The Stoic Code General Mattis Lives By

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Make Stoicism translatable for us right now.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  Deal with it. Just deal with it. No victimhood, no cynicism. Deal with reality and keep confidence in yourself and each other. We'll get through this.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, Stoicism is the idea you don't control what happens. You control how you respond to what happens. And the idea was you can, not just that you can respond to anything with virtue, but, but the worse the situation is, the more important that response becomes.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Find how we handle the toughest things in life.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  How we respond. All right.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so that was me and the great General Mattis talking about Stoic philosophy. How did that all come to be? It's kind of a crazy convergence of events bringing this all together. Let me walk you through that. Okay, so back in March, a bunch of things converged pertaining to the ideas that we talked about here, to Stoicism. So first was just the application. I had a brutal, brutal travel day. I was down in Florida. I had a 7:00 AM flight out of Panama City, which I had to get there super early because all the airport TSA stuff was going on. Get on the flight, fly from ECP to Atlanta, Atlanta to San Francisco, drove down to Palo Alto,

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  got a decent run in, and then I had to show up at the Hoover Institute, where I've been doing a bunch of research for the book that I'm writing about Stockdale. Stockdale studied at Stanford. This is where he was introduced to Stoic philosophy. So I'm walking around the campus. I'm seeing like the exact building where Professor Philip Reimlander handed future Admiral James Stockdale a copy of Epictetus, the book that he would rely on in the Hanoi Hilton. So that was incredible. And then I walked down to the Hoover Institute and I did a television interview where I sat onstage with one of the few modern Stoics of our time,

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  the great General James Mattis, four-star general in the Marines.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  Forty years of deployments. He carries Marx's meditations with him. And then was the former Secretary of Defense before he resigned on principle midway through the first Trump term. Just a shiro of mine, a lifelong student of the Stoics. We'd been trying to meet for many years now, since Steven Pressfield connected us, but he was doing this thing for PBS's Firing Line, where they were going to talk about the 250th anniversary of the founding. He wanted to bring in some of the sort of Stoic ideas, which Tom Ricks talks about in his lovely book, First Principles, a mutual friend of ours. And he suggested that they also interview me. So that was just an incredible honor and incredible opportunity

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  to have. That's what I was flying out there to do. And we got to talk about Stoicism quite a bit onstage. We had a call beforehand where we got to really nerd out about the Stoics. Obviously, with the events happening in the world, they wanted to talk about some more political stuff with him. So if you want to watch the whole episode on Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, you can listen to the whole podcast. I think they split it up into two episodes on TV. But if you want to hear me and General Mattis briefly talking about Stoic philosophy, well, this episode is for you. You can grab General Mattis's wonderful book, Call Sign Chaos, at the Painted Porch, which we carry. There's a lot to learn from him, I feel, when it comes to honor and leadership. And in the meantime, here is

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  me and General Mattis, Margaret Hoover, talking about Stoic philosophy.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  The two of you, to the uninitiated, may seem like an odd couple in terms of your pairing. But the truth is that you have found one another in a shared passion for Stoicism.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  The ancient philosophy that emphasizes key virtues: courage, discipline, justice, wisdom, in pursuit of the better life. Ryan, you are a bestselling author, an expert on Stoicism, and in your public appearances, you often cite General Mattis. You have referred to him as one of your heroes. Why?

