Stoicism, Democracy, and Personal Responsibility | Stacey Abrams

You can't control everything that happens in politics, but you can control what you do with the power you have. In today’s episode, political leader, voting rights activist, and bestselling author Stacey Abrams joins Ryan to talk about the importance of accountability, the difference between outrage and action, why good leadership requires more than good intentions, and what Stoicism teaches us about our responsibility to make things better. Stacey Abrams is a New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur, voting rights advocate, and political leader. She served 11 years in the Georgia House of Representatives, including seven as Democratic Leader, and made history in 2018 as the first Black woman to become a major-party nominee for governor in the United States. Following the election, she founded Fair Fight Action to protect voting rights and expand access to the ballot box. — Grab signed copies of Stacey’s books: Stacey’s Extraordinary Words https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/staceys-extraordinary-words?_pos=1&_sid=56a0eb53a&_ss=r| https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/staceys-extraordinary-words?_pos=1&_sid=56a0eb53a&_ss=r https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/staceys-extraordinary-words?_pos=1&_sid=56a0eb53a&_ss=r While Justice Sleeps: A Thriller https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/while-justice-sleeps-a-thriller-avery-keene?_pos=2&_sid=56a0eb53a&_ss=r | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/while-justice-sleeps-a-thriller-avery-keene?_pos=2&_sid=56a0eb53a&_ss=r https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/while-justice-sleeps-a-thriller-avery-keene?_pos=2&_sid=56a0eb53a&_ss=r Coded Justice: A Thriller https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/coded-justice-a-thriller-avery-keene?_pos=3&_sid=56a0eb53a&_ss=r | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/coded-justice-a-thriller-avery-keene?_pos=3&_sid=56a0eb53a&_ss=r https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/coded-justice-a-thriller-avery-keene?_pos=3&_sid=56a0eb53a&_ss=r Follow Stacey on Instagram |https://www.instagram.com/staceyabrams/?hl=en Stacey’s podcast Assembly Required | https://www.youtube.com/@AssemblyRequiredPodcast Get Involved at 10StepsCampaign. Org http://10stepscampaign.org/ | https://10stepscampaign.org/ 🎟️https://www.dailystoiclive.com/DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ Boston, Massachusetts - November 16 https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0100648FA1C21706 Nashville, Tennessee - November 20 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1991992836196?aff=oddtdtcreator Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - December 8 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1987339339462?aff=oddtdtcreator Washington D. C. - December 9 https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/daily-stoic-live-09-dec 🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:55Speaker 01

