Ryan, I've been a fan of yours for quite some time.
You're a popular man.
12 best-selling books.
That's a lot of books.
That's almost more books than I've read.
But you have a lot of fans out there
from very successful comedians like myself,
to folks in the NFL, to senators.
Sort of what you speak to goes across many aisles,
if you will.
And I will say, I've taken a lot from some
of the ideas you have.
I will also say that you kind of talk about philosophy,
and it helps me work through life.
And then a byproduct is that I go home
and I tell my wife how she should work through life.
RYAN HOLIDAY: That's a great idea.
Yeah.
And I'm just-- before we get started,
I'm wondering if it's possible for you to apologize
to my wife for me.
People asked my wife what it's like living
with the stoic philosopher.
And she usually answers, I don't know.
That feels Socratic, but mostly maybe
it's just passive aggressive. - Yes.
Yeah.
One of us writes about it, and then the other
is sort of naturally it.
JORDAN KLEPPER: That kind of lives it.
Yeah.
For those who don't know a stoic philosopher, what
are the tenets of stoicism?
Stoicism, if I had to summarize in one sentence,
I would say it's this idea that we don't control what happens
to us in life, but we control how we respond
to what happens in life.
And the stoics say that, basically, every situation,
big ones, small ones, ones you wanted, ones you didn't want,
it's all an opportunity to respond
with these four virtues.
The virtues are courage, discipline,
justice, and wisdom.
So the idea is that that is what life is asking from you.
One or all of those virtues in some kind
of a combination, that's what it's demanding of you.
And what's cool about the stoics is, like, I think
when people hear philosopher, they think,
like, a tweed jacket, or an old white guy in a toga,
or whatever.
JORDAN KLEPPER: Sure.
But the stoics were philosophers.
They were thinkers, but they were also doers.
The most well-known stoic is Marcus
Aurelius, who was the emperor of Rome, the philosopher king.
But there were stoics who were slaves, who were
soldiers, who were artists.
They were men and women.
They were people trying to do what we're all trying to do,
which is make sense of the crazy world that we live in.
Right, but this image of them.
Marcus Aurelius doesn't seem like the most modern person
that people are drawn to.
Why do you think there's--
don't get me wrong.
Why do you think there's resonance today?
Yeah, I mean--
We have a hard time.
We're kicking Rosa Parks out of libraries in Florida.
So it feels like trying to--
I mean, maybe the fact that it's
a white guy from back in the day
makes it easier in places like Florida.
But I think we have a hard time with grappling
with historic ideas.
These feel archaic.
Why are they resonant?
I actually think that life hasn't
changed that much, good and bad, right?
Obviously, we made all sorts of progress in 2,000 years.
And, at the same time, life is still life.
Like, in one passage in Meditations,
Marcus Aurelius is like, when you're struggling to get out
of bed in the morning and you go, but it's so much warmer
here under the covers, he goes, but is
this what you were put here to do, to stay under the covers
and be warm?
He says, no, you have a purpose.
You should help people.
Should make a positive difference in the world.
You should do what you're uniquely suited to do.
So even 2,000 years ago, the most powerful man in the world
was like, ah, I don't want to get up.
It's too early.
And that's because he was a person.
And Marcus also lived through a pandemic.
He lived through social unrest.
There was an insurrection and a coup, right?
Some of this might be sounding familiar.
So--
At least the laziness does, yes.
Yes, yes.
Life is life.
People are people.
And for better or for worse, that's
going to always stay the same.
JORDAN KLEPPER: It feels like what is active.
I mean, there's been philosophy for at least 20 years.
We'll fact check that, but I know it's been around a while.
There's many tenets of philosophy.
It feels like an element of stoicism
is that it feels actionable--
RYAN HOLIDAY: Yeah.
--around your emotions.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, you're-- it's not this thing that you think about.
It's this thing you're supposed to do, right?
So some of the stoics--
the great stoics never wrote anything down.
They were considered stoics because of how they lived.
It was the idea of deeds, not words.
So, yes, I struggle with it in my own life,
but I try to actually put the ideas into practice.
