Mike Duncan On Using the Past to Guide the Future

On today’s podcast, Ryan speaks to author and historian Mike Duncan (History of Rome podcast) about his incredibly important book, The Storm Before The Storm, and what Roman history can tell us about current events. Mike Duncan is an author, historian and host of the award-winning podcast series, The History of Rome, which has been downloaded more than 100 million times. His ongoing podcast series, Revolutions, explores history’s greatest political revolutions This episode is brought to you by Ladder, a painless way to get the life insurance coverage you need for those you care about most. Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. This episode is also brought to you by Literati Kids, a subscription book club that sends 5 beautiful children’s books to your door each month, handpicked by experts. Literati Kids has book clubs for children ages 0 to 12, and each club has age-appropriate selections tailored to what your child needs. Every Literati Kids book in your child’s box is hand-picked by experts and guaranteed to spark their curiosity, intellect, and spirit of discovery. Go to literati.com/stoic to get 25% off your first two orders and receive 5 incredible kids books, curated by experts, delivered to your door every month. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN, the #1 worldwide VPN. ExpressVPN has super-fast connection speeds and keeps your data safe. No more advertisers selling your info for a quick buck, no more downloads at a snail’s pace. Sign up now at ExpressVPN.com/STOIC and get an extra three months on your one-year package, absolutely free.***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 Mike Duncan:Homepage: https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikeduncanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom, designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

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• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

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• 1:33Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We've said this before. We study the past, understand the present. So I was really happy with my interview with Tom Ricks, who talked about the philosophical underpinnings of the founding fathers. Today's episode, I wanted to go back even further to one of my absolute favorite books, a book I've recommended many, many times. I won't get into it because we talked about it in the interview, but it's totally changed my understanding of what's happening in the world right now. And it did when I first read it in 2017. The book is The Storm Before the Storm by the great Mike Duncan. If that name is sounding familiar, it should.

• 2:17Ryan Holiday?

  Mike has an incredibly popular podcast called The History of Rome. So if you're unfamiliar with some of the terms and concepts we talk about in this podcast and my books, that is a great podcast to start. It's hugely popular. It's done more than 100 million downloads. And he has a new podcast series that he started, it's not really new anymore, that he started after that called Revolutions, which is also fascinating. He is just a super smart dude. We have a great discussion. And I thought there was no better day to run this episode than today, the day of the inauguration here in the United States, just

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  a few weeks out from one of the most shocking and unexpected events in American history, the attempted insurrection on the United States Capitol. A dark day, to say the least, but a day that the Stoics would have been familiar with, the kind of extra political violence that unfortunately marked a century of Roman conflict, which ultimately culminated in Caesar overthrowing the Republic. All things we talk about in the episode. I can't wait for you to listen to this episode. It's fantastic. The great Mike Duncan, please read The Storm Before the Storm and then also check out his podcast, The History of Rome. His episode

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  on Antoninus Pius is very good, as is his episode with Marcus Aurelius. If you're looking for a place to start. And then don't forget to check out Revolutions, also very good.

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  You know, I read your book. When did it, when did The Storm Before the Storm come out?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  2017.

• 4:01Ryan Holiday?

  So I read it right when it came out and I thought, oh, wow, this is relevant to where we are today. And, you know, now three years have passed. And unfortunately, I'm talking to you when it could not be any more relevant.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 4:19Ryan Holiday?

  Is that what you thought? Or is it surprised even you?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  It, when I, so I had the idea for the book by, you know, by the time the history of Rome was over, it was a period I knew I wanted to come back and revisit. Mostly as a sort of, as a projected sort of prescient look into a near distant future, but certainly not like right around the corner. And so when I, when I was pitching it in, let's see, come out in 2017. So I was probably pitching the book to publishers like in 2015.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  2014. And, and it was, it was meant to be, yes. In the, I am beginning to detect troubling signs inside the American body politique that seemed to me to be echoes of some of the things that the Roman Republic was facing. You know, all caveats about historical parallels aside. And then, you know, I was writing it during the 2016 election is when I was actually like drafting the final, was actually drafting the final manuscript. And, you know, all through that whole process, you know, people are bombarding me on social media. It's like, you gotta get this book out, man. And I was like, you know, I was just like,

• 5:37Speaker 01

  I'm writing the book as fast as I can. And I was just watching things accelerate so much faster than I would have thought, you know, like, if I was projecting mentally, I'd be like, oh, by 2030 or 2040, you know, we'll be in a bad place. And then it just, we really, we really started accelerating towards some things that. Then yeah, especially the first couple of chapters of the book are just extremely relevant to what we're facing right now, like as a country.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  Well, when I I've recommended your book to like world leaders and senators and athletes.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  I do appreciate that, by the way.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, thank you. No, I mean, because people ask me sort of what, you know, what are you reading? Or what do you think I should read? Or what's a way to sort of understand this stuff? And when I recommend the book, my sort of summary of it, and I'd be curious if you think this is accurately depicts it, and maybe we riff on this a bit, but I sort of go, people think that Julius Caesar just happened, that he just overthrew the Roman Republic out of, you know, force of personality, or genius, or necessity, you know, sort of depending on where you come down, but that it was sort of in, he was an aberration, that it was, it was a force of nature, essentially. But the argument of your book is like, no,

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  history doesn't just happen. A hundred years of smaller events contributed to that happening. And you have to, you don't start at Julius Caesar if you want to understand why the Roman Republic fell. You have to look at the generation before, and the generation before that, and the generation before that. And what the storm before the storm does is give you, it sets the table to then understand what you heard about from Shakespeare, or movies, or anything like that.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  That's exactly what I was trying to do. And that is exactly, you know, sort of what I discovered for myself when I was writing the history of Rome, and going through all those episodes. And one of the things that I have said, you know, coming out of the history of Rome, and this remains true, is that if you talk to people, just out in the general public, you know, what do they know about Roman history? Start telling me things about Roman history. They will tell you things that are really confined to about 100 year period of the sort of thousand years that at least the Western Roman Empire existed. And it usually starts around Julius Caesar. They know Julius Caesar, and they know Mark Antony and Cleopatra, because they've been in movies. And they know Caligula, and they

• 8:05Speaker 01

  know Nero, because that stuff is like in, you know, it's in I, Claudius, or another sort of like, it's in pop culture. But yeah, when you talk about the quote unquote, fall of the Roman Republic, you are talking about Julius Caesar, and you are talking about Cicero, and Cato the Younger, and Brutus, and But where did those guys come from? Where did they get the idea to do the things that they were doing? Why was the entire Republican political culture in a place where these things could actually happen? And to understand that, you have to go back about 70 or 80 years, in my estimation. I mean, you can backlog everything. You could say like, well, ultimately, the, you know, the beginning of the end of the Roman