  I first intersected with today's guest when she mentioned Stoicism in a very famous speech. Let me play that for you real fast. And this struck me because it's different than my interpretation of Stoicism. And in fact, as I told her later, I found that how she responded, the political organizing and democratic work she did after was, to me, the definition of Stoicism. I mean, she's the person who flipped the Senate in 2020. She and I have become friends. I had her on the podcast before. It was remote. She's someone I very much admire and look up to. She was in town to do an event at the LBJ Presidential Library, where I believe she is on the board. And I asked her if she would come out and do the podcast, and she did. We had a lovely discussion. I think you're really gonna like it.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  We're not getting into partisan politics here. What we are talking about is sort of bedrock American values, bedrock Western values. We're talking about how you effectuate political change, how you deal with setbacks, how you take accountability when you make mistakes. And I think this is gonna be a lovely conversation. We went over to the bookstore after and talked about books for about 30 minutes. I'll bring that as a bonus episode. If you don't know who Stacey Abrams is, well, you should. She's a number one New York Times bestselling author. She spent 11 years in the Georgia House of Representatives. In 2018, she was the Democratic nominee for governor there. She won more votes than any Democrat in the state's history. She was the first Black woman to become a gubernatorial nominee for a major party in the United States.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  And then she was the first Black woman and the first Georgian to deliver a response to the State of the Union. And then in the wake of that election, which she lost, she launched a campaign for voting rights. And she has built a massive political machine that has activated hundreds of thousands of voters and shaped electoral politics here in the United States. She's also an entrepreneur. She wrote a great business book for Portfolio. We have the same editor. And then in addition to her children's books, which I have here, she is also the writer of many New York Times bestselling legal thrillers, which she told me about a little bit at the end of the interview. She signed those, and you can get them here at The Painted Porch. This is me talking with Stacey Abrams.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  You can follow her on Instagram, @staceyabrams, and check out her podcast, Assembly Required, wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  There's a tension, I think, for anyone in any form of public life, which is, on the one hand, you have to have a thick skin, because people say mean things about you. You get criticized.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  You do?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yes, you might know something about this. And at the same time, one of the problems in our culture right now, I think, is this complete shamelessness.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Right? So what do you think the balance is? It's like, if you are a sensitive little snowflake and you don't want to be criticized or attacked, you'll never do anything. And then we've taken it almost too far in another direction, where people are like, the idea of resigning in shame is like a relic from a bygone era.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Look, I grew up in the South in a religious family. Shame has a place.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  And it is, it's a governor. It helps you understand that you've crossed a boundary, that you've made a mistake, that you should be accountable for what you've done.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  And that's important. The issues are, what are we shamed for? And I think the tension is not whether it's shame or no shame, it's what is worthy of shame, what is not. And leadership is the ability to accept accountability, to accept the need for remediation. And we've gotten to the place where, because we don't like the things that we get held accountable for, we just decide that there's no accounting to be had.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Good leaders understand, or good people understand, you make mistakes. And when you make those mistakes, you're responsible for the harm that those mistakes cause. You're responsible for how you navigate what you learn. And the best people internalize it and say, okay, let me try not to do that again. If you are too thin-skinned, that thin skin often reveals itself in other places, because it's not just what they say about you on X or on Instagram, or, in my case, on everything. It's what they do.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  I get it on videos where you, like, if, because you were on the podcast, if we just flash a thumbnail of you as a person who's been on this show, people, I get it.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  I apologize. No, no, no. I mean, it has, so I was actually, I was having this conversation a couple of days ago. I was on the cover of Governing Magazine in 2014, is 2012 or 2014, because of my bipartisanship. Now, I have never not stood in my values. I've always been very clear about what I believe. But I recognize that there are some times, your job is to, you know, cooperate.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, politics is compromise.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. And sometimes your job is to compete, but your job is always to be held accountable. And in that article, the Republicans who lauded me, who said, you know, really nice things about me, a few years later despised me.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Nothing about me changed, except that people could see me. And they could see that the competition side was never, the values never changed. I just got better at getting some of those things done.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  And so sometimes I think the tension that's endemic to me, I'm perfectly acceptable in quiet spaces. Like, there's still Republicans who I worked with, in fact, a congressman who has said vile things about me in public, saw me in the airport recently and spontaneously hugged me. It was like, because he was like, oh, you're, I miss seeing you. Like, then why did you say this thing about me on Fox?