What Did The Stoics Get WRONG? | Nick Thompson (CEO of The Atlantic)

Running isn’t just good exercise, it’s Stoicism in motion. In part two of Ryan’s conversation with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, they talk about how running mirrors the daily discipline of Stoic philosophy, the decline of expertise in modern life, the one decision Marcus Aurelius made that changed history, and what the Stoics might have gotten wrong. Nick Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, an American magazine founded in 1857, which earned the top honor for magazines, General Excellence, at the National Magazine Awards in both 2022 and 2023. In his time as CEO, the company has seen record subscriber growth. Before joining The Atlantic, he was the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. He is also a former contributor for CBS News and has previously served as editor. He has long been a competitive runner; in 2021, he set the American record for men 45+ in the 50K race. Check out Nick’s new book The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of SportsFollow Nick on Instagram and X @NXThompson🎟️ Come see Ryan Holiday LIVE: https://www.dailystoiclive.com/Seattle, WA - December 3, 2025 San Diego, CA - February 5, 2026 Phoenix, AZ - February 27, 2026 📖 Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday is out NOW! Grab a copy here: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I was in Palm Springs a couple of months ago, and I went for this little run. And this is the reel that I recorded while I was running. It is 4:00 PM in Palm Springs. It is 105 degrees outside. My wife says I have a mental illness, but I am training for this marathon. It's gonna be hot and greasy. I'm gonna do it early in the morning. But the idea is, you do it when you don't want to do it. You push yourself when it's hard. You try to keep it within three's inner bounds. Maybe this is beyond that, but it's the only slot I have. But we just flew in from Texas a couple of hours ago, and then we have dinner, and then I have a talk tomorrow. So I'm gonna do this run.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  I've done it before. It's beautiful. It's gonna be very hot and tough. But you challenge yourself, and it all leads you to where you want to go. I just hope I don't get heat stroke. And I hope I...

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Can make it back.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  So I've said this before, I don't know if my running habit is always totally healthy. The fact that I can't not do it is maybe something the Stoics would be a little suspicious of, but you know, you gotta pick your poison sometimes. So I think better this than a more destructive habit. If you listen to part one of this episode, you heard me introduce Nick Thompson, our guest. Nick is the CEO of The Atlantic. He runs to and from his office every day. He's also an American record holder for men in the 45 plus category in the 50K race. So he doesn't mess around, also a great writer. And apparently we go way back. He tells a story at the beginning of part one, where apparently I'd asked him about something

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  for an article I was writing for The Observer, where I was an editor many years ago, almost 10 years ago now, I guess this would have happened, maybe even more now that I'm thinking about it. It goes way back. Anyways, it was kind of a, just a delightful, full circle interview. We ended up talking much more than I thought we were gonna talk, which I think is a good sign. You know, you never know when you're having guests on. Are they gonna be someone that you're gonna hit it off with? Sometimes people aren't always well set up for the conversation style I do. We've actually taken a briefing guest, go, Ryan doesn't always ask questions. Sometimes he just says stuff and then it's your turn. Cause not everyone can handle that. Maybe it's not the best style, but it's my style.

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  And I either wanna have a good conversation, or I wanna wrap it up as quickly as possible. And in this one, I did not feel that way. We really got into it. And in part two, we talk more about the discipline of running, some of his thoughts on journalism. He's the CEO of one of the longest standing magazines in the country. And we talk about the Signal Gate crisis, which they were right in the middle of. Then we talk about some Stoicism at the end, which was a nice surprise. As I said, Nick is the CEO of a magazine that dates back to the 1850s. It's published some Stoics over the years, including Emerson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Previously, he was at Wired and The New Yorker. That's where we connected for the little thing we talked about at the beginning of part one. And he's a great runner. He has a new book called The Running Ground: A Father, A Son,

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  and The Simplest of Sports. I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was haunting. There's a bunch of Daily Dad stuff in there, too. Mostly what not to do, as far as his father was concerned. But you can follow Nick on Instagram and on Twitter, NX Thompson, and check out his new book, The Running Ground: A Father, A Son, and The Simplest. Sports. Hey, it's Ryan. I'm doing a bunch of live dates, including one coming up soon. I'm going to be in Seattle, Washington on December 3rd, San Diego, California on February 5th, and Phoenix, Arizona on February 27th. The talk I just did in Austin sold out, so this will almost certainly sell out, too. I would love to see you there. Go grab tickets at DailyStoicLive.com.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  This is the problem with my father, being told by John F. Kennedy that he's going to get to the White House by, you know, before him, right? Like, it suddenly makes it hard to appreciate little successes because you really need, like, big successes. And so, you know, huge success at a young age is a blessing and a curse.

• 5:02Ryan Holiday?

  Relatively few Wunderkins turned out to be that wonderful.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, the promise is there, and all the ingredients are there, but there's something, maybe it's you needed the drive to really earn it, and you don't have it because you think it's yours, or I don't know. Maybe it's like, in the older, less competitive, less meritocratic, not that our world is perfectly meritocratic, but when they were deliberately excluding large swaths of the population from the competition, you could be mediocre and entitled and still get pretty far.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  And now, a lot harder.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you're competing not just against men, women, people from all different backgrounds, but also like, the whole fucking world.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  Like, Harvard used to just be for this small part of the country, you could go there. And now it's like, no, no, no, do you know how many people live in China? And they're best people.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  They all want to go there, too.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  They go here, too.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  That can be either really inspiring and invigorating, or it can kind of just...

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Well, then it also, like, you can get your credential, and you can win in the 1960s in an easier world, and then you're competing in the 1990s and the 2000s in a much harder world.

