Ep 73 | Finding Stillness in the Chaos | Ryan Holiday | The Glenn Beck Podcast

You know, when I first started this podcast and wanted to do this podcast, I mean, I have radio, I have television, I can talk to anybody several different ways.

This podcast was important to me because I wanted to talk to guests with unique perspectives on what we're going through and people that have been shunned in academia, for example, people who I wouldn't otherwise find myself talking to, or people who wouldn't have an outlet to share their amazing stories because of their political views, and to do it in a forum to where we could just sit and just have a conversation, because that doesn't happen anymore.

Agreeing with me on political issues or anything else has never been a prerequisite.

In fact, I want to hear different points of view.

I want to be intellectually nimble and curious.

I encourage you to do something dangerous once a week, something that scares you once a week.

Have a conversation that you're not sure about.

Listening is a lost art now, and it is absent in our culture, and it's sapping our unity.

Listening is one of those things that my guest today has been cultivating on his own journey.

This is an incredible story.

College dropout became brash, prodigious talent in the world of media and publicity, huge success.

He wrote a book in his early 20s on how to manipulate the media.

He was really a fake news pioneer, and he hated it.

In the aftermath of that book and his pulling back the curtain on the dark underbelly of American media, he did what what most brash prodigies fail to do without tragedy, addiction, or failure forcing it on them, and that is self-reflection.

He looked in the mirror and didn't like what he saw.

There has to be more to life than this.

But how is he gonna turn that ship?

It was already churning through deep, deep waters of lies.

Answering that question has spurred him to remake his career in a way that invited a lot of skeptical criticism because of the way he first burst on the scene with his how-to book on media manipulation.

Is he still playing the media manipulation game?

Is he playing me like a fiddle?

Well, I don't think so.

Since that first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, he has written six other New York Times bestsellers, including his latest book titled Stillness is the Key.

It sounds like, oh,

and you're going to have to meditate.

It is not like that at all.

It's been translated into 30 languages.

30.

The Prince of Media Lies has morphed into a philosopher and an internationally known speaker in 30 different languages.

There's some things I'm sure we don't agree on, but there's a lot we do.

There's one thing that he and I, and all of us, really have in common: most of our lives are too chaotic.

There are practical ways to cut through the chaos and live richer, deeper, more meaningful lives.

Ryan Holiday, countercultural, really.

All countercultural ideas about shh stillness.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way.

Uh-oh.

I know, I know.

It's never good when it starts that way.

But in some ways, you remind me of me.

That

you went and you did something and you thought you were doing great and you're pioneering and you're doing it for maybe all the right reasons.

And then you stop and you look back and you're like, that caused some problems that I didn't see.

Yeah.

Right.

Yes.

And then you stop and you're like,

I could be very successful if I just keep doing that, but it provides

too many

real

traps.

for my own personal happiness that I just can't get past.

Yeah, it's like sort of what you have to look in the mirror at some point and go what kind of person do I want to be and and do it's not am I being well paid for this?

Am I doing it at a high level?

And, you know, am I doing, am I sort of challenged by it?

But like, is this making the world a better place?

Yes or no?

And I think on the media side for me, it was like

I discovered something I could be very good at it.

The sky was the limit, but it was

it was realizing like, hey, if everyone was doing what I was doing, this would not be the world that I would want to live in.

And that I was doing things I thought for the right reasons, but people could very easily do them for the wrong reasons.

And

that's almost exactly the way I felt.

Yeah.

That

I think I'm doing it for the right reasons.

It's not being taken.

And if everybody does this,

it's trouble.

I remember I read an interview with Michael Lewis, and he was saying, he's like, he wrote that book, Liars Poker, about everything that was wrong with Wall Street.

And he's like, people come up to me and say, you're why I work on Wall Street.

And he's like, that was not what.

And so I get that a lot.

I would identify as sort of like center right or sort of radical middle politically.

But when like very extreme alt-right people tell me that like, trust me, I'm lying is like their Bible or like the guy that gave Donald Trump the idea for the wall said that Trust Me, I'm Lying is like the Bible that he lives by.

Like that's not.

That's not the difference I want to make in the world.

And so, yeah, I ended up writing that book.

And the funny thing was,

people, when I wrote it, people accused me of writing the book just to make money.

And it was like, writing a book is literally the worst possible way you can cash money.

Oh, yeah, I know, I know, I know.

So, for anybody who hasn't read the book, just in a couple of paragraphs.

It is like a sort of a whistleblower's account or ripping back the curtain of how the sausage is made from

our modern media system, of which I was a sort of a bad actor in,

but also sort of, I think, someone who is sort of show, like in the way I sort of.

Hang on, just say, you weren't a bad actor in, I mean,

you were working for an apparel company.

Sure.

It's not like you were like, and then they'll all die.

Yes,

I wasn't spearheading Russia's

collection interference.

But at the same time, like,

I sort of liken it to a computer hacker who is like hacking into things that they know they're not supposed to be doing, but then telling,

like, leaving signs afterwards that say you should fix this.

And that's where I came from from the book.

I totally get not everyone's going to interpret it that way, but like for me, it was

the thrill and the challenge of like

having fun in a corrupt, broken system,

but knowing ultimately like this was not leading down a path that I was proud of.

Okay, so you had somewhere in you something

good

that

you had some sort of an archetype in you that said,

that's not what I imagine a good person to be.

Yes.

Right?

Yes.

We're erasing almost all of those.

There is no,

we are destroying everything to the point to where

we used to be able to point and say, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jesus, Moses, whoever it is.

I really don't care.

We don't have anybody.

Everybody's bad.

When I was about 19 years old, do you know who Dr.

Drew is?

Yeah, so I was 19 years old.

I went to this conference and Dr.

Drew was there and I asked him what books I should be reading.

And he told me to read the Stoics.

And I read Marcus Aurelius's meditations.

And there's a line in that book.

He says, like, waste no more time.

And I have this as a print on my wall now.

He says, waste no more time talking about what a good man is.

Be one.

And I think that was a big part.

It was like, I'm reading about this.

I'm writing about this.

I know this is true.

But what am I, is what I do professionally in line with that?

And it wasn't.

And I think, and this is something you hear the Stoics talk about, is exactly what you're saying about heroes.

You have to have someone that you're comparing yourself to or against.

Like Seneca says, he's like, without a ruler, you can't make crooked straight.

And I think that's what these heroes should do for us.

I think the problem is

we now spend most of our time undermining heroes rather than lionizing the virtues that those heroes had.

Well, partly because

we made our heroes into gods.

Sure.

And

we would not accept anything.

I mean, let's just take America.

I grew up in

a family that, yeah, we got...

We have problems.

America has problems, but it's generally a good place.

But boy, is that screwed up.

You know what I mean?

That's the way we should look at heroes.

But even today, you'll have people who are like, America is the best place ever and you don't like it.

And the opposite, it is the worst place on the planet.

It's neither of those.

It has had moments of each.

I think that's a big part of it.

I also think academically, like teachers used to think their job was to

teach their students how to be good people.

Now they believe their job is to teach them facts.

So, like, I, I, like, if you look at old, old school books, they had the story of George Washington and the cherry tree in that book, as if it was true.

Obviously, it's not true.

And obviously, I don't think they thought it was true.

I think they were teaching it as a moral lesson.

I remember in school

not learning that story, but learning specifically that it was not true.

Like they went out of their way to go, hey, by the way, George Washington did not chop, like, did not do this thing with the cherry tree.

That's a lie.

But what they, which is fine, as long as you go, but here is a real life story of someone who didn't tell a lie when it counted, right?

Here is his book on virtues that he wrote when he was like 10.

Yes.

I mean, that's an incredible thing.

What kills me, especially on George Washington,

that

however long ago, we came up with a lie to teach how honest he was.

