Stephen Hanselman on Pursuing Virtue and Redefining Courage | How Are You Going To Be?

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to his agent and writing partner Stephen Hanselman (The Daily Stoic, Lives of The Stoics) about how they both got introduced to Stoic philosophy, how his new book Courage Is Calling and the Stoic Virtues series came about, how true excellence cannot be achieved without the 4 virtues, and more. Stephen Hanselman has worked for over three decades in publishing as a bookseller, publisher and literary agent. He is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, where he received a Master’s degree while also studying extensively at Harvard’s philosophy department. He lives with his family in South Orange, New Jersey. Ryan Holiday’s new book Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave is out now! You can still get the preorder bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/courageiscallingList your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to https://appsumo.com/ryanholiday to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal. SimpliSafe just launched their new Wireless Outdoor Security Camera. Get the new SimpliSafe Wireless Outdoor Security Camera, visit https://simplisafe.com/stoic. What’s more, SimpliSafe is celebrating this new camera by offering 20% off your entire new system and your first month of monitoring service FREE, when you enroll in Interactive Monitoring. Again that’s https://simplisafe.com/stoic. The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today. 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. Go to dailystoic.com/preorder to get your copy today. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Stephen Hanselman: Instagram, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  How are you going to be? Every day, we have a choice. We choose how we're going to act, what we're going to do, what kind of code we're going to look by. As the title of Sheila Hady's novel puts it, "The essential question of our days and lives is this: How should a person be?" And that's really the central question of Stoic philosophy, too, to help you answer that question well. Each of us has the choice to be good or bad, strong or weak, brave or cowardly. Marcus Aurelius's writings, in a sense, are his attempt to

• 1:26Speaker 00

  answer that incredibly difficult question. You've been made emperor. What kind of emperor will you be? What kind of person will you be? And when he lists his epithets for the self, that's what he was answering. He was saying, what a person, what he should be, he was saying, upright, modest, straightforward, sane, cooperative, disinterested. And there's so many that we should add to this list: resourceful, resilient, grateful, kind, courageous, still. And certainly, all of these words are better than the alternatives: uncooperative, insane, duplicitous, egotistical, crooked. So what will you choose today? How will you

• 2:08Speaker 00

  be? That is the question. And actually, the rules I have, I have them written here, my epithets for the self, I keep them on my computer, say, honest, calm, fair, father, like a parent, brave and generous. That's how I want to be every day, in every way, in everything that I do, and I never want to forget it. Because I'm trying to decide, we're becoming who we're gonna be, as Cheryl Strayed says. So you might as well be that person today.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As you know, Murphy's Law is a law of the universe. What can go wrong will. And anytime I put something out into the world, I am reminded just how much can go wrong. Book launches are always like insanely stressful. So much goes wrong. But this one has been nuts. So as you know, I'm signing the copies myself, fulfilling them out of the painted porch on like Lives of the Stokes and Stillness. They mailed me like sheets of paper, which I signed and they then bound into the book. Well, that wasn't possible with this book with Courageous

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Calling. And so it's been this, you know, overwhelming, both emotionally, but also logistically, sort of scramble to fulfill something like 10,000 signed pre-orders, which seriously, to everyone who ordered, I am beyond honored and I appreciate so much. But I thought I'd give you a little inside look into how that's gone. The printed copies were supposed to arrive off the printers at the publisher's warehouse, like the 27th of August. And then there was a small delay. The pandemic has overloaded most domestic printers and they arrived on the first. Now, I was leaving on the 5th to do the, we drove

• 4:01Speaker 00

  across the country. I did a bunch of in-person podcasts in Los Angeles, which there's a bunch of stuff from me coming on. And there's a great YouTube vlog we did about it, if you want to check it out. But I needed some of those copies to arrive before I left, so I could sign like 1,000 or two before I left. And then the rest would arrive while I was gone. And then I would come back, sign the rest of them. They would all be set up and arranged for me to do that. So there'd be a lot of redundancies and overlap. And then I could sort of steadily do it. Well, that did not happen. Not only did no copies arrive before I left, but only like 10% of the copies that needed to arrive while I was gone, arrived. And then I came home and was way behind the eight ball. And the books

• 4:46Speaker 00

  that were supposed to arrive in the middle of last week, didn't, didn't arrive. And then the day they were supposed to arrive, they didn't arrive. The publisher hadn't sent them on time, which is very frustrating. Then the shipping company lost them, sent them somewhere else, then they brought them back. And then, this is all happening yesterday, 4,500 copies of the 10,000 or so arrived at the painted porch in a van without means of unloading them. So we had to unload them by hand, then I had to sign them, then we had to package them, and we're not even close to digging our way out of it. It's been a lot. So it's been a lot, and that's what I am dealing with today.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  But I took a quick break from signing and packaging and overseeing this operation, which a bunch of amazing fans and volunteers have come and helped with. So thank you to them. And my wife and my in-laws and my employees have also been spectacular. But I took a break to have a discussion with one of my favorite people, a person who not only would none of my books be possible without, but The Daily Stoic itself would not exist without, and that is the one and only Steve Hanselman. Steve is my translator on The Daily Stoic. He was my co-writer on Lives of the Stoics. And he's also my book agent.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  He's been a book seller, a publisher, and a literary agent for like 30 years. He's a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. He has a master's degree and studied quite a bit in the philosophy department. He's worked with a bunch of amazing authors, including the one and only Tim Ferriss, who is the source of our connection. But I wanted to talk to Steve, because Steve knows about as much about Stoicism as anyone I have ever met. And I wanted to talk about the virtue of courage. Because whether you pick up the book or not, courage is important. It's desperately lacking in today's world. And I wanted to just, I wanted to talk about courage. I wanted to talk about what it meant to the Stoics.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  I also wanted to give you kind of an inside look into my, who I am, how other people see me, what I am like as a client, what I'm like as a writer, what I'm like as an author, working with a publisher, and just some of the logistics of like the big leaps and some of the backstory behind the big... Scary leaps that I took in my life, whether it was leaving marketing to write my first book, whether it was publishing my first controversial book, leaving marketing behind to write my first philosophy book, and then the decision to take on this sort of big overwhelming and scary series, the Four Virtues series that I'm working on now, and just some of the stress and tension

• 7:36Speaker 00

  that it that has been sort of getting this book out into the world over the last several weeks. And Steve felt like an amazing person to talk to about it. I love Steve. He's a great dude. And I think you'll you'll get a sense of our affection and collaborative relationship in this interview. So thank you to Steve. And remember Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave is now available everywhere. You can go to your local bookstore and pick it up. You can come to the Painted Porch and pick it up. We are still offering the preorder bonuses. We've extended it to the end of this week. So you can get that at dailystoic.com/preorder. But you can also get Audible, you can get eBooks, you can get whatever you want from wherever

