and I, I write about them in the new book, this is in Lives of the Stoics, you know, then there's Helvidius Priscus, and there's Thrasia, there's Agrippinus.

• 22:02Ryan Holiday?

  There's Musonius Rufus. There's like a whole parade of Stoics that sort of take the resistance path, but almost every, it costs almost every single one of them. If not their property, they were all exiled at one point or another, but, but the majority of them lose their lives. And so, you know, that's, that's, that's a heavy thing to consider. But, but history is a series of those dilemmas. I would much rather have probably been alive in Vichy France than, you know, Nero's Rome for a lot of reasons, but, but we, we could, we could take, you're supposed to be looking backwards to learn lessons from the past.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, like, so you had on, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, you had on SG Gwynn.

• 22:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  On, on the podcast, right? And I love, you guys talked a little bit about it, Empire of the Summer Moon.

• 22:56Ryan Holiday?

  Incredible book.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Incredible. Ben, you know what? There is a time when I was promoting this book that a lot of times I would say, you know what book you should read? And I would end up talking about his book, or I would talk about another sort of native white person clash with another moon in the title, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Gray. I felt like, like I was shilling for their book as much as I was shilling for anything else. But in any case, I, I listened to that podcast in part because I love Gwynn's work, but you guys started to talk a little bit about the American Civil War. And there again was a situation where it's like, okay, well, on what side do you fall, especially if your family is one of those where like it's right on the line? Or if, do you actually pursue

• 23:42Speaker 01

  what you know to be right and good if you're a southerner? Or if you're a northerner for that point, right? Like, do you actually join the Union if you believe in eradicating slavery? The way that Lincoln ultimately would after the Emancipation Proclamation, right? Is, is that part of it? And if so, like, what does it take for you to act on behalf of that? That is one of the animating questions of really my whole life. Like, part of the reason why I've started to really get into reading a lot more history and now writing it is because I'm constantly searching out those people who either chose to act and honor their conscience, or those who didn't. And I think like, I feel like I could spend, you know, I'm almost 40, I feel like I could

• 24:26Speaker 01

  spend the next 40 years like just tapping that vein and never exhausted creatively.

• 24:34Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I had a, I think one of the things that makes this trickier is, and I had a classics expert on not that long ago, but, but, you know, one of the things that de Gaulle is able to tap into in his speeches, certainly Churchill does it, we think that it's just their rhetorical brilliance that sort of inspires millions. But really what these two men do quite effectively is tap into the myths of their nation's history. And to call people to, you know, de Gaulle at one point says, "I answered my nation's mute and imperious call."

• 25:14Ryan Holiday?

  And so he had a sense of where this struggle fit in France's like thousand-year history. And Churchill does the same thing, you know, he says, you know, if the empire stands for another thousand years, let us, you know, he's able to sense what this means from his understanding of history, but he's also able to call upon the shared history of the people to make them realize what he was so prescient about seeing. And one of the troubles I think we have, not just in America, but in the West, is, is I think postmodernism has gutted our understanding of history.

• 25:56Ryan Holiday?

  It's sort of stripped all the meaning out of these myths. And so when, when, you know, somebody who understands history, I find there are very few people. Who understand history, who are not deeply alarmed by what's happening right now. It's the people who I think are looking at these things at a very surface level that are able to sort of shrug them off. If there isn't a shared understand, like you can't get people outraged about this norm or that norm if they don't historically understand what that norm has represented. Or what like, you know, the comments that Trump made yesterday about, about, you know,

• 26:37Ryan Holiday?

