It’s Going To Take A While, So You Need To Do This | Ask DS

It takes a lot of flying time to become a certified pilot. It takes years on stage for a comedian to learn how to command an audience. It takes time to get sober, time in therapy to heal a marriage. No book is written overnight, and few fortunes are made in one swoop. No, they start small and accumulate, the power of compounding interest working on them. All great things take time. You know this. You know where you want to end up, and yet, and yet still you have not started the clock.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions from cadets as part of a media and philosophy course at West Point about how to identify and deal with misinformation in the media, the gray areas of censorship on social media platforms, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  It's going to take a while, so you need to do this. It takes a lot of flying time to become a certified pilot. It takes years onstage for a comedian to learn how to command an audience. It takes time to get sober, time in therapy to heal a marriage. No book is written overnight, and few fortunes are made in one swoop. No, they start small and accumulate. The power of compounding interests working on them. All great things take time. You know this. You know where you want to end up. And yet, and yet, still you have not started the clock. The Stoics say it is foolish to expect figs in winter. More foolish is expecting outputs without the inputs, final results without the basic beginnings. The Stoics say that if you don't know what port you're sailing for, no wind is favorable.

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  Well, if you never get on the boat, if you never leave the harbor, no port is possible. It's going to take a while to lose weight, to acquire mastery, to turn things around. It's probably going to take longer than you'd like it to. You don't control that. You do control whether you add one more day to the tally. You control whether you push the ETA back unnecessarily. You control whether you start the clock today, whether you stop putting stuff off and get after it.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  When I wrote my first book, Trust Me, I'm Blind, I had, honestly, there's a part of me that thought it was early. I was writing about media manipulation and fake news and how the ideas that we take for granted in our culture, where they come from and the forces that marketing and public relations exert on that information. And I wasn't sure how the book would do. I just knew it was a book that I had to write. Then if I, I was very much influenced by this wonderful book from Upton Sinclair. He wrote The Brass Check. After The Jungle, he wrote this exposé of media in the early 1900s. And that's what I was trying to do in Trust Me, I'm Blind, show what's really happening behind the scenes,

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  warts and all, including my own screwed up role in it. Now, this isn't exactly a stoic book, although I felt like I was coming from a stoic place and that I'd seen something, I'd been part of something, I didn't like it, and I knew it wasn't right, and I wanted to talk about it. I didn't know how controversial the book would be. I didn't know how many people were upset. I didn't even know how right I would turn out to be about a lot of things. And I certainly didn't think that 10 years later, I'd be talking to West Point in the midst of an information war with Russia about how these ideas, how cyber war and this information spreads and can be used as a weapon and how, I just, I had no conception of any of that. But that's what I'm doing today. It's going to be a Q and A between

• 3:37Ryan Holiday?

  me and this class of cadets at West Point, and I thought I'd share some of that with you. Here we go.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  So we talk, every class, obviously, is, probably not surprising, about the situation in Ukraine.

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  And one of the things, obviously, since the mass media class, we've been talking about is sort of the different actors on the information side. And so I wonder, as, I know as I watch it, watch what's unfolding, sometimes I think, oh, that's something we talked about in the book. But I wonder, as you're watching that unfold, have you seen things that you're like, you know, wow, that's, that's kind of straight out of chapter whatever?

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  There's definitely that. I would say one of the weird things I've been noticing about the conflict is as some of the social media companies have cracked down on misinformation, specifically in light of what's happening, and I've seen a few memes that have pointed it out, and I think anyone that has a public platform that's talked about political issues is noticing this. But the effect of the meme was something like, you know, ever since Twitter and Facebook cracked down on Russian misinformation, there's been a lot of true, there's been a lot fewer true American patriots tweeting things at you, meaning that so much of the people or the pushback that you get as a public figure if you talk about what's happening

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  in the world, you think you're hearing from real people, but you're really interacting with bots, or you're interacting with internet trolls that are that are paid for or supported by foreign powers. So it's been interesting to watch as the stakes of this crisis have grown, some real basic steps have changed the tenor and tone of the conversation that I think we were taking for granted before. So, you know, obviously, the book is primarily about much less harmful forms of marketing and misinformation. But the reason I wrote the book, and the reason I thought it was important to talk about is that if someone

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  can use this to market t-shirts, or books, or movies, much more powerful people with much more insidious motivations can use a lot of those same techniques and tools. And so I think we watched Russia try to use a lot of its sort of cyber methodologies in the run-up to Ukraine. I think a decent amount of credit goes to Biden for how he's navigated that, his use of, you know, the platform of the US presidency to sort of Call a spade a spade, to lay out what's going to happen, to use American intelligence to sort of preempt and counteract that misinformation.

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  I think what, obviously what's so different between this all-out invasion of Ukraine and the 2014 invasion of Crimea is that, one, we were gaslit about, right? It was never fully owned, there was a lot of misinformation about what was happening and who was doing it. And I do think it looks like the other actors, and some credit to Ukraine as well, I think masterfully pushed back and spread its own narratives throughout this. You know, we've watched, we've watched people push back against that disinformation, so we have at least a somewhat better picture of what's actually happening. At least from the perspective of the average person on the, watching on TV or whatever.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Sir, that talk has changed the topic a little bit, so to focus on like the 2020 presidential election. There's been a lot of discussion over like how much censorship companies like Twitter or Facebook should have over the content they put out. So to use an example from like my own state, Arizona, it's like during the election, you saw a couple tweets go out about Sharpies invalidating ballots in Arizona. And obviously, it's not like they won, it's not like a causal relationship, like this directly led to the insurrection on the Capitol, but like, things like that did fuel that type of narrative and that type of response. So where do you see the line between companies like Twitter being able to like police their

• 7:47Speaker 02

  own platform, and then also the First Amendment coming into play as well?