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Republic is like when, you know, it wouldn't have happened if, if Romulus hadn't have founded Rome in the first place. But if the wolf had been different. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if that wolf hadn't, you know, breastfed Romulus and Remus, you know, there never would have been a Roman Republic to fall. That's just fun. That's just fun with history. But I do really think that it's true that something happened coming out of the Third Punic War, that the Republic itself was in such a place economically and politically that things did need to happen to, to correct some of the inequalities and correct some of the sort of the mental drift that happened inside the senatorial aristocracy, that once

• 9:32Speaker 01

  that drift started to set in and once they started to get away from the things that had bound them together politically up to that point, and we can talk specifics about this, is that that process started to build on itself like a snowball. And even more than a snowball, it was, it was a reactions to reactions to reactions. And the collapse of political norms becomes sort of like a Hatfield and McCoy style feud, where people keep responding to whatever the last move on the board was and whatever the last breaking of the most recent norm was. And in that sort of reaction, you always feel like you're responding to some bad thing that somebody else has done. And then you do something to that person, then thinks, oh, well, you've done something

• 10:17Speaker 01

  bad and they respond to that. And then suddenly you go from people arguing in the forum to literal armies marching into Rome and literal civil war engulfing your entire political culture, all of which happened. You know, 40 years before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. I mean, the Roman Republic could have fallen multiple times, you know, during the civil wars there, in the social war and during the fighting between Marius and Sulla. It's actually something of a miracle that the Republic even lasted for Caesar to take down a couple of decades later.

• 10:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you know, this is sort of a Stoic thing. We're gonna, let's zoom way out and then I want to get into the norm stuff for sure. But it's like, when you, when you look at the Roman history, it feels like it, it happened over a thousand years, as you said, but it also feels like it happened over like 10 years. Like, when I was just did this book, Lives of the Stoics, which is a biography of all the, the different Stoics, but even to go like, from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius is like 600 years. And, and yet, they all seemed to be just a generation or two away from each other. I mean, even, this is a little bit after your book, but like, it struck me to go like, Seneca lived through five emperors.

• 11:32Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so there is this, like, there is this idea that history is really long, but it's also recent. Like, I've talked about this too, but, you know, I met a guy, he's unfortunately now passed, but he was born when Theodore Roosevelt was president. And you're just like, oh, you think this is so long ago, but to a lot of these Romans in your book, it's like, the, the thing that happened 40 years ago, they grew up with their father talking about, or, you know, Cato is like, he's, he shares the name with his great, great grandfather. So these things feel both distant and very current to all these figures.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you, and if you look at Julius Caesar, but as, you know, a very specific example of this, I mean, who is he? He is, he's related to Marius. You know, his, his, his aunt, his, his great aunt, I'm now blanking which one it was, was married to Marius, you know?

• 12:26Ryan Holiday?

  She's probably named Julia or something also.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Well, they're all, they're all named Julia, which is, you know, I'm sorry, if you read the book, I'm sorry, they all had the same names. There's nothing I can do about it. Like, there's, all the names are the same. I'm like, that's not my fault. That's the Romans. They only had like 12 names. But, yeah, he is, you know, Caesar pops up at the end of the storm before the storm as a teenager. He literally lived through this. And his, the, the normal environment that that quote unquote last generation of the Roman Republic was born into Cicero and Cato, the younger and Caesar, I mean, Cicero fought in the social war, which was, which was a huge civil war that nobody ever really talks about anymore because again, sort of popular culture has confined itself

• 13:12Speaker 01

  to just this one very specific stretch of Roman history. But yeah, those guys were teenagers. Those guys were in their twenties. They were just embarking on their own careers as they watched what happens if somebody who is very bold and who refuses to be taken down by their political enemies and is willing to, to push things to the absolute limit in order to win and not be taken down. You know, that was the lesson they all learned. And that last generation had already learned a lesson about how to wield and utilize power that, that generations before them, they were growing up in an environment where none of those things were done. None of those things were thought to be possible. None

• 13:55Speaker 01

  of those things were, you were not meant to act or behave in that way. And so the, a lot of the, the bad things that happen when a political culture takes itself to that place is not the immediate crisis. An immediate crisis can come and go. We can look, just for example, at what happened on January 6th at the Capitol and say, ooh, boy, boy, we really dodged a bullet there. But who are the teenagers who are watching this kind of thing on TV or whatever they watch, whatever the kids are watching things on these days? And then we look forward to 2030 and 2040. And what are people who are being bathed

• 14:38Speaker 01

  in this version of American politics going to be like in 20 or 30 years?

• 14:44Ryan Holiday?

  That was actually one of the things that I told a congressman that I know when we were talking about what happened on January 6th is, you know, history does not judge poor responses to spontaneous violence or rebellion well. And I said, you know, might I remind you of a sort of inadequately punished attempted coup in Germany in 1920, you know? And that's what struck me about the book. There was all these moments where, you know, everyone thought, hey, things are breaking down a little bit, but things are weird. They've always been this way. We'll turn around. And then like a mob would break into

• 15:24Ryan Holiday?

  a building and tear someone to pieces, or a mob would, you know, a mob would demand the execution of so and so. And it kind of felt like these leaders were just kicking the can down the road, hoping a problem would resolve itself. And really, that was just ensuring that there would be an explosive outcome at some point in the future.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Right. And I think, I think part of that kicking of the can down the road is that we do get locked into forms of tribalism, right? And the, I mean, the Romans literally had, you know, tribal and family client patron networks that operated very differently from the way that-

• 16:08Ryan Holiday?

  Street gangs and-

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, and like the way that those client patron networks were operating, they operated far more like, let's say, the mafia does than like an American political party, a modern democratic political party does. But one of the things that was really apparent all through the storm before the storm, as I was writing it and researching it, was that whenever those things happened, you were always, right on the tip of everybody's tongue, was why, why the last, why the people who were sort of the victims of this round of violence were actually the causes of it because of this thing that they had done five years earlier, 10 years earlier, right? And so when, in chapter one-

• 16:51Speaker 01

  You know, sort of, so the Gracchi brothers are long associated with the introduction of political violence into the Roman system. And this is really true. If you, if you go, you take, you know, the founding of the Republic around 500 B.C. all the way through to the Gracchi brothers, who now you're talking the 130s, 120s B.C. You're talking about centuries. There wasn't really a whole lot of political violence inside of the Roman republican system. There was, there were some, some stuff coming out of the conflict of the orders, sort of in the early days, but most of it was pretty subdued in terms of, you know, like knifing people or beating them over the head with table legs if you didn't get your way, if you lost an election, let's say.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  And one of the, actually, not to get off on a tangent, but one of the genius things about the, about the Roman system is, you know, the two consulships every single year. We often talk about that being really smart because no one person could ever accumulate power, right? So there was no sort of, it was a, it was a guard against dictatorship. You got two guys in office and they're going to be out by the end of the year. And one of the benefits of that system, though, in terms of political stability, was that it also meant that everybody got their bite at the apple from the senatorial class. So everybody was always going to have another, always going to have another bite at the consulship if they lost this election, right? So, so losing an election was not an apocalyptic event for these guys because they could always