• 8:17Speaker 00

  you want it. But I would very much like you to support the new book Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. And in the meantime, enjoy this conversation with Stephen Hanselman and myself on the topic of the Four Virtues and the most important of the Four Virtues, courage.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  You know what I was thinking about? What do you remember about the first time we met? Because I it occurred to me that it was almost 10 years ago exactly that we went out with my first book.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess the first time in person, we were in a room together at Tim Ferriss's Marketing Summit out in Napa. And we actually both spoke on the dais that day, but we didn't get to talk to each other personally.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  It was after that you followed up with me and sent me Trust Me, I'm Lying, which you'd already been through a couple of drafts on before I even saw it.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was basically done. I'd sort of I well, you know, I had been sleeping on the draft. I hadn't told anyone I was working on it. And then you didn't tell me that you were interested in Stoicism until like, I feel like it was like after The Obstacle is the Way came out.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny because it was like a conversation that I had been having with Tim, who is also very interested in the Stoics. And of course, he was very focused on Seneca, and you sort of came in through Marcus Aurelius. But yeah, my own story with Stoicism went way back. I actually had a professor in college, Delbert Weens, who did his dissertation on Musonius Rufus.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I first heard about them then, but was only reading secondary sources. And it wasn't until I got into graduate school that I started reading Epictetus, which was basically, I found a Thomas Wentworth Higginson translation. And that's when I first started reading the Stoics directly.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Interesting. Yeah, Wentworth Higginson is fascinating, and it's sort of strange that he's not a better-known American hero. I mean, some people know who Robert Shaw is. There's a monument to him in Boston. He's also the subject of the movie Glory. But if you want to talk about putting Stoicism into practice and the Four Virtues, there you have a guy who translates Epictetus. I believe he's the champion and friend of Emily Dickinson.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  That's correct. And he was also very involved in the suffragette movement.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Right. And then if that weren't Stoicism enough, then he leads a black regiment in the Civil War, which was, to fight in the Civil War, to fight on the right side of it was a dicey enough proposition. But, I mean, they buried Robert Shaw in a ditch when he was killed because it was considered to be the ultimate race transgression to lead black soldiers as a white person at that time.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, there's no doubt that... Higginson really found such strength, you know, from his reading of the Stoics, and he showed it in so many aspects of his life.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  I'm just Googling this, Wentworth Higginson. I don't, I wonder if there's any statues of him. I imagine that there are not.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  I, I'm not sure. I think he's buried in upstate New York. I'm not even sure what's there.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a small grave. He died in 1911. Wow.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Fascinating, fascinating guy.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  I think so. I mean, and to me, that's what I think I fell in love with as far as the Stoics. Although, again, I didn't hear from, about him until much, much later. But I, I like the idea of the philosopher as the man or woman in the arena, right? And I think that's what's so interesting to me about the Stoics is that they weren't these kind of like passive figures. They weren't theoretical figures. They weren't talking about the action as it was happening, but actually sort of were in the action as it was happening and pushing the envelope as far as what that action was.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, I know in, in the new book, you, you quote William James, but I think there's this sense in all the great Stoics, you know, who are exemplars, you know, not only in their own time, but to us still today, but they're all using the system, the precepts, the, the powerful ideas to kind of, as William James put it, make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. You know, it's like this constant work, not for some schoolroom practice, but to take it out into the arena and show what a difference it can make.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. And you know, we kind of almost brush over some of the contributions of the Stoics, not just someone like Higginson, but you know, it's like, almost all the Stoics that we profiled in Lives of the Stoics had some form of military service, some form of public service, were exiled. Like, we almost just take for granted that the, maybe it's that the ancient world was so chaotic and so much was happening that we just like, sort of assume, like, of course, they were there, or of course, this happened. But it is interesting just to think about how active these, these people were.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, it was, it was Xeno's dictum from the beginning that, you know, you have to participate in public life unless you're unable.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Right. No, the people think the difference between the Epicureans and the Stoics was the sort of, you know, pursuit of pleasure. And in fact, the Seneca says, actually, we're not that much in disagreement there, you know, sort of pleasure in moderation is fine. It's that the Epicureans retreat to the garden, or to the, you know, I think the modern equivalent would be like, the academy, or, you know, pursuit, they, they flee to the sort of individualistic world. And the Stoics sort of believe quite deeply in our collective obligations. And, and unless something actively prevents that sort of

• 15:08Speaker 00

  overwhelming corruption, or dysfunction, or injury, or something like that, you are obligated to contribute to the polis.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  So let me ask you, so, okay, so I, we, we connected on that first, at that meeting, and then I came to you with the book. And then I was thinking about selling it recently because I was, I was in California and I was visiting my, my grandfather's grave, who I remember, I had flown like directly from the funeral to sell that book. But I'm curious, what did you, where did you think my trajectory would go? Because I remember I was asking Nikki, my editor on, on most of my books, like, sort of what she thought when I started the, the first Stoic book. And she was saying something like, well, we just hoped you'd get it out of your system and then go back to marketing books. Is that the direction you thought I would go as a client?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Not at all. In fact, you know, when Julie and I talked about it, and we, we loved Trust Me, I'm Lying. And we knew that was sort of, it was sort of this deep philosophical lesson you had learned from practicing, you know, these dark arts of, of, of media manipulation. But we knew from following your blogging and your writing that, you know, popular philosophy was much more your gift, you know, translating the ideas in a way that people can use in their lives. So, you know, I told Julie, I said, we're going to get this book in the right hands, but, you know, I really want to see him, you know, writing about philosophy. Of course, you know, I, I was a double major in history and philosophy in college, and