  he says he was apparently standing on the grave of a dead US Marine. And he said, you know, I don't get it. What was in it for them? And he famously said about this World War One battle, he didn't want to see a bunch of suckers. If you understood the history of the First World War, you would, you would, you know, lay down and weep in the memory of what these people did. But if you don't, not only can you say something like that, but if you don't understand it, you can't understand why someone saying that is so profoundly stupid and dangerous.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think that there's so I could not agree with you more because so a couple of things. Number one, what you were saying about Churchill and de Gaulle, like part of the answer to why did Robert do this fell in line with his own family lineage. The La Roche-Fricônes were the fourth oldest family in France. My favorite story is Louis XVI is looking out on the pitchforks as they approach in 1789, and he says to an aide, is this a revolt? And the aide says, no sire, this is the revolution. And, you know, it was. And that aide was Robert's great, great, great, great, great grandfather.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  So like he came from a family that literally built France. So he felt it was his duty to write his own chapter in that family history. But to bring it, I think that's part of the reason why he did it. But I think you're also hitting on something big about like what's happening right now. And it's not only, it's not only the president. I think it's, I think your, your criticism of post-modernism is really astute because I'm frankly alarmed by that as well. Like, I'm alarmed by the shattering of norms in such a way so that everything can be interpreted through identity, victimhood, basically everything that Michel Foucault began to argue in the sixties,

• 28:37Speaker 01

  that then moved into critical theory in the eighties and nineties, and then has become so much of the discussion on the left and the right about like, who we are today, which is increasingly, we are only, we, we hate each other because of the us and them differences. And I, to my mind, like, that has a big root in post-modernism because at, post-modernism to my mind, at its root, does not actually care about any sort of shared understanding. It cares only about the interpretation of your own identity based on your experiences. And those experiences are such that they trump any sort of agreed-upon norms

• 29:21Speaker 01

  on which entire nations have been built. And so like that, when I, my kids and I watched Hamilton when it streamed recently on Disney. And I was so, you know, my daughter's 11, we have twin boys who are nine. I was so glad to get a chance to show that to her because it's, I, it, it, it almost brings tears to my eyes to imagine these people coming together to say, we, we have our individual differences, we have differences of political stripe, we have identities that are in no way shared among each other. Nevertheless, we have this, again, this shared understanding about what sort of nation we should build.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Because we know we sure as hell don't want what we had before. Like, that was bullshit. So, so let's try something new. And out of that came, to my mind, still, the, the greatest country. In the world and the concern that I have now is again on both the left and the right, those are getting shattered and in large part because we don't understand history the way that we should.

• 30:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, we tell we it's like if you look at yourself as being a descendant of racists and criminals and plutocrats and, you know, irredeemably evil people, what that does, like if you look at the sort of modern take we have on American history, if I call it the sort of the people's history of the United States, the Zen book, you read that book, I think what Zen was writing and he was saying, I want to open your mind, I want to get you to see this, but I, you know, I think the actual effect of that book is to deprive people of their of agency. It's to say, you know, it's been a hopeless parade

• 31:11Ryan Holiday?

  of awfulness and you are complicit. And so and it sort of drops off there. And what like when I was when I linked to the Julian Jackson book and in my reading newsletter, you know, and I think I got this from your book as well. I was just saying, I was like, I mentioned this sort of great man of history theory. And, you know, a bunch of people immediately wrote in this history, you know, this theory has been debunked. No, no good historian believes this anymore. And I was like, that's my, that's my point. I mean, how can you, how can you read the story of Churchill or de Gaulle or Frederick Douglass or or Abraham Lincoln or or Hamilton or any of these folks and not see quite clearly

• 31:52Ryan Holiday?

  that an individual has the ability to to to direct the course of history, to change it. And so I think what you get with a Trumpian figure is you get all the problems of him. But that is only possible because on the other side, there is this profound loss of agency, this sense that anyone can do anything about it.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, so like, well, the book I'm working on right now is about the Civil Rights Act and what had directly preceded it, the 10 weeks in Birmingham, which to me is Endlessly fascinating and

• 32:30Ryan Holiday?

  I was writing about this this morning, by the way, and I did the math. I think you'd like this. How old do you think? How old was Martin Luther King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh, would he have been 30 or thereabouts?