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  And that's, that was tricky.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think that it kind of explains the political environment that we're in a little bit, too, although there obviously is a youth movement to it. A lot of it is like, people going like, hey, like, I don't like this new competitive environment. I'm not as comfortable in this competition. Like, I'm really... Good at trading stocks, but I'm not good at being polite to people. And you're saying that politeness and respect and collaboration is also one of the skills required to win in this competition.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  Fuck that.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  Fuck you. Let's take this part of the game off the table and just compete in the area that I'm comfortable with. And that's not how it works.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  It's not. It's well, it shouldn't be how it works.

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, right. But it's like, hey, they invented the forward pass at some point in football. And so the game changed.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  And you're like, no, no, no, I just like to smash into people. That's the football I like. But that's not the football we're playing anymore. It's a different, more elegant, finesse game now.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, one of the skills that's so important, it's going to change even more with AI when it starts changing, like upending businesses, changing the way we work, changing the way we relate to each other, like the ability to adapt and to play. Like to adapt to football where there's no forward pass, to adapt to football where there's a forward pass, and to adapt to football where you've got like half your team is robots, like

• 7:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  That's like part of the skill.

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  For the next 20 years.

• 7:32Ryan Holiday?

  Have you read this biography of William F. Buckley, the Sam Tannenhouse?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  I haven't read that.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  It's incredible.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Really? He's a great writer. I mean, Tannenhouse is, and Buckley is an amazing person to write about.

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I was like, do I need to read an 800-page biography of someone I don't care about and also don't like?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm like, no, I need every page of this.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  It's really good.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's really good. And it's kind of the same. You're like, oh, this guy was just born. Well, first off, talk about sort of overbearing fathers. That's sort of original sin. I was fascinated by the amount of intellectual energy. Once you understand the father, you go, oh, this, all this work and all this thinking and all this sort of rhetoric and elegance and artifice is just trying to dress up the inherent antisemitism, racism, reactionaryism of the anti-communism of the father. You're just like, he can't be like, well, dad hates Jews, so I hate Jews. It's like, well, that's not okay anymore, but I gotta figure out.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  You could have fought against it. I mean, you do have a bunch of options.

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, of course you could. Obviously. Obviously, that would have been better. What I'm saying is he gets the beliefs from his father. He accepts them.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:44Ryan Holiday?

  But they're not acceptable.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  He creates this whole political movement around kind of sublimating the raw kind of energy behind it.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:56Ryan Holiday?

  But making it palatable.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  So interesting.

• 8:59Ryan Holiday?

  And creating a way that other people who didn't get that spoon fed to them.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  Can believe, oh, okay, actually, Joseph McCarthy isn't a liar and a drunkard and a fool. No, he's actually serving this purpose. And it's like, it's fascinating.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wow. I will, I'll have to go, I'll go buy that in the bookshop when I'm on my way out.

• 9:20Ryan Holiday?

  So the idea of the bookstore is it's just the books that my wife and I have loved.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:24Ryan Holiday?

  And so I'm, I'm, I've got like 100 pages left, but I will definitely carry it. Yeah. Sometimes you, there are these figures and you're like, oh, this is kind of a key to understanding not just a moment in time, but then this moment in time is a way to understand like today's moment in time.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, my previous book was on the Cold War was on, it was called The Hawk and the Dove. It's about Paul Nitsch and George Kennan. And what drew me to that story is something quite relevant today. So they're like the two people who are key in American foreign policy from 1945 to 1990. They completely diametrically disagree on all matters of foreign policy, and yet they maintain a friendship.

• 9:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  And like part of what drew me to that story was thinking, this is something that needs to be told for today, where we have such a hard time talking to each other, right?

• 10:06Ryan Holiday?

  That was very common then, because even with Buckley, right? He's like friends with all these people that he is either attacking their lifestyles or their choices. And I can't, part of it's good. And then part of it, you go, there's a professional wrestling element of it that I don't like, which is like you are saying these horrible things or claiming to believe these things or enacting these policies. But on an individual level, you clearly don't believe it.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Right. That is, that's, okay, the professional wrestling analogy is good. But as a general principle, our country would work a lot better if. People who disagreed with each other in politics were also having dinner with each other and able to sort of talk, understand, work through it.

• 10:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, to people who sincerely believe diametrically opposed things, them being able to come together, collaborate, not see the other person as the enemy or a traitor, whatever. That's great.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And then like to understand there, it's like even just to listen, right? To get outside of your filter bubble and to listen, right? And maybe you don't change your view overall, but you actually understand it in a much deeper way because you've challenged your assumptions. And so much of the problem today is you live inside an information bubble, you live inside a filter bubble, you live inside a social bubble. We've segregated ourselves geographically, right? Like where we are right now is actually, it's great. There's a real mix of people across the political spectrum. But most of America, it's all blue or it's all red.

• 11:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Right? And that's a shame.

• 11:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, I do think this sort of great sort that's happening is beneficial in that way. Yeah, I think too many, there's no reason that all media has to be based in New York City or Los Angeles.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's one, I mean, one of the things we're trying to do at The Atlantic, obviously, we're based in New York and Washington, but like, we're starting a strategy of going to every state, right? Like, we're doing a big partnership with the Texas Tribune Festival in November.

• 11:47Ryan Holiday?

  They just asked me to talk at that.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  You should, you should talk at that. It'd be great. I'll be there. You know, so we're spending time in Austin. We're doing an event in every state in the country, right?

• 11:57Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  We're trying to get writers, you know, as far across the political spectrum as we can, right? So we are doing our best to be a magazine about America.

• 12:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and you need, you need people who have a sort of a basis and a familiarity with other parts of the country.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 12:12Ryan Holiday?

  I actually think of all the Trump ideas, sometimes there's occasionally a good one. I do think relocating certain government branches makes sense. Like, I think it's good the CDC is in Atlanta. Why would that also need to be in Washington DC?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you should, I mean, let's hope the CDC survives.