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  But I think that goes back to shame, because he feels very comfortable being permitted to have a public persona.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  And a private belief system. And I think it's that tension and shame that is really the most pervasive, because we've created this media and, I think, social narrative that doesn't devalue hypocrisy anymore.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and the reason I think it matters is because, like, on the one hand, you have people who, they won't take an obvious stand or push through something because, like, seven people are mad on Twitter, and they're afraid of upsetting those people. And then on the other hand, you have someone who's, you know, either committed a crime or totally humiliated their family, or, you know, and they can't just go, you know what? The penalty for this is not, is not death or social exile, but it is, you know, I have lost the moral authority of my office, at least for, temporarily, at the very minimum. And so I'm gonna impose a punishment on myself here, or whatever.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  I mean, part of it's incrementalism, because when you get comfortable with the small violations, you start to forget that those were the warning signs.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Recently, I had a, I made a choice in my, my team, and I didn't clearly communicate it. And it led to sort of this temporary firestorm, this sort of storm and drawing, people thinking things have gone horribly wrong. I'm like, oh, no, that was my fault. So I called each person, and they all work for me. And I called each person and said, look, this was my mistake. I should have done it this way. And my failure to do it this way led to this pain.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  And that's my job. And one of them, when I called to apologize, she was like, why are you apologizing? Like, you get to make the choice. I said, yeah, but I also have to deal with the consequences. And you can't trust me on the next mistake I made if I didn't acknowledge this one. So, yeah, this is a small one in the scheme of things, but it's important enough that if I want your trust long-term.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  And I think this goes to your point about moral authority. My moral authority is not just on the big decisions, it's how do I make those small interstitial decisions that let you trust that the big decision I get to was grounded in a set of values and principles and philosophies that you can trust.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we, we all like to think that in the big moments, we'll make the big, right decisions. And we forget, and this goes all the way back to Aristotle, that it's actually on this muscle that you're building. Like, I remember a year or so ago, I was, I was in a car from JFK, and I was, you know, this is actually one of those papers. Did you have to do tip-ins where you signed the pages for your book? So I would just bring them with me. I'd do these tip-ins. So I'm like signing these pages in the back of the car, because it's like the dead time I have. The car hits a bump, and the Sharpie goes like, and it like marks on the, on the, the door of the car. And it's like, obviously, the driver doesn't see this. And obviously, I could just get out of the car, and I was like, you know what? It's always a good practice to have to take accountability. Like, what are the consequences gonna be for this thing? It's gonna be nothing.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  It's like, the cost is really that I just have to point out a thing that I could have got away with. And so I was like, you know, I pulled over, and I'm like, hey, you know, I think this will come out, but it happened, you know? And I just remember going like, to pat myself on the back on it, but it's saying like, hey, it's actually in these little moments that you're building the muscle that hopefully later on, it's not totally unfamiliar to you to, to do that accountability thing and to have to deal with the moment of discomfort while you do it.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  And I think that that practice, it's not patting yourself on the back, it's acknowledging choices.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  And all of these are about the choices we make. It's the choice to decide that shame doesn't matter, because one of the reasons politicians in particular, and leaders at large, are being more and more shameless, is that there's no accountability that's imposed upon them by the people.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  And, you know, the work that I'm doing on authoritarianism, the frame I use is, look, This is all a power conversation. Democracy and authoritarianism, it's both sets are conversations about power. But authoritarians want to take power. They want to seize it. They want to hoard it and they never want to be held accountable for it.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Democracy is about how do you share that power even with people you don't like?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  How do you leverage that power even for people who will benefit that you don't care for? And then how do you hold yourself accountable for that power? And part of what has accelerated competitive authoritarianism in the US, I think, is that we've gotten out of the practice of holding our leaders accountable. Because we get one little thing we want and we decide it's not worth fighting about it. And so, yeah, when you get out of that car, your decision to turn around and say, I made a mistake. I'm going to tell you about it. You might decide to lower my Uber ranking. Yeah, I'm not sure what happens to you when it falls below a certain threshold, but I'm going to risk it.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  That's part of how citizenship works. Like, it's, it's not just your willingness to tell him. It's your willingness to introduce a dynamic into that relationship that says, there's a cost. And his decision was, okay, I'm going to get really mad and I'm going to lower, you know, his rating, or I'm going to say, it's okay. So what did he say?