• 16:47Speaker 01

  I went through divinity school at Harvard, doing about half my work in the philosophy department. So, you know, I've always had a bias for writers who have that kind of interest and focus. And, you know, I, at the time, I just knew that there was nobody really doing what you could do on a popular level. So, it was my hope that that's where you would go, and you did.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  That's interesting, because I've had this thing a bunch of times in my life and career where like, I kind of had some vague sense of what might be possible, but weirdly sort of other people saw it more or more excitedly than I did. Like, I kind of thought dropping out of college would work, or I kind of thought, you know, the, the books would work. But it has been weird that certain people have seen it better than me. I'm not sure what that says or what that means, but it's always been surprising to me.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you're, you're a very clear writer, and you're a very prolific writer, and you've been putting it out there for longer than the books have been out there. So, you know, those who follow you know, so.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was the funny thing. When Trust Me, I'm Lying came out, a lot of people were like, whoa, what is this? Right? They're, they're like, I thought you write about philosophy. And then when Trust Me, I'm Lying did well, or it was sort of this big splash. You know, then, then, then when the philosophy books came out, people were like, what is this? And now, and now that's the question I get asked the most. People go like, well, how did you transition from marketing to philosophy? And it, it's weirdly the other way around.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is, for sure.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  So, the, the other juncture point for you and I was the decision to go with, you know, go away from marketing to the philosophy books. And I remember I'd already written the proposal. I remember it was called Turning the Obstacle Upside Down, or something like that. It wasn't the way, just yet. But I remember you, I didn't do any meetings for it, but you had gone out with it when I was, I was in Brazil or something, I was doing a talk in Brazil. And I remember being in a hotel room and going back and forth over email about it. But I think now that the books have done very well, people see that as like a very obvious transition.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  And sometimes for really cynical, or, you know, people who are not fans go like, oh, he obviously did this for money. But, but that wasn't the case at the time. I remember it being a very hard sell.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I, I think there was a lot of convincing and we, we certainly were paid less for it.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  A lot less, right?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, but, you know, I always, you know, I'm a literary agent by day and I tell, I always tell my clients that, you know, if we're in the right hands, we're with the right editor, we do the book in the right way, you know, the book is gonna earn. Eventually, it's gonna earn its way. And so, yeah, I mean, we were, we were definitely swallowing a loss there at the beginning, but...

• 19:56Speaker 00

  It was less than half, if I remember.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Far less than half, but, you know... It's turned out to be the bestselling book. So there you go.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  No, I think, and to me, there's a couple of lessons in that, that at least that I've taken, which is number one, having, people often think like you have to be all in on whatever you're doing. But the fact that I still had a job meant that I didn't care that much, right? Like, I could very easily take the massive step backwards because like I didn't need it to feed my family or something, right? It was all sort of, at that point, the writing income was all extra income in my life. I had my own business, I had a job. So to me, that was one thing I took out of it. Two, if we talk about ego is the enemy, the idea that like, what you get paid is not reflexive of your worth. And you have, if you really believe in something, if you really know, it doesn't really matter

• 20:48Speaker 00

  what people think or what people value it as. What matters is sort of what it becomes in the long run. But then I think the other thing that this ties more into the idea of courage, and of course, there's, this is not the same courage as running into a burning building. But I have found, because I've done lots of ghostwriting projects and worked with all different types of people over the years, which is that almost no agent or author is willing to do that. You were saying like, hey, if the book is good, it'll earn. I find that most agents and most writers, all they care about is the advance. So they're, they're essentially not willing to bet on themselves. The Obstacle is the Way was a big bet. I took half, half the money upfront that I would normally get. But in the long

• 21:31Speaker 00

  term, it, it, it earned out. And it's actually, it's actually better for tax purposes to get paid out over a long period of time. But, but I find that people aren't willing to do that. Either they don't believe in the project, they don't believe in themselves, or they don't believe in a long-term future enough, like the idea of the marshmallow test, to be willing to take less guaranteed for a higher, you know, upside down the road.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, you know, even, even. Accounting aside, I mean, it kind of comes down to, you know, the basic insight of the Stoics and, you know, what we value and the choices that we make, right? It's what's important is the soundness of your aim and, you know, your perseverance in sticking to it. Happiness is never going to be found in things, money, desire for things or money. That's a dead end, you know?

• 22:33Speaker 01

  If you want to get on the right road and go somewhere, you have to have the right aim and you have to stick to it. And, you know, that one book became a series and now look at us today. We're launching a whole new series.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Well, what's the alternative, right? Writing books that you don't actually want to write because the advances are better? And I know if you, when you say that, people are like, oh, obviously not. But that's what the vast majority of people do, not just in publishing, but in literally all professional fields. Most people don't do what they want. They do what the market wants the most, or they do what is the most immediately viable at the expense, not just of like their happiness, but also their like credibility and dignity as a human being.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Correct, yep.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  It's hard, though. It's, I mean, there was certainly a part of me that was like, maybe they're not valuing it at this level because it's a bad idea, right? So you, I think that's the hard part is that, you know, it's easy to go where lots of people are.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Or where the market is.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true. But professionally too, though, you know, this happens in publishing a lot because, you know, publishers, you know, they, every time they acquire a book, they have to give examples of similar books and they have to give forecasts of sales and they even go as far as doing a profit and loss statement. And, you know, once an author has been overpaid and had a book that doesn't perform.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  It in a way, it almost dooms an author's career with a publisher. I mean, good editors, good publishing teams will, you know, allow an author to course correct, but often you see the one hit wonder where, you know, the publisher got really excited in the author's pitch and belief and paid a lot of money and they never got published again when the book didn't work.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  To sort of show people how it works behind the scenes, we kind of went through that a little bit with Conspiracy too, right? Because it was this sort of splashy of the moment book. And I don't, I don't think we were overpaid for it. And I actually think probably if you looked at the math, it would have been, I still think we were underpaid. But it was interesting to watch that book sort of be very critically reviewed and be sort of develop this cult audience, but not, you know, it didn't sell like Bad Blood or something. It didn't blow the doors off.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  And so I remember it being as still, as the launch of Stillness was getting prepped. I remember there being a bit of a headwind because people had trouble, they wanted to then use Conspiracy as a baseline. And I wanted to sort of go, no, no, that was a risk. That's like outside the sample here. But I think people are often worried about taking risks or doing outside the box stuff because they know it will cost them in terms of people's expectations and where they classify them and where they rank them and all of that.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I, you know, I think one of the things about that book, I mean, you say it felt of the moment, but, you know, I think oddly in a way, it's going to end up being one of those books that people understand defined an era in a way, in a way that we couldn't see at the time, you know? Kind of like the way The Big Short defined, you know, that whole era and the kind of, you know, mindless risk-taking and.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  You know, stuff that was going down and accepted as normal at the time, you know?

• 26:29Speaker 00

  But what I really liked about that book was actually a really sort of the obstacles, the way part of it was that because that it didn't, it didn't, you know, all my books up till that point had sort of sold faster than the book before, and that was the first one that didn't. And it was actually really helpful and freeing because I, I knew it was very good, and people that I respected said that it was very good. And it also resonated with an audience that perhaps my other books hadn't resonated with. And it was actually really helpful for me to completely decouple the idea of quality and sales, right? And, and then, so weirdly, when Stillness is the Key came out and sold the most that any of my

• 27:10Speaker 00

  books had sold and debuted at number one, it was actually helpful because those things were decoupled, right? Still, they were just two, it's not that they were, that I didn't care about either, they were just two unrelated facts. It was, I had written the book that I was most proud of to that point, and it had sold the best, as opposed to this sold the best because it is the best, or, you know, whatever other relation you want to put between those facts.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think, you know, at this point now, what are we on? Book number 11?