• 12:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, of course.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  I would like it to stay in Atlanta and have as many employees as it did a year ago, but we'll see. Yes, I absolutely agree, right? Like, move the government around, put in different places. And with The Atlantic, you know, I love having writers around the country. You just have different perspective, you learn different things, you know? You want people who come from different schools. It's hard, like, there are a lot of, like, reasons why journalism centralizes in New York. But, you know, do your best to get outside of it.

• 12:52Ryan Holiday?

  But a lot of it is because at some point you had to, like, physically hand someone the draft of your story. And that's not so necessary. Or someone wanted to be able to walk downstairs and look at the printers.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:03Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so, yeah, that why it's concentrated there, just like why tech is concentrated in Silicon Valley. Historically, makes total sense. But, but for the ecosystem to remain vibrant, you, you want, I think, kind of a diaspora of people in different places.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we're, we're, we're doing our best.

• 13:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and, and, yeah, there's no reason, like, there's no reason the writers themselves need to all be in one place.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  They don't only be in one place, and you can send them around, and they can go, they can live in Washington. They, so they can get all their sources, which is, you know, very valuable, has worked out great for us. But, like, send them around the country. You show up at DC cocktail parties, sometimes you get added to group chats, it's wonderful. But it's wonderful to have them going around the country.

• 13:42Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it was funny, knowing about that story and then, and then reading the book, I was like, I wonder if you had to go on some long runs to process how to handle this?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  It was funny, I didn't, you know, because I'm the CEO, not the editor in chief, I don't know what The Atlantic is going to run today. Like, I'm not involved in that process. And when that story came out, it all was so clear that we were in the right and that the folks criticizing us were in the wrong.

• 14:05Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  That, and it wasn't like a 60/40 thing, it was like a 99.9 to 0.1 thing.

• 14:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, no, that one's not, that's not even like the Pentagon Papers where there's some moral dilemma. It's very clear.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Very clear. And, and in fact, and Jeff Goldberg, the editor in chief, who gets included in the Signal chat, handles it perfectly, right? He doesn't disclose the classified information, he calls the White House, the White House says, yep, that's true, no problem, we publish it. Then after they've said it was true, and after we've published it, like, Nikki Haley and Pete Hegseth go out and like, that story is false, it's nonsense, there's no class. And we're like, usually it works the other way around. Like, normally, you lie and then say it's true. You don't say it's true and then lie afterwards.

• 14:42Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the amateurness, too, of the- Hey, it's it's not true, even though they could have very clearly looked at the chats.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:51Ryan Holiday?

  And then been like, oh, should we got to be very careful about how we deny and spin this story? Because we're setting them up for the next move. What alarming to me about how that happened, not not just the general incompetence of it. But let's like, you take something like the Cuban Missile Crisis and you go, okay. Secretary of Defense and the president better be very well versed in game theory.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:14Ryan Holiday?

  Because they do something, the other side does something. And this process, it can spin wildly out of control. You want someone who's able to have that kind of strategic empathy and savvy.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  So they tell the pilots, if you're shot at, you say it's birds, right? Because they know what will happen if they say they're shot at, right?

• 15:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And and so to go to to get off the plane and be like, there was nothing in this text. It didn't happen. And it's like, he knows and he's in the media, right? So he he's seen scandals and covered them. And he would have some instincts as a journalist, even a very partisan one of how he would. How he would attack or spin this story if he was trying to make someone look bad. And he like, doesn't understand that that this he's so emotional and then nurses these grievances. And then so impulsive that he can't think that he's serving to you on a silver platter. Your next story and the story after that and the story after that.

• 16:13Ryan Holiday?

  And you go, this is not a guy I want going eyeball to eyeball with the Secretary of Defense from another country.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, it was. It was a very weird situation. So I didn't actually have to go on any long runs to processes. I just sort of sat back and was like, wow, this is working out really well for us.

• 16:30Ryan Holiday?

  I just meant that not the long runs to decide what you're going to do.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:34Ryan Holiday?

  But just the stress of sometimes you have those days where you're like, have I just spent all day refreshing this as it's coming in?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:41Ryan Holiday?

  And those are the days that I feel like I really need to process. Or else I'm just going crazy because I did, I wasn't my regulated self throughout the day. I was. In this crisis mode.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I definitely had that where you're responding to comments and there were things that they were.

• 17:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's a perpetual adrenaline dump, I'm sure, for about 72 hours.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  And the White House is like, "The Atlantic is a failing magazine, losing money." I'm like, "No, actually, we're doing great. We're profitable. We've turned the corner. Our subscriptions are at a record high. We've been around since 1857." You can say you don't like us, but financially, I run the P and L. We're crushing it. I've got those facts. They're right here. So there were some things I had to respond to.

• 17:35Ryan Holiday?

  Well, again, yeah, I think you can get used to saying whatever you want.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Well, that was the weirdest thing about the crisis. It was like, do they think? Because sometimes you can lie and BS your way out of something, right? Do they really think that they can lie and BS their way out of this? Because there's screenshots, right? It's not questionable. It's like...

• 17:56Ryan Holiday?

  Well, here's what I think has happened. And this is a shift we haven't quite figured out what to do with. Because I just went through this thing where I was supposed to give a talk at the Naval Academy, and then they, basically, they found out that I was going to mention that they'd been removing books from the library, and they revoked my thing like minutes before I was supposed to go on. And so I, thinking of the old paradigm, I was like, "Guys." The person delivering the message is obviously not the bad guy and is just someone who's having to think about his pension, right? And I go, "I think you think you're going to avoid controversy by not doing this, but you understand it's going to be a lot more controversy. This is how it works." I was like, "You've publicly announced this talk. Even if I don't say anything about

• 18:41Ryan Holiday?

  it, journalists are going to know. Some student is going to say something. You're going to get way more attention." And then he goes, "Yeah, yeah, I understand." And then I realized, "Oh..." They don't care about negative attention at all. They are, we are post a world where, I mean, the fact that Pete Hegseth did that and didn't lose his job.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:03Ryan Holiday?