• 32:44Ryan Holiday?

  26, 26, you know, this, this man changes, you know, history. Hamilton was 21 on July 4th, 1776.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  And so, so you'll, you'll like this because so a lot of, of course, a lot of the research now is about like, I'm really trying to hone in on this because I think there's a fascinating story to tell. And I think there's also a modern parallel to it, especially to what's happened this past spring with George Floyd's death. I'm going to leave it there. So my publisher doesn't get pissed, but, but, but what all of those guys were reading at that time was Gandhi. And of course Gandhi's famous line is be the change you want to see in the world. Like what, what greater example of the great man theory of history could you possibly see? And, and of course Gandhi wasn't perfect, just like King wasn't, but to diminish,

• 33:36Speaker 01

  to diminish them to their flaws, to hold them only to those flaws, as I think so much of post-modernism tries to do, is to just wipe out everything else that they've accomplished. That to me is just, it's baffling. It's like, it's, it's intellectually dishonest in a way that I'm just sort of surprised that the academy has allowed to flourish in some manner over the last, you know, 10 to 20 years. Have you ever had, have you had, um, have you had Michael Hight on your, I didn't know if I'm pronouncing that right. Michael Hight, Michael Hate, uh, the Codlin American Mind? Have you had him on the podcast?

• 34:09Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 34:10Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, Jonathan, Jonathan Haidt.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jonathan Haidt. Yeah, yeah.

• 34:13Ryan Holiday?

  No, I have not. But no, I mean, I, I, I think he is criticizing the exact same thing we're criticizing. The assumptions basically come down to a lack of agency, complete, you know, moral purity. It's a, it basically creates a kind of a learned helplessness.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly. Like I,

• 34:34Speaker 01

  In addition, once again, whenever I talk about my book, I end up plugging others just as much. If anybody wants, The Coddling of the American Mind is one of those books that for me was just like, wow, like this explains so much of what is happening. I see this in in journalism, you know, in my sort of day to day lived existence. And I see it as well, if reflected more broadly, of course, across social media, but then just reflected in the dialogue of how we talk about ourselves these days.

• 35:04Ryan Holiday?

  Let's transition there because I think it does pull us back full circle, both with obviously what your day job is and where these sort of issues are, you know, manifesting themselves. I think I've been I've been so impressed and inspired with what the stands and the impact that athletes have been able or are starting to have on these exact issues. I mean, look, these athletes are not perfect. You know, some of them are idiots. Some of them are genuinely bad people in other cases. But as a group, it's been very impressive

• 35:46Ryan Holiday?

  to see them using their platform to draw attention to these issues. And then I would say it's equally illustrative to go to our point about, you know, most people in France not joining the resistance. It's been amazing to see just the vehemence of the reaction against these things from so many otherwise good people.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I was shocked, genuinely shocked by what the NBA did earlier this month with shutting down playoff games. And

• 36:23Ryan Holiday?

  And the NBA, I think it's important to say the NBA did not do that. The players in the NBA did that, which is incredible.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm sorry. That's what I meant. And if, you know, so my day job is at ESPN and some of the some of what my colleagues were doing there, these sort of TikTok stories about what was happening behind the scenes, like LeBron James on the Lakers, a team that might, you know, at the time was thinking like, oh, we can, we can definitely win this whole NBA championship. LeBron James and the Lakers were like, let's just stop the season. Let's cancel the season. Let's take a stand for, because we so believe in this cause of trying to Right all of the wrongs that have occurred in this country regarding police brutality against blacks.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  I thought that was remarkable. Of course, it didn't ultimately happen. They're playing again. But I would say that just making that point was something that like not even the sort of the activists from the 60s who were in their own times seen as quote militant, right? Like Bill Russell was famously sat out a preseason game in Kentucky. I want to say this is in the early 60s. I forget exactly the year.

• 37:37Ryan Holiday?