They're not-- philosophy-- it's a shame
if we think of philosophy as a series of thought
exercises, right?
How do we know if we're living in a computer
simulation, right?
Or is there such a thing as right and wrong?
Like, we can use it to answer these abstract, impractical
questions, or we can use it as a way
to make things impossibly complicated,
or we can use it to really simplify
things and go, who am I?
What am I supposed to do?
How do I make the best out of this
complicated, messy situation?
That's what I think philosophy is.
And it's a shame that so few people have access to it,
or that it's been made accessible to them
in a way that would help them make better decisions
and be better people.
All right, help me-- help me through this.
- OK. - All right?
So a real-life philosophy.
I'm-- I'm with my son at a store,
and he throws a shit fit and is screaming
and doesn't want to leave.
And I'm embarrassed.
I'm exhausted.
How do I use philosophy in a moment like that?
Well, I think what we do is we
don't do what the guy on the plane did, which is throw--
which is throw our own tantrum in response.
- Right. - Right?
So first episode--
JORDAN KLEPPER: He was more like a Nietzsche guy.
Yes. Yeah.
JORDAN KLEPPER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know where he studied.
But the idea is we only control ourselves, right?
So our kid is throwing a tantrum.
And we have to say, OK, I'm not going to make this situation
worse by freaking out.
I'm also going to say, I'm going
to strip out the part of me from my own upbringing,
from society that says this is a reflection
on me as a person, right?
That it's reflecting that I'm a failure,
I'm embarrassing myself, everyone's looking at me.
Everyone who has kids knows exactly what's happening,
and they're too busy with their own life to even
think about for the most part.
And then I think another part of it
is understanding why they're feeling that way, right?
Which is, hey, they don't want to be doing this, right?
Life is hard.
It's hard to be a two-year-old, right?
And when we understand that people are dealing
with their own crap, right?
It gives us empathy, and passion, and compassion,
and patience for those people.
And so if you can try to think, well, why do they think
this is a good way to respond?
What are they trying to get?
How do I resolve the situation, as opposed to solving it
with force, solving it with rushing out of the situation,
or just having a meltdown because the whole thing
is overwhelming to you.
Now we're regulating emotions here using stoicism,
but are we just creating robots?
Like, is this Elon Musk territory here?
No, no, no.
Stoicism is not about making you a better sociopath.
It's not--
JORDAN KLEPPER: Which one--
which one is that?
What book is that?
Do you know?
Is that-- is that Kierkegaard?
I think Andrew Tate has some videos about this
Andrew Tate. It's an Andrew-- OK, good.
OK, good. OK.
The idea is not that you suppress the emotions.
It's that you don't over-- be overwhelmed by the situations
and make decisions from those emotions, right?
So there's a difference between being angry, right?
And then doing something out of anger.
And I think this is an important distinction that we
can miss in the moment.
Someone did something that's upsetting,
that's annoying, that caught you off guard,
you're going to have your immediate reaction.
But there's a lot of space between that
and hitting send on the email that you wrote
dressing them down, right?
Or you're getting mad at your kid
because they're having a meltdown.
And you can stop yourself part of the way
through because you're older, because you've been--
you know what this looks like.
And so the idea is have the emotions,
process the emotions, try not to make bad decisions
from those emotions.
And that we have power along the spectrum.
JORDAN KLEPPER: Now there's a criticism
of stoicism, too, about--
yeah, yeah, yeah.
[applause]
I think what I appreciate with some of this
is the idea that it takes response,
and it breaks it down little bits and pieces.
And I know this main tenet that, like,
being aware of what you can control and what you cannot,
and being able to let go of the things you cannot control.
I think a criticism of stoicism is
if you look at, is it a philosophy that comes
from a place of privilege--
RYAN HOLIDAY: Sure.
--for people that are in situations where,
even institutional situations, you look at things like
racism, activism movements, where, like,
the situation that they cannot control is one
that is inherently oppressive.
Is stoicism teaching you how to accept those things
and not push back?
Is there inherent privilege in there?
It's hard to get more privileged
than the emperor of Rome. - Sure.