• 18:19Speaker 01

  come back around next year and win. So that's just like a little thing. But the Gracchi are associated with the introduction of political violence. And what people forget, though, is that they were not actually the ones who instigated the violence. They were doing things and pushing things beyond the normal limits of the Republic, but at least Tiberius, in, you know, the very first instance of this, is a group of conservative senators who don't like what he's doing. The pontifex maximus, leading a mob of armed, like basically an armed gang, who's going to go up there and beat Tiberius to death and beat his supporters to death and push them off the Tarpan Rock.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  So that, basically a reactionary violence attack on the Gracchi that happens there in 133, and then again to his brother a decade later, that rooted in the minds of more populist oriented. Roman politicians and their supporters that like we have to take revenge on these people. And then a lot of what happens in the one teens and like, and like, as you approach the turn of the century, like during the time of the Juggurtha War, a lot of what they were doing was a, was it was a 15 years later, getting their revenge on what had happened to the Gronkai. And then once those guys start to do these, start to take it out and have their revenge

• 19:45Speaker 01

  on the senatorial aristocracy, to purge certain members, to bring them before various courts, to drive them out and exile them from Rome. Now that creates a system where those guys feel like they need to respond to it. And it just, you see this very long running tit for tat feud between these different families that you see, I see this a lot in American politics where, you know, Democrats will bring up the treatment of Merrick Garland and say, this is, this is an example of, of a, of a completely violated norm in terms of a president being allowed to appoint somebody to the Supreme Court and having the Senate basically be like, well, is he qualified?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  If he's qualified and he's not a horrendous candidate, then the Senate should go along with it. And that's kind of the way it was always done, except then Republicans will say, well, what about Robert Bork?

• 20:35Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Isn't it amazing how sort of self-serving, and I think it's just true in Rome and it's true today, how self-serving the rationalization is, you know? It's like, hey, we're going to steal a Supreme Court seat, but you did it, you know, 30 or 40 years ago. And by the way, the circumstances are totally different and you didn't, it didn't actually cost you a seat. That we managed to find a way to root, nobody ever comes out and says, I am overthrowing a democratic norm.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  No, of course not.

• 21:09Ryan Holiday?

  What we do is we find a way to root it in precedent, however baldly preposterous that precedent is, I was appalled, for instance, in Ted Cruz trying to rationalize the failure to certify an election, the precedent of the 1876 election, which, which is one of the travesties of American democracy, when we ended, you know, Reconstruction in the South and basically deprived black people of their rights and shoved them back into pseudo-slavery as a political bargain. That's the precedent he's using to rationalize a destruction of an important norm.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  And then, of course, what we're also watching, I mean, and if you go from Bork, which is like, we don't like him, so we're going to-

• 21:55Ryan Holiday?

  He's probably a racist, etc.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, then there was lots of reasons for the Democrats to oppose him. But then they did bring it to a vote and they voted him down, right? And that was the thing that happened, which then you fast forward 20, I guess, 25, 30 years, and you've got the Senate Majority Leader just refusing to even have hearings at all. And that's how these things can escalate while still also being, not really my fault, it's your fault that you started this like 30 years ago. And then Democrats will always be able to point to Merrick Garland as, you know, and wave the, you know, sort of the lost flag of Merrick Garland, I think justly. And this is how these things are just going to keep going.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 22:43Ryan Holiday?

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• 23:28Ryan Holiday?

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• 24:10Ryan Holiday?

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• 24:15Speaker 01

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• 24:22Ryan Holiday?

  So how do you break that cycle, right? Because so it's like, it's like what happens with Merrick Garland? And then, and then, you know, and then you get the Republicans, they go, hey, you know, Kavanaugh gets sort of jammed up with this me too thing that, you know, I think a reasonable person could agree or disagree with. And then, you know, now you have the Democrats saying, hey, if we, if we take all branches of government, we're going to pack the Supreme Court. And you do see Biden saying, hey, that's not a good idea. But I think what's, what it's so, it's both tempting, but then also like almost from a game theory standpoint, rational to meet the breaking of one norm with the breaking of another norm. It feels like a sucker's payoff

• 25:05Ryan Holiday?

  to be like, hey, I'm going to let the other people get off scot free with political violence or what have you, or norm breaking, but I'm going to, I'm going to follow the rules like to the letter. Only the Kato's do that.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Right. And they lose.

• 25:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  And so it is important to note that, that underlying all of this is profound differences in your vision for what the United States ought to be. And if you have profoundly different visions for how the country ought to be, then yeah, for one side, to allow your political opponent to just sort of behave any way that they want without any repercussions while you say, well, we are going to adhere to these old traditional norms and like, you know, if they retake the Senate to listen to what Republicans have to say about anything, which, you know, Mitch McConnell didn't listen to anything any Democrat wanted while, while he was in power. And so it would be, again, as you say, from sort of a game theory or

• 26:04Speaker 01

  a political strategy, or simply advancing your own interests, what you think you want to have happen to the country. It would be madness to do anything but play as equally as hardball as you got played.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  So your question, though, is, is the big one. I mean, it's, it's the million dollar question. Once you have gotten into a feud like this, how do you ever extract yourself from it?

• 26:30Ryan Holiday?

  And how do you pull out of the spin?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Okay, so I've obviously given this a lot of thought. And the, to the, my best guess, because partly, I gotta tell you, I'm just incredibly pessimistic about not pulling out of it. Why, it's a hard, it's a hard thing to do because these hurts are deep. These resentments that we feel about each other are really down in our core of our bones. But I think that the correction has to come from inside the team, as it were, or inside your group, inside your tribe. Right? And this is what it like, and, and we had a moment just now, and the moment got missed, the moment was, was pretty much

• 27:17Speaker 01

  blown, where we had something straight out of Roman history, which is early, that, you know, the bad bits of Roman history, which nobody ever likes to say, we're living through the bad bits of Roman history, where the President of the United States and a clique of allied senators and representatives sort of whipped up and egged on through a, a really dedicated mission of disinformation and lying about the results of the election. They whipped up a mob, and that mob stormed the Capitol to disrupt the legal transfer of power. Right? And so now the United States can no longer say that we do peaceful transitions

• 28:01Speaker 01

  of power. Like, we actually just, on January 6th, we lost the right

• 28:05Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, how many, we've had 240 years of no workplace accidents, and that's not the case anymore.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Right. Well, yeah, the last workplace accident was like in 1860. Right. You know, and, but since then, we, and, you know, we, we always like to, you know, like, that's one of the things we do, like, you We have these peaceful transitions of power, which we can't say anymore because we did not just have a peaceful transition of power. We had, there was violence associated with it. There was violence to try to stop the legal transition of power. So.