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Oh, he's like, it's totally fine. He's like, I'm sure it'll come out. And I was like, look, if it's not, like, if someone had booked the car, I was like, if it's not, you have my info, just, just tell them what I, you know what I mean? And, and like, again, never heard about it after this moment, because probably it did. You, you put a chemical on it, it probably comes right up. But it's the decision to try to do the adult responsible thing. It's like, there's like the kid in us and then the adult in us. And are you going to be the adult or the kid? And I think about it politically, too. You make this point about leadership where it's like, also, our system is dependent on leaders modeling the behavior over and over again. Like, I think about Washington, like, Washington sort of understood that they were setting up this system and a lot of it was going to be voluntary. But if you could create a tradition or a practice around it, people would follow.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  And like, you know, his decision to resign his commission first in the army and then to resign the presidency, first off, that's rooted in the example of, of Cincinnatus. Like, it goes all the way back to the Romans. But that's a tradition that lasts all the way until Roosevelt, which is pretty crazy. You think about the habit that we got in the peaceful transfer of power, not interfering in election. There's all these different things that every single one of our politicians for basically 250 years observed. And then I think it'll be really interesting and challenging when you get out of the habit as anyone who's relapsed in anything in their life. How do you get back in the habit, starting from zero?

• 13:22Speaker 01

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• 14:27Speaker 01

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• 14:42Speaker 01

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• 15:55Speaker 00

  I'm going to talk about something that you didn't ask about, but I think anyone listening is going to wonder. So you and I met because I made a comment about concessions.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  And for me, that was part of my responsibility. Because there are those who will say, oh, she violated the, the tradition. And I didn't. But because we've lost nuance.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  It feels that way. And, and I think it's an important point because one of the obligations of shame is critique.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  It's the ability to understand that something may be okay in multiple ways, but there are flaws. And when you cannot critique systems, those systems then harden around whatever the fracture is. And there are only certain people who have the platform for critique. And typically in an election, it's the person whose name is on the ballot. As the person who lost and was never unclear about that. Never got to go in the governor's mansion. I promise you, they did not invite me after that election. I was never unclear about the fact that I didn't win. But I also think language matters. And one of the things I love about your writing and your compendium, you know, it's just,

• 17:09Speaker 00

  it's how often we get better at being people because we do things that are hard. Like, I knew in the moment I gave that speech, there are people who liked me, who were not going to like me after it. Because they were going to hear me say something that was not what they expected. I said, this thing that we've all anchored our democracy around has a problem.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  And we should do something about it.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  You were saying there was a conflict of interest in your opponent. Not that the entire election was, was improper or that you were challenging the results per se. You were just saying, hey, at least what I understand you to be saying is, hey, I don't think this is the right way to be doing this and we should fix that. And then, to me, I found what you did to be immensely stoic because you said, and I'm going to go fix it.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And which, I think to a degree you did.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  So part of it was, the process was flawed.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  And the people who were supposed to benefit or have access didn't.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  And in fact, post my speech, post that election, the opposition, you know, the Republicans who won, went back and actually fixed a number of the things I pointed out. Now, they've since broken it again because it worked too well. Because in the next election, that fixed piece led to an outcome they weren't happy with, so they broke what they'd fixed. But in the moment, yeah, my, my point was, look, I'm not going to benefit from this. There is no universe in which this is going to change the outcome for me.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  But the people who were harmed, and I think this is the part, when you and I had that first conversation about Stoicism, that was really grounding for me. The people who were harmed were the ones who needed a voice. And part of my, my statement was, look, I'm supposed to be quiet because that's what feels better to everybody. I can't do that because the responsibility is to speak for the people who are never going to get this microphone. But the other thing was, look, I don't want to get rid of democracy. Don't want to get rid of elections. I'm perfect, I love elections.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  But what I do want to make sure of is that the next time we have one, more people who are entitled to participate actually can show up.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's good faith arguments and bad faith arguments. And there is this idea that Stoicism is resignation and apathy. It's not that far from cynicism, like the lowercase cynicism, like, the system is rigged, everyone sucks, so I'm going to focus on myself. And I think if that's what Stoicism is, first off, it doesn't interest me, but I think that's a self fulfilling prophecy. But if Stoicism is, hey, there are elements of the system that are rigged, there are real problems, they've been problems for a long time. I'm, one, not going to be a party to that. And two, with whatever limited success I'm able to have, I want to try to make it a little bit better. I can't personally fix all of it, but I'm also not going to absolve myself of my responsibility and duty to try to fix it.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  And I'm going to live with the consequences of that decision. Bellisarius.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Bellisarius?