Right?
But the philosopher that influences Marcus Aurelius
more than any other philosopher, who he quotes
in his writings all the time, is this guy
named Epictetus, who is a slave,
the exact opposite of Marcus.
You have extreme power, and you have extreme powerlessness.
And yet, they're all human beings.
They're all dealing with the hand that life deals us.
And they're trying to make the best of it
and trying to have the most impact
that they can in the world despite and because of
that, right?
So the stoics occupy a wide range of positions in society.
But most of all, the stoics are active in public life.
In fact, this is the big distinction.
People have heard of the word epicurean or the epicureans.
The epicureans sort of retreat from public life.
They study philosophy and they go,
let's just hang out in this cool garden.
We'll drink.
We'll have fun.
We'll enjoy life.
We will not be disturbed by things.
We'll do our own thing.
Well, the stoics say, but if you do that,
who does that seed the field to?
Like you were saying on your thing,
it seeds it to the worst people.
And the stoic's idea is that unless something
prevents them, they will get involved in public life.
They will try to contribute.
They will try to make a positive difference.
And this is why the stoics were influential to the founders
in the Renaissance.
All throughout history, the stoics
have been involved in social movements
and positive change-making because, yes, there's
a lot we don't control, but we do control what we do, right?
We control whether we vote, whether we
go out to a protest, whether we speak
out about something, right?
So courage is one of the virtues.
Justice is another virtue.
Discipline is a virtue.
And then wisdom is a virtue.
All of these, I think, propel us into being informed,
and then being active in the world.
How do we utilize something like this?
So I go on the road, I talk to a lot of folks,
and I get into infuriating conversations
more often than not.
Yeah.
People ask me, how do you deal with something like that?
And I do go to philosophy.
I go to Bourbon as well.
A hell of a philosophy.
I don't know if the philosopher Bookers.
He's great.
Macallan is a great one.
A Scottish philosopher.
He's great.
But I do find elements of, like, again, controlling
your response and your temper.
And also, empathy helped me get out of things like that.
RYAN HOLIDAY: Yeah.
People also--
I talked to a lot of people who are really frustrated
with what's going on.
Both sides of the aisle, it's-- they're scary times.
People turn to god.
I think less and less people are turning to god.
Like, what do you say and what can people
find in philosophy and stoic philosophy that can help them,
that can provide a balm to days where you
wonder just how long we're going to be
able to fight this battle?
Whether it's climate change, whether it's democracy,
whether it's just getting up in the morning.
Yeah, philosophy at its best is
what they call the guide to the good life,
to human flourishing.
Not just to happiness, but productivity, and purpose,
and meaning, and being able to endure
suffering, and pain, and loss, as we all
have to go through in life.
But I think if we can see philosophy
as something we lean on, something
that gives us counsel, that's really helpful.
Not as this thing that only people in universities do,
but that it's, like, there for all of us.
I think one of the problems is, as those other systems have
fallen away, whether people are turning away from the church,
or they're disillusioned with higher education,
or they're disillusioned with the media,
like, where do they go?
They go to random stuff on the internet.
And a lot of those people are grifters
or they're trying to weaponize those feelings,
or those doubts, or those emotions of those people.
And so people end up down these dead ends.
And we can pity them, but also understand that, like,
that's not a good way to go.
How do you--
I mean, because you're all over the internet.
You have newsletters.
You're put on Instagram videos all the time.
I think you've taken something that
seems to live in libraries in dusty back rooms,
and you've brought it to people's phones.
How do you balance using a medium that has zero depth
and is destroying our conversations,
but also is the way in which you can talk
to kids in 20-second snippets?
I do think it's important that we go to people
where they are, right?
And take what we think is important,
what needs to be said, and find out how to-- in the same way
that I speak Latin or Greek, I read the translations
of those texts.
We have to figure out how to translate these ideas that we
want kids to understand, that we want young people
to understand, that we need sort of permeating
through our culture.
We have to figure out how to translate those
into the different mediums where
people get their information.
And so I love hearing that someone discovered
me on YouTube or on Instagram.