It's insane.

It is.

And then, you know, people go, oh, but George Washington owns slaves.

And that's one way to look at it.

The other way is to look at it, if all the founders who almost all universally believed that slavery was bad, he's the only one that freed his slaves.

And he was the only one that could, though, at least in Virginia.

But Jefferson couldn't.

Well, we don't even, we can't even

get into the debate about like, hey, look, actually, Virginia passed laws that made it so you had to provide for your slaves after you monumented them.

So it was actually extraordinarily difficult to do it.

Like, have you read the Chernow biography of Grant?

No.

The new one?

It's really good.

And what I loved about it was that he spends a whole bunch of time on Reconstruction.

And I had always believed, and what I, and this is someone who'd studied the Civil War, that it was like, we won the Civil War,

the North wins the Civil War, the motivations are somewhat conflicted, and then we just dropped the ball on Reconstruction, right?

We just didn't actually care about black people, and we threw into the roads.

What you read in that book is just how hard Grant and Sherman and all these Union veterans fought to solidify the gains of that victory and how the Freedmen's Bureau and all the

prosecutions of the Klan and all like, so we tell the story, like the story we tell kids is that like, We failed on civil rights, it's a black mark, a shame on this nation, and we're horrible hypocrites.

When we should be saying, look, it was a narrow run thing.

We almost got this right in the 1860s.

And because we didn't get all the way there, it took us 100 years to get it right again.

And that's why we have to keep fighting and we have to believe that we're capable.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, those are fundamentally different narratives.

I'll have to show you my first copy.

We have a

copy of the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, handwritten by Thomas Jefferson.

Have you ever seen one?

No.

I mean, yes, in D.C.

I've seen one.

Yes.

So we have the 1820 engraving of it.

When Jefferson is writing about slavery, that's been taken out of the Declaration of Independence.

His handwriting changes.

You can see how passionate he is.

He's capitalizing words.

It's crazy.

And

we don't learn any of this stuff.

We just...

tear it all down, say that it's all worthless.

And I've gotten to the point

where I look at, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by a creator with certain inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And government is established by men to protect those rights.

Beautiful.

Can you think of a better

dot on the horizon that you say that's where we want to go?

I can't.

And we're just, we're throwing the baby with the bathwater.

There's lots of stuff that we could change, but that wasn't, hey, we've done it.

That's saying, this is our direction.

For the first time in human history, we believe we should do this.

And let's say that wasn't what they were doing.

Lincoln reframes it that way in the 1860s because he re and Martin Luther King, 100 years later, reframes it that way.

And so did Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass was against it at first until Lincoln said, have you read it?

And so the idea of like deciding what, are you going to, like Victor Frankl had this line where he said, you know, if you take things as they are, you make man worse.

If you think about it as what we can be, you make men better.

And I think we've decided to tell a very depressing, a very dark, a very resigned narrative about America, about the human race,

instead of one where we are calling to our capacities to be better,

when we're pushing the mark of where we can go, instead we've decided that we're all terrible, totally irredeemable, everyone's a hypocrite.

And what I think this has left us in is the sort of nihilism that is the modern world where nothing matters, nothing can be accomplished, nothing is improved, and we all suck.

It's Nietzsche when he said it wasn't a celebratory phrase when he said God is dead.

He was challenging.

So

man's going to need a God.

What are you going to replace it with?

And if you don't replace it, you're doomed.

Yeah, he doesn't say, he says, God is dead and we have killed him.

That's a problem.

And what do you replace it with?

And I think, you know, as someone who writes about the Stoics, like every couple of months, the New York Times or the Washington Post or one of these news will do a trend piece about how the popularity of Stoicism is, you know, about, you know, it's like, why are people in Silicon Valley obsessed with suffering?

Why are we using this philosophy of the ancient world where they used to tolerate

who were the founding fathers thinking about when they were they were thinking of Cato, right?

Like George Washington was inspired by these ancient figures who themselves fell short of what they believed in.

And so you have to be looking at history not with an eye of judgment, but by finding something to call you to a higher principle.

And

we've lost that and we've replaced it with what?

I had a friend tell me one time,

he was a great man, great man, and taught me so much.

And he came into my office one time and he said,

do you have any pictures of any of your heroes?

And I said, no.

And he said, you have to.

You have to.

He said, you have to put a picture of some men you want to be like.

And you put them right there on the edge of the desk.

So when you're making a decision and you're just talking, you glance down there and think to yourself, is that what that guy, am I getting closer or farther away?

When you would walk into Monticello, Jefferson had statues of his heroes,

contemporary heroes like Washington, but also ancient heroes.

And I have a bust on my desk of Marcus Aurelius from the 1840s.

And I think I use it for a couple of things.

One, I think the guy that had this statue made is dead, and someone will own this statue after me.

Like this is just

like what they say about like

a caretaker.

Yeah, that you just own a Rolex till you pass it on to the next generation or whatever.

It's not a Rolex.

What is it?

It's a Patek Philippe.

Yes, but that idea that we're all just

stewards.

But

we have this expression that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And then there's this guy who is adopted to be emperor.

So he suddenly thrust upon him that he's going to be the emperor of Rome.

And what does he do with absolute power?

We know what everyone else has ever done with absolute power.

You kill your rivals, right?

Marcus Aurelius, the first thing he does as emperor is name a co-emperor.

The first thing he does with absolute power is give half of it away to his stepbrother.

And you're just like,

that has never happened before in history, and that will probably never happen again in history.

What can you learn from these people?

And how can you keep their memory fresh?

So, and that helps us if you know history.

I mean,

Wilson was the first who tried to run for a third term.

It wasn't against the Constitution.

Yeah.

It's just that George Washington gave it up when he didn't have to.

You know, King George said, if he gives that up, he'll be the greatest man to ever live.

He did.

And so the conversation was,

you really think you're better than George Washington?

Yeah.

We don't have that anymore.

So these people, because that self-regulator is gone, these people would run until they did

Barack Obama, Donald Trump, they'd run until the day they died.

Well, and what's so incredible is why did Washington do that?

Because his hero was Cincinnati, who is made dictator.

He saves Rome.

And then he says, I want to return to my farm.

And like, I think it's George Wills.

He's writing that

Washington wanted power for the sole purpose of giving it away.

Like, that his dream was, for him, it wasn't, how can I become powerful?

It's how can I become powerful?

And then use that to teach the lesson that the institutions matter more than the individual.

And he resigns his commission.

That's the first time he gives power away.

Then he walks away after he becomes.

It's incredible.

But he does that not because he's superhuman, but because he had the myths and heroes that inspired him to be better than what he naturally was.

He had humility.

There's nothing,

there is nothing.

Look at Abraham Lincoln.

Is there a more humble guy than that?

He's beaten almost to death.

You look at the picture, five years different.

Do you think Obama changed in office?

It's incredible.

It's incredible.

So he's just beaten into humility.

And there is nothing,

nothing in our society that is

saying, hey, good for you, you're humble.

Yeah.

Right.

Nothing.

Well, no, no.

Look, I wrote a book called Ego is the Enemy.

Like, I think about this a lot.

Like, the greatest people are the most humble, but

they're also advertised for themselves the worst.

So we hear about them.

Do you know what I mean?

Like George Marshall, I think, is the greatest man of the 20th century.

Why do we know less about George Marshall?

It's because in 1950, George Marshall was offered a million dollars to write his memoirs, and he turned it down.

Wow.

And

he said,

And why has George Marshall not become president?

And Eisenhower does.

FDR says to Marshall, I know you want a battlefield command.

I know your reputation as a general depends on it.

Do you want to command the troops at Normandy?

And he says, I want you to pick who you think will help you do your job best.

And it goes to his subordinate, Eisenhower.