  Tells you, did the Signal Gate thing, it didn't lose his job. You realize, oh, it would have to be almost unfathomably bad, the scandal, that for us to re-enter a world where a New York Times story, or a Wall Street Journal story, or an Atlantic story helps you lose your job, because you're already unqualified for the job to begin with. And it's embarrassing that you're even in the job. So like, this normal world where a journalist reporting

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:31Ryan Holiday?

  that you are unqualified is not serious enough. So, so why, what are they afraid of? Like, in this case, these people, this is like a three-star admiral or whatever, that is ultimately, you know, making this decision. He or she is worried not about the New York Times piece that I'm gonna write about my invitation being revoked, or the subsequent, you know, CNN story. They're worried about the president screaming at them.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:00Ryan Holiday?

  Or they're worried about someone coming after them for mortgage fraud.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:04Ryan Holiday?

  Or Elon Musk sending a tweet about them.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:07Ryan Holiday?

  Or they're literally worried about a crazy person showing up at their house.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:12Ryan Holiday?

  Because of the attention. And so I think that's the scary world we're entering, where like, it's actually, public embarrassment or losing face is no longer an effective deterrent, because on the other side, you have this stick of like, violence, or...

• 20:30Speaker 01

  And you gotta hope that like, somehow this reverses, and we get a more trustworthy, believable civic discourse. But we haven't been going in the right direction for quite some time now.

• 20:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I don't know how you put that car back on the track.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Well, my hypothesis a couple of years ago was that if you could fix social media, right, so that you would go on Twitter, you would go on Instagram, you would go on threads, and you would emerge with a deeper understanding of the world as opposed to just like a hotter understanding of your viewpoints, right? If you could do that, right? You would solve a lot of these problems. Like, if you could have, like, the internet exist as a place where it's like Kenan and Nitsa, where you're like, learning from each other. And so, I tried to build a social media platform. And like, the moment to do this is now, while social media is fragmenting and while you have the opportunity with AI. Like, AI can introduce you to new viewpoints. AI can help you challenge your assumptions. AI can help you think through things more deeply, right? There is an opportunity to do this. I don't know who is gonna do this, and it doesn't seem like the platforms are doing

• 21:27Speaker 01

  that, because there's obviously a business imperative to... Twitter just moves further and further to the right, deeper and deeper filter bubble, threads like, is countering that, blue sky. But, there is a way to get there. Like, you're probably in group chats, where you can have real discourse. And you're in the group chat because you're like, you agree on something else that put you in the group chat. Like, you're either, you're part of a community, you're soccer dads, you're whatever. So you have this thing that binds you that's outside of the hard issues, and then you can talk about the hard issues. That is doable, right? And like, getting that done at scale is like, a project that would do so much good for America.

• 22:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you could argue that Elon Musk might ultimately do the world a service by effectively destroying Twitter.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:10Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, it's certainly gotten worse, and made, had real consequences for how many brains it's broken. But like, it's also dying at the same time.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  I had, you know, when he took it on, I was like, it's probably gonna get worse, but maybe he'll make it better, but it hasn't.

• 22:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's interesting that he decided to... It's clearly like, it broke his brain quite some time ago, right? Like, how does this guy that used to read Soviet rocket manuals, and host salons about space, so he could figure out the aerospace industry, and then the solar industry, and then electric cars, and batteries, and all... Like, this guy that was this first principles thinker, not that long ago, like, recognizably a first principles thinker, at the highest level. Go to a guy that's like tweeting misinformation from like Russian bots.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Like, how does that happen? Three in the morning, right?

• 23:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and hundreds of times a day.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:04Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Like, clearly, to me, that's one of the starkest examples of like what an information diet can do to a person. I mean, he went from being like as good a shape as you could be in.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:16Ryan Holiday?

  To like, like one of those people that, you know, is like on the TV shows where it's like, I weigh 3,000 pounds and I, you know, I have to be lifted out of my house by a crane. Like, it's, he went from as healthy as you could be. I mean, also probably always an asshole and weird and on the spectrum and whatever, but like, lived in, in not just reality, but on the cutting edge of all these breakthroughs.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Right, like lived in the future and now just.

• 23:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, lives in fantasy land.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  I do think that the more time you spend on Twitter, like, the more likely it is to break your brain. You see that with lots of colleagues, you see that with lots of people you work with, not with everybody. And if you could change the architecture, right, if you could like somehow fix it and change it, or you could build an alternative platform, that would do, I mean, my inspiration for this, you know, project, which we, you know, since Soul shut down, was a conversation with a friend of mine where we're like, what is the best thing you could do for America right now? Like, what, like, if all the things that one could possibly do, and like, part of the reason I work at The Atlantic is like, my genuine view that The Atlantic helps American democracy by informing people across spectrum, by like knocking at everybody, by doing deeply fact-checked reporting, and that my skill is like building business models for publications like this.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  So if I'm going to do something good for the world, it is to make as much money for The Atlantic as possible so we can hire as many journalists as possible and put them into our editorial machine. And I had this conversation with a friend, like, what is the best thing you could like reasonably do for America? It's like, well, if you could fix the way the social media algorithms work, that would be it.

• 24:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, because it certainly has broken a lot of people's brains. And I think, I do think that's a big part of it, but when I said it, I don't know how you put that cart back on the. On the tracks, I mean, like where we all agreed that there were certain things, like if you accidentally add a reporter to a highly sensitive, you know, sort of war plans, and you don't resign in shame.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:08Ryan Holiday?

  Like that's-

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Or even admit it was the wrong thing to do.