• 28:35Ryan Holiday?

  And that's why it's fundamental, for anyone listening, that's why what happened on January 6th was fundamentally different than all of the violence during the Black Lives Matters protests over the summer combined. And it's fundamentally different than any violent protest or looting or disruption or even terrorism that's happened in the United States because the, the core purpose of what happened on January 6th, and I'm saying this because I do know I have some listeners who are not clear on this. The fundamental purpose of what those protesters did on January 6th was to stop the certification of a democratic election. It was effectively a coup attempt. And, and that has never happened in American

• 29:20Ryan Holiday?

  history and God willing, it never happens again.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope so. The precedent is now there.

• 29:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Which is part of what makes the storm before the storm so distressingly relevant.

• 29:31Ryan Holiday?

  And all. Because it didn't just happen once in Rome. Each time it escalated.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  I, I, there's, there's no, there's no doubt in my mind that something like this is going to happen again. There's no doubt in my mind. And I, I hate to say it. What happened didn't even really surprise me because all the warning signs were there. They were doing this all right out in the open. Like, I mean, we, I don't know how many times you have to treat somebody like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and take them at their word for what they say and do.

• 29:59Ryan Holiday?

  People show you who they are as leaders. You gotta believe them.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they constantly follow through on the wild ass things that they were promising to do in public all the time for like two months. So, but the, but again, the million dollar question is, okay, how do you stop this? And the response, and you like, and to be clear, lots of Republicans, lots of conservatives expressed shock, horror, condemnation for what happened, right? Like this is, this is disgusting. This is violent. This is not how we're supposed to do it. All the people who were involved should be arrested. You know, it would be flagrantly dishonest to say that Republicans have not responded.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  To what happened on January 6th with words of strong condemnation. I mean, George W. Bush is putting things out there as he rarely does to say that this is this is a bad and terrible thing. But then when it comes to what do we do about the leaders who stirred this up, who revved this up, who were planning to benefit politically from it? What do we do about those people who didn't just aid and abet what happened, but actually started it in the first place for their own political advantage? What's going to happen to the representatives who gave tours to

• 31:26Speaker 01

  to people who we would now, you know, just as a political science, a piece of political science terminology called insurrectionists? What do we do about Ted Cruz? What do we do about Holly? And what do we do about Trump? And unfortunately, at the moment, the response seems to be absolutely nothing. Right? Or if something is going to happen, it's going to be entirely the Democrats who do it. And as and what they said was that, you know, you can't, you should not impeach Trump. You should not try to remove him from office because that will be an entirely partisan response to what happened. And it is, in the grand scheme of things, not great to only have Democrats being the

• 32:06Speaker 01

  one responding to this because it will create a sense of grievance and a sense of resentment and a sense of, you know.

• 32:14Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think, I think you're right. It's like some of the Republicans have said like, hey, we need to unify. We need to come together. And in a sense, they're completely correct. We just all need to come together and reestablish in some unified way.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  We need to come together as both parties and impeach Donald Trump and remove him from office. The Senate needs to come together and vote 97 to three to remove Ted Cruz from the Senate, to remove Holly from the Senate. Right? There are lots of examples, all through Roman history and all through the history of democracies across the world, that sometimes representatives, senators, delegates, peers, whatever, do things that are so heinous that they simply are forbidden henceforth from serving in. Government. And the problem, though, is that the Republicans are exactly right when they say that it will look bad and be bad for the political climate if only Democrats

• 33:14Speaker 01

  are the ones trying to impeach Donald Trump and remove him from office or remove Cruz from office. And I happen to agree with that, which is why I would implore all Republicans to get on board with the vote. The answer is then not to let's come together and do nothing about it. Right? That's even worse. It's let's come together and do something about it together. Because if Republicans are not the ones saying, our guy screwed up and we're going to punish them too, then the message is going to be this is still just a running political feud between two hyper partisan factions. And we've moved beyond that. And so if you want to stop this, if you want to dissent, if you want

• 33:56Speaker 01

  to stop the dissent into what ultimately becomes a civil war, like, we are on a path right now to civil war, like, just objectively and historically. If you want to arrest that, Republicans need to take care of what's happening in the ranks of the Republicans. And to the extent that similar things are happening inside the Democratic Party, Democrats need to be the ones who are taking care of that. And so it's, it becomes a bit of, we need to take care of our own tribes, a little bit, because we are already in a place where we all feel persecuted. We all feel persecuted by Democrats feel persecuted by Republicans, Republicans feel persecuted by Democrats. And the fact that the Republicans just let only the Democrats respond forcefully to what happened on January 6 will leave that

• 34:41Speaker 01

  persecution complex in place. And that stinks, man, that stinks.

• 34:46Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah, it's like in the lead up to the civil war, you have the beating of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, as a Congress, I forget. But you can't, you can't allow these things to happen because they escalate. And so let me, I would say that one of the Republican responses, and this is probably true in Rome as well, and I think this segues into obviously what I write about, is that they might go, but to expel Trump, or to have impeached him earlier this year, or I guess last year now, to, you know, to expel Republican members from the Senate, to vote against something that not all of their base supports, is to commit political suicide, right? And so maybe what we're really also talking about, and the Stoics were there in the events of the

• 35:31Ryan Holiday?

  books you're talking about, what you need beyond politics and beyond the sort of the compass of self-interest, is you need some sort of personal virtue, or some philosophy that guides you. So when you say, hey, look, I'm choosing between committing political suicide and doing the right thing, it's very clear to you what the right choice is, right? That it would be better to not be in power, or to have to go into the political wilderness for a while, than it would be to stay relevant, to maintain your party's hold on things,

• 36:10Ryan Holiday?

  and do it by tolerating or tacitly condoning something that is, you know, beyond the pale and a violation of one's democratic norms.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has always been a bit astounding to me, the lengths, the things that people will let go on, and the lengths people will go to, and the things that they will accept, simply in order to continue to be a congressperson in the United States House of Representatives for six years, you know, from 2012 to 2018, or if you have somebody who's planning on running for office here coming up, you know, I don't know what the average tenure of a congressperson is. Sometimes you get these people that serve for 50 years, of course, and we know this, but sometimes it's just like, yeah, I do it for six years and then I become a lobbyist.

• 37:06Ryan Holiday?

  Right, or I go back to my law firm.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, or like whatever, and it's a cool thing you get to put in your obituary. But there is a degree to which, as you say, like, what is the consequence of...