Marshall has to write out, this is one, I think, the greatest, one of the greatest, most remarkable moments in American history.

So FDR offers the job to Marshall.

He turns it down.

He says, okay, I'm giving it to Eisenhower.

Please write out, please, here's the orders.

He has to write out the orders to his protégé, giving him the job that gives Eisenhower the

presidency,

the most important invasion in history.

And after he finishes the orders, orders, he writes, and you can see this, he writes, Dear Ike, I thought you might want this memento for

your records.

Congratulations.

And so all he's thinking about is the country and the mission and not about other people.

And then, so you go, oh, but doesn't this help him?

Doesn't this hurt his career?

When Marshall goes, when you have a reputation like that, when Marshall goes in front of Congress and says, hey, I need hundreds of millions of dollars for this thing called the Manhattan Project, and I can't tell you what it's for, and you'll have no visibility into it, they say, sure, right?

Like, when you have that reputation, you can actually accomplish incredible things.

But it's interesting to me, because I didn't know that story about Marshall.

It's interesting to me that Ike was similar in many ways.

I mean,

one of the more powerful letters in history I've ever read is

this is my fault.

I did it wrong.

Blame no one else that he wrote before the Battle of Normandy is saying, in case it goes horribly, just release this, where he takes 100% of the blame.

And

he kept this poem in his wallet that said, like, take your hand, put it in a bucket of water.

Now, remove your hand from the bucket of water.

That's how important you are.

Something like, like, he would meditate actively on how insignificant he was.

Meanwhile, he's heading the largest army ever in history.

And

you need that balance.

Otherwise, you become like MacArthur and eventually you spin off the planet, right?

And you make catastrophic mistakes.

And

again, this is what the study of history reminds you of.

Hopefully, none of us are ever leading an army that large, but we are leading companies or you're a parent.

These are timeless forces that have led humans astray forever.

And

this is what the smart philosophers and leaders have always been struggling with.

And, you know,

I think Mattis is a deep admirer of

Marshall.

And I think he struggled with, do I write my memoirs or not?

He decides to write them.

I think the remarkable thing about Mattis's memoirs is not only does he not mention Trump one time, but there's a scene in the memoirs where he talks about, I think it's in the second Gulf War, he has to fire a commander who was good but not aggressive enough.

And this had been like an international incident because he fired, like as we're winning the war, he forget who it was, but he basically cashiers this like uh commander.

All these years later, he's writing about it in his memoir.

He refuses to name the guy because he doesn't want to add to the guy's embarrassment.

Like, he already did it, but he he's he has the dignity and self-control and the principle to say, like, here's the kind of person that I'm going to be.

And I just love that kind of a code.

So

it is the code that built us.

You know, it is

I own a ranch way up in the mountains in the west,

and it's a farming community, and

contracts for anything.

Yeah.

Hey, can I run my cattle on your land and I'll pay you this at the end of the year?

Yeah.

Sure.

Done.

Right.

That code is who we used to be.

You didn't break your word.

You were a man of integrity.

Not all of it, but at least that was

the thing that, again, we pointed to and said, you want to be that man.

Yeah.

Okay.

Is this going to come back into fashion?

Because to me, our suicide rate is going up because we don't have that.

There's nothing to strive to be that will actually mean something.

There's nothing better

than

somebody saying,

you're a good man.

Thank you for that.

Or you just doing something and nobody knows, but you feel good.

That's what feeds us and keeps us up.

No, and that's the glue that keeps the society together.

I think

the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were designed to give us all these freedoms.

The idea was not that you were free to do whatever you want.

It's that the government wasn't going to tell you to do these things.

It's that there had to be some sort of personal or religious or spiritual code that governed your behavior.

We've gotten rid of all that.

We've gotten rid of our heroes.

We've gotten rid of our churches.

We've gotten rid of

what else held us into place.

Just our common bands as a community, it's all gone.

Well, I think...

Like, I'm not a religious person.

I think I used to be an atheist.

I identify now as agnostic and that I don't know.

But like, if

you start talking to someone about the cardinal virtues,

you know, sort of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance, they hear cardinal and they think, oh, that's like a religious cardinal.

They think that's a, and cardinal,

C.S.

Lewis talks about this.

Cardos is hinge.

These are the pivotal virtues of society, of the Western world.

But they're not Christian.

These are philosophical.

These go back to Socrates and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius.

And so one of the things that gets me excited, and obviously I'm a little bit biased in that I write about it, but like that people are turning back to these ideas because they realize we knocked everything down and that you have to, there has to be something, or else why not just kill yourself?

As you said, because like if this is meaningless, what do we life is too hard to keep doing it?

I've always believed that if

the Ten Commandments or the New Testament were just

travels with Jesus

and

top 10 tips from Mo,

they would be the gold standard of everything.

But because we've attached, we've taken all of those principles, doesn't, I believe they are true, doesn't matter if it actually happened.

What matters is this is 5,000 years of people going,

you know,

this really repeats itself.

You know what I mean?

You're just learning

how it repeats itself.

Well, I think what's remarkable, I talk about this every Christmas to people.

Jesus and Seneca were born in the same year, and they walked the same Roman Empire at the same time, saying a lot of the same things.

Jesus is obviously saying, I am son of man,

I am the son of God,

and that there is a religious justification for what he's talking about.

But it's not as if he was the only person saying this.

Like St.

Paul is debating and talking with the Stoics and the cynics and that philosophy was the civic.

This was where we were discussing, like

in some senses, it's almost like religion, Christianity was too successful.

It ate everything.

And rightfully so, they sort of absorbed a lot of the tenets of these ancient schools.

And so now, because people are like, I'm not religious, they think that humanity, that's the only moral framework that humanity has existed in.

And that's nonsense.

And what I find so

inspiring is that when you turn to Eastern philosophy,

in all the religions, at the core, they are saying very similar things about what kind of person to be.

Almost all of them are saying exactly the same thing.

It's why I started questioning

God in hell and everything else because I'm like,

if I'm over in China and I'm, you know, Gandhi always bothered me.

Gandhi, good guy.

You know, Jesus didn't wear pants.

He didn't wear pants.

I mean, they had a lot of common, you know, and good,

but philosophy.

But Gandhi knew Jesus.

He knew.

He said, I like this Jesus guy.

I just don't like his followers.

Is he in hell?

That didn't make any sense to me.

Yeah.

You know, it's

God is speaking a language.

You know, if there be a God, I happen to believe there is.

But this is, there is something that is a

pulsar that is saying truth, truth, truth.

And it's global.

It's universal.

It is, there are certain things

that

make us better people,

make us a safer people, a safer civilization, a happier people.

Yeah.

I think about it, it's ironic you would think about it in terms of evolution, but like apes and chimps both have, sorry, pandas and chimps both have thumbs.

Bats and birds, they both fly.

Evolutionarily, they have a common ancestor, but it's not like they're both descendant from the same thing, right?

These are independently, these animals evolve very similar strategies for surviving.

I think in a way, it goes to the central truth of what Christianity and Islam and Confucianism and Buddhism is talking about, that these schools independently said, oh, you got to control your temper.

Oh, suffering is an inevitable part of life.

You know, oh, courage is important, right?

The golden rule, that they would independently come on the golden rule is to me like the proof that it doesn't have to, either it's proof that it's supernatural or that it's proof that it doesn't matter if it's supernatural.

It's that it clearly works because we've discovered it multiple times.

I mean, to me personally, it matters to me personally

for you, for me looking at you, I don't care.

I mean, I don't care.

Are you getting to be a better person than you were yesterday?

Are you discovering the

tenants of just universal truth?

Because it's just

like,

you know,

the family is just being torn apart.

Just torn apart.

Family, traditional family.

Look, it's a building block.