• 25:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, that's obviously a social media problem, but that's also like, that's what happens when you, when you live in a culture or a world where honor means nothing and reputation means nothing. Like, that, that's further upstream, I think, than even social media. Like, or even like, imagine, you think about the, when he's asked, right, if he wants to be Secretary of Defense, he should have said, "I'll be spokesman for the Defense Department." Because like, he's just like, no part of him is like, "I am not qual-" Like, if there was ever an instance where imposter syndrome needed to rear its head, it should be here, you know? Like, it's remarkable.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  I mean, he really, he has a strange sense of what needed to happen, the most important thing for American warfighting. But he did have a sense that like, to fix the American warfighting machine, you have to sort of get rid of the trans soldiers. And he really believed that was the number one thing to do, and he was the guy to do it. So I guess, in, I guess in a way, I'm defending him. Like, he, I don't agree with, he thought was the central problem in the American military, but he did think there was a central problem that he was the first person to-

• 26:15Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think he thinks that's the central problem with the American military and sort of the global ecosystem, because he just doesn't know literally anything about it. Like, I think all of them, all of them have this view, Musk included, of like, how the world works from like tweets they've read, like tweet threads they've read-

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:34Ryan Holiday?

  And from like Fox News stories, but they just don't, they don't, they, like, when you, they don't understand how these organizations and systems evolved, why they exist, you know? And part of that, I think, is the Silicon Valley thing of like, "I don't know anything about this industry, but I'm gonna disrupt it."

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:54Ryan Holiday?

  Is like, kind of become an ethos of all of- Not like I'm gonna understand it inside it out and then fix it or improve it or blow it up because of X, Y, and Z, but it's like, yeah, yeah, I get how it works. You know, and then it goes to your first book, like, take someone like Keenan, or like, they, they were deeply informed, not just like on a intelligence basis, but like, they knew all the literature and the class, they were just-

• 27:22Speaker 01

  They speak the language, right? Like, you speak Russian, you go and you live there, and that helps, gives you an understanding. You don't do like one real estate deal for McDonald's in Moscow, right? And suddenly, you're the guy, the guy to do it. Yeah, we have given up a lot on expertise in our government, which is a real, which is a real shame.

• 27:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, one, I mean, one of my favorite Atlantic writers is Tom Nichols, in his book about the, the death of expertise, like, just this sense that like, I know better because I thought about this for eight seconds.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the stories that just crushed me from the last year was the story of the United States Institute of Peace, which is where my dad worked. And like, my dad, for all those foibles and flaws, like, knew a ton about Asia, right? Lived there, written lots of books, studied it, cared a ton about it. And then, you know, Musk comes in, and it turns out, like, there's a guy, the US Institute of Peace has been funding, he's been advising us on like, our strategy in Afghanistan, and like, helped us prepare for meetings with the Taliban. But a long time ago, he worked for the Taliban before he overthrew the government, and then he switched sides. And he'd work for him because that was how you got a job. And so Musk comes in, it's like, United States Institute of Peace is funding the Taliban. And you're like, no, that's not what's going on. They're like, this guy who, 25 years ago, had an administrative job, switched side, in fact,

• 28:31Speaker 01

  advised the Trump administration on how to meet with the Taliban, he got a grant. Because that's what the United States Institute of Peace does. It funds people who have expertise, who advise our government, so we can make the right decisions about policy in Afghanistan, right? But if you like, kind of just want to destroy it, and what you care about is not expertise in government, but how to get a good tweet, right? Well, then you blow it up. And so the whole institute where my dad spent a lot of his life is blown up with this utter nonsense, right? And it's, like, was the United States Institute of Peace, like, the most efficient organization? I have no idea, right? Based on what my dad said, maybe it could have been better here and there. But like, surely, it's the kind of thing that we should be doing in the world. And to blow it up over stuff like that just made my heart break.

• 29:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that he would, he basically takes, and he's a big character in the book. I'm just finishing, but I think it's a fascinating trajectory of a human being. But like, he basically takes Twitter, wrecks it, and then, you know, drives its valuation into the toilet. Although there's some now financial chicanery about whether it's an AI company and it's supposedly worth doing.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Well, he's made a lot of money off Twitter net, net. I mean, like, he's drove the business into the toilet, but he's like, used it to help his other businesses and like gotten leverage and political power.

• 29:46Ryan Holiday?

  And is that real or is that financial, you know, shenanigans, I think? So put that aside, but basically the business of Twitter itself, which he, you know, so he takes it over. But sorry, he take, the lesson he takes from all this is like, this is an effective and smart way to do reforms and changes. Right? As though there's not a playbook for hostile takeovers that like has also been, you know, figured out over generations. But like, probably Twitter did have way too many employees and a bunch of them needed to be taken off the books. Like for it to maintain its viability. That's very different than laying them all off indiscriminately and then having to rehire some of them. And then accidentally laying off the janitor who, you know, cleans the toilets.

• 30:28Ryan Holiday?

  And now the toilets are overflowing and, you know, maybe there is too many leases on the books, but just not paying the leases is not enough. Like, there's a way to do things and I don't mean it's like, this is how we do things in polite society. But there's like, there's a way to do things and then there's chaos and dysfunction. And like, it's interesting that we have taken a lesson in the dangers of chaos and dysfunction. And been like, let's apply that to the place where we make nuclear weapons.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's insane.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  It's, and like, let's like, let's blow up all of USAID in such a way that we now have warehouses full of food that we were going to send to children in Africa that is now rotting and we're not sure how to dispose of it.

• 31:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. You could, you could just say, hey, get rid of, give all the stuff to Africa and then we're closing it down. Like, there's, you can still end up with the same outcome, just one is incredibly wasteful. And extra cruel. But if cruelty is the point, as the famous Atlantic story puts it, then you don't care. And then that's, that's actually the algorithm that you're trying to game.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:33Ryan Holiday?

  And that's not good. It's not just good for the, not good for the world. It's not good for the people doing it either.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  That's not good for anybody. And like, I think about NHTSA and Canon and like, what they would think about this and just like, watching the world of expertise where you fought hard and you disagreed. And then a world where expertise doesn't matter and like, care doesn't matter.