• 27:44Speaker 00

  I don't know. Is it 11 or 12? Do you count the journals? Do you count the different editions? I don't know.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  But, you know, you've definitely, at this point, there are genres of Ryan, of Ryan Holiday. And they're all working in a little bit different ways, so.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  What does a courageous author look like to you? Like, if you think about that attribute as far as like a person in a creative field, what is that, what's that criteria for you?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  To me, it's the person who's actually done the work, who's, you know, gone out, researched, done the reading, you know, thought long and hard about, you know, their point of view, and, you know, will not, in the process of producing a book, will not, you know, do injustice to either, you know, of those two things.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's often in trade publishing, there are a lot of pressures

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  to, you know, kind of suppress the work that you've done, or to smooth off, you know, your point of view.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  But, you know, I think both those things have to be in place. And the authors who are staunchest and sticking by that and seeing it through to the end, I think, do the best. They break through because it stands out.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Well, and don't you think part of breaking through is also sort of breaking through into new ground or open territory? Like, what I think is so interesting is now I get them all. Like, lots of books are being published about Stoicism. And I'm not questioning those people's commitment or interest to the philosophy. I think it's wonderful. But I do suspect that there are a set of motivations going on, both from the publisher and from the writer, which is essentially, this is a lucrative market, right? Like, that, that, that, the, that, I think sometimes the people are going, you know, Ryan doesn't have any credentials. What does he know? I'm smarter, I'm better, I will sell.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  And because of those things, I will obviously be much more successful in this market because I have, you know, I have those markers. But, but really, what they are doing is walking into a much safer space because there is a defined market. There is an understanding from the retailers and from the algorithm and all of that, that people are interested in this.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, you know, publishers like to believe that they can look around the corner and see the next thing. But, you know, more often than not, they're more trying to adapt what's coming in to something they already know is a success. You know, it's funny, I'll just never forget, you know, when I went out with Tim Ferriss the first time with A Four Hour Work Week, which was not called that at the time.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Right. It was like a, how to be a drug dealer or something?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  We were calling it Lifestyle Hustling.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  But it was based on a course that he jokingly titled at Princeton, Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit. But you know, all the ideas in that book, again, this gets back to, you know, have you done the work? Do you have a point of view? All the ideas in that book at the time just sounded a little bit nutty to publishers, like there was nothing to compare it to. Like the idea of remote working and, you know, geo arbitrage and mini retirements and, you know, using the Pareto principle to, you know, to optimize, you know, productivity. Like, all these things were like, you know, people were like, what? But, you know, fast forward today, and look, we just like, because of the pandemic,

• 31:33Speaker 01

  which nobody saw coming, we're like in the greatest productivity period in American history, the last couple of years. And it all happened when people were basically free to work remotely.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  So, uh, it's funny, I was just talking to Tim the other day, I was like, you know, it's like, you know, everyone thought it was crazy at the beginning, and now the whole world is living this life.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, you know, it's funny, I have a chapter in the Courage book about, based on the Henry Miller quote, where he says, "All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience." And that's really, I think, the thing about publishing or making anything is that the real big hits, the things that work, or that Peter Thiel, as we were talking about him, that talks about give you a monopoly, is in the dark, the dark spaces, the space where there is no one, where it hasn't been proven yet.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  And I think people really struggle with that, though, because they want, as you're leaving or as you're trying to, if you're leaving your old life, as you're, you know, thinking about quitting your job or whatever it is, to do this new thing, you want some guarantee or reassurance that, like, it's gonna work out, that there's some, like, minimum level of success you can count. But that that sort of floor is also establishes some sort of ceiling. And so you really do have to sort of carve out a new space. And I feel like all of my books have that. That's something I think about when I do them, which is like, has anyone done anything similar to this?

• 33:24Speaker 00

  And if so, I that's not what I'm interested in doing. I want to do a totally new way of thinking about this topic or this idea or this space. I want to make something that doesn't exist.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  No, and I think you brought that into this new series. I mean, you know, I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of people are aware of the four cardinal virtues. You know, many aren't, but you know, they're so central or have been central, probably not. They're missing completely in current culture, but they've been so central to, you know, certainly to Western civilization. But, um, you know, the idea that you started with courage, I think for those who are in the know, it's going to surprise them that you're starting with courage.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  Why do you think that is?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Well, it's, you know, generally when you see all the lists of the virtues, it's not the first one, you know, that you see. But, you know, I like the way you talk about it in the book about it, you know, really being the backbone, you know, of the virtues. And, um, you know, uh, we can, we can choose to, to do the appropriate thing. But unless we stick to it and follow through, you know, which is what courage is all about. What's the point? So.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Do you remember when I came to you with the idea? I was, I was just doing a video about it, but I was just thinking about like the sort of the origin story of the book. I was, I was wondering what you.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Well, what I remember, and this is what it's like, you know, working with you is you're always kind of, you're always kind of digging it all out in advance. Like, you know, you were doing a lot of writing about the virtues and, you know.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  You know, you had, you had the medallion and, you know, you're really like trying to highlight it. And, you know, it's important because a lot of people will come into Stoicism and they're just thinking about, you know.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  Productivity or whatever.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the, and being tough and, and all of that. But, um, you know, often the kind of stuff you see and hear out there and the memes is just like completely devoid of the virtues, you know? And I know that's been important to you, you know, from the beginning. So, you know, I could see you were working toward it. Um, when you told me, I just, I was so excited. I was like, yes. So.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember I was walking in Bastrop State Park with the kids. Uh, this is right as, for people who don't understand how publishing works is like, you finish the book and then, then there's all the other stuff like the editing and then the publishing and there's like a bunch of stuff. But there's kind of this like fallow, um, period, like about three months before a book comes out where sort of you can't do anything to the book that's coming out. Um, but there's this looming date as to when, uh, it is coming out. And you kind of have this sort of nervous, weird energy. It's like that, uh, Shakespeare line