That doesn't mean I hate...

I mean, my mom was a single mom.

Okay.

I don't hate families that broke apart or whatever.

That doesn't make any sense.

I don't hate gay people.

I don't.

But can't we all just say,

if you can get a family where mom and dad aren't drunk alcoholics, you know,

is probably better.

You know, there's some things that, you know, but where you have a family unit, that is the structure of all life.

And it's best to do that.

That doesn't mean

these are all evil.

It just means this is something we can say, this is what we should strive for, knowing humans fail all the time.

And it's not always going to look like that, but this is something good listen to i'd be curious for your thoughts like i think it's like this word like decency is coming up a lot or norms come up a lot and we seem to think those are things that you enforce on other people rather than follow yourself so like like i i think donald trump has run roughshot over a whole bunch of important norms in american history and in our political system I think it's ironic that the media, which is violating all the hundreds of years of norms of its own profession, is the one that's upset about that.

It's like

you can deal with the stuff that's going on in your house.

So it's like decent, it's like, I think the bedrock of a family is important.

So instead of being really upset about that other people are doing things over here, work on your shorter be a good dad.

Yes, yes.

And don't condemn everybody else for living a different lifestyle than yours.

We just have to be able to say,

you know, what Donald Trump does is

nuts a lot of the times.

And as a conservative, I don't like it a lot of the times.

Sometimes he does stuff that turns out good.

Sure.

And I'll take that and I'll leave that and not embrace it and not become everything I despise.

Yeah,

and I think the politics becoming kind of a team sport has.

There's no nuance.

And that has eliminated the idea of like, oh, these are the things I believe.

Like, like,

that's what I think about Trump, where it's like, I don't care whether I agree with his policies or not.

Like, would you let your daughter work for him?

Would you want him to be in charge of your retirement money?

Like, the like, so I don't, I don't care whether I agree with the policies or not.

I agree with the previous conservative position that character and temperament and

personal behavior matters more than politics.

So, now,

how do you get there when there is no no one

of character?

I mean, we had, I think he, I don't agree with his policies.

I don't like him all that much.

He doesn't like me either, and I'm fine with that.

Mitt Romney, I think he was a fundamentally good, decent man.

Yes.

He was made into the devil.

Right.

And Americans on both sides were like, yeah, and he's a Mormon.

So no, sure.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

He was a good, decent man that you might disagree with, but he was a good man.

He's somebody I would let my daughter go to their house.

You know,

he would watch my money.

Yeah.

All of it.

I mean, I think McCain, I think liberals are going to have to look themselves in the mirror about this.

It's like, look at the quality of

people that we have turned into monsters over the last 10, 20 years.

And then

I liken it to the sort of the over-prescription of antibiotics.

It creates superbugs.

You know, when you prescribed the shame treatment to John McCain, a guy who refused to go home from a POW camp because he wouldn't get preferential treatment, you want to make him into some sort of corrupt, selfish monster.

Like, of course, you end up with Donald Trump.

Because what sane person would, and then let's look at it the other way.

Obama

was one of the most dignified, self-controlled, sort of modeling good behavior presidents that we've ever had.

I mean, like, as far as like not bad, like, almost every one of the presidents we've ever had has been at the core probably a bad person, unfortunately.

Like a lot of them were bad people.

George Bush was a good man.

Yeah, I'm just saying like on the odds, a lot of them were not good people.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, he wasn't cheating on his wife.

He wasn't lying.

You know, even the way he's like, you know, like you, obviously you compare Obama post-presidency to Truman post-presidency.

You know, one, one, one is much more dignified.

But at the same time, like, you know, he didn't make his money doing illicit things.

He has, for the most part, practiced what we say, what everyone is preaching.

And somehow he got turned into a monster.

And then we wonder why we get actual monsters.

We're the boy who cried wolf, and then a wolf came, and suddenly...

People don't trust you when you say this is not normal.

And what comes after?

I don't know how it can get.

Like, it's either going to get a lot worse.

I used to say that.

I used to say that.

I can't imagine how it got worse.

It's going to get worse.

It does.

I started saying that in 2004.

It can either get like history book bad or this is a rock bottom moment where it can get better.

I mean, I think it's one of the.

Do you think America is even sensing a rock bottom coming?

I mean, if the things that are happening on a daily basis are not rock bottom, I don't want to know what rock bottom looks like.

My mother committed suicide.

She was an alcoholic.

She committed suicide when I was a teenager.

I know rock bottom.

And for me, it's not there.

And thinking as an alcoholic myself and somebody who has been around suicide, I'm scared to death of America's rock bottom.

Yeah.

Because I don't.

At some point, you're like, okay, there's an exit we just went by.

There is an exit we went by.

Hey, here's one.

And we keep passing them and the bridge is out.

Yeah.

I mean, one of the things I take from history is like earlier this year, I reread Ford's

post-presidential memoirs, and you're just like, oh, history is just the same thing happening over and over again.

Do you know what I mean?

And

that

it's always seemed like it was coming apart at the seams.

Except

there was the underlying belief that tomorrow would be better, the underlying belief that there are good people and heroes, and a uniting force of e pluribus unum.

We're here for the idea that all men are created equal.

Even though we don't ever get there, we still have this fundamental belief.

You know, Martin Luther King challenged us to live up to that.

Brigham Young,

when he first crossed the mountains, being

with torches across the mountains and kill everybody,

he gets there and says, it's the people, it's not the documents.

The ideas are right.

We had that.

I don't know if we have that anymore.

I mean, yeah, the silver lining might be that

is this also kind of a transition?

Is a younger generation going going to, there's an F.

Scott Fitzgerald story, I love where it's a sort of spoiled young woman, and she has this doctor, he comes, and he gives her this, he says, like, it's your turn to tend the fire.

Like, you have to tend the fire.

And this is like the wake-up call for her.

This is also kind of the plot of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Like

the fire.

The fire people.

You're depressing the crap out of me.

The fire passes, right?

And I wonder if we are in it.

Like,

is this,

are new people going to decide to enter public service?

Is there going to be like sort of,

can this create less partisan mayors and city councils?

And, you know, are we...

It could.

It could.

yeah, I hope it could.

I know it could, yeah, whether it will or not, because you have to have

somebody has to be laying some cornerstones, and I don't see them.

I think, I mean, when you look at,

I mean, Louis C.K., I love the song, uh,

all my heroes are on TV for the wrong reason.

I love that, yeah.

Uh,

is, I mean, okay, disgusting, whatever,

but does he ever get a chance to go, okay, that was wrong.

I got it.

I've learned.

And welcome back.

There is the cornerstone of forgiveness

is gone.

So if we don't have somebody relaying cornerstones, how does this new generation

well, I think

who's the congresswoman from California?

She ran after the 2016 election.

You know, she's the bright young Democratic face of change.

And then she's like in a three-way relationship with a campaign manager and then, you know, is forced to resign and then is like, oh, I'm the victim here.

It's like, so I think the problem is even the people who are coming to save us, you know, save us are

horrendous hypocrites.

Well, that's what happened to the Tea Party.

Yeah.

The Tea Party actually believed in a few things and then they elected those people and then they all turned into the same monsters, and they were like,

Right.

Well, that was a waste of time.

Yes.

Yeah.

And

like,

I don't know.

I don't know.

I think what I try to do is zoom way out.

I think one of the other things, we were talking about this on your show.

It's like, I think people consume way too much news.

Like, we are watching information in real time when we should be zooming out and turning to books and history and studying human nature and psychology and biographies.

and so it's like so I do that yeah and I watch too much news and it doesn't make it better for me

because I keep closing the book going okay that didn't end well let's try this one

I mean it did end well and that we're here you know what I mean like well it will end well

in the end I mean life goes on men are meant to be free and you know it might take us a couple of generations if it's lost it might be very very dark for a couple of generations.