  Over a segregated restaurant or something.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Segregated restaurant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then of course, there's Muhammad Ali in his opposition to the Vietnam War. So I see this as some ways, of course, a direct descendant of it. And in some ways, kind of transcending what other activists, athletes have done in the past. The, you know, the comment, this is again, gets back to this sort of shared understanding of what we want to do. The commonality among those NBA players to say, yeah, let's sit it out. And then how that spread, how suddenly like the Milwaukee Brewers without a single, I don't want to say without a single. I think there was a black guy. I think there is one black player on that team. But it was the white players who said, you know what?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  This is, this is effed up what happened in Kenosha. Like we need to sit out this game too. And then the WNBA, which, and this needs to be said often and loudly. The WNBA among any professional league has been at the forefront of this stuff for way longer than any, than any of the men have been, right?

• 38:43Ryan Holiday?

  And from the, the least cushy of, of the positions. Do you know what I mean? Like LeBron, LeBron James doesn't need another championship. A lot of these players in the WNBA need the game checks.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  They need the game checks. Like, you know, for, for, for the listeners who aren't familiar with it. To me, the most remarkable athlete of the last probably 20 years is Maya Moore.

• 39:04Ryan Holiday?

  That's incredible.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  It's incredible. And for those who doesn't, for those who don't know the story. Maya Moore, amazing star at the University of Connecticut, comes into the WNBA. More or less like the LeBron of the league. And she decides to.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Work to free a man whom she believed was wrongly imprisoned in Missouri. She sits out all of last year. She sits out this season and she actually did it like she she helped gain. She helped gain his freedom. I think his name is Jonathan Irons. I think that's right. And again, Ryan, to your point. She does. She's not paid a lot of money. Like she doesn't have millions in the account like to me.

• 39:48Ryan Holiday?

  Now, there's probably reporters at ESPN that make a lot more than she does.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's probably fair to say. Certainly the people who appear on air. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the so that is what. I have found like so. I need to sort of maintain some sort of journalistic dispassion here. Uh, but I have found the movement as a whole so intriguing. And frankly, so sort of inspiring to a certain extent because. I had always wondered what. What would they do like what would they do if they actually had to do something? And, you know, I grew up. The generation before that. A huge fan of Michael Jordan. And Michael Jordan never did anything like this when he was in his playing days, you know, very famously said.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Um, well, uh, when there was. Uh, let's see Jesse Helms on his Dixie crap platform. Uh, there were, I think it was the NAACP or there was some. There was some organization, my majority African Americans that wanted. Jordan to take a stand in his native North Carolina.

• 40:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it was a senate race.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Senate race. Was it Helms? I think it was.

• 40:59Ryan Holiday?

  I think it was. It would be for the first black senator from South Carolina.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay, okay, okay.

• 41:04Ryan Holiday?

  Or post war, you know, like, uh, post reconstruction, I think. I think there'd been one other one, but yes.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yes. And, you know, he very famously said, no, I'm not going to do it because Republican buys buy shoes too. And that for forever, forever, like that was sort of the guiding guiding ethos of professional sports. Better not say anything. Don't want to go there. So in the last four years. Like, you know, the Stoics talk a lot about how to take. Even the even even the refuse of life and turn it into fuel, right? Like, take what is terrible and find a way to turn it to your advantage. This is actually the what I've found so inspiring about the past four years. All of the people who have said, this is enough. We got to stop this like this. And it's not just about Trump.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  It's just about like so many lasting inequalities or injustices in the world. And just being like, this is BS. When are we going to change? It's time for a change.

• 42:01Ryan Holiday?