• 36:23Speaker 00

  about, uh, between decision and the deed, there's this sort of vague phantasma. Uh, it's, it's, I hate that period and I usually try to channel that energy into writing the ne- the next proposal.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it's sort of become your flywheel. I mean, you, this has been the rhythm now for many years.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I imagine it's a, it's a tad exhausting. Uh, certainly, certainly my wife has told me it's exhausting. I can't do it any other way.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  I'm quite sure of that.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so what I remember is I had the idea for Courage and then I was, I don't remember how Courage, I, I originally I just thought Courage and I don't remember if it was you or if it was Niels. Uh, my wife says it was her, which probably means it was, but I don't remember how that became the series, but I think that came pretty quickly.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, I think, I think it was a great, it was a great choice, particularly for the time that we're living in, right? You don't, you don't see a lot of courage and bravery, a lot of, you know, frank talk in the face of some of the crazy stuff that's going on. And of course, being in a pandemic and on lockdown, you know, oftentimes, the only place that frank talk can happen is in social media, which is, you know, a complete ruin these days.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, you know, and, and there was, to me, I think what I liked about it was, the, I think what I liked about the idea of doing a series was, Obstacle, Ego, and Stillness had sort of accidentally become a trilogy. But although it looks like a trilogy afterwards, there wasn't actually the big sort of swing challenge of like, well, what's this series going to be and what's the arc? And what, what, what do I want to include and what do I not want to include? It was much more ad hoc. And I do think I was attracted to the idea of like,

• 38:29Speaker 00

  literally like the sort of four dimensional chess of like, well, how do all these ideas relate to each other? What goes in each book? And, and like, because there's definitely chapters, like, there's a chapter on ego in ego versus confidence and stillness that I wish was in ego. And there's chapters in obstacle that I wish were probably in stillness and vice versa. To, on this one, to really like, have to think about four books simultaneously in a relatively short runway was just like ambitiously attractive to me.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, it, it makes sense and, you know, people are going to understand, you know, with this series that, you know, basically, the Stoics believe that, you know, happiness can only be found in virtue, nowhere else. All the Stoics agreed on this, you know, the happy life is to be found in the pursuit of virtue, you know, which they called Arete, human excellence, you know? These sort of forms of knowledge that guide us in everything that we think and do.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  You know, the, the Stoics believed that virtue was about the integrity of the self, right?

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Arius Didymus said that virtue is a disposition of the soul in harmony with itself concerning the whole of one's life. And, you know, I think these four books are really gonna map that out for people. You know, virtue, the Stoics thought, was our operating system as human beings. It's what we have to use, the program we're supposed to be following, to make our way through the world.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  Well, because there's no situation in which one or more of the four virtues is not called upon.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  It's funny, though. I remember I gave a talk, so this would have been right as Daily Stoic was coming out, I gave a talk at StoicCon in New York City, and I think you did too, if I'm remembering correctly, but, or maybe that was the next one. But I remember I gave a talk and I said something like, and this is a thing, I just gave a talk last week, or this week, and I just said the same thing, but, but I, you know, I said to the Stoics, and this is what, to me, the idea of the obstacle is the way is, is not that every bad situation is positive, it's that there's no situation so bad, so undesirable, so unexpected, that, that one of the virtues is not possible, that you, if it's not an opportunity, all situations remain an opportunity to practice virtue. That's what the opportunity is.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  But I remember saying in the talk, like, virtue can feel like a very loaded word to people, because it has a sort of a Christian, sort of sin connotation that can be, can just mean a lot of things that, that it doesn't necessarily mean. And so I said, I remember saying this, I said, you know, let's take, let's put virtue aside and call it excellence. And I remember some people got upset, I remember getting an email about it, or some comments about it, that that was somehow, sort of... Taking an ancient philosophy and making it too much about success literature, too much sort of a modern context.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  But to me, that's actually restoring virtue to its proper context because virtue, as you said, is erite, which means excellence. It's just that excellence has both a moral and a worldly component, right? Like excellence, if you're just good at a craft, but it's done immorally, that's not excellence. But also, if you're just moral, but you can't apply it in the world, you have no sort of skill or expertise, that's also sort of emptiness. So to me, I think if we can think of virtue as human excellence, sort of flourishing as a person in the highest form that we are capable of being,

• 42:36Speaker 00

  virtue or virtues becomes a lot more accessible.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I like the point that you hit on about, you know, sin versus, you know, basically missing the mark. I mean, it's the same word in the New Testament or for the Stoics, ha martia. But, you know, for the Stoics, there is no original sin.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Ha martia is just missing the mark. It's like, we were aiming for something, we didn't get it, you know? We're trying to avoid something, it hit us anyway.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  We didn't want to do something, we did it anyway, even though we know it was bad.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  So, you know, they believe that, you know, contrary to this, any notion of original sin or corruption, that we're only in bad environments. And actually, we have something positive to celebrate. All of us have these great inborn resources. They believe the seeds of virtue are in each and every person, like it's in there. But just because it's in there, doesn't mean you're going to make use of it or get benefit from it, make progress in your life as a human being. You have to actually engage the disciplines. They are both an aim and a practice, you know? There's something we're directing our life toward, but that we have to practice in each and everything that we choose to do.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  And don't you think, to me, the other part of removing it from this sort of sin context is it's not that falling short or doing a bad thing or sort of not being as good as you can be. It's not that God will be angry at you and that you will go to hell after you die. To the Stoics, it's that to live without erete, to sort of not fulfill your potential, to continually miss the mark, to not even try to hit the mark, is to live in hell, like that your life is hell. So to me, it's a much more self-interested logical argument for being good. And I think you see this with all the Stoics, but particularly the Stoics who had sort of close proximity to power,

• 44:39Speaker 00

  whether it's Nero or Marius or Caesar. The Stoic argument was like, it sucks to be these people. There's not some cosmic karma that's going to punish them in the afterlife. The Stoics were like, it's horrible to be this person. They are not winning. That's why Marcus really says the best revenge is to not be like that.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the only, the only evil that we can do is to abandon our pursuit of virtue, to corrupt our own character. So the focus is always back to our choices. What are we putting value on? What are we choosing? How are we responding, you know, to the situations in front of us? And, you know, when you engage, when, as you were saying before, when your assumption is that bad things are going to happen.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Trouble is always gonna come. As Seneca says, you know, the wise man accustoms himself to coming trouble, right? You lighten the evils of life by long endurance, by thinking about them, right? The wise man knows that everything is in store for them. So, you know, but I think, you know, where one of the things that you really bring out to the fore, and I think it's gonna be a theme in all the books, but in courage, is for the Stoics, virtue, the practice of virtue, all the virtues were interrelated and of a whole, right?