But we will, you know, the people, the Chinese people, the Christians in China, are actually praying for the United States to be brought down.

And I was talking to some of these people that have been rescued, and I'm like, what?

Could you stop that?

And they said,

they said, if you're not humbled, you will not remember who you are and you will not be able to help.

You have to remember who you are.

I keep this, maybe you'll like this.

I'll do it too.

I keep this coin in my pocket.

And this is a very ancient practice, the idea of memento mori,

the sort of timeless elements of life.

And that's a Marcus quote on the back.

He says, like, you could leave life right now.

Let that determine what you do and say and think.

And what he means is not like, life is meaningless, you're about to die, like go to an orgy.

He means like, this is the only moment you might have.

How are you going to behave in that moment?

Who are you going to be?

What are you going to do?

And I think our obsession with

breaking news of the moment has taken us away from like thinking about it.

Like George Washington was performing for history, you know, and you might think that's bad, but that's what called, like, in the short term, like in up close, you know, Washington is like moving his slaves around so he can keep them enslaved while being in free territory, right?

Like he's a massive hypocrite.

But on the larger scale, he's thinking about what's the lesson I can teach, you know, people about power.

How can I set up institutions that outlast?

I think he was thinking about that bigger picture.

He wasn't thinking about his petty squabbles with Thomas Jefferson, you know.

And I think if people could get some perspective, it would help give them some clarity.

And that for me, I wrote the book, it's like, is this who I want to be?

Like, is this the legacy I want to live?

If I die tomorrow, is this enough for me?

And it wasn't.

How did you get

to where you are?

How did you,

I mean, you are

a remarkably unique individual because you are, you're not only writing about it but it's an i can tell it's an honest search

and you want to put it into practice every second every time you put your hand in your pocket i've done it yeah

i've carried george washington's compass with me on my hardest days okay incredible yeah um because yeah

hold on you know who you want to be yes hold on where did you come from How did you get here?

I don't think it's that exceptional.

I had like two ordinary parents.

My mom was a school principal.

My dad was a police officer.

So was it

a little bit of that?

Did the

shock of being hit in the face, of being like, you're my hero, and it's Hitler?

Was that it?

What was it then?

I mean, I think it was a little bit from growing up, and then it was

I read these books, and it was like,

this is what I wish people had been telling.

Like, I think I just got hit, I got hit by this freight train of these books, that this is like this timeless struggle, that philosophy is not this series of abstractions and questions, like, you know, how do we know we're not living in a computer simulation?

Philosophy is like, what kind of man do I want to be?

What is the right thing?

Like, how do you control your temperature?

It's a difference between a applied philosophy and theoretical philosophy.

I don't care about theoretical

philosophy.

Like the greatest Stoic is Cato, who doesn't write anything down.

He's a philosopher because when it counted, he did what he said he believed in.

And Cicero, by the way, who wrote all sorts of things, was the opposite of that.

You know what I mean?

Cicero wavered and Cicero contradicted himself and Cicero, like Cato dies resisting Julius Caesar.

Cicero, his friend, censors his eulogy of Cato because he doesn't want to get on the wrong side of Caesar.

You know, like, I just, I just, I'm just in love with those examples.

To me, that's what transformed.

You're in love with books.

I am.

And ideas.

And where did that come from?

My grandmother was a reading instructor, and so I think that's where it first came from.

But it wasn't until much later in life that I read anything that you might call good.

So I grew up with just novels, right?

And then there's nothing wrong with with that.

No, no.

It's the love of reading.

It's the idea.

I remember I was 19.

I had only read stuff that I was forced to read.

18 years old, I pick up The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

I read that book because I thought at the time, this is the only good book in the world.

It just opened up so many different doors for me.

And then I wised up and went, I bet there's something else.

And then I started reading classics.

And I realized, well, there's a reason this book's been around for a couple of years.

That's a really good story.

But you have to have the love of reading and the appreciation of a book.

Yeah, and it's, I think, something that people don't realize that it compounds.

So each classic you read gives you a whole new sense of history because that's what was influencing the people doing those things.

So yeah, I think it's been deciding to dedicate myself to books.

And the nice part about dedicating yourself to books is it eliminates the time.

Like, I don't watch five hours of TV a day because I like reading books.

You know, like

I get on an airplane and I've never bought Wi-Fi in my life on an airplane.

I just read books.

And

you watch people watching crappy movies and you go, of course you think you don't have time to read.

And so, yeah, I think, you know, Warren Buffett has said like the best investment he ever made was buying The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.

I think we make a poor case for books to young people.

We say like, read books because that's what smart people do, or read books because you'll get an F if you don't.

We don't say, like, this is, this will pay off for you.

Like, this will give you an idea.

Like, the decision, I asked Dr.

Drew what books to read.

I went back to my hotel room and bought them.

Like, I would not be sitting here if I hadn't done that.

And so, that ROI allows me to continue to invest in education.

It's the same thing

in many ways that I did when I was 30.

I mean,

people used to joke I had the library of a serial killer because

none of them agreed with each other.

And I was looking for,

hey, this guy says this.

Who would this guy really get pissed off on?

Who would this guy say, don't read him as a contemporary?

Yeah.

And then I'd read him.

And then I'd find, my father told me, When you find,

if you could look at books and knowledge as a transparency, and when you see the same thing, it's the cardinal point.

When you see the same things, you know that's true.

You know what I mean?

And

it completely changes your mind.

So

give me five books that you should read.

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, writes

private notes to himself, not thinking anyone would read it.

It's incredible.

I think Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power

is essentially an introduction to all the classic texts of all time.

My favorite novel is this book, The Movie Goer by Walker Percy, which is all about sort of

angst and deciding who you want to be and what you want to do in life.

That's one of my favorite novels.

Have you read Memoirs of Hadrian?

I'm nerding out about the Stokes, but it's a novel that's written

as if Hadrian was writing the advice to Marcus Aurelius when he is going to become emperor.

So I think that's an incredible one.

And then, how many is that?

Is that three or four?

I think it's four.

What would be the fourth one?

I really liked, it's influenced me a lot recently.

I really like David Brooks' new book, The Second Mountain,

about like, you get to, and this is sort of the journey we're talking, you get to the top of your profession or your thing and you go, wait, this is it?

And then you have to find a second, more meaningful mountain or contribution to society.

And that second mountain is usually smaller.

It's usually smaller and much more personal

and much less recognized by other people.

Correct.

Correct.

One you wouldn't have seen if you weren't on the top of the mountain.

Yes.

You could have.

Yes.

You just had to realize that this big, huge mountain was kind of meaningless.

Yes.

That's sort of what I'm thinking about and going through now.

I just read

Frankenstein over again.

And the reason why I read it is because I was looking at the times that she was living in.

And the time she was living in was the beginning of electricity and everything else.

And so

she's being influenced by

sticking electrical wires into animals.

You know what I mean?

And they're dead, and all of a sudden they reanimate.

And

I was just talking to you, you know who Jason Blum is?

Yes, the movie producer.

So I was just talking to Jason Blum.

He was a big fan of Ego's interview.

He told me.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we were just talking, and I said, you've got to redo Frankenstein, but forget the old Frankenstein.

It's the same thing.

We're now talking because of science.

Maybe there is no death.

Yeah.

And what can we do with algorithms?

What can we do in downloading people?

What can we do by enhancing people?

Nothing's changed.

The same exact warning, except they didn't have the technology.

And

we're coming to the party this time, like they did, saying we do have the technology or we will.

What is the monster going to look like this time or will it be a monster?

I will definitely,

the other two novels I think fall in that category.

Have you read The Count of Monte Cristo?

I love it.

It's such a huge book, but it's so much more than just about revenge.