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  I think we tend to think of philosophy as something that might happen on a university campus, as opposed to something that you use in the world, what you actually do, which is what the Stoic philosophers were. We have Stoics who were emperors, we have Stoics who were generals, we have Stoics who were politicians, Stoics who were merchants, people who did things in the real world. And so, I'm less interested in people like me who write and talk about Stoic philosophy, and much more interested in people who are applying it in the real world, which General Mattis is an example of. You famously carried Marx's meditations with you on your deployments over the years, did you?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Many times.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Ryan, one of your recent books, Courage is Calling, has a curious blurb on the top: "A superb handbook for cultivating a purposeful life," by none other than General Jim Mattis. General Mattis, you cite Ryan often in your interviews. You mention that you're reading his latest books. You're not only just reading the Stoics themselves, but you're reading how Ryan has repurposed them. What is it? I will say also, we know you to be, as you are called sort of popularly, the warrior monk, a man and a general who has a library of thousands of books. So what is it about Ryan's work that speaks to you?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, Margaret, thank you, because while Ryan and I have been back and forth communicating many times over the years, this is actually the first time we've ever met in public court, or met at all. So thank you for this opportunity. But the problem that you face, I think, in the military on a personal basis, is you're often careening from one crisis to another. It's just the norm of military life. It's military generally are not used unless there's a crisis of some kind. And a crisis is often defined by what? The people who are affected are not in control. You've got to deal with it. You're not going to control it. And so, what you do in a crisis as a human being, you fall back on something.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  And in my case, I found that by falling back on certain values, I was able to keep myself at least calm enough to take purposeful action. Because a lot of people are looking to their officers to say, "What are we going to do about this?" And it was in finding a purpose that I stumbled into the study of philosophy. It wasn't something I picked up in school, frankly. It was something almost forced on me by my circumstance. With Ryan, what I saw in his writing and wherever I followed him, it seemed like everywhere I went, I'd show up at the Naval Academy. I'd go to Notre Dame. Guess what? Ryan Holiday was here last week. I think, "Well, I'm not going to look too good this week then,

• 7:23Speaker 02

  because he's a lot better at this stuff than I am." Because he's really done his homework. He's studied the applicability. And he understands it in almost classical terms. And so that was what drew me to Ryan's writings.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there was a Stoic about a century before Christ named Scipio Emilianus, who's one of the great Roman generals. And he was famous, an ancient historian said, "For training as much in philosophy as he did at arms." And I think of General Mattis as maybe a modern reincarnation of that very timeless idea. The warrior monk as an archetype is not a new thing or even a particularly rare thing. You have to study what you're doing. And as you talk about in your book, the idea of learning by trial and error is both arrogant and reckless. And so we turn to the past, because the people in the past lived through situations like we're in right now, like whatever the one that you're in as an individual right now.

• 8:24Ryan Holiday?

  And this goes back to the origin of Stoicism. Zeno is this merchant in the Mediterranean, and he stops at the Temple of Apollo. And he asks the oracle there for the secret to the good life. And she tells him that it is having conversations with the dead. And that's what, he takes this only later to mean that reading, the study of philosophy, is a conversation with the dead. And how do we access this wisdom, bring it into our own lives? Because, again, to the general's point, to learn by trial and error is largely an expense paid by people other than you.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  We're approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a signing. This is a time in our country of division, uncertainty, and now war. General Mattis, what guidance can Americans glean from the founding generation?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Well, Tom Ricks has written a book about this sort of thing called First Principles. And what you do when you're in a crisis, you fall back on your first principles. Well, what are our first principles? Declaration of Independence, you just mentioned, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. And you fall back on those things, and you look at our founding fathers, who, drawing from the Enlightenment, which is all based on the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, they had guidelines for themselves. And based on those guidelines, they drew up those documents with a lot of skepticism about human nature, yet a belief in, quote, "the people," unquote.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  And so what you do is you look for something to kind of ground yourself on. I mean, think of the Simon and Garfunkel song about Mrs. Robinson. And, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you." In the midst of this time, we can be turning back to our first principles and the Joe DiMaggio kind of leadership, which is mature, humble, competent, and all these things that really are summed up in a code that you live by. Again, a song, "You, when you're on your road, have got to have a code to live by." Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. For us gray-haired guys, right, sir?

• 10:45Speaker 02

  And so the code you live by is probably found somewhere in those principles, because there's nothing new under the sun, as Ryan said. And people have been through it before. I mean, the people who think this is so bad, what's going on right now in the country. And yet, the founding fathers were mostly still alive when we nearly made Aaron Burr our president, okay? So get over it, this is nothing, these aren't dark times, these are stern times, these are testing times. Welcome to democracy, the worst form of government, except for all the rest we've tried.