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  But for them, our self-interest and our self-concern always had to remain connected to the interests and concerns of others. Like, when you think about doing the right thing and right actions, one of the first measures to bring up to see whether you're really practicing the justice, the virtue you proclaim, is whether it's just, right?

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, Cicero talks about that in Moral Duties on Dionysius. He's like, you know, "We can't trust anyone who's gained a reputation for courage by treachery and cunning," you know? It has to be morally right, you know? On moral ends, he says the same thing, you know? It has to be about what's right.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, for people who obviously haven't read the book yet, the third part of the book is, so the first part of the book is about the battle with fear, the second part is about being courageous, but the third part is when we apply this courage to something other than our own self-interest. So I talk, for instance, about Michael Jordan, the decision to leave basketball to play baseball is immensely courageous. He's walking away from millions of dollars. Everyone, he has the courage to be bad in front of millions of people. It's a huge career risk. He's walking away from his prime years. But we contrast that with, say, someone like Maya Moore, who walks away from equal heights in her sport, in the WNBA,

• 47:49Speaker 00

  to free a man who's wrongly convicted from prison. They're just, it's a higher form of courage. And so, I think, yeah, courage is not... Being willing to jump out of an airplane because you don't feel fear, courage would be, you know, parachuting behind enemy lines at Normandy. Or that's what heroism would be. So I think, yeah, the Stoic conception, it's very easy to think of Stoicism as an individualistic philosophy, which it is, because the individual is all that we control. But the sort of the paradox is the Stoic controls the individual so as to make the best or the greatest contribution to the collective.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  To the whole, yeah. You know, this is, um, so the Stoics were really, they stood apart from Aristotle's school, you know, the peripatetics, um, you know, who I think had ideas that kind of, you know, resonate more with our current culture. You know, they felt that, you know, anger, for example, could be like the whetstone of courage. But the Stoics were like, no way, you know? Marcus is like, you feel a fit of rage coming on? You know, that's not right, you know? It's more human to be gentle and civil. And therefore, it's a, he even says it's a manlier thing than, you know, having anger. But, you know, today, a lot of people excuse themselves from the virtues because they're angry.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Or as you say in the first part of this book, they have fear. Or they just want to sit around and complain about what's made the situation this way. Or blame whoever they think, you know, is at fault. All of those things, anger, fear, complaint, blame, they're all excuses to inaction, right? To avoiding the constructive things that we should be doing, the proper choices we should be making.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Well, I've thought about that a lot during the pandemic because, you know, we've taken it very seriously in our house, partly because my wife has always had lung issues. But partly because I have the privilege, the ability to not have to do things that certain people have to do under ordinary circumstances. But anyways, I've taken the pandemic very seriously and I've talked about it. And it's been interesting, you hear people, and actually Derek Thompson for The Atlantic, who's great, I've loved his stuff. In the early days, he called this pandemic Stoicism, this sort of toxic masculine approach to the pandemic, which is like, I'm not afraid of a virus. I don't, I'm not a pussy, I'm not gonna wear a mask. Or, you know, then later, the sort of vaccine hesitancy.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  I think it's so, it's so easy to miss what courage is about. Courage is not about not being afraid of something. It can be, but you have to, you have to do exactly what you said, which is think about how this plays out for people other than just yourself. So if you say, I don't care about a virus, I'm not scared of it. That's great if the virus only affected you. But if by not being afraid of the virus, you then, let's say, first off, just make other people uncomfortable, right? Like you just walk into a store and you make this poor cashier uncomfortable, that's already damaging the collective whole. Like part of mass is signaling in the sense that we're all saying, hey, don't worry as

• 51:08Speaker 00

  much about me, we're all on the same team. But if by not being afraid of the virus, by not worrying about, by not, by saying you don't care about your health, you are actively endangering other people's health, right? They're saying with the Delta virus that the average person infects something like seven to 10 other people. So by having a cavalier quote unquote courageous attitude about it actively harms the collective whole, then it's not just not courageous, it's actively violating the core Stoic virtue. First off, it's violating wisdom and self-control and all that, but it's definitely violating the virtue of justice.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  So how our courage connects to and impacts other people is not just a core part of it, it's the whole damn point.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you know, what the Stoics would say about a person behaving that way is that they're cowardly. It's cowardice. They're, they're proclaiming something terrible, you know, their liberty for masking, right?

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  They're confusing it with what's really terrible. You know, namely their lack of concern for others.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  No, that's totally right. And honestly, they have found that like at the core of it for a lot of people. It's like, deep down, a fear of needles, but um, which I think is a wonderful irony. But but I think you go to the vaccine, right? I wrote this piece, I'm not sure where it'll get published yet, but I've been thinking a lot about it because it's something I was really struggling with. There is seemingly, or at least on the surface, a certain amount of courage. Like, let's say, you know, there's now some vaccine mandates and a significant percentage of like nurses and different people in different professions have said, I'll lose my job rather than you tell me what to do. There's people in the NFL that have lost their job. There's teachers that have lost their jobs.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  A whole bunch of people have said like, I will lose my job over this principle. Now, that might seem like courage, right? Because and ironically, that is the kind of courage that we desperately need more of as a society. We need more people who are willing to put, you know, principle over professional interests, right? Or who are willing to go to the mattresses on what they believe. But this is where you have to look at how the other virtues interrelate with each other. Because what is your courage? What is the principle ultimately at stake here? You're resisting, you're proclaiming your freedom to infect yourself

• 53:49Speaker 00

  and therefore, very likely, other people to say nothing of the cost on the medical system and and the economy and all of that. You're fighting for the principle to actively harm other people. That's where these virtues come together. Like, can you sacrifice your own preferences? Can you take a risk? There is a certain amount of uncertainty to it. Because ultimately, you care about other people and not just yourself. That's the whole thing.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, you write about this in the book too, um, you know, the, um, you know, being able to speak frankly, you know, to people and to let them know, you know, where the line is. Um, I mean, you've experienced this in your own bookstore, right?

• 54:39Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Uh, with people who don't want to come in and obey the mandate.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  Do you ever think that I'm, that I'm, uh, depriving myself of an audience or that I am thinking, like, do you, do you ever see stuff that I write or say and think that I should, I don't want to stay in my lane, but do you think that I am potentially not reaching people who I could reach with stosis by doing it? Or do you think it's the right call?