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Joining an effort to impeach Trump or doing something about Ted Cruz. The consequence, and we can talk about the, you know, the physical threats that they do feel, which I think is a little bit true.

• 37:33Ryan Holiday?

  It's very real.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  It's very real, but in general, what we're talking about is they might not get to keep that job anymore.

• 37:41Ryan Holiday?

  Privately, they all complain about not liking to be.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, which, yeah, you can go back to being a lawyer. You can be a lobbyist like I don't that maybe that's not that that's not a particularly virtuous thing either. But there are many things that you could do. It's not literal suicide. We're not saying if you do this, then you have to go home and light incense and candles and, you know, cut, cut your stomach open with a sword. You know, you don't have to sit in a hot bath and open your veins because you voted to impeach Trump. Like, that's not what we're talking about here, but the, the apocalyptic.

• 38:14Ryan Holiday?

  Jeff Blake's doing fine.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, the apocalyptic visions that people have, like, what are the consequence? I will lose an election if I do this. And then the, what that does is, I firmly believe that many, many, many, many, many Republicans have done many, many, many, many, many things over the past four years and over the past eight years, and even, even before that, in terms of their opposition to, to President Obama, that they don't, that doesn't actually align with their worldview, doesn't actually align with their ethics or their values. But they do because they feel driven to do it, or they will lose their job. They will not get to be congresspeople anymore. They will not get a good seat at a restaurant.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  You know, they will not get to go on Morning Joe or whatever, whatever the perks of this job are, they're going to lose those. And they find that to be, for some reason, so, the consequence is so intolerable that they will tolerate all of this stuff. And at the moment, yeah, we're watching them be afraid of their own voting base, partly because they will lose an election. And of course, by, by now, we've let things get to the point where it's not just, I'm afraid I'll lose my job. It's, I'm afraid somebody's going to murder me, which is like, that's also like, if anybody's listening and doesn't think that that's like a true fear that they have or truth that they have, of course it is. There was a, that was a lynch mob that we saw march into.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  March into the Capitol. And in the American experience, you know, lynch mobs are very closely linked to racist violence in the South. And if you say lynch mob in the American context, you're and I mean, there were many, many racists in that in that crowd. But a lynch mob happened in the French Revolution, happens in the Russian Revolution. It's a it's a phenomenon that happens, a group of people who want to murder somebody. Once their once their sort of bloodlust is up, this is a thing that has happened in human history many times. And it happened on January 6. You know, some of the people in that crowd were totally ready to kill Mike Pence. They were totally ready to kill Nancy Pelosi. They were totally ready to kill Chuck Schumer, like they wanted those people dead.

• 40:24Ryan Holiday?

  Isn't it weird?

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Not everybody, but enough of them. And it doesn't take many people in those circumstances. You only need a couple of people to actually start to start the killing. And there's there's French revolutionary precedents for all this, too, which is which are always fun and troubling.

• 40:40Ryan Holiday?

  But I think it's so fascinating how how utterly indistinguishable the mob on January 6 is from the mobs that you talk about in the storm before the storm. Like, this is something human beings do when the systems break down, or when they've been encouraged in such a way. And on the other side of the the sort of the the self interest and the rationalization from the the senators and the congressmen and women is also, I mean, you're also describing Seneca and Cato and countless other senators who always, a little bit after your book, but sought to rationalize horrendous things, probably in part because they didn't want

• 41:25Ryan Holiday?

  to lose their jobs, and also because they told themselves they were so indispensable to the process that if they were not to be in power, things would be worse.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and so you start, you get this weird mixture of this sort of very individual, personal self interest and human beings are wonderfully.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Gifted with the power of rationalization. I mean, we can take, we can take anything that we have done, anything that we have said, anything that anybody else close to us has said or done, and take that raw material and turn it into a story where we are still the hero and other people are still the villain and have it makes and just fit it right into our existing worldview. You know, it is, it is something that human beings can absolutely do. And as you, as you referenced to, you know, the, the, the easiest and most obvious comparison that we're talking about right now is what happened on January 6th versus the Black Lives Matter protests in, over the summer, right?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Which is instantly where many conservatives and many Republicans went feeling, as I said, there, there, there's this just, there's just this mutual resentment and mutual persecution complex that is absolutely infected the United States of America at the moment, where it is impossible to look at what happened on January 6th for a conservative or for a Republican and not say, why are these hypocritical Democrats so up in arms about some people taking selfies in the Capitol when they just cheered on mobs of people burning down America for three straight months? Like, the hypocrisy is beyond comprehension. I hate these people with the heat of a thousand suns, right?

• 43:12Speaker 01

  They want to impeach Trump, they want to, they want to kick Cruz out, they're like, they want to, they want to purge all these people from Twitter and from social media. I cannot believe how hypocritical this all is. But as you said, there are many, many profound differences, right? Between Black Lives Matter and what happened on January 6th, but more germane to what we're talking about right now is how quickly their minds shifted and how quickly their rhetoric shifted from actually confronting what happened on January 6th to re-litigating what happened last summer, right? They don't want to talk about what happened on January 6th because it's very bad for Republicans and it's very bad for conservatives.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  So they want to keep the conversation on what happened over the summer because that they feel is bad for Democrats and bad for liberals. And so the conversation that we're having right now is like,

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it continues to be a persecution complex, leading to a prosecutorial mentality aimed at Democrats and liberals over what happened during Black Lives Matter, rather than actually confronting what happened just now, right now, in front of everybody. And that, too, is a part of this system of dodging responsibility and not facing the things that are actually happening right in front of us, and always making it the other side's fault that anything has gone bad or wrong.

• 44:34Ryan Holiday?

  And this is where I think also the sort of intellectual rigor and and and sort of self-discipline and accountability of a philosophy like Stoicism, but really, any religious code or any set of values is so important, because what-aboutism is a plague on the mind and the spirit of a human being. You know, like, I've joked about this, like, if if I do something wrong, and my wife says, Ryan, don't do that, I don't like that, I don't get to just bring up a bunch of other irrelevant shit that I don't like that she does. Like, that's the that's a nice recipe for a toxic relationship that immediately is going to fall apart, because no one ever has to be accountable for themselves, and

• 45:19Ryan Holiday?

  you can't have a discussion about what is right there in front of you. And so, the fact that the other side is doing it is irrelevant. The fact that the others that when the other side does stuff, they bring up how you do do stuff is irrelevant. You have to have the intellectual and intestinal fortitude to deal with the facts in front of you, regardless of what anyone else is doing.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  And take your lumps, as they need to be taken. And I think that there are actually, you know, personally, I think that there's far more, there are many more people that probably ought to resign from office for having done so much since the election to build up and gin up, like, not even just like the people who were We're really organizing what happened on January the 6th, right? The final, the final batch of ringleaders. But the rhetoric over the past two months has been apocalyptic about the consequences of Joe Biden becoming president of the United States.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  The consequences of, you know, Democrats potentially taking control of the Senate. They built it up into such, you know, insane, like it would be Armageddon. And this is what, this is what they're pumping out there. This is, this is what they're feeding their voters. And it became a feedback loop. But there is, there is a degree to which many, many people out there should probably take a good, hard look at themselves and say, what am I actually a part of? What am I actually helping to promote here? What was my role in all of this? And should I take responsibility for my role in all of this? And my pessimism about what's happening in the United States right now comes from

• 47:10Speaker 01

  a place of not really believing that these people have it in them to do that. And that the, the crop of leaders that we are currently saddled with by our own choosing, because obviously we still do have democracy and these are still, you know, these are the people that are being elected to serve as our political leaders. The, the introspection and the desire to take responsibility is pretty much nowhere to be found. I don't, I wouldn't even know where to start looking for such a rare and extinct animal in the halls of government at the moment.