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  And it's worth pointing out that ancient philosophy was what the ancients turned to also. When Marx realizes comes to Stoic philosophy, it is roughly 500 years old. So he is looking backwards and going, how did people live through moments like this before? What do my predecessors have to teach me about a moment like this? As we are doing today. It's both reassuring and then, of course, a little disappointing that we're still doing the same things that we've always done. And when the people point out that the Stoics can be a little depressing, that's one of the things they're meditating on, is just how little has changed over the last 20 centuries.

• 12:00Ryan Holiday?

  But it is true that the ancients were looking backwards to Cato. And Cato was looking backwards to Zeno and Cleanthes and Chrysippus and the founding Stoics. And so it is this ancient thing. It probably says something about the moment of time that you're in, when Stoicism is popular again. The founders were turning to it because the founding wasn't a walk in the park either. It was a dark time. And just remembering that there have always been moments like this, and that people have lived through it, and then were lucky enough that they distilled some of those lessons into these classical works that we can benefit from now, that's the journey.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  You both point to George Washington as sort of the seminal founder who drew on the Stoics, but particularly, I mean, he, Cato, and the fact that he...

• 12:57Speaker 01

  He even arranged for Joseph Addison's performance of Cato's play in Valley Forge during the revolution at a time when Congress had banned theater. General Mattis, what is it about Stoicism that is so beneficial to the military?

• 13:13Speaker 02

  You know, if you look at what he went through, I can give you 100 quantifiable reasons why we failed in our Revolutionary War. And each time, you find where Washington is able to stand the strain. And he was not a perfect human being, not by a long stretch of the imagination. But he also knew his own weaknesses. He knew he had a volcanic temper. And one of the principles that you draw from Stoicism is self-control. And so he learned, how do you actually lead an army of free men, and in some cases, slaves? How do you lead that army to surrender some of their personal freedoms so that they can survive and thrive

• 13:58Speaker 02

  and have victory on a battlefield eventually? And you see him actually turning to the examples. You think of Cincinnatus, a wonderful example that obviously Washington was very, very aware of, and others too, actually. So what he's gaining is the ability, when he's in a fight up against the finest small army in the world, remember, the redcoats a few years later are going to humble Napoleon. That's the army that he defeated by keeping his army alive all those years. And he's doing it largely set on a foundation, I think, of the ancients, of the philosophers. Furthermore, he has learned

• 14:41Speaker 02

  how to actually apply what they said, what they wrote about. And he is the most boring leader you can ever find. I guarantee you, as a colonial officer in the British Army, as a revolutionary general, learning how to fight from French generals half his age but with more combat experience, to the father of our country as the first president. He does the same thing time after time. He listens with a willingness to be persuaded. He quiets himself down, tones down his temper, and he learns. He listens and he learns. And then, a matter of fact, one of his aides said, "He listens so well, he can even hear what's not being said." That is a man in control of himself.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  And then, after listening and learning, he helps them, and then he leads. That's the way he melds this army into a warfighting instrument that can actually survive these bloody battles. And so you see almost a direct line from the examples that he reads about, straight into his conduct on a daily and hourly basis. Listening to even what's not being said. He can even read body language, in other words, in the midst of all the crises he's going through. And remember, in crises, we fall back on first principles. He had them in him. He didn't just read it and then pass the course in college. He never went to college, you know? He actually lived them.

• 16:07Ryan Holiday?

  We do these men and women a disservice when we make them superhuman, when we forget that this was hard work. You know, one of the sculptors of Washington spends, you know, hours with him sitting there. He notes that, that actually, right beneath the surface, there were these fiery passions, that he was, in fact, an incredibly passionate and a man with quite a temper, as you said. And he notes that Washington's first victory then is over that, over himself, which is the basis of Stoicism, that no one who has not first mastered themselves is fit to govern or to lead. And so, it was work for Washington. He's not naturally this way.

• 16:50Ryan Holiday?