• 31:50Ryan Holiday?

  Do you think if you drop them into where we are today, yes, they might go, this is crazy. You can't do any of this. But what's interesting to me is how many experts and people who were of and in love with this system even have become those. Like you go, this is a Supreme Court justice. Like if there's anyone who could be like, I might agree with some of the policies, but I don't agree with the way you're doing it. It would be that person. I think you're watching how, how difficult it is to remain sane in an insane environment.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people go along with the insane environment because they're afraid. You know, you mentioned earlier, they're afraid of the consequences of not going along with it. But also a lot of people like, some people just feel like, okay, the system is insane. And my best role is to do the best I can. Right? Like I'm going to, and those, you know, I have a bunch of friends who like work in the Trump administration. Some of whom work on like AI policy where like, it's actually pretty good, right? Like they're a bunch of like smart people. And I disagree with the way they deal with China and all that. But like, you know, I have a bunch of friends who have made a commitment saying, you know what? This is crazy, right? There's a lot of nonsense going on, but I'm going to go in there and do my best. And I do actually wonder with NHTSA, you know, my grandfather, like he would have like wholly objected to everything.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  But he also might've said, you know what? I'm going to go in and like, try to like move it in my direction as best as possible. Because this is America and we're all committed to America. And that's like the most important thing.

• 33:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and the the human capacity for rationalization is immense.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:32Ryan Holiday?

  And the capacity of ego to tell yourself like, no, no, no, I'm essential.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:40Ryan Holiday?

  And I need to keep my powder dry, or I need to be there in the room for when this really bad thing happens. That's if I'm not there, like, it's this sort of.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Well, that might be true.

• 33:53Ryan Holiday?

  It might be true, but also if everyone convinces themselves of that, then nobody ever actually does it.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  But sometimes it's true. What if like, you know, was it true of Mark Milley in the last two months of the Trump administration, the first term, that like, you know, who knows?

• 34:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. No, no, I think about that a lot because one of the classic examples in antiquity is like Seneca is Nero's advisor.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 34:15Ryan Holiday?

  And he has to, you know, he probably is rightfully telling himself, I'm the adult in the room. I'm preventing this from getting bad. He's also the guy that's like, look, I know he just murdered his mom, but like, it's my job, you know?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:28Ryan Holiday?

  And so it's this, it's this interesting thing because yes, there are sometimes that person, right? Some, if Mike Pence is not there on January 6th, it goes very differently. And yet, almost certainly, you are not Mike Pence. Right? Like, like.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  But somebody was, there was one person who was Mike Pence, right?

• 34:46Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Right. Right.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  So how do you know?

• 34:48Ryan Holiday?

  You don't. That's, that's like where the sort of academic philosophy meets real world reality.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  So do you think Seneca should not have worked for Nero?

• 34:58Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know. Well, and then you go, okay, the last time, what happened when we tried to get rid of that one emperor? How did that go? Oh, yeah, Rome had a horrendous civil war, and then we ended up with another emperor forever.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:10Ryan Holiday?

  So like, there is this, there's a book I'm gonna give you in the bookstore about this exact topic. But yeah, I don't know. I like, I think you can, I think you can debate it either way, and I think it's actually very important that you debate it.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:21Ryan Holiday?

  But it's, it's complicated.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  All right, let's go to another one.

• 35:23Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Why did Marcus Aurelius hand the emperorship to his son?

• 35:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, this is the infinitely fascinating one.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  I don't, this history is not my history. I've like, always had like, I won the Marcus Aurelius Award when I was in high school. So I've always had like, a little bit of interest.

• 35:35Ryan Holiday?

  What was that?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  I mean, it's kind of an interesting part of the book where I win this big award in Andover for just like scholarship and leadership, and my dad is drunk and like storms the stage to congratulate me, which was amazing. But any case, you know, it's like the perfect life philosophy. You talk about it all the time. It's incredible. Like, his writings, just amazing. Meditations are awesome. I really think that like. Part of the reason I'm so excited this podcast is like the lessons of Stoicism are like so deeply ingrained in my book in like a subtle way, not in a way I ever lay out there. And yet he makes the decision that like ends the Roman Empire.

• 36:05Ryan Holiday?

  To be fair, it does go for like another 300 years.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like-

• 36:08Ryan Holiday?

  The decline of Rome is grossly overthrown.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Kind of like-

• 36:11Ryan Holiday?

  If you're the last of the five good emperors, that says something about you, right?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  So what happened?

• 36:17Ryan Holiday?

  I know. It's, so I think part of it is related to the themes of your book, which is like trauma, right? So five emperors in a row, or four emperors in a row, don't have a son. So they get to choose their successor. Well, Marcus Aurelius not only has a son, but he has like five sons.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:34Ryan Holiday?

  So it's already complicated.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:37Ryan Holiday?

  I think one thing we can take from this is this is why hereditary kingships are bad.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 36:42Ryan Holiday?

  Right?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  With your five sons, it's easier to not give it to any of them than if you have one son.

• 36:46Ryan Holiday?

  And so he tries to get, the plan was to give it to the first one, then the plan was to give it to another one. Then the plan was to have two of them rule as, as co-emperors, as he did with his stepbrother.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:56Ryan Holiday?

  And then the problem is they keep fucking dying. So all of them die. He loses, six children die before adulthood. So Commodus is the only one left, which in and of itself, if you're like, why is Commodus as bad as Joaquin Phoenix portrays him, which he is? You go, losing half your siblings before adulthood-

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:17Ryan Holiday?

  Would fuck you up, right?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  So if you're Marcus Aurelius, maybe you should realize that and then be like, okay, I'm not going to give it to this guy. I'm going to give it to this other guy.

• 37:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, right. But this has also never happened before in human history.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:29Ryan Holiday?

  Where a king has chosen someone over their own children. Right? So like, this is, this is the dilemma. And this is where I think Stoicism has this kind of idea of like duty and you're not in control and you play the hand you're dealt. Maybe falls woefully short in this instance. But like, we're told by historians who are writing around this time, I actually have a chapter about this, weirdly to connect it back to Elon Musk. It comes back to like, who advises you? So, so it's not like everyone, as far as we understand from the evidence.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:01Ryan Holiday?

  It's not like everyone's like- Romulus is a psychopath at age 11.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:06Ryan Holiday?

  And he can go nowhere near. And Marcus Aurelius is, won't hear anything about it and does it anyway. As far as we're told, he seems somewhat promising. And by the way, Nero has five good years first. It's called the Quinianum Neuronus, where he listens to Seneca.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:22Ryan Holiday?

  And then he goes off the deep end. So there's some evidence that it seemed like it was going in an okay direction. And then we're told that he entrusts his son, who is not, you know, fully of, of age, as I understand. You know, he's not 30 or something. He entrusts his son to like the smartest advisors and thinkers in all of Rome, many of whom had taught Marcus himself. And the idea is like, hey, if you listen to these people, you'll do all right.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:51Ryan Holiday?

  And he promptly fires all of these people and does not listen to them. And so to me, it's, it's something about, yes, power corrupts absolutely. But this is why we have corporate boards. This is why.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:04Ryan Holiday?

  There's checks and balances and it is very hard.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  So Marcus Aurelius should have figured this out and somehow like, okay, I'm going to give it to you, but you have to listen, you have to have your Seneca.

• 39:15Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, no, what I'm saying is I think he did, one argument is he did basically everything you can do. And if, if someone chooses not to listen.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:24Ryan Holiday?

  To their advisors and rejects all of the teachings that they've been given, decides to be a wild maniac instead. There's only so much you can do about that.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:34Ryan Holiday?

  Right? So I, I think mostly what we use classical history for is to teach kind of anecdotal lessons that, that are more applicable to our slightly less insane situation. So what I, I take from comment is, okay, this is what happens when you reject the advice of people who are more informed than you. But I think if Marcus Aurelius was sitting here, the first question you have to ask is, what happened? This is insane. And because I don't think there's anything in the historical record that explains it. Like, there's no, like, he knew it was a bad idea and did it anyway. And there's no, like, we were all surprised by it. It's, it's kind of this black hole of like, we just don't. No.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:15Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, maybe it's, I mean-

• 40:17Speaker 01

  And there's nothing in his diaries about the choice.

• 40:20Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:20Ryan Holiday?

  Or his letters. And yeah, it's weird, but it's like Churchill's son sucks, Roosevelt's sons suck. There are very few world leaders who have had amazing children.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  I mean, we're now dealing with the RFK Junior testimony today after RFK, RFK the first.

• 40:42Ryan Holiday?

  And you gotta lay a good chunk of that, not on his dad, but on his grandfather, who was a maniac and a monster.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:51Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, so it's, I think part of it, part of it has, it's, it's almost more explicable in those full dynasties. Like King Charles, you're like, okay, this is why we don't have this system.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:05Ryan Holiday?

  It's a dumb system. But what's remarkable about this period of Roman emperors is that it wasn't that system.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:12Ryan Holiday?

  Like, he was violating precedent.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Right. He didn't have to do it.

• 41:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there could have been some other, like, stop or some way to, anyway.

• 41:20Ryan Holiday?

  But what's remarkable to me, like, I think that's fascinating, equally fascinating and baffling, is what happens when Marcus Aurelius becomes emperor, which is the first thing that he does is give half the power to his adopted stepbrother. So you're like, at some level, he's not like this power-loving-

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:41Ryan Holiday?

  Like dynastical, you know, Macbeth character.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Well, and that comes through in the diaries and in all the notes and everything and like, you know, and you really appreciate that kind of leadership and the humility in that kind of leadership.

• 41:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And then even Hadrian, which doesn't have a son, to set this in motion is remarkable.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Which makes the ultimate decision so much more shocking.

• 42:01Ryan Holiday?

  It's, it's fucking fascinating.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it's, it's a great historical, I mean, I'm not a Roman historian, but it is an amazing question, and I've always wondered about it.

• 42:09Ryan Holiday?

  I suspect the only reason there is not a book on it is that there's just not the material.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, who knows? Maybe there-

• 42:15Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I just mean like, the, the evidence is so, there's like five lines about it, you know, there's not, but, but it is a, maybe it would make a better novel.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would be an excellent novel about like Marcus Aurelius's choice.

• 42:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Why?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:30Ryan Holiday?

  Because you could decide to make Commodus- Cartoonish or not like, you know?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  And there are all kinds of things when you have like an unqualified son like this, like the Saudi princes do this, like you give them like something amazing, like you go run this like beautiful piece of land.

• 42:45Ryan Holiday?

  And you can say, look, Egypt's yours.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:47Ryan Holiday?

  But this guy is.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  You're not going to make the decisions, right? Like, you can go run this hotel chain, you can have a great time, we'll set you up with a nice car, right? But like, you're not going to make the important decisions because it's not really right.

• 43:00Ryan Holiday?

  But that's also easier when you have 40 sons.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:04Ryan Holiday?

  And not.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Not one who's left after.

• 43:07Ryan Holiday?

  And then there was one.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:09Ryan Holiday?

  And then also, I mean, you think it's like, it's a major innovation when they're like, actually, the daughter can do it, too.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:15Ryan Holiday?

  Like, that's 1,000 years later. They're like, oh, maybe the daughter can do it, and then she can get married, and that's an innovation.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Are there other elements of Stoicism where you're, where you're like, this is wrong, like, this doesn't apply now?

• 43:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I just think it's interesting, you talk about like, you're sort of groomed for some job. At no point is Marx like, I don't want to do this.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:35Ryan Holiday?

  Like, like, he would have been so much happier as like, an academic, or as a philosopher, like, or as the advisor to the emperor.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:42Ryan Holiday?

  At no point does he seem to think like, oh, yeah, I can, I can do what I want.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:48Ryan Holiday?

  Because there is this kind, I think, the idea of agency is a concept that comes later.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:55Ryan Holiday?

  Or even, I just did this Daily Stoic email a while, there's this letter from George Washington where he's like, like, basically like, I really hope someone does something about this slavery thing, because it's like, so bad.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:06Ryan Holiday?

  And it's like, I don't know, maybe the guy starting a new country could do something about, like, there's literally no one in a better position.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:13Ryan Holiday?

  To do something about this problem than the guy writing this letter going, I hope someone does something about this.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:19Ryan Holiday?

  And it's interesting that you get this guy who's literally the most powerful person in the world, and he seems to have this like, very circumscribed understanding of like, what his capacities are.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:34Ryan Holiday?

  And I guess that's kind of a letdown, considering how rare philosopher kings are.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:40Ryan Holiday?

  Like, Jimmy Carter, one of the most thoughtful, fundamentally decent people to ever become president, to become the most powerful man in the world, like, immediately gets to work, and he's like, here's all the important things I want to do.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:53Ryan Holiday?

  There's like, not really any of that in Marx's realist, which I find also fascinating.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:58Ryan Holiday?

  Like. There's no reforms. There's no like, like that scene at the beginning of Gladiator where he's like, Rome is meant to be a republic. Like, I'm gonna do, like, I think he takes from Stoicism that that's just not how it's done in real life.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Right. So in a way, like, what you're teaching is like, follow these lessons, but there's some things you should do a little differently, right? If you are made emperor of the world, like, you don't have to be quite as humble as the Stoics are teaching. Like, you should go and like, maybe fix some of the problems.

• 45:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I mean, look, there's what's in our control, and then there's what's not in our control. That's the basis of Stoicism.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, what about all the stuff in the middle?

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:34Ryan Holiday?

  Like, there's obviously some stuff that we have some ability to influence, or some say, or should try.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:43Ryan Holiday?

  And that, that's, I think, missing in the Stoics. There's also just a, I mean, there's not a resignation, but yeah, there's just an understanding that the status quo is what it is. And that, I think, can be helpful, but if everyone thought that, where would we be?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Right. You really don't change a whole lot.

• 46:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And I think that's Seneca's dilemma in the Court of Nero.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, as I said earlier, like, my running life, I think about Stoicism like, a decent amount, because, like, the daily habits of running connect very deeply. And I fully believe that part of what went wrong with my father, as I kind of alluded, is almost like he didn't have this, like, Stoic belief, right? But the other thing about running that's so interesting is that, like, sometimes you have to not accept, like, how fast you can go. Like, when I think about my running life, you know, there are a couple of moments where I just made these huge breakthroughs by essentially denying the sort of what seemed like the obvious limit. You know, once kind of inadvertently, because I didn't know how far I was running, the other, like, through a sort of a more psychological process in my 40s. But that's kind of anti Stoic, right?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  It's like, it's sort of flipping it.

• 46:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's anti Stoic and it isn't. I mean, there's that famous line about how a reasonable person adapts themselves to the world and the unreasonable person adapts the world. And it's thus, progress depends on the unreasonable man.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:06Ryan Holiday?

  Right? So like, where would we be if there weren't people who challenged things and tried to do things and whatever? At the same time, like, it's easy to overstate the passivity of the Stoics. Then when you look at like, who they were and what they did, I mean, like, Cato doesn't accept this.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:22Ryan Holiday?

  The founders are like, steeped in Stoicism. They're like, we should start a new country.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:26Ryan Holiday?

  So there, there is this sort of long lineage of sort of Stoics who are active in public life.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:31Ryan Holiday?

  Who are not just like, doing their duty and questioning nothing, but are kind of, not just actively engaged, but like, radical. There's a whole generation of Stoics known as the Stoic Opposition. So for, you contrast Seneca in Nero's court with this guy named Thrasya, who's like, basically, like, the perpetual thorn in Nero's side and is like, active and again, ultimately gives his life in that sort of resistance. So, like, I think the, our understanding of who the Stoics were, were, is over-informed by what they wrote.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:04Ryan Holiday?

  And not informed enough by what they did.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:08Ryan Holiday?

  And that is interesting because it's so much of philosophy about, you're supposed to do it, not say it.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:13Ryan Holiday?

  And you go, oh.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  That's a funny irony.

• 48:14Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so maybe they're like, sure, don't get, don't get too passionate, don't get too worked up about things. That's because they're super passionate, involved.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:25Ryan Holiday?

  Active people. And like, so, so it's not the, like, um, sometimes I'll see this, because I'll post something about, especially in this kind of very aggravating, triggering, outrageous world we live in, it's like, about not being upset by everything you read. And people go, so you're just telling me to sit here and do nothing?

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Suck it up, yeah.

• 48:43Ryan Holiday?

  And it's like, well, you're probably already doing nothing. So, you know what I mean? You're, you're commenting on TikTok pieces. Like, I don't think, you didn't take time out of the massive, you know, global nonprofit that you run to comment on this thing. You're already doing nothing. But like, I think they're saying- Saying, no, no, no, if you're in the arena. Yeah. Then you've got to be in control of your emotions because the stakes are very high. Right. And so I think we sometimes, if you take it that these are, these are people involved in the thick of things, saying, don't get triggered, don't get upset, manage your emotions, focus on what you control. That's very different than like the Epicureans in their garden saying the same thing. Because the default for one is engagement and the default for

• 49:27Ryan Holiday?

  the other is disengagement. Yeah. You want to check out some books? Yeah, I'd love to check out some books. I got time. All right, great.

• 49:39Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.