• 47:49Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Hey everyone. Look, these are times when people are thinking a lot about privacy and data. Maybe you're searching for something you don't want people to see. Maybe you don't want to get targeted with advertising information. All of that, perfectly reasonable. And that's why today's sponsor is their Express VPN. I know you might be thinking, well, I just use incognito mode in my browser. That doesn't- Actually keep your activity secret. No matter what mode you're using, no matter how many times you clear your browser history, your ISP knows what you've searched for and they can sell that information. And that's why you should use ExpressVPN for your searches.

• 48:33Ryan Holiday?

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• 49:10Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics talk about, you know, sort of finding inspiration in your heroes, right? The exemplars, that the people from the past who did, you know, sort of embody the traits that you want to embody or you need people to embody today. And one of the heroes of, he's a minor character in your book, but he's sort of become a hero to me, having talked to you about him already. And then I did a chapter on him in Lives of the Stoics. But maybe tell the story of Rutilius Rufus real briefly because I think, you know, there is this, there is this theme, as bad as it was getting in Rome and as bad it would get

• 49:51Ryan Holiday?

  after the rise of Julius Caesar and after, there was always amidst the dregs of Romulus, as Caesar would, as Cicero would say, some heroes, some bright spots. Well, if you want me to tell the story of Rutilius Rufus, you are out of luck because he is a minor character at the end of the storm before the storm. And I do not have his brief little bio sketch in front of me to remind me exactly what it is that I need to be saying about him at the moment, which thinks- He would be a good, he would be a good person to think about because, I mean, what you have there is someone who is- indicted by the political corruption of his time wrongly brought up on charges and and

• 50:34Ryan Holiday?

  sort of insists on hey I'm gonna be an honest man despite all of the norm breaking around me. And I do think that was common.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Oh, right. He takes the exile and thumbs his nose at him on the way out the door. Right?

• 50:47Ryan Holiday?

  That's right.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  There we go. Okay.

• 50:49Ryan Holiday?

  And look, I think Cato, Cato and Cicero are two examples too. You know, everyone else is cheating in their elections, right? All the elections are bought and rigged at this time. And these two men say, I'm not going to play the game that way. I'm going to try to win honestly. And so there, I mean, there are, there are people who say, I'm not going to be infected by what's happening.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but of course, Cato, the younger, you know, he spread his bribes around too, when it actually came down to, you know, when it was, you know, if it's this or Caesar, you know, he too made his choices there at the end. And they all did, because as he said, you know, at a certain point, from a game theory standpoint, if, you know, you have one side that is behaving and doing anything they want to do, like in the fall of the Republican context, Julius Caesar did not feel bound by any rules at all, right? His, he did not, none of, he seemed to have

• 51:50Speaker 01

  found all of those old norms and rules so quaint and so archaic, you know, like, of course, I'm going to bribe voters to vote for me. I want to win the election. Like, you'd be a fool not to do this. Why wouldn't I do it? And so the problem then becomes if one side is doing it, to try to not do it, you're really mostly setting yourself up to lose. One of the,

• 52:22Speaker 01

  one of the examples that's really easy to use, because everybody knows it, is what happens to the Washington generals every time they play the Harlem Globetrotters. They get their asses kicked because the Harlem Globetrotters do whatever they want. And the Washington Generals are out there playing by the rules. They are, they're not traveling. They're not, they're, they're making sure they dribble all the time. You know, they don't go out of bounds. They don't pull the refs pants down and then, you know, just run up and do a slam dunk. And that's, that's the problem. You, you can't, you, if you're going to actually have a sporting contest in that way, or you're actually going to try to win a sporting contest, which, you know, is what politics can be considered in certain ways.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  You know, you have to be playing by the same set of rules. And if one side is going to chuck the rules overboard, then you do, you are saying to yourself, either I sacrifice my principles, the things that I care about and take the hit, or I don't. And so what I, so what I mean when I say we need to self-police ourselves is that what you need to have happen is not the Washington Generals decide that because the Harlem Globetrotters are flagrantly cheating. I mean, so flagrantly, it's amazing the refs never catch it. But the, it's not about encouraging the Washington Generals to stop playing by the rules.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  It's about encouraging the Globetrotters to play by the rules. And that's where it needs to come from. Now, obviously that would make for crappy entertainment and nobody wants that to actually happen in, you know, fun exhibition basketball. But in terms of politics, that's where these things need to happen. And what you're talking about, finding the honorable people who are willing to take their personal lumps and lose, you know, and accept the loss. That has to come from the people who have violated the rules and have violated the norms and have.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  And have tossed them overboard because right now the fear is not necessarily because because when I say we're going to see something like this in the future, I don't mean the Republican Party is uniquely on some dark path, which I mean, I do think the Republican Party is on a uniquely dark path at the moment, but not.

• 54:49Ryan Holiday?

  The other side can rationalize doing the same.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  That's exactly what I'm saying is that when we get wins, the next time it's going to happen, is it going to be Democrats? Well, maybe, you know, and I I've talked about this on social media and I, you know, everything is happening so fast that it's it's really hard to articulate everything that's going on. But there is a scenario where, okay, let's like, let's just run through this for a second. Let's say that on election day, Trump was very clearly losing the election. And then let's say, let's make up some crazy hypothetical, not like this would ever happen. But the president starts calling various secretaries of state and encouraging them to find votes however they can in order to, let's just say in Georgia, to turn the

• 55:36Speaker 01

  election that's going against him. And let's say that instead of saying no to the president as the secretary of state of Georgia did, because that all happened, we just pretend like Donald Trump didn't spend two months trying to steal this election. It's insane. But let's say he says yes. And then we got up one day and Georgia and Pennsylvania have suddenly found a bunch of votes. And now Trump has won the election. And what are what's the response of Democrats going to be to this and liberals to this who believe that Donald Trump is so fundamentally dishonest? Let's say we have evidence that he did this. We get the same phone call. We get all the evidence that Donald Trump has actually successfully

• 56:17Speaker 01

  stolen the election. And now we're in sort of an alternate timeline where that certification process is going to happen on January the 6th is a fraudulent certification of Donald Trump's fraudulent reelection, right? So now who's out in front of the Capitol?