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  When you wrote about it, so again, I, I'm a huge fan and I think anybody who's, no, I mean, look, I, you are better than like three philosophy classes I took, so.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  No, I mean, I, and I think I've told you, but what Bellisarius would do, like, his willingness to not just do the thing that needs to be done, but accept that there are consequences for it.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  And that those consequences are not fair. And, and I think that goes back to the question of shame.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  The consequences for being ashamed is that you're going to be uncomfortable. You're going to lose things, something's going to happen. And we've lost the ability, or at least we've weakened the ability to deal with consequences.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  I have faced consequences. I have donors who will not support me anymore. I have liberal friends who now categorize me with someone who, you know, fomented insurrection. Like, I didn't do that.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  And I understand and I understand that I'm not always going to get the fulsome opportunity to explain what happened and people are going to go with the pithy understanding that they have. But part of what Stoicism and what Bill Sarris is, you know, life taught us is that, look, you do it anyway because you believe that the greater good matters.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  And that greater good in Stoicism is, what was your effort? You can't, you cannot determine the outcome. You can only determine your input and your effort. And even when it's taking accountability and taking responsibility or speaking an uncomfortable truth, those things have consequences and you've got to be willing to live with it.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Are you willing to take the hit and pay whatever the price is? And it might be, hey, like I could, I could have said that better. Or, hey, I wish I'd not said that at all. Or, hey, you know, in some moment of personal weakness, I did X, Y, or Z. Again, that doesn't mean you don't get to contribute at all, but maybe it does mean that you are disqualified from being the governor of New York or something, you know? You make, you make mistakes and you have to be willing to pay the price. And I do think there's something about our society that seems to, to, to feel like consequences are for losers and suckers, you know? And I've sort of likened it to, it's like, if you treat everything with antibiotics, you get superbugs.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  The people who, who we actually need a little bit more determination and a little bit more thick skinniness are bowing out. And then it's leaving the most shameless, least qualified people. And that's, that's an asymmetry that I think we're dealing with.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  I think that's the nicest way of saying things are falling apart.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Yes. Which, by the way, would not be unfamiliar to the Stoics, right? Like, I think about like, it's really bad. Would I rather be alive now in America or in Rome under Nero? Probably this. Yeah. And, and like, there are mechanisms that we have that, that they didn't have in the past. And by the way, to take them for granted, like to, to pretend we don't have them is to disregard the immense sacrifice and struggle that went in to getting them.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Like, you think the legal system is rigged now, like, let's go to 1964. And, you know, you've got a, you've got a case before a, a Southern judge and tell me you wouldn't prefer this legal system.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  I mean, look, I, as, as angry as I am about recent decisions from the court, Plessy v. Ferguson was deeply, deeply problematic.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  It's a foot in my helmet.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  And, and the conservative court that disavowed my humanity is not the court we have today. This court is willing to diminish and limit my personal freedoms and my civil rights, but they at least acknowledge I'm human so that there's progress there.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  I think part of our responsibility though, is for us to not get comfortable with, you know, we don't have Nero, but we deserve better.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  And yes, let's mark our passage by what could be, but let's also be aspirational about what we should get to. And I think that's the other thing. Shame stalls from us because you have no ambition when everything's acceptable.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  How do you reach for more when the dregs are enough?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, was it maybe John Doerr, the civil rights attorney? He was like, you just got to keep going back.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  And that was my other question for you as an organizer. I think there's something, just like in the, in the stock market, we're focused on short-term gains. There's something about our sort of political activism these days that like, gets very discouraged when you don't get the result right now, instead of thinking about it in terms of batting averages or in terms of a long-term movement where you're chipping away at it.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  I think it's two pieces. So we've reduced people's lived experience to politics and we don't connect the dots for them as much. Democracy is not about the esoteric nature of how do we allocate power? It is about what does that power do to or for people? And in organizing, if you don't have both conversations at the same time, then yeah, people are looking at who wins the horse race and not the batting average.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Because the horse race is about, did I win today?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  The batting averages, am I making progress? Am I actually batting well enough?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  That I, that they don't cut me?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Am I getting things? And are things okay? And right now, people are watching their lives devolve and deteriorate. And instead of saying, oh, why is the batting average below 200? We're saying, well, we're at bat and if I get a homerun, great.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  And so part of our responsibility is to help people calibrate. The political consequence is about what happens to your daily life. Democracy needs to deliver things for you. And the extent to which it stopped delivering, or worse, it starts taking, that's a problem. And that's a batting average conversation. The extent to which the guy you liked won an election and the person you didn't like lost, that's inconsequential until you see what they do with the power you've given them. But it's a lot easier to be distracted by the highs and lows of an election than it is to be consistently paying attention to the consequences of who holds your power.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  And also, what is the movement aiming at? What are they, what are the tangible policy goals that you want? Like, better is not, you know, like, I think anyone who's tried any physical fitness things or whatever, like, if you're not, if you're not concrete and specific with what you're trying to do, you know, just getting better, like, getting in better shape is not a thing, you know, or eating better is not a thing, or being smarter is not a thing. Like, what are you specifically trying to accomplish? There's this kind of vague sense of like, what people want, but when the other side is like, hey, no, no, we want to end this, we want to make this illegal, we want to own this, it might not be morally right, but it's concrete and so it's politically more effective.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. My best friend and I, back in June, I had this plan and I worked out every single day. And I had this big calendar and I marked off every box. I would have to send her a note every day. I then hurt myself.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Because that was stupid.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  And so, like, two, two months later, I'm like, I want to start again, but I allowed things to kind of interfere. And so I would have these peaks and valleys of, I can do it this weekend.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Which doesn't do anything.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Kind of goes to your point about, you know, the political horse race. And so today, this morning, I actually sent her a note. I'm like, okay, so for the next four weeks, I have to do these things three days a week and these things two days a week. And so she wrote back, well, you know, how much are you going to do? I'm like, oh, it's only six minutes.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Like, because I'm on a plane like every five minutes.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  But if I can get back to consistency.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Because my mission is not to, it's not the number, it's, I need to build this muscle and therefore I'm going to consistently do this.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  And then I'm going to measure after four weeks what comes next. And she said, you know, well, I'm going to just go on the weekends. And I said, you can.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  But the problem's going to be that when you only go on the weekends, everything you do during the week erases whatever you did on the weekends.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  In politics and in democracy, if we only pay attention to what we do on the weekends, if we don't, to your point, have this long-term plan, I mean, Project 2025 is antithetical to my core values and beliefs. It is incredibly thoughtful.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  They have written down, and I mean thoughtful as in they have thought about it, not thoughtful as in it's a nice. Yes. It is an incredibly strategic, well-resourced, well-referenced, well-researched plan for dominion.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  And it is doable because they know where they're starting, they know what the peaks and valleys look like, but it is consistent. I'm never going to get to where I want in my physical fitness if my only ambition is once a week to have this like great, you know, outcome. We are never going to get to the society we want if our only ambition is to think it's going to show up on the weekends. And right now, on, you know, on my side of the aisle, there's a set of dynamics and debates about who gets to write the plan. And I think to your point, and, and what a Stoic would tell us is that part of it is, we've got to determine what our outcome is.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  And we've got to know what our ambition is towards, not the thing we're going to do, but what do we want it to accomplish?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, it's funny because we connected over your idea of like Stoicism being a luxury, like, I'm not going to be silent in my outrage. The, the way I think about it though, is like, I think something like Project 25 is truly outrageous, right? And truly offensive and it makes me angry. And then I go, but wait, they didn't write this in anger. This was done calmly and coldly. It's possible because of its lack of emotion, right? It's, it's seeing human beings not as human beings and as these sort of pieces you can move around. And so if anything, it's when you're up against something like that, that you need to have this sort of calm. You can be outraged morally, but then strategically, you have to be equally cold and calculating and you have to be able to know, okay, so we got to, we got to take Congress, we got to take the Senate, we got to, this is what we're, we're going to have to stop it in