  There are people who are naturally lowercase stoic, but I don't think that would describe Washington, wouldn't describe John Adams, it wouldn't describe many of the founders. It was work. They learned about these ideas as young men, as part of the educational process, and then it was a lifetime of trying to apply them and falling short. And trying to get a little bit better, falling short and trying to get a little bit better. And that is what makes Washington so impressive and why we were so lucky. I think Thomas Paine wrote that how uniquely suited Washington was for the moment. He said, "There are some men who adversity makes them wither, makes them fall apart,

• 17:34Ryan Holiday?

  and then there's others in which," I think he says, "unlocks a cabinet of fortitude." And Washington is this embodiment of the Stoic idea of getting better because of obstacles and difficulties. The revolution is not the kind of war that he wants. It does not go the way that he wants, but he makes it work. And that is, I think, his genius.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  You have said, Ryan, that Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the only president to simultaneously embody all four of the Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. How? And why was that so unique?

• 18:15Ryan Holiday?

  What's so impressive about Lincoln, unlike many of the other great men of history, your Napoleons, or your Caesars, or your great conquerors, he uses his ambition, his power, to bind a nation together, to heal, to put it back together. He said, "Every man has their peculiar ambition." But his ambition, unlike so many of those towering figures, doesn't come at the expense of anyone else. He's great in that way. He was actually writing about those figures in a letter, and he talked about how you can become great by making slaves of men or by freeing slaves.

• 18:59Ryan Holiday?

  And there is something, I think, uniquely wonderful about Lincoln in the ends to which he directs this ambition. And he's a towering figure in that regard. You could look at him as this self-made man who educates himself, who conquers great heights, but there is this moral purpose to it that I think... Isn't shared necessarily by all the people who hold that office.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  You know, that brings to mind, Ryan, something that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, and ladies, he wrote in the masculine tone of his time, so bear with it. But he said, "Great men, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons. Rather, they have perceived the terror of life and manned themselves to face it." By manning themselves, they're disciplining themselves. They've got to have the inner character to actually deal with the reality. And any leader's number-one responsibility, whether it be of a corporation here in Silicon Valley, or a football team, or anything else, is they have to define reality.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  It is very hard to define an external reality if your internal geography is churning with no real anchor point. You'll pick up very quickly if you have a leader who does not have a quiet mind if you're in a crisis. You'll read it loud and clear. And Lincoln was somehow able to take the worst crisis of our young nation, still-young nation, even at 250. And I think that this is why, is what Ryan's pointing out.

• 20:35Ryan Holiday?

  It's easier to be successful, and I think Stoicism has been misinterpreted. You know, it is not a recipe for being a better sociopath, right? It is easier to succeed if you don't care about anyone else, right? If you're not held up by pesky moral principles, or ideas, or ideals. And I think what you see in Lincoln is this unique combination of an incredibly crafty and pragmatic politician, who also had some, what do you call them, flat-ass rules. Some things he would not do, yes. Some lines that were more important to him than anything else. And that kind of moral leadership is ultimately what Stoicism is supposed to... That's why the virtue of justice is so essential.

• 21:20Ryan Holiday?