• 56:34Speaker 01

  It's a bunch of Democrats. It's a bunch of liberals. It's a bunch of leftists. Right. They are the ones who are screaming and braying and saying, you know, hey, we have at all costs, we have to stop this because this is a fraudulent election. I think that that is very, that is a very plausible scenario. Like, everything I just outlined could have just, it could, it could have happened so easily because Donald Trump did try to steal the election. He did try to find votes that didn't exist. Liberals and Democrats are so pissed at him already. And he was already, he was already signaling many, many times that he was going to try to steal the election. He spent two months trying to steal the election.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  So what then is the difference between those two things? Would I be sitting here and encouraging protesters to storm the Capitol? Because this is the last gasp of American democracy. And if you don't overturn this, you know what, man? I don't know what I would say at that point. Because I don't know.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  As we're talking right now, where we're at politically. Is it inherently bad to just charge into the Capitol and turn over and try to overturn the vote?

• 57:50Speaker 01

  What if we know for a stone cold fact that Donald Trump stole the election? Right. What if, what if it was actually proven beyond all shadow of a doubt? What do you do in that situation? And I don't, I can't answer that question because it never actually happened. But I will say this about it is that one of the huge differences between that scenario that I just outlined and what actually happened is that those people who charged in the Capitol did so fraudulently, based on lies, not to secure American democracy, but to overturn it.

• 58:23Ryan Holiday?

  But perhaps many of them or some of them.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Oh, they all believed it. Oh, they, oh, of course they earned it. Oh, I absolutely 100% believe that they believed it. But, you know, you know, and I know that there is something called empirical truth. And as, and as much as it becomes a very sort of lazy cynical thing to say, which is, oh, well, perception is reality. Or we live in, we live in this digital world where people are allowed to choose their own realities and live in their own realities. And their belief. That Donald Trump had the election stolen from him is equally valid to my, let's say, my, Mike Duncan's belief that the election was not stolen, that Biden won the election, right?

• 59:11Speaker 01

  That's my belief. The people who stormed the Capitol had the belief that Joe Biden did not win the election. And some people will try to tell you that those two beliefs are equally valid because they're both earnestly believed. The problem is that one of them is actually empirically true and the other one is not.

• 59:27Ryan Holiday?

  That's where this other virtue of wisdom comes in. The ability to, like, you know, I saw this meme the other day. It was like, how do, how do I know that, what good is my college education? It's like not falling for a fake coup, you know? Like, like to be able to discern fact from fiction is a skill that not everyone has. And I think when you want to look at the collapse of norms in Rome or today, it's probably rooted in the fact that, I mean, even, even I think some of the politicians we're talking about, we're not cravenly manipulating the masses, but we're themselves the manipulated masses.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Right. Because, I mean, that's the thing is, I like, so I think that Ted Cruz, for example, knew that he was cynically manipulating people.

• 1:00:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  I think that's really clear. He's a smart guy. He knows exactly what's going on. Now, the question is, like, what about Trump? Because that dude's brain is pickled and that dude's brain has been pickled by watching way too much TV and reading, you know, reading propaganda that is fed to him either over the TV or on the internet, that it's entire, it is impossible to understand whether or not he, and I don't think, I don't think it matters to him, right? Like, he's a pure bullshit artist in the sense that he doesn't care what's true or not true. He is a liar, but he doesn't care mostly. So, does he actually believe that he won this election and that it was stolen from him?

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Is, is his narcissism so powerful? Is his, is his delusional, that's delusional feedback loop that he lives in, where he just watches Fox and Friends and tweets about it? What does he actually believe?

• 1:01:15Ryan Holiday?

  What was going through Nero's mind? You know, was Nero a Machiavellian murderer of his enemies? Or did he delude himself into thinking that this was the rational response to real threats? And I think Seneca talks about this in his plays. He's never sure. He talks about it overtly. But you know, it goes empty fears earns one real fears. It creates your delusions and your insanity. It also contributes to the feedback loop that we're talking about.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is, this is actually something that happens a lot in, in all the work that I do on revolutions, which is most of the leaders that I'm talking about, I'm talking about them because they get hit by a revolution, whether it's Tsar Nicholas or Louis XVI or, you know, Charles X. These people were living in delusional bubbles, right? And they were protected from, and you know, I actually just said this about Nicholas, Tsar Nicholas, that he was living in a reality only slightly less manufactured than the Truman Show. That he, he couldn't, he didn't know what was happening beyond the walls of the palace because there was, there was an information bubble that he was trapped in. And for Trump, you know, this is not, it's not like courtiers are, I mean, though he was protected.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  I mean, he, God, now that I'm thinking about it, he was protected in exactly the same way that they used to coddle like the Habsburg rulers, right? Who wound up getting overthrown because, you know, they're printing out the good news for him and stuff. And so this guy has been living in a narcissistic reality bubble that is entirely possible that he believes that he won that last election by 20 million votes. And that, you know, that it actually was stolen from him. But again, you go back to it, there is, and I actually do believe this as a matter of philosophy, that not all reality is strictly plastic and plastic in a way that what your mind impresses upon it is as equally true as what somebody else impresses on their plastic.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Reality in terms of what can be manipulated and what is not. And I think that's true and I, and I, but I think that people like just out in the discourse do lose track of that. And they do say, well, they believed it. So it's, you know, so it's the same, but it's not the same because it was lies. It was disinformation. It was misinformation. Right? Those people believed a delusional fantasy that was not true. And it drove them to violently attack the legal transfer of power. Cop got killed, you know? People died at, because of what just happened. It's not, and so it's not the same as saying, um, you know, I don't think that Trump won the election, which I don't, for the record, I don't think Trump won the election.

• 1:04:02Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I, I, I think you're totally right. And, and you, you sort of, but you get the, you get, it, it does start to make sense. The dilemma you're talking about, okay, there is an illegal seizing of power. And this is a dilemma that the Stoics go through, right? So, so at the end of Julius Caesar's reign, uh, you know, short life, uh, then there's the Second Civil War and then Octavian becomes emperor. And now all these Stoics, all these students and peers and, and descendants of Cato are forced to reckon with the new reality, right? Athena Doris and Arius become the advisors to Octavian Seneca, you know, by the time he comes around and is, it works under Nero, this dude has seen, this, this guy has seen

• 1:04:47Ryan Holiday?

  five emperors, you know, the, the, the Republican days of, of Cato and, uh, and Cicero are a distant memory and they have to adapt themselves to the environment they're in. So it's, it's, you know, it's sort of what is the right thing? And then what's, what's the reality of the moment you're in? These are all, these are all timeless, but very timely questions.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then I was reading, um, I'm reading, I'm reading this book on historiography at the moment, and it was, it was going through some of the, you know, we're talking about, you know, the book's talking about Polybius and, um, uh, this Collingwood, in case anybody cares. But, but he was talking about Tacitus and, uh, and Tacitus's whole dilemma. And one of the things that he was trying to, um, uh, trying to convey to his readers is how do you live in what is a fundamentally rotten system?