And then they're like, and then I read your books
because that's the--
JORDAN KLEPPER: It's how you get paid.
Yes. JORDAN KLEPPER: Yes, yes, yes.
- But that's-- - I get it.
I get it.
[applause]
That's the medium that human beings
have been learning about big ideas for a really long
time, right?
books are where we--
books are, I think, one of the best mediums
to really meditate on something or think
about something over a long period of time, right?
As opposed to something that's bit-sized.
And so I think it's important that we drive people
towards books, and reading, and big ideas,
and things that are not always of the moment.
JORDAN KLEPPER: I like to-- actually, I don't--
I don't think that's articulated enough
to use social media as a conduit
to something that has more depth.
Yeah.
We talked about Andrew Tate on this show.
And I am a father.
You have a book, The Daily Dad, that is coming out.
How do you use these things to be a better
dad, to create better humans to make
this world a better place?
Yeah, first off, I mean, we have to model the stuff.
The stoics-- yeas, the hardest part.
JORDAN KLEPPER: Shit.
Epictetus says, don't talk about your philosophy,
embody it, right?
My kids aren't going to read my books.
JORDAN KLEPPER: Sounds like a real fun one to hang out with.
They're never going to read the books, right?
So what matters is, do I live the books at my house, right?
And how do we model the things we want our kids to be?
And I think, politically and culturally, that's
a big thing a lot of people my age are dealing with us, how
do you respond to the fact that your parents, apparently,
didn't believe a lot of the things they grew up talking
to you about because they're willing to throw their vote to
a carnival barker, you know?
Because they want to win elections, right?
Like, how do you deal with that?
It's not even a hypocrisy, but it's a sort of--
it's an insincerity, I guess, right?
And so what really matters is, do we model the things,
and do we show that we're sincere and we really,
like, put value?
We put stock in the things that we pay lip service to.
JORDAN KLEPPER: Do you feel there's, like,
a parenting crisis in America?
Well, I think--
I think people are struggling with the fact
that their parents are struggling, whether it's, you
know, they get sucked down some internet rabbit hole
or they're having to work longer than they thought.
I do-- I do think there is a problem.
There's a problem in every generation,
but it's not just the millennials
and the young people that are struggling,
you know what I mean?
There's a joke I heard that, you
know, all the things that my parents warned us about--
that warned us was going to happen to us on the internet,
it happened to them. JORDAN KLEPPER: Yeah.
You know?
JORDAN KLEPPER: Yeah, yeah.
A question to a healthy philosophical diet.
Obviously, you talk a lot about stoicism.
But people who are interested, myself included, one, they
should go towards your books.
They should go to the ideas of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus,
Seneca, things of that nature.
But, also, is it healthy to indulge
in other great philosophers?
Do you find yourself-- like, do you
find yourself having to be defined by one
particular philosophy?
No, we should read widely.
We should put anything to use that's good for us.
One of the stoics, Seneca, he says,
read like a spy in the enemy's camp, right?
He says, I'll quote a bad author
if the line is good, right?
So it doesn't matter who said it.
What matters is, is it true, and does it help you get
better at being a parent, a person, a professional,
whatever it is?
It of use?
That's what matters.
If you had to replace a philosophy quote,
if you had to replace live, laugh, love, one of my faves.
One of my faves.
What should if-- I take that down from my living room--
If you're looking for a sign at Home Goods.
I need a nice sign at home.
What should I look at every day?
Marcus opens book two of Meditations with a thought.
He says, today, the people you will meet
will be jealous, and stupid, and annoying,
and obnoxious, and mean, right?
It goes on.
JORDAN KLEPPER: He's right.
Yes, he's preparing for the day ahead, right?
And so some people think this is depressive stoicism
at its best.
But then he goes, but you can't hate them
and you can't let them implicate you in ugliness,
he says, because we're meant to work together.
We're like two rows of teeth or two hands,
and that we're all part of this large thing together.
And that some people are fulfilling their role
by being the kind of people that you have to interview,
and then the rest of us are doing the best we can.
And that is life. - I love it.
And that is life.
Ryan Holiday, everybody.