• 30:12Speaker 01

  the state legislature. I think there is something too about where the outrage feels cathartic and the anger feels good, but again, it's connected to that sort of vague idea of opposition, not, here's how we're stopping it and here's what we're replacing it with.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Exactly. There's a, a line that I have half in my head that is from Washington in the calm light, what's the line?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  In the calm light of mild philosophy.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  There you go. Part of what we haven't done is that calm. We are, we are spending so much of our time reacting to. Basically, we're taking the bait.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Over and over again, because the bait is distracting.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  And the dubait is inconsequential if there's no action to follow it.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  And instead, we're focusing on peaks and valleys. Who holds the Congress? Who holds the courts?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Or what dumb thing the president said or did today.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  I was thinking about this. It's like the Iran war is spiraling out. All this stuff's happening. I saw the decision to kick those reporters out of the White House as him going, how can I disrupt and distract the news cycle? How can I make the news cover itself as opposed to covering me? And everyone fell for it exactly as planned.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  My podcast, I do these A blocks where I kind of talk about something that's bothering me. And I saw my mom the weekend of the, you know, decision to throw them out. And my mom said, should they boycott?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  And I said, absolutely not.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  She said, she had the look that you have. She's like, why not? I said, because boycotts give him what he wants.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  A boycott turns it into a longer story. Just don't cover him.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  But don't make a show of not showing up. But also, don't let him hide what he's doing. The reason he doesn't want them there, there's the showmanship, which he's exceptional at.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Which is refocus on me and not on what I'm doing. But there's also the strategy of if you're not there, I can do more things that you have to later figure out.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  And it's what they did with the Pentagon. When they kicked out the reporters from the Pentagon, what they did was close off our knowledge of what is now a seven-month war that has raised prices and taken lives and killed schoolchildren. And we have no proof of anything because our truth tellers aren't permitted in the room.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  And so part of our responsibility, to your point, is we've got to pay attention not only to what they want us to look at. It's the art of prestidigitation, not just what their hands are doing, but why are they doing it? And what's happening where we can't see it?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  And when a boycott happens, a boycott is an event. It's a decision that is a distraction, but it's also a cover for bad actors. Because when you're not there to look at what they're doing, that means they can run amok.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yes. And the ability to sort of stay on message and laser in on what's important, that to me is one of the main things that Stoicism offers us is the ability to sort of not get inside somebody else's loop, but to focus on what we're supposed to be doing. And like crazy people really test us in that regard. Children test us in that regard. You know, like in a way, we're just not equipped for people who are just kind of chaos.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. I have a niece who is very used to me talking about her. So she moved in with me when she was 14. My parents, who were raising her, they all came to live with me. And there was a moment where I'm like, either she's crazy or I'm crazy.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  And I read a bunch of books on raising teenagers and realized that chemically, they have a profile that is chaotic, to put it nicely. That their entire modus operandi is to destroy and destruct anything you have as logic. And it was so revealing for me, but it was also calming.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Because I'm like, okay, now that I know what I'm dealing with, I don't have to react when, you know, she's halfway down the stairs and her personality completely changes. And I don't have to push her down the stairs because that would be wrong and CPS will show up.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  But it was this, it was this very grounding moment for me that made me better at helping raise her. Because I didn't let myself get distracted by the chaos that was part of how she had to test herself and how she had to become who she was going to become. I didn't have to feed into it.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  And in that decision, it made me a better aunt. It made me a better guardian, to the extent I was her guardian, because I could meet her where she needed me to be and not where she was trying to shove me into being.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  And I think, I wish we learned that more in our politics.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, you, I think it is not good for people to be on social media as much as they are, following the information in real time as they are. Like ideally, the leader is seeing big picture. Because if the leader is not seeing big picture, what are they seeing? And who is seeing it? We do expect our politicians to be way too plugged in to the sort of the discourse, as they call it, when really they should be setting the discourse long-term and thinking long-term. And that's kind of our problem is I think we don't, like we have some big problems, like looming problems. If you think your job is to deal with sort of piddly things day to day, like who is taking care of the long-term problems?

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Right. When you think about the philosophers you've studied, but also the business world that you've been in, who has done it better? Like with comparison to this moment, knowing that of course, each moment has its own, you know, challenges. Who has done it better?

• 35:44Speaker 01

  There's a famous line from Eisenhower. Eisenhower says, I don't deal in personalities. Being like, he would refuse to address any person specifically. Like if so-and-so said X, Y, or Z, he would refuse to respond to that thing or criticize that thing. He's like, I, my job as the president is dealing with big picture stuff. And I do think we have forgotten that that's the president's job.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Right? The other one, I think I told this story in Ego is the Enemy, where like somebody brings him an envelope and he says, never. Like, he's like, all the things that could be dealt with before they get to me have to be dealt with before they get to me. And then I have to deal with the big picture, hard decisions that I was uniquely trained for and then elected to take care of. And so I do think that the leaders that are able to think like, yeah, my job is to set the five-year plan and the 10-year plan or the 50-year plan, not to, you know, have hot takes over the, you know, every single thing that's happening. I tend to admire that. And that isn't to say that they don't deal with it. One of my favorite books, it's very, it's called The Hidden Hand Presidency. And it's all about how Eisenhower dealt with McCarthy without ever specifically talking about McCarthy.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  He's like, McCarthy has to be stopped. But if the president condemns McCarthy, then we're in, first off, it lowers the presidency and it elevates McCarthy. And it kind of just does, it's an interesting look at the sort of behind the scenes machinations of Eisenhower, who we don't think of as a sort of savvy political operator, but you don't become president if you're not.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  And I think that kind of like, how do I work behind the scenes? How do I, I don't want my fingerprints on it, which means I don't want credit or blame for it. Like, I think that is an element of leadership that maybe we have not been selecting for so much these days. All right. So I'm just finishing up this tour here in Australia. And I thought it'd be warmer here than it was. And so I thought maybe, you know, I'd be a little overdressed. But a bunch of the sweaters I got on Quince are what I wore on stage in Sydney, in Auckland, in Melbourne. That's one of the weird things about this Daily Stoic stuff. It's like, I had to be on camera, to be on stage more than I thought. You know, if it was just me, I'd probably be wearing basketball shorts and a, and a band t-shirt most days.