  No, look, I totally agree. And I think I think what it's a sensitive thing, right? Because I could talk about all this stuff all day. And then you realize like, you're sort of alienating people. You're not, you're not, you know, people are like, hey, I want to learn about philosophy. I don't want to talk about politics. I think people have to understand that there really is no separation between philosophy and politics. In fact, this is the big distinction between the Stoics and the Epicureans. The Epicurean said, hey, let's just focus on personal self-development. And the Stoic said, no, no, no, no, no. You know, you have an obligation to the the the polis, to the to the cosmos. You have you have an obligation to sort of justice generally.

• 42:43Ryan Holiday?

  And and so I don't, you don't have to agree. Let's like, let's say, let's say you have a more nuanced take on the police brutality issue, let's say. So be it, right? And I think reasonable people can have some discussions about police tactics, police brutality. We can have a discussion about defunding versus demilitarizing police. There's a whole bunch of things we can discuss. But where we have to start, where we have to have some common ground, first off, is just respect for courage generally. And anyone who puts, you know, their career on the line, who who says what they think to be true, we have to, I think, first begin by just admiring and respecting courage, not shut up and dribble or, you know, whatever this nonsense is.

• 43:25Ryan Holiday?

  And then, second, we have to understand that just because an issue is unpleasant, just because an issue, you know, maybe contradicts what we're we're we would like to be politically, doesn't mean, doesn't absolve us from having to think about it, to take. Take a contradictory stand about it. And I think that's ultimately what Brooks's column was about, which is, look, like, these are not abstract discussions. Like, there may come a time in the in the next few months, where literally the fundamental legitimacy of of of American government is called into question. And and at that point, that's what Stoicism is for and about. It the the answer to that will not be to riot in the streets and burn things down.

• 44:10Ryan Holiday?

  But it will require, you know, those virtues of courage and justice and temperance and wisdom. Because if you don't do something about it, who will? And I think that was the fundamental issue there in France, which is everyone sort of thought, well, I don't like this, but someone else will take care of it. And that's not how it works.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  I think it was. You were you were one of the people that first drew me to to Stoicism. And what I liked about it more than anything else was the fact that, like, Aurelius literally led the world, right? Seneca was a senator, right? These, to me, that is the best way to sort of live your virtue. And and that is.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Stoicism. I I have read a lot of Stoicism now. I got to say, like, it is it has been one of the most beneficial things to me in my life. And the courage, the justice, in particular, these days, the the sort of temperance. Because there are so many times where I want to take to saying something online or like shouting somebody down. Or even even if I see something that I know to be terrible. Like, if, like, I don't want to go into too many details, but like, my wife and I, we went to a few Black Lives Matter protests. And.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  The counter protesters, of course, have the right to be there. I don't want to say that. There was a part of me that wanted to get in their face and sort of like shout them down. But there really isn't any purchase in that. Like, you're not, nobody ever changes anybody's mind by saying how stupid you are. Like, your views are idiotic. The thing you can do, and this comes back to Stoicism, you have to first sort of address who you are internally and change what you can. I mean, that, I mean, I'm starting to blog now a little bit on my own, on my website.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  And I have actually, and I think it was Epictetus, who said, like, you basically can't control the outside world, you can only control your response to it. That, to me, is, I think that's like the most powerful idea in the whole of mankind. Because, once you realize what you can control in your own life, you actually also begin to realize how much of that individual life can then influence the outside world. And this fall, and really the whole of the last four years, anything that I'll be doing in my own life will be trying to live according to the virtues of what I feel is right and just and courageous.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  And it's inspired by, to a certain extent, Robert, and it's inspired, to a certain extent, by the book I'm researching now. But it's really inspired by, like, the Stoicism that I read, or try to read on an almost daily basis. Because it's like, I feel like those guys were on to something. And I think there's a reason that it's, what, 2,000 years later, and you and I are still talking about it, right? There's some sort of eternal truth to what it is that they were saying. And to me, more than ever, like, Stoicism informs, should inform, how we live and how we act.

• 47:45Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's, I think that's right. I think that's a great place to stop. Paul, thank you so much.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  No, you're welcome.

• 47:52Ryan Holiday?

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