The Peter Attia Drive - #101 - Ryan Holiday： Finding stillness amidst chaos

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. Welcome back to another episode of the drive. My guest this week is Ryan

00:00:55.540 Holiday, a previous guest and a close friend. In addition to the conversation we released on

00:01:01.080 Tuesday with Sam Harris, I also wanted to bring back Ryan to talk about stoicism and how it can

00:01:06.140 help us during these current times. We talk in this episode in particular about some of the

00:01:12.060 measures of stoic philosophy and how moments like this are sort of tailor-made for examining those

00:01:17.660 principles and more importantly, figuring out how to apply them to our lives. But worry not,

00:01:22.620 this is not an episode that gets deep or philosophical in any way, shape or form. It

00:01:26.440 is mostly about us talking about balancing the challenges, trying to think through other things

00:01:33.200 that folks are experiencing that perhaps Ryan and I are not experienced. For example, Ryan and I

00:01:37.640 happen to live in largely rural areas and therefore, at least we're not space constraint during this

00:01:43.060 period of time, but we're aware that many people are. And the question then is, okay, well,

00:01:47.200 what would you do if you're stuck on the 17th floor of a 600 square foot apartment in New York?

00:01:53.580 How can you apply some of these principles? We revisit some of my absolute favorite stories

00:01:58.400 from some of his books, including the one that I think about the most, which is that of Winston

00:02:03.820 Churchill during the second world war. And basically we extract insights and lessons from a number of

00:02:09.560 Ryan's book. Again, his most recent, Stillness is the Key, Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy,

00:02:14.480 et cetera. Let's just get right to this one. It's about 90 minutes long. And I think most of you

00:02:19.260 will find at least something of value in here. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion

00:02:23.720 today with Ryan Holley. Ryan, thank you so much for making time on pretty short notice.

00:02:34.540 Yeah, of course. Anytime. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. Overall, I think I'm doing pretty well.

00:02:40.880 Feel pretty fortunate to be with my family during all of this. I think sort of reflected on it the

00:02:47.440 other day and thought, man, this would be a lot worse if all this were going on and I wasn't with

00:02:52.640 my family. So despite the inconvenience of this, which I think is, it's obviously inconvenient in

00:02:59.420 different extent to different people. Yeah. I don't know. I'm doing better than I was a week ago of

00:03:05.860 seeing the potential upside of this. Now you, from the beginning, Ryan, I mean, I was in contact

00:03:11.940 with you right away and you seem to immediately find a way to be productive in this. And I think

00:03:17.880 part of that is you're one of the people that has the luxury of being able to work from home. But

00:03:21.840 aside from that, does this also kind of pose for you a new laboratory in which you can examine your own

00:03:29.120 reactions to this sort of thing and then that of others?

00:03:31.720 Yeah. I mean, to me, that's the only potential positive of any sort of dramatic setback or

00:03:40.460 adversity or obstacle or whatever it is, is that it is a chance to sort of see things differently or

00:03:46.060 look at things differently. Almost always the status quo is something we had some sort of part

00:03:53.460 in setting up. So we kind of like things the way that they are. So sort of given a choice, I'd probably

00:03:58.520 have left them exactly as they were. But then when you sort of experience these sudden shocks,

00:04:03.260 suddenly you're working from home or suddenly you're not doing this anymore. Or in my case,

00:04:08.120 like a whole bunch of stuff that I was planning to do later this month and then in all of April was

00:04:13.420 suddenly canceled. And so obviously the economic hit of that is very large and very unpleasant.

00:04:20.860 But at the same time, so I never would have canceled them sort of deliberately. But then when you find

00:04:27.600 yourself feeling relief that they got canceled, you're like, oh, maybe my feelings on this were

00:04:32.060 a little bit more mixed than I understood. I mean, for me, I am very lucky. I work from home. Not only

00:04:39.440 can I work from home, but I live on a fair amount of property outside of a major city. So,

00:04:45.320 and I had some mutual friends and you being one of them that sort of gave me some heads up on stuff

00:04:52.000 that was happening. So I was able to prepare. So I wasn't sort of caught off guard or as harmed by it

00:04:58.180 as some people. So I have a little bit on the hierarchy of needs because I'm not that worried

00:05:04.760 about food, let's say, or not that worried about where my parents are or how my kids are doing or

00:05:10.460 whatever. I do have some time to think about it, but I, I have been feeling this weird feeling of,

00:05:16.900 oh, maybe this pace and this setup is actually closer to what I want my life to be than what

00:05:24.880 the life I had that was supposedly disrupted was. Yeah. That's an interesting thought, right? Because

00:05:31.080 as you said, there are a lot of things that there's probably nobody listening to this who hasn't had to

00:05:35.600 make an enormous sacrifice in something with respect to their professional life and their

00:05:42.060 personal life. And for many of us, those changes, like the example you gave are not things we would

00:05:48.360 have done on their own. If someone came to me in January and said from March 1st until, I don't know,

00:05:54.600 I'll just make it up and say July, you cannot get on a plane. I would have said that's impossible.

00:06:00.320 I'd just say, look, that's incompatible with my job. That's incompatible with what's expected of me

00:06:07.200 by the people I help. I could have come up with a hundred reasons why that could never have been

00:06:12.020 done. And yet, guess what? That turned out to be untrue. Yes. A lot of the things we think are

00:06:18.220 non-negotiable, we're just actually not willing to negotiate, but of course aren't non-negotiable.

00:06:25.260 Weirdly, that is something that kids sort of teach you as well, I think, is suddenly all

00:06:30.300 these things that you thought you couldn't do, that you thought had to be a certain way, get blown up,

00:06:36.040 and then you're forced to sort of question them. But yeah, I'm in the same boat. Obviously,

00:06:41.300 this is the way that it had to be. Obviously, this is the system. It only works this way.

00:06:46.020 But so much of that is just sort of a status quo bias that we have or a sense of what's normal.

00:06:53.180 One of the really great things about being a writer, of course, although I think there's