I think that one is a shockingly modern book.

But

because we were talking about it earlier, I reread Fahrenheit 451 three or four years ago.

What inspired me is, you know, he talks about the shell in people's ears?

I thought, isn't this just ear pods?

And I thought that's what I was going to get from it.

And then

I had read it in high school, and

the lesson I took from it is like, government censorship is bad.

That's what it was a warning of.

And actually, the book is a warning against the way we censor each other.

Like, he says, like, the government didn't want to burn books.

Minorities and people wanted to burn books because they thought it was offensive to other people and other minority.

That

this was a self-inflicted hellscape that we made.

And then isn't it amazing how all those writers in the 50s, the 30s to the 60s,

they all got it pretty right.

Shockingly right.

Because I think great art, and this is something I talk to writers all about, is like great art is rooted in timelessness.

So Star Wars is

not about cutting-edge sci-fi effects.

The reason

people who went to the premiere of Star Wars now take their grandkids to see Star Wars is because it's about the hero's journey.

And that's why Odysseus is still relevant and Gilgamesh is still relevant.

And I think the Count of Monte Cristo and Frankenstein, if you're Lord of the Rings, totally.

Poppet.

Yeah.

But now,

I bet you could take the next year of novels on the New York Times bestseller list, and it's all nihilism, and

it's all garbage in that it's about.

Are you saying 50 Shades of Gray is

almost 50 Shades of Gray?

I wish.

I'm talking more.

It's like these are novels that don't say anything.

They don't say anything.

They don't mean anything.

They are not rooted.

They are not.

The Great Gatsby is not a novel about the jazz age.

It just looks like that.

So

there's a show on Apple TV Plus that

I started watching.

I've only seen four episodes, so what do I know?

But

it's called The Morning Show.

Oh, yeah.

And if it's not the Matt Lauer story, I don't know what is.

But I was struck by it because I don't think a network could have made this show because they have all that baggage.

But they're asking the really hard questions on that.

Is there forgiveness?

What about the people who knew about it and didn't say anything about it?

They just accepted.

Are they good?

Are they bad?

It's amazingly rich and deep, which you don't see anymore because you're not supposed to be.

You'll offend too many people.

You're taking a side.

When this, I haven't seen a side yet.

I've seen both.

And you're like, wow, that's a really good question.

How come nobody else is asking this question?

I mean, and isn't that time?

One of my favorite books, James Rahm wrote a book called Dying Every Day.

And it's about, the subtitle is like Seneca in the Court of Nero.

And it's about how does the world's greatest philosopher become the advisor to the worst emperor in Roman history?

And on the surface, it seems obvious.

It must be a corruption, it must be a hypocrite.

And then you're like, oh, how does James Mattis serve Donald Trump, right?

Even though, like, not that Trump is Nero, but like

to Mattis, he probably is.

You know what I mean?

These are exact opposite human beings.

And you realize, oh, this is a timeless struggle.

You know,

what are our obligations to serve?

What are our obligations to dissent, right?

Well, then, how does our story end?

I mean, you've studied it.

You're looking at the characters as characters.

You're looking at the people on stage right now as the characters that you've read.

How does our story end?

Well, if this is a Shakespeare play, it ends with us all committing suicide and dying, unfortunately, or, you know, this is setting the stage for a hero to emerge.

And that's what I'd like to think

is in the works.

Maybe it has to get worse before it gets better.

But, like, the one good thing about bad times is that they

call up the best in us us as much as the worst in us.

And, you know, I don't think in

1859

we thought an Abraham Lincoln, like that was one, that was probably the worst time.

That was probably the worst time in American history, and you would not have expected some, you know, hillbilly lawyer from.

What was he, the 56th vote at the brokered convention?

Yeah.

He was like, he didn't win until the very end.

A single-term congressman, a guy who taught himself to read.

I mean, Lincoln goes to Washington and the Civil War breaks out and he literally goes to the Library of Congress to read books about war because he was that inexperienced for what was just going to happen.

And yet, you know,

you go to the monument and you read the second inaugural address and you think, how did a human go from there to there in five years?

It's

unreal.

But it's trials, but it's also what humans are capable of.

And I think that would knowing what humans have been capable of and does in history makes you deeply depressed, but it also means you never count us out.

Technology scare you, thrill you, a little of both?

A little of both.

I mean, one of the things I've started doing now,

and especially writing about stillness and thinking about it, is like, I don't touch my phone for the first one hour that I'm awake.

I set the terms of the day.

I do not

start the day reactive.

And

that's when I do my reading.

That's when I do my writing.

That's when I do journaling.

I think technology is great as long as you're using technology.

It's fire.

Yeah.

As long as the technology is not using you.

One of the bright spots for me, I think podcasts, and obviously people are listening to this as a podcast, like that is the first encouraging media development that I've seen in the last five or six years.

It's long form.

It's antiviral.

I bet half the people you have on this show, you vehemently disagree with.

And it is modeling, like, I love those sort of liberal

condescension about the Joe Rogan podcast.

Like, what better thing could you design for young men specifically to be consuming than hours and hours of thoughtful discussions with like a meathead and college professors, like this, and a guy who's on the journey, yeah, yeah.

Like, again, that's always my thing with stoicism.

People are like, oh, this is ridiculous.

What would you rather engineers in Silicon Valley be reading?

Do you know what I mean?

Like,

this is

like the thing that I love Jordan Peterson.

I've gotten to meet him a couple times.

You know, it's like,

he's, that's the dream, man.

Like, that's what, like, whether you agree with him or not, like,

who would you rather young people be listening to than a Harvard-educated college professor who makes them love

text?

Can I tell you something?

I sat in one of his shows.

He came to town, and I told him this afterwards because he was kind of musing on, I don't know why this is successful.

And I'm sitting in the audience, and I wanted to shout at him.

I do.

I watched this audience, and a lot of meatheads in the audience, a lot of people who have never thought about anything about what he's talking about.

But he was up there going, you're smart.

You can figure it out.

You have to apply yourself.

You can make it.

Yes.

You know what I mean?

He was saying things that were empowering to people that made them sit and listen and want.

to learn more, want to open up their minds.

You know, I said to him, I said, I got to tell you, man, you lost me at least four times.

My son looked at me and he said, what are you talking about?

I'm like, I have no idea.

Okay.

He's shaking the trees, but he's empowering people because he's telling them the truth.

You are not stuck where you think you are.

What makes me so angry about Jordan Peterson is, can I curse on this podcast?

Yes.

That's the f ⁇ ing job, man.

That's the job of a college professor.

The problem is not Jordan Peterson, if you agree agree with him or disagree with him politically.

The problem is the tenure system is supposed to create, every university should have 50 Jordan Petersons.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Like, that's the entire profession.

Love books, encourage learning, you know, make people think, take provocative viewpoints, like stand on principle.

That's what college professors should be doing.

What is tenure all about if it isn't about saying things that make people uncomfortable?

Yes.

That's what you're supposed to be doing.

That's the only way to learn.

You know?

It's crazy.

Like the problem is that there's not enough Jordan Peterson.

It's like that Jordan Peterson is the only college professor probably that your average white male like who's under 20 could name is a problem.

Like it's the same thing with Malcolm Gladwell.

So if you don't want to be political, it's like

The problem is not Malcolm Gladwell popularizing academics.

It's that academics are so boring boring that nobody wants to read them and that it's fallen on this journalist to bring their work to a mass audience.

So I don't think a lot of academics

have gotten there and then they've reached the mountain and then they're just there.

Where the ones that are exciting, Joe Rogan, not an academic, but he's searching and he's excited about when he finds something.

Academics don't seem excited about anything anymore.

I love Tyler Cowen,

just an amazing human being.

That's the ideal of a college professor.