• 37:58Speaker 01

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• 38:42Speaker 01

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• 39:40Speaker 00

  Sorry, I know this is your show, but I'm asking

• 39:42Speaker 01

  No, please.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  So let's say, oh, I don't know, you're someone who's in politics, who's trying to navigate the fall of democracy and the rise of competitive authoritarianism. What would you be doing with these moments? What do you wish more people in my posture were doing right now to help us navigate where we are and get us to the next bank of opportunity?

• 40:03Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I mean, I do, I think your point about communication, there's this quote from this journalist in the early 1900s. It goes, so America is a company ruled by public opinion. So whatever rules, public opinion rules the country. And I do think one of the problems of having a group of politicians who are not good at communication and don't really understand how it's formed, you know, we're really struggling, right? Either they're bad at it or they're old and they don't understand it. But I think we've lost the ability to explain to people why certain things matter. And so it's not just like explaining what happened, but the next step of like, and this matters because it means this.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Like, I think they're struggling to explain, say, corruption or struggling to explain, you know, the stakes of this or that, but not why it matters to you, the voter, and why if you elect me or if you vote for this policy or that policy, it will address that in a positive way. And so I think, I mean, you definitely saw it during the pandemic. To me, the pandemic was such a great example of people who had the knowledge being totally incapable of communicating it. Like, I remember they put up like this graph at one point where it's like, if this, then, and it's like, these are people who have like two kids at home that are not at school and they're not sure if their business is going to close and then they don't want to get this.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  They have no time to think about this, so you better communicate it as quickly and as cleanly as possible. And if, if in that situation, which was like kind of a life or death health thing, they couldn't do it. I think they're really struggling to explain why certain norms matter or certain ethical boundaries matter. And, and so I think just communicating the outrage is not sufficient. We have to communicate why it matters. It's this kind of civics education of like, we set it up this way for a reason. And when we lose this, here's where it causes problems for you down the line. Like, like they're like, Trump is awarding no bid contracts. Well, okay, first off, does the average person know what a no bid contract is?

• 42:09Speaker 01

  And then what was a time in the past where the government did allow no bid contracts? What were the consequences of that? And when and why did we develop this system where you're supposed to have? Because you might be thinking, if you're a person, well, that sounds like it's just slowing things down. And maybe this is good, you know, like you have to explain all of it quickly and cleanly. I think that's one of the areas we're really struggling.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  I, I love that. I, I was a research assistant in law school for a book and the professor I worked for, Anne Alstott, she gave me this framework that has become the way I try to talk about everything. She said, what's the problem? Why is it a problem? And how do you solve it?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  And the example I use especially when I'm doing trainings for young people, I'm like, so your car stopped and a nice person comes by and sees that your car stopped and like, oh, I'm going to help you. And before you can explain what happened, they rush off and they come back with a can of gas. And you say, well, somebody stole my engine. Like they, they, you know, they saw the problem and they solved the problem, but it wasn't your problem. Because they never asked and you never explained, why is it a problem? And I think what you're describing is that we are, we're in this moment where because of the surfeit of harm and bad information and bad news, we spend so much time talking about, here's the problem. And then we jump to a solution set. But if we don't talk about why it matters, there's no one who's going to defend that solution at the end.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  No one's going to show up and say, oh, you have a little more time because you've explained the problem to me enough and why this is the problem, that I'm going to give you more than two years to solve what is a 50 year

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  you know, conundrum. And because, and this goes back to your point about the, you know, the batting average. If we aren't seeing how we're making progress, or at least where we're moving and we're not looking at averages, we start to judge every decision based on, well, I'm just going to go get some gas. I'm like, guys, this is not the problem.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Totally. What is the problem and what is the, what is the solution? And can you do that in a way that makes sense to normal, regular people? And if you can't, then, you know, there's the Feynman thing about like, if you can't explain it to a, to a whatever, you don't really understand. And I think there is some level that people are bad at explaining it because they don't really understand it either. They just have been told like, well, our party's against this and they don't, they haven't, well, why are we against this? And like, what, what is the problem with it? What are we going to do about it?