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Like he was writing, he was writing from the perspective of the defeated senatorial class, right? The people who had essentially lost those civil wars 150 years earlier. And yeah, I mean, he's writing for the Flavians, you know, a bit, and he's, he's especially hard on the Julio Claudians to, you know, sort of, because it, because it sounds good for the Flavians. But how, how does one live inside of a fundamentally rotten system? And, you know, I was reading that and I was like, God, is that what I'm going to be doing with the rest of my life? Am I, you know, is it tacit? Is this tacit as time? Is it, you know?

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Because I do have a hard time not being pessimistic about the course that we're on. Because I really don't see people making the kind of corrections that need to be made. And I feel the same way about this that, you know, I feel about, I felt about, let's say, climate change 20 years ago, you know, when I, when I was in university, you know, back in the late 90s and early 2000s, you know, global warming and climate change was a big thing and everybody was beating the drum, saying like, we need to do something now, we need to do something now. And I can remember having conversations with people in 2003 and 2004 just being like, you know, I don't see anything happening at the, at the level of politics and

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  industry that needs to happen right now to actually head this off. Like it's coming. I just don't think anybody, it's clearly nobody's doing anything to head this off. And now 20 years later, it, it's all happened, right? Like climate change is here, like it's a done deal. Nothing, we're not, we can manage it, we can try to work with it or work around it or mitigate it, but we're not, we didn't, we didn't turn it back. You know, we didn't avoid anything. And I feel the same feelings that I felt back then about the course of politics that we're on. I still don't see anywhere. The political or moral will to actually address what's going on head on because we're still too busy trying to blame each other for what's gone wrong.

• 1:07:45Ryan Holiday?

  You and I are talking on Martin Luther King Day. The only thing that's given me hope recently is I just went through Taylor Branch's epic series on Martin Luther King and really getting a sense of how horrendously awful it was. You know, I sort of had the high level understanding of the civil rights movement, but just the amount of extra political violence and the destruction of norms and the there were you could murder someone and then you'd get off by a jury trial, you know, fake jury trial. And that was also how they could circumvent federal laws about elections. And these people controlled states with, you know, populations of millions of people. And when you look at where we were to where

• 1:08:27Ryan Holiday?

  we are, it does make me think that it is possible. It just requires an incredible amount of will and luck and leadership. And, and, and I think at the core of it, and this goes to me, what your book is fundamentally about and where we're struggling today as a society. What Martin Luther King did that very few leaders have done since, before or since, is he tried to get everyone on the same page about a set of ideal. He pointed us back to the Constitution and back to the Declaration of Independence and back to the founding myth. And that is partly what reestablished some of the norms that you and I are, you know, talking about sorely missing today. And that's what Lincoln did. That's what Cato, I think,

• 1:09:12Ryan Holiday?

  tried to do and failed to do. But, but you have to go back to your, what is it, the mass morium? You have to go back to the old ways, root it, and then, and then use that to justify a new way of being.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think that that's all true. And also, I mean, since we're talking about it from that angle, like, let's be clear, too, is that like, so I wrote this book about the Roman Republic, you know, let's say 2000 years ago. And, you know, their political system was different, that their, their social system was different from our social system. And a lot of what we're seeing happen right now. You know, when people talk about how, you know, America has never experienced political violence, you know, you would have to be pretty ignorant of American history.

• 1:10:01Ryan Holiday?

  There's people who would disagree.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's been a lot of political violence in American history. Most of it top down, most of it racially motivated, not all of it racially motivated because, you know, the entire history of American labor is replete with murders and bombings on both sides. So, yes, we, the fact of the violence is not actually unique in American history. But where are we going to find the will and the way to start drawing back from where we have taken ourselves?

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  And I don't know where we find that will and that way because a lot, because everything that you just talked about with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, there are a lot of people who will tell you that what we're seeing right now is the end of second reconstruction. And second reconstruction really starts with the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s and then proceeded through to, let's say, the election of Barack Obama and is now being violently closed in the same way that we had after the first civil war. We may be calling it at some point in the near distant future that first reconstruction was a period that existed and was then later closed.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  And I think that there is something to the idea that we've lived through second reconstruction and that we are seeing an attempt to close second reconstruction. So this is all to say that we can use Roman history to guide us because it is, the Romans do lace us with a certain universal, universal mode of thinking about things because of how much our culture.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  Directly or indirectly is related to Roman tradition and Roman history like we are the heirs of of Rome, whether we like it or not. And so their history does actually matter to us. They're not Martians. They're not from another planet. The Romans are us and we are the Romans. But, you know, this all is taking place not in the context of the Roman Republic, but in the context of the United States through the 19th century and the 20th century and now the 21st century. So that's it is always important to keep that in mind, you know, as we go forward. But, um, yeah.

• 1:12:25Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I was trying to end on a hopeful note and you.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, I did. I did. I completely twisted back. No, let's, let's, let's end it on a hopeful note.

• 1:12:34Ryan Holiday?

  The decline and fall of Rome happened over hundreds of years.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  It did. It did. It happened over, over. Oh, oh, here we go. Here. This is a good one. I have a great deal of confidence in the United States military. I think that there is a, there's a code of professionalism and centrally, the pay stubs are centrally distributed rather than, rather than by an individual general, because I mean, one of the things that actually led to the, to Marius and Sulla and those civil wars is that those guys, their pay and their prosperity was based entirely on how successful their general was. Right. And the United States doesn't, we don't have that same system and we don't have that same problem. We have a, we have a military apparatus that is far

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  more based off of the post civil war Augustan model, which involves a great deal of stability and neutrality, rather than the, the personal armies that were allowed to be revved up by Marius and Sulla. So we don't, we, I don't see personal armies in the, in the near future. So that can, can that be hopeful?

• 1:13:44Ryan Holiday?

  It's not much, but.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  I'm a ray of sunshine.

• 1:13:51Ryan Holiday?

  I love the book. I can't wait for the next one. Let's talk about that when it comes out.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Okay, thanks.

• 1:13:56Ryan Holiday?

  You're the best men. Hey, it's Ryan. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend, whatever you want. We'd love for you to have a copy. I know I love signed copies of some of my favorite books. If you love a signed copy of The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic, we have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.