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's really tricky. I was at a, I was at a dinner with some officials a few months ago, and they were sort of lamenting that, you know, that, that, that social media platforms had taken the drastic step of, of deplatforming the, you know, the president, or now the former president of the United States. And, and I sort of pointed out that I agree, that's a, that's an alarming precedent, right? That's not something we should like to see. But, but what I was saying was that part of the reason things only had to get that bad is because at every other step of the political process...

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  People who had the ability to sort of police their own side of the street had failed to do that. And so I think there's a couple of different equations. There's ultimately, what is the role of the platforms in this? But then there's also the role of parties and public figures and people of influence to police and maintain themselves. So just as an example, like the movement to, you know, either cancel or pull Joe Rogan from Spotify. And I happen to know some of the people involved in that.

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  India Ari, as it happens, has read my books and she and I were talking about this. It is interesting, right? Like what role Spotify's, what obligation Spotify has in this as far as misinformation as far as the pandemic goes. But Joe Rogan could also just decide not to have fucking quacks on his show, right? Like Joe Rogan could also say, hey, I'm the most, I have the largest show in the world and that comes with it a certain amount of responsibilities and I'm not going to have Alex, I'm not going to give Alex Jones three hours of uninterrupted, direct access into millions of people's brains, right?

• 9:59Ryan Holiday?

  And so I think we can tackle this problem from both ends, but it seems to be that everyone's got to sort of force the responsibility onto the platforms when, you know, any number of people could have intervened before it got that bad.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  So going along with that same thing with Joe Rogan, doesn't the nature of these media platforms, like Joe Rogan's not necessarily a news source, he's, the nature of his show is to provide a voice for everybody. That's why a lot of people watch him. Does the nature of his show sort of change what level of responsibility he might have as far as information being produced, especially since he's not a news source himself?

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I push back on that for a couple of reasons. So number one, I-

• 10:49Ryan Holiday?

  There's this, there's, there's something we, we call in, in, in the internet world, jacking off, J A Q, just asking questions, right? And this is what Holocaust deniers do. This is what vaccines deniers do. This is what misinformation spreaders do, is they just ask questions, right? And they, they hide behind this idea of, I'm just asking questions. But then when they get the answers they don't like to that question, right? They don't change their mind or stop. They just continue to ask other ridiculous questions, right? The science on vaccines is like overwhelmingly settled, but, but what Rogan has done, I think,

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  consistently is repeatedly find the quackiest, weirdest, most fringe figures to come in and allow him to just ask questions, which spreads doubt or false ideas or bad information. So, look, I agree, Joe Rogan is not NBC News. His obligations are different, but as a human being in the middle of a crisis that's killed a million Americans, let alone, you know, millions more internationally, one, one I think has an obligation to not put on a legitimate crazy person like Alex Jones or, you know, let's say you're going to have Robert Malone on to talk, who's a, who's a vaccine skeptic.

• 12:09Ryan Holiday?

  That's, it's a deliberate choice that Rogan makes to call him the, the, the father of mRNA research, which he's emphatically not. He was like a, like a grad student tangentially involved to it. So there's, there, there's deliberate choices that are made. And then when those choices have respond, have consequences, I think what we see is people try to make excuses for why they're not responsible for that. Does that make sense?

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Excuse me. Good afternoon, Jeanette Pelton.

• 12:45Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  So, a question. It was kind of just a quote from this bit out to me from your book. So, I'm studying your book that "Due to the work of media manipulators, marketers now write the news, opinion mass creates back, it's back, algorithms run everything to the extremes, and no one is accountable for any of it."

• 13:04Ryan Holiday?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  So, my question is, we saw a lot of the effects of that in the Trump era and the political other of January 6. So, do you think that the Trump era or the fallout and fallout after January 6, those would change any of those tactics?

• 13:20Ryan Holiday?

  Unfortunately, I don't. I mean, I think, I think we're pretty much in the same, in the same place we were then. You, you could argue there was, there was, it did seem like there was a brief awakening on January 6, where, where, and, and we've seen that the January 6th commission is revealed, you know, a number of like, let's say Fox News hosts were texting people in the Trump administration, like, "Call this off." Like, "You've got to stop this," etc. So, there was a sense that, "Oh, hey, these things that I'm saying, this information that I'm spreading out in the world, people are taking real action on this. It's having real effects." There was this sort of brief moment of that. But then it, it strikes me that there was probably

• 14:04Ryan Holiday?

  the understanding that actually reckoning with that and changing that would have real political consequences and probably real viewership consequences. And so, we've now gone back to this sort of spreading of, of lies and misinformation. The right has largely told themselves a totally fake story about what happened on, on January 6. Largely, again, so they don't have to, to accept the consequences for that. It's a, I, I don't want to say that it's only the right that has, you know, proverbial blood on their hands here. I think, obviously, we saw this in, in the riots.

• 14:42Ryan Holiday?

  After the murder of George Floyd, you know, people think that what they talk about on the internet stays on the internet, but it spills over, it has real-world consequences. And, you know, political violence is the most dangerous thing there is in a democracy. And I think both sides have fomented that, you know, pretending that these sort of tweets they send, or these articles they write, or these videos they make, that it's like a video game. And it's not a video game, it's very real. And the consequences of it make it increasingly hard to have a functioning civil society.