• 44:35Speaker 00

  And one of the reasons I was excited to come to your bookstore is that, you know, I write these legal thrillers, political thrillers, and they're all about how do you take very weighty, heady concepts that people are never going to read a white paper about?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  And convert it into something they understand. So usually I kill somebody. So, yeah, the last one, Coded Justice was about AI. AI is an incredibly complicated topic. And I wanted to talk about DEI.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  And I wanted to talk about veterans and how we treat, you know, those who have served us. And so I like spent, whoo, months like reading about and teaching myself just enough. But my job was to be able to write a book that made people who read it think I know AI and made people who actually know AI know I respect them enough to know I don't know AI. But it's part of my training for myself. I wrote about, wrote, so my book before that was called Rogue Justice. After Texas had their energy grid collapse, I was like, hmm, this could happen in other places. What could lead to that? And I was also thinking about the fact that we have the secret court called FISA that people aren't paying attention to. And so I spent a lot of time doing deep dives into these things because my mission is to take these concepts.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Like, we need to understand that we have a surveillance court that can actually tap your phone. And I guess at this point, hire Palantir to like go into your computer. And you don't have to get noticed. Like, there's no one to tell them no, because we don't get to pick the judges. And yet this controls so much of our lives. And when I was trying to explain the FISA court to someone, they kind of looked at me with this sort of blank look. And I said, okay, think about it this way. Let's say your daughter is doing a study abroad and falls in love with a guy. Because of that, that could be enough of a nexus that the United States government starts eavesdropping on you and surveilling you and everything you and your family do.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  And even if you're not doing anything bad, they've now amassed an entire data file on you. And so when you do make a mistake, even if it's not nefarious.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  They get to tell the story about who you are. Is that something you want to have happen? And she was like, oh my God. I said, yeah, because all you need is that one connective piece of tissue. But that's what the FISA court can do. And it's a court that operates in your name. And in my book, what happens if that court can be blackmailed because none of us know who they are?

• 46:56Speaker 01

  What you just did was you told that person a story that explained it. And, and I think the best political communicators are good storytellers, right? And that art of telling an effective and clear story is really what it's all about. And when people don't understand what's happening or they're confused by what's happening or they don't like what's happening, they're going to go to whatever story is the clearest and most resonant. I mean, I lived through that energy crisis here in Texas. Like, I had to go in my son's room. It was like 15 degrees in our house or something like the power had failed. I had to sleep in my son's bed so he did not freeze to death, right? That was the reality of that situation. And then because the governor of Texas goes, oh, it's because of the Green New Deal. That's a story that makes sense, right?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  That is an explanation. It's, it's happens to be completely untrue. But because the Green New Deal does not exist.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  And because we didn't tell the right story.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  But because nobody's won statewide in Texas for a very long time. So there's not really anyone to tell that story. But, but because the opposition party is not able to tell a story that says, hey, we're the only state in the country that has this. And by the way, we only have it as some sort of, you know, reaction from the, the oil interests like 50 years ago. And so, you know, we're uniquely vulnerable to a thing that hits the state really hard. That by the way, Florida is not vulnerable and California is not vulnerable and Maine is not more, because they can draw power from other places and that this is a crazy system. Like, we, a better system is an integrated system because it's more resilient. And I still don't really even think that story's been told.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  And it hasn't because most people don't understand how the power grid works.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  And the fact is, you know, California is not on the same power grid as Florida, but Florida is friends with a couple of other states. And so it has a grid. And so my new book that's going to come out next year, I kind of talk about how we need to understand that the interconnectedness, not just of our power system, but our water systems. Like, we just kind of turn things on.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  And we think the fact that we turned it on means that it's going to work. And Texas proved, and to your point, because we don't understand the grid, when Texas had this calamity, Texas didn't have anyone they could turn to.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  But we also have to recognize that we haven't fixed the problem.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  And that the next time something happens, it's going to happen again. And what could happen in California and Oregon and Washington state, part of their grid is connected to Canada.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Well, now that we've ticked off Canada.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  What does that mean for the power grid? Because part of our country is reliant on another country for its power. In the north, we're reliant on Canada and in the southwest, outside of Texas, there is, there's an interconnectedness of our grid with Mexico. When we fight with those countries, we risk losing power, not just theoretically, but having the lights go off.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  No, and that's, Donald Trump is pissing off our allies. Donald Trump, it might pull out of NATO. You can't just say, hey, that's bad. You have to explain, you have to make the positive case for why allies matter and why this was set up. Because no one was around when that was set up. So they missed the case. So you just had this kind of zombie case and, and, and you're not re-explaining over and over, hey, these are our values, these are why we do this. It's like in sports, the coach goes over the team's philosophy over and over and over and over and over again. Right? And I think America's 250 is a great time to be re-explaining what America is, what the project has been, what the values are. And yeah, you can absolutely talk about all the times we fell short of the value, provided, or I think especially to make the case

• 50:30Speaker 01

  of what the value was, right? Like, it only, it matters because, hey, that's in contradiction to this thing that we share as how it should have gone. And yeah, if you're not effectively communicating that case, then you're just in this kind of, Robert Greene calls this tactical hell, where you're just like, that's bad, that's bad, that's bad, that's bad. Instead of like, well, this is my argument for how it should be. And doesn't that make a lot more sense? And don't you see how this is causing problems for that? And I think that's why communication matters.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Well, I think we solved it.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Okay, good.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  You want to go check out some books?

• 51:04Speaker 00

  I'd love to check out some books.

• 51:10Speaker 02

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