I love those guys, and I love those guys, particularly as a college dropout who didn't get that.

You know what I mean?

Do you think you'd be the same person if you had continued college?

Yeah, I don't think it, I mean, I don't think it would have changed me that much, but it did help make the distinction for me, that Twain quote about schooling versus education.

It was like, oh, college is school.

Education can happen at school, but it's better if it happens wherever you are.

So I think it might have changed me in some ways.

Maybe I would have had a better base of knowledge in other ways, but I think

in some ways, maybe you're awfully, you explore an awful lot.

So yeah, I mean, I think that's almost like me compensating for it.

So I think that it was a net positive.

The problem with school is

I think school done right should open up doors.

You should leave there thinking, I'm a dummy.

I've learned all this stuff and there is so much out there.

I'm a dummy.

Instead, you walk out going, I'm the smartest man to ever live.

Yeah, I think it's John Wheeler, the physicist who invented the hydrogen bomb.

He says, as your island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance.

That's what they should print on your degree.

But it's not.

Did you ever talk to him?

John Wheeler?

Yeah.

No, I know.

Yeah.

So I talked to him

years and years and years.

Wow.

He was one of the more frightening people I've ever met.

Why?

Because he was so bummed.

Oh, sorry, not the hydrogen bomb.

Sorry.

I'm thinking neutron bomb.

Okay.

He was so bummed that the neutron bomb hadn't been used.

He was like, this is the best.

It doesn't blow up buildings.

It just kills people.

And, you know, and you're like, yeah, but they die a horrible, horrible death over several hours.

He's like, yeah, but the army gives up immediately.

I don't know how you feel about this.

I think this is why we have checks and balances in our.

Yeah.

Good for you for inventing now.

Move over there.

Yeah, yeah.

So tell me, because we are not a society that is

still.

No.

I knew when I was sober,

not drinking, when I was sober,

when I found myself turning off the radio in the car and driving and just thinking.

You know what I mean?

Totally.

And I was like,

something's happened here.

I think I might be better.

Yeah.

We don't do that.

It's constant interruption.

Not that we don't do that.

We have never done it.

Like, it is bad, of course.

But like,

two pivotal things for me in the book were one, there's a Blaise Pascal quote from 1500s, from the 1500s, all of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

And then there's a scene in one of Seneca's letters where he is describing how hard it is to concentrate because it's so noisy outside of this window in Rome.

And you're like, no car horns, no jackhammers, no trucks.

You go, oh, it's always been hard to focus.

It's harder than ever.

Yeah, I used to cut fields on the tractor without anything in my ears.

Yeah.

Now,

and it was, they were glorious days.

Now, trying to get my kid onto a tractor without something he's listening to is impossible.

And you're like, trust me, you will thank me.

You will thank me over time.

No, I have this piece that's coming out.

I went deer hunting with my 17-year-old neighbor.

a couple weeks ago.

And, you know,

it's like five in the morning.

We're in my back pasture and

there's no cell reception.

And I was like, do you understand how abnormal what we're doing is right now?

This is,

and I think about that too.

I love swimming.

I love swimming more than ever because it's the only place that no screens and sounds are really possible.

No, I don't know.

Now I can do it.

It's so bad.

Like we can't help ourselves.

I know.

It's like, oh, how can I take my cell phone and check it while I'm swimming?

Like people are doing that.

But I think seeking out activities that cultivate solitude.

The first thing I do every morning is I wake up,

I don't use my phone as an alarm clock, and I take my son, we go for a walk, and we walk outside, we watch the sun come up.

And that experience sets me up to be creative and clear-headed and not jerked around and not, you know, it sets up my whole day.

But people,

you know, people wake up and the TV they fell asleep watching is still on.

And then they go to the office where there's a TV running, running, and then they're getting their,

you know, their phone is telling them this and that, and they go from meeting to meeting, and then they wonder why they make bad decisions, or they don't think big picture.

And, you know, they wonder why they can't.

We wonder why people can't see what's obviously happening, whether it's with Trump or anything.

It's because they're so up close to it, they can't,

there's no room for reflection or perspective or

any of that.

I think it's why successful people are always the first by hours, usually

at work in the office.

All about the morning.

Yeah.

When I was in New York, I had this great office.

One window looked at the Empire State Building, the other one looked at the Chrysler Building.

And I would come in early before anybody, and I'd watch the sunrise.

And I would sit there for a few minutes and I would just watch how the light was bouncing off of one of those buildings.

And it centers you.

And so when people hear that word stillness, I think they think, oh, I got to go to a meditation retreat or I got to, you know, go to India.

Or, you know, they think it's like, you can go for a run.

You know, you can read a book.

You can watch the sun come up from your office.

There are, there are,

think about what an athlete does before they go on the court, right?

Like, there are ways to get stillness that are not sissy, that are not.

withdrawing from the world.

There are ways to get stillness that make you better at what you do.

And in fact, if you're not doing it, you're not going to be good at what you do.

And to me, like one of the things that motivated the book was it was real, like, I was like, what are the best moments?

I bet when you think of some of the best moments of your life, they are moments like, like, I bet you think very fondly even now of those moments when you watched the sun come up, probably more than some of the biggest accomplishments in your life.

And so it was like, if those are the special moments or those are the best moments, why am I content to just like let them happen randomly?

Shouldn't I be cultivating?

One of the reasons I live in Texas and I live out in the country a little bit is

so

I can build my life around those moments.

It's funny you say this.

I forgot that

I did an event in Washington, D.C.

about 10 years ago.

500,000 people there.

What I think of when I think of that

are two things.

One, going down the night before

where it's still pretty quiet and the sun was setting and I just talked to a few people.

And then the next morning, I got up and I sat with my children in the

steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and we watched the sunrise.

I've done that many times.

Yeah, and it's not the screaming crowd, it's not that moment of

that.

It was those personal quiet moments.

Yeah,

interesting.

I think that's what that monument is there for.

It is.

That monument's not there for you to take a bunch of photos at 2 p.m.

as part of a a tour group.

I think it's there to catch the sun coming up and to see yourself reflected in that waiting pool.

I was 18 years old and I was working in Washington, and this is when they would hose it down like once a week.

I don't think they hosed it down since Reagan now.

But

I would go early, early in the morning before the sun was up, and I would just sit on the steps and I would, you know,

talk to the guy who was hosing it down when he was hosing it down or just nothing and just sit there.

And it, it, uh,

there's something, and I think it maybe part of my life was

set.

You know, the compass points may have been set at that moment because it's, you're right.

That is what that is for.

Yeah.

It's horrible when you go there and there's a whole bunch of people.

Yeah, it's horrible.

Of course.

Because mainly, at least me, I'm like, what are you doing?

Shut up.

Right.

Shut up.

Read that.

Look at him.

No, this should be accompanied by silence and reflection.

And again, that's what the mornings and that's what the late evenings

are so

special for.

And

we lose that because we try to cram crap in there.

And what I love about podcasts is like...

I don't know about you, but I don't have a lot of 90-minute conversations just for the hell of it with people with no device.

Like, you know, you don't, it's almost like it's forcing us to do the thing that naturally, this is,

the founders weren't watching TV they were sitting around discussing that's why they were in all these clubs and that's why it's so great I love having people I really I have respect for because I think they're honest

but they really disagree we usually you know come into it thinking this could turn into a bloodbath and it never does no because we respect one another and it's those what I love about it is you're sitting with somebody and you're like

I got to write that down remind me of that I've never thought of it that way that's what we're missing we're we're only getting the thoughts that we agree with yes or the thoughts that fit in 140 or 280 characters and that make for a good YouTube video or good headline

nobody likes it but everyone's participating in it I think that's the

Can you tell me from the book, one of the stories that really stuck out that I never heard before,

the Michael Jordan story.