  It informs the others.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Looking back, General Mattis, at the 250 years of this country, or since our signing of the Declaration of Independence, what are the Stoic virtues that have most defined American leadership?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  I think that, first of all, the idea that we are all custodians of our democracy. We are all protectors of our constitution, all of us have that obligation. I think we've gotten big as a country, we're spread out, we're diverse. At times it can seem like these things are kind of out there and we're more spectators. But democracy is not a spectator sport. And I think what it really has brought home is that we're going to have to get together. Really what we have is one great big dispute resolution process is what a democracy is. You think one thing, Ryan, you've got another, I've got another.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  And somehow, in the interest of our children and generations to come, we've got to figure out how to deal with it right now. And I think that that is a fundamental requirement, that we then meet the demands with all of us pitching in and working on. And that is the fundamental idea of a democracy. We're going, no one's going to get everything they want their way. At times we're going to be compromising and we're going to be working and making it certain that we can deal with those fundamental problems. So what we turn over to the next generation is something just a little bit better as our goal for a more perfect union. There's a word I never say if I've had two glasses of wine.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  It's usufruct, and you understand why. It was first used in presidential papers, I found it in Thomas Jefferson's. But basically it means that, he was an agrarian guy. And he said, you know, when you take over your parents' farm, you, a guy or gal, you can change the water course, chop the trees down, plant things, move the rocks, do whatever you want. But you are obligated to turn it over to your son or daughter in as good a condition or better than you got it. But we hold this nation in usufruct. And we are obligated to do this. You cannot, as a Congress, surrender your constitutional duties. You do not have the right to do that.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  The Constitution is our guide, it is our protector, but it also must be protected by all of us.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  In 1979, General Wes Moreland, who commanded US forces in Vietnam, appeared on the original firing line with William F. Buckley Jr. And he discussed sort of what you're getting at. He discussed the duties and the rights of citizenship. Take a look at what he said.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  I don't believe our democracy long range is going to work unless there's an attitude in our society, and particularly among our young, that they have an obligation of service. Now, a principle of democracy is for every right, there is a duty. For every right of citizenship, there's a duty of citizenship. Now, we inherited this principle from the British, and the British, I believe, inherited it from Roman law. Now, it seems to me that in the last decade, we have put inordinate attention on rights of citizenship. Rights, rights, rights.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  And in the process, we have neglected duties of citizenship.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Of course, General Wes Moreland was speaking in the context of the military draft. But to what extent, 250 years into our nation's founding, does our democracy's long-term survival depend on this greater recognition of civic duty?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Well, certainly, if we don't all protect it. This idea that we're going to just pass on these freedoms and there's not going to be any kind of interruption of them is something that history would refute. We may be a very, very young country in the history of the world. We are the oldest democracy. How many people in the world's history have had the freedoms we have? And it shows why we have got a duty equal to every right that we get to pass those rights on undamaged, I think. I don't have a good answer for you, other than to say, in my case, I was having a whale

• 25:54Speaker 02

  of a good time in college, lost my draft deferment, and as raised by the greatest generation that felt the country didn't have to be perfect to be worth fighting for, and if Uncle Sam said, "You're going," we all went. A few didn't, but 99% of us carried out our patriotic chore. And as my army buddies put it, "You were the dumbest draft dodger we ever met. You joined the Marine infantry to get out of the Army." I say, "Well, yeah, but it worked out." But my point is that each of us has a responsibility, and it's not based on a perfect country. There's never been a perfect country. But you'd have to go a long ways to find a country more willing to point out where

• 26:36Speaker 02

  we have fallen short, where we have such documents as our founding fathers gave us, because they were guided by the ancients. They gave us that one man locked up in a Birmingham jail without any access to any of those documents, but they're so in all of our minds that he could write a letter from a Birmingham jail and say, "America, you are falling short. We've got to do better." And so you see it actually in action right there from a Birmingham jail cell.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Ryan, but General Les Moreland actually cited that we got this sense from the British who got it from the Romans, right? I mean, there's a clear sense that this does come from the ancients, and there's a connection to the Stoics.

• 27:19Ryan Holiday?

  But there was a tension even in the ancient world. Seneca talked about how the distinction between the Epicureans and the Stoics was that the Epicureans were more interested in their sort of self-discovery and enlightenment. They retreat to the garden. And the Stoics got involved. He said that the difference was that the Epicureans got involved in politics only if they had to, and the Stoics got involved unless something prevented them. And, you know, today, when we think politics... We think, of course, running or holding office. But there are so many ways to contribute to public life, the public sphere. Right down to the fact that, you know, 50% of adults don't vote. So we have to participate in this system.

• 28:01Ryan Holiday?

  And if the people who are philosophically inclined are not participating, who are you seeding the fields to? I think that's ultimately what the Stoics realize on a very sort of practical level, that if you retreat off with your books and your ideas and you just debate these things in theory, but you're not involved, you're not contributing, you're not making these things accessible and practical to real people in a real way, somebody else is going to step in and fill that void. And so I think, yeah, the question of if you're not going to participate, who is participating? Who is speaking on your behalf? I think that sort of explains the situation that we're in right now.