• 55:05Speaker 01

  I think it's the right call. I mean, you know, look, obviously, um, this sort of goes back to, you know, the conversation about point of view and, you know, talking about when Tim was first launching. I mean, if what you have to say polarizes people, good, because out of that comes conversation, right? And those who don't want to participate in the conversation, they're eventually just going to drift away anyway, right? They're going to go, uh, pull together, um, with like-minded people and, and, you know, yell and complain and blame, uh, you know, others. But, you know, there's nothing productive in that. You know, you're, you're trying to build an audience of people who want to

• 55:47Speaker 01

  engage the conversation and want to pay it forward. So.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  That's true. But, you know, there's that, that Michael Jordan line that he's sort of, uh, pilloried for, but he goes like, Republicans buy sneakers too. Um, it, it, it's, it's a tricky thing. I think when, you know, people go like, uh, you know, most people are on the, you know, say like the vaccine bandwagon or something, but it's like, you know, like 30% of the population is not, that's a large, that's like, if you said, hey, Ryan, uh, if you do this, your book sales are going to decrease, you're, you're risking pissing off 30% of the audience. I, I see why people don't do it.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I, yeah, I mean, in theory, but, you know, in practice, what do we see? You know, the, the audience is growing. Um, the only, the only fallout I see and you see, of course, every day is you get these hatchet job reviews that get posted on Amazon or, you know, people trashing up your social media feeds. So.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think that is a thing, the term they have for it these days is "audience capture." So what happens is someone, you know, you think you're building or acquiring the audience, but actually, Seneca talks a lot about this as far as money or profession, but actually, the audience, or the platform, or the success is capturing you. And so you'd think you'd have more freedom when you become successful, when you have followers, or fans, or an audience. But actually, you become more conservative, more constrained, because now you're afraid of risking them. And this is why people don't, you know, say or do unorthodox

• 57:33Speaker 00

  things. They are worried about the costs. And ironically, the more successful and bigger you get, the more quantifiable and large those costs can be. You know, what's his name, Daryl Morey, you know, it sort of tweets out some controversial comments about Communist China, like, two seasons ago in the NBA. The entire salary cap of the NBA is reduced as a result of the direct economic consequences of that decision.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's, it's true.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  It's tough, though. You know, I think, so you go, oh, it's obviously the right thing to do. There's a great Fitzgerald story that I like called "The Four Fists." And at the end of it, the guy is sort of, he's sort of put in this difficult, unethical business proposition. He ends up sort of telling the person across from him the truth, instead of, you know, sort of this shark-like business deal. And he goes, "It's obviously the right thing to do, but when you're, when you've got a wife and kids, that sort of righteousness can also feel like selfishness," right? Like, I think about Rutilius Rufus, right? He's sort of brought up on these false charges, and he just doesn't bother to defend himself

• 58:56Speaker 00

  because he feels like doing that is beneath him. I'm now getting off on a little bit of a tangent, but, you know, he doesn't- So he ends up being tried, convicted, and sent away. And on the one hand, that's very brave and bold. But, you know, I'm sure his, his, his family was probably a little bit like, Dad, why didn't you just, you know, like, bother to defend yourself? And Musonius Rufus, doesn't he push back? He goes like, I will fight.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, he actually, he, he, he makes fun. This is sort of going back to, to Socrates, too, right? He's like, you know, hey, I'm gonna make a defense of myself.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  You, you could count on a Stoic making a, a very strenuous defense for themselves. You know, it's funny that, another related story, and Epictetus, it's interesting, when you read Epictetus, like in Marcus, you can find all the four virtues listed, right? In his writings, but Epictetus never lays them all out, like, in a list. But, and courage is the one that's usually missing from his list. But, he tells all these great stories. And in fact, there's one story that Epictetus tells twice, in Arian's, you know, collection

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  of his lectures, in Book One, Chapter Six, and in Book Two, Chapter Sixteen. He's talking about how all these terrible things befall us, and we just sit around crying, "Oh, my nose is running, my nose is running." And, you know, in both places, he's like, "Hey, what's up with you? You know, don't you have a pair of hands? Blow your nose."

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  But, but in both cases, he lists, and again, this goes back to these resources that we have, you know, that are built in. In both places, he's like, you know, hasn't God given you endurance, magnanimity, courage? He lists them, though, in both places, in all of those things, endurance, magnanimity, courage, they all fall under the Stoic idea of courage. And that's why I think Epictetus loved to tell the story of Helvidius Priscus.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  And Agrippinus, too. I think those are two of his heroes.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Who, who stood up, you know, in, in Helvidius's case, to Vespasian, right? Threat of death.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  So he, you know, he may not have always listed courage, but he loved to tell, in fact, he would, he would say to his students all the time, "Yeah, you're lions in the classroom, but you're foxes when you get out there in the world."

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  You turn your tail and you run.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  No, and, and you think about what courage would mean for someone like Epictetus, who's a slave. I mean, like, courage is having your leg broken. Courage is being executed and, and, uh, or being exiled with sort of not a thought. I mean, he's riding the razor's edge. He's not living the sort of posh life of Seneca or even Cato.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  So one, one thing, I, look, this is again, a sort of a minor courage moment, but one of the things I was really conscious of on the launch of the book, um, and I know, I, I, I think people somewhat enjoy the inside baseball, but the decision, obviously deciding just to open a bookstore was one of the crazier, uh, things that I've done in the last couple of years. And you know, it's funny, I don't know if I told you this, but, um, when I have an idea for something I want to do, um, I, I usually, because I get excited about it, I usually look for disconfirmation. So I call people who are liable to convince me that it's a bad idea. Now, you told me it was a good idea because you love bookstores and you used to have a bookstore, but I, I, and I was talking to my wife about it and

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  I was like, "Who will tell me this is a very bad idea and why should I, why I shouldn't do it?" And so I was like, "You know what? I'm gonna call Tim. I'm gonna call Tim Ferriss." Tim, the, the sort of outsourcer, uh, you know, avoid, uh, entanglements, uh, you know, assets that, that, that sort of costs time and money. I was like, "Tim will tell me this is a bad idea." And Tim was like, "How will you know you, if you don't want a bookstore?" Or, he's like, "How will you know if you really want a bookstore if you don't try one? And how will you know that you don't want a bookstore if you haven't tried one?" And he was one of the few people that gave me the permission to do it.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  That's cool. I love it.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  But, but as part of that, this is the sort of first book launch that I've had while the store exists. And so, early on, strategically in the launch, I decided, you know, instead of routing these orders to these different vendors, instead of sort of, you know, outsourcing the customer relationship to Amazon, to Barnes and Noble, to Audible, to, you know, these big retailers, I was like, I'm gonna do it directly. Like, I'm gonna sell the book directly. Which I had a little experimentation with, with The Boy Who Would Be King and the leather-bound editions of the two books, but nothing at the scale of this book.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  And I just thought it was interesting. I anticipated it because it's happened on, I've seen hints of it. But I thought we should talk about just how much of a surprise this was to people in publishing. Because, not because they thought I wouldn't sell as many copies, not just because they thought it would be a lot of work, but did it not seem like one of the big objections and concerns was that this would affect my position on a bestseller list?