Oh, yeah.

I think this has

all kinds of ramifications in our society today that we should learn.

Well, so obviously Jordan,

the greatest basketball player of all time, incredible human being, incredible businessman, incredible entrepreneur, now an incredible philanthropist.

I'm sure also generally a nice person, especially now I've heard.

But I would urge everyone to go watch the Michael Jordan Hall of Fame accepted speech because it's one of the darkest,

saddest things you'll see.

When I read about it,

I had no idea, and I would never have thought about that

from Michael Jordan.

He basically, from an early age, decided that the fuel for greatness was anger.

It started, he believed that his father loved his brother more, and that was the first sort of spark.

And he said, I'm going to prove my dad wrong.

You know, and this is the saddest thing.

I think about this now, because I had a little bit of that growing up and

now I have young kids.

It's like, if you think you can earn

someone being proud of you,

it's already lost.

But so he starts there.

He gets cut from the high school basketball team.

In fact, he just doesn't make varsity as a kid,

as a sophomore, because the other guy was eight inches taller.

But instead, he accumulates slight after slight.

And it's this anger, this rage

that is at the core of what's motivating him as a player, this love of the game shit was not true, right?

What motivated him was crushing his opponents.

I mean, he punched Steve Kerr in the face when they were on the same team.

You know, he wrecked people's careers, even at the saddest part.

So he gets, he doesn't make, he doesn't make the

high school team, and this fuels him to, you know, to prove everyone wrong.

Okay, that's enough.

He gets accepted into the NBA Hall of Fame, and he invites that guy to

the banquet so he can point him out in front of a national audience and say, Coach, you picked the wrong person.

I mean, just imagine how terribly

sad that is.

And it's the opposite of Marshall.

The opposite of Marshall.

It's the opposite of

Gandhi or

Lincoln or,

you know,

it's the opposite of the greatness that truly endures, you know, um,

and

and but worse than that, it's just a miserable way to live.

Like, that should have been his shining moment.

Instead, and someone I know, they said that that's the moment when everything he'd crammed in the closet came exploding out all over him.

And he saw, even he saw it afterwards and said, I don't, I don't like that person.

And so anger is, anger is,

we think anger is good fuel, but it is the most corrosive, it's like jet fuel.

It'll blow up all over you.

And the worst part is it, even if it makes you great, doesn't give you the one thing you want, which is feeling good about yourself.

Aren't we kind of training our society to be like him?

Yeah, to me, this is the real danger that Trump represents, that

that's what now

think success or power looks like.

It's pettiness.

Funny, because I agree with you on that, but that's not what I thought of.

I thought of all of the,

you know, Greta Thurnberg,

how dare you?

You stole my childhood.

All of this anger and angst that I've been slighted by someone else, even people who lived a hundred years ago.

Yeah.

It's craziness.

No,

that is true.

We have now conflated anger and political change when really the great political movements were typically motivated by love or idealism, even if they are about a grave injustice.

You know, you compare Martin Luther King and Colin Kaepernick.

Like Martin Luther King is saying, this is what we believe.

Let us, you know,

let me shine this at you to inspire you.

And

Kaepernick is basically, and I actually admire, I admire the courage that it takes to put your ass on the line.

What I don't respect is the, what I don't think is strategically valuable is the, is the hopelessness of it.

Do you know what I mean?

And

like, the way I think about it is like, look, most people who are doing wrong in the world are not doing it on purpose.

And so if you yell at them, you don't change their mind.

And then there are really awful people in the world.

You don't defeat the Stephen Millers of the world by yelling at them.

You don't defeat defeat the Hitlers of the world by being angry at them.

Not to compare those two, I know that's extreme, but there are people who hold malevolent beliefs and

who are

attempting to exact an agenda that I think runs counter to the principles that the world should operate by.

You do not beat those people by being emotional.

You beat those people by being strategic and by being hopeful and by being collaborative.

And listening.

Yes.

Not having, we are not, we're not a

society that

is

humble enough to release certitude.

We have to be stop being so certain.

The one thing I'm certain about is certitude will kill us.

Certitude is okay if you actually are right.

Moral certitude is the worst.

Yeah, yeah.

Certitude on mathematics.

Yes, right, sure.

I'm not getting into a rocket if you're not certain you did the math right.

Yeah, moral certitude.

I am right about this when it's not,

you know, I appreciate the fact that you're an agnostic.

And, you know, I've had several atheists on, and they'll ask me, if I could prove it, if you could prove that God didn't exist, I'd be a moron.

Okay, I'd be a moron.

And if I could prove to you that God did exist, you'd be a moron.

If we're honestly looking, I don't know.

I really don't know.

It's not provable.

Yeah.

Okay.

And the moral certitude is what is killing us because we're dummies.

We have no, it's not like we're the scientists that were, you know, working on the Manhattan Project and going, no, I'm pretty.

That's right.

No, I'm right on that.

We're not that.

We're uneducated boobs that are just emotional going, it's your side.

And how quickly moral certitude seems to descend into total moral hypocrisy, right?

Like the guy prosecuting Harvey Weinstein is like into kinky violent sex, you know?

Like it's like

the media that attacks Kavanaugh

is colleagues with Matt Lauer.

Like it's it's so complicated, right?

No, it is not.

It's only complicated because

we want to win.

That was the one thing about Donald Trump that I bothered.

You're going to be sick of winning.

I'm already sick of winning.

Okay.

I just want to do the right thing.

Well, that's the Jordan thing.

Like, you know, people laughed at that.

And it's like, if sometimes you look at some of those winners and you realize they are sick of winning because it sucks.

You know, like, like when you look at Jordan at that Hall of Fame speech, you're not like, I want to be that guy.

I talk to people, it's like,

you have to live in Donald Trump's head.

What's that like?

You know, like, that's what, you know, I don't want to be alone in the White House.

my wife not wanting to be in the same room with me.

My only friend is Sean Hannity.

And I, you know, we text each other at 3 a.m.

That's not healthy.

You know, like that's not healthy.

And so that there are a lot of people who are tired of winning.

You know, like there are a lot of

rich, like, you don't want to end up like the end of there will be blood, you know, and that's where it goes, I think, a lot of times.

And

yeah, yeah, we

tired of winning is a real thing.

Because we've mislabeled winning.

Yes, and that's why I like the second mountain so much.

Oh, winning is not how much you accumulate.

The Stoics talk about this so much, too.

It's not what you accumulate.

It's what you do.

I love the Jackie Robinson thing on his tombstone.

Like, a life is important insofar as its impact on other lives.

One of my heroes is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

He was executed.

Most people say he didn't win.

He did.

The guy who helped,

oh, and then 36 Olympics,

Jesse Owens, the German

that helped him on the high jump, he won.

I mean, he was sent to the front for that, but he won.

It's

a miracle is a change of perspective.

That's all it is.

Yes.

And to circle back to where we were, we need to hold up those, Where's that guy's where's that German guy statue?

Do you know what I mean?

Where's the...

Because you can't be a society without statues.

Yeah, right.

And no one is perfect.

Yeah, like, look, okay, you give Robert E.

Lee a statue, sure, but where's the statue of the southern guy who left everything behind to go fight for the union?

Like, where's that guy?

Like, there's lots of those statues.

I'm more interested in the people who are not traitors.

You know, like,

that was a bigger sacrifice.

And

we can tell those stories

and we can build monuments to those people.

And if we're not going to build monuments to them, you can have monuments in your house about them.

And yeah, where are the Frederick Douglass statues?

Here's the Booker T statue.

Oh, incredible human being.

There are so many fascinating people like that that we don't give

short shrift to.

Thank you for the conversation.

This was so cool.

Thank you.

It was an honor.

It was really great.

We'll have you back.

Thank you.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.