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I mean, completely. You know, it's, it's all, uh, the various lists have various methodologies and they're sort of tried and true. And it's a certain mix of accounts that report in different ways. And it gets compiled and that's how you know, you know, who's on the list in the various categories. And once you start, you know, talking about, um, you know, a startup bookstore that is barely on, you know, anyone's radar, becoming, you know, in essence, like, one of the largest channels of distribution for the book, it's like, well, that's gonna, that's gonna spell disaster because the list keepers won't have you on their radar.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  No, and it's funny, like, it struck me as a connection to one of my favorite Marcus Rilke quotes, which I remember really hitting me for the first time when The Obstacle is the Way came out, sold enough copies to hit more than one bestseller list, but mysteriously did not appear. And I remember, you know, turning to and drawing some value from the quote where Marcus Rilke says, you know, "We care about ourselves more than other people, but then we care about their opinion more than our own." Like, even though an author is paid not on how they do on the bestseller list, but paid based on how many copies they

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  sold, and the whole point of writing a book is to reach more people, as many people as possible, the irony that even people in publishing, to say nothing of authors, value the New York Times, which is admittedly not an objective list, we value whether the New York Times says you're a bestseller or not, even if that came at the expense of selling better. It's a hilarious, weird thing we back ourselves into.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, because, you know, people know inside publishing that often a book is on the list, and it really hasn't done that well, or, you know, or it was a one-week wonder, or whatever. But I do remember distinctly, you know, I had a fairly long career at HarperCollins, Rupert Murdoch didn't want to hear about the New York Times bestseller list, because he knew a lot of those books weren't selling.

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  Interesting. Yeah, and to me, the tricky part about it, and it's not, again, not the courage of, you know, airlifting people out of Afghanistan, but it's easier to measure yourself against external metrics, right? It's easy to go, "Oh, the New York Times said I was a success, therefore I'm a success." It's harder to stick with what Marcus is saying, which is to value your own opinion more than these external things, because you control it. But to go, I think, there was a feeling, as I embarked on, you know, this approach was like, hey, I'm going to kind of burn the boats behind me.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  I'm not going to value these sort of easy, uh, straightforward benchmarks. I'm going to have to, to measure what success is to myself and I'm going to have to, um, I'm going to have to bet on myself long-term at the expense of, uh, short-term, uh, validation or recognition.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yep. Well, it, it certainly requires great resources to do what you're doing. Especially when you have four pallets of books show up without a, without a forklift to unload them. But, you know, there, there is an aspect of the virtue of courage, which the Stoics prized above all. And it was Philoponia, um, the love of toil, the love of work or industriousness. As the translator sometimes referred, referred to it. And, you know, they believed that it was a knowledge of, you know, how to accomplish what is proposed without being prevented by the toil.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  And I know you and your team are certainly right up against that wall right now.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, it's, it's been, it's been a grind. And then, and then, yeah, it may be that even though I would sell enough, uh, enough copies to, to debut at number one, like Stillness, uh, did, uh, I may not only not do that, I may not appear on the list at all. But you have to, to me, I know I'm making a bet on one, the direct connection to the audience. I know that it's actually increasing the sales. I know that it's, um, I'm also getting to, you know, sort of hand sign the copies to the, the, the most loyal fans, which is my, you know, something I, I feel really honored to be able to do.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  And it's an investment again in the the rest of the series because now instead of Amazon being able to say, hey, there's a new book out, I'll be able to say that directly.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  And people really want to support the painted porch.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  Yes, which is, which is, you know, incredibly overwhelming, both literally and figuratively and emotionally.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:09:57Speaker 00

  But, but, but like, ah, the, the consequence of all that, and there are no decisions that don't have consequences, that are not trade offs, is like, hey, I, people will be like, did he fall off? You know, like, why did your, are your books selling worse? And so you, you have to be willing to judge yourself by your own standards, the inner scorecard versus that external scorecard, and it's not without its consequences.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  Anything else we should say about the book, Steve?

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Well, I just.

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  The idea of courage?

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  I, you know, I just really want to do everything I can to, to help get the word out about it. I'm, I've got copies here that I'm getting ready to send out. I know your, your, all your books are being shipped. But I think there's so much here for people to dig into and from the very first pages of the book where you talk about Hercules at the crossroads and how his story is really the story that each of us is facing every day. I think people are, this is going to resonate for people and it's, again, I think, starting with courage was, was the right place to start. It's, it's the very, it's the very thing that we all need now.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  As we're getting a gradual reopening to a very broken world, we all need some more courage.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  Oh, that last thing I was going to say, because I've been actively working on it, especially now on the self-discipline book. You know that putting out books is frustrating, working with publishers is always frustrating, working with people is frustrating, but, but publishing has always been that way in the middle of a pandemic. Am I doing better at being calmer and less, let's say, keeping my temper in check? I feel like I am, but I'll take some radical candor from you. Am I doing better this go around? I'd like to think that as each book gets out, I'm a little bit less a bundle of nerves, but I know I remain still.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Given all the obstacles of the last two weeks and spending more than a few days nauseous myself, I think you're doing great.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  All right, I'll take it. I'm trying. I do try to get less attached to the external results with each book, and I try to anticipate all the things that could go wrong with each book. I think the tension is always, how is a stoic? Do you focus on what you control, not taking things personally, understanding that things go wrong, and hold people accountable and expect both competence and accountability from people who have different assignments and jobs? That's the tension.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  You have to surface the urgency when it's required, and if you don't, things will not be completed. But I know that you did a fair amount of meditating this week, and again, it's back to the William James that you quote in the book. We're all working on making our nervous system our ally instead of just one more enemy.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  That's right, and trying not to do things that don't age well, and tantrums or knockdown, drag-out fights don't age well.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  No, that's for sure.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Steve, you're the best. We'll sell some more books together, and by that I mean more projects, and I really appreciate you helping me make this one a reality. Thanks, Ryan. It's been my privilege. And go. All right. It's gonna be a great week. Remember, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave is now available everywhere. You can go to your local bookstore and pick it up. You can come to the Painted Porch and pick it up. We are still offering the preorder bonuses. We've extended it to the end of this week. So you can get that at dailystoic.com/preorder. But you can also get Audible. You can get eBooks. You can get whatever you want from wherever you want it. But I would very much like you to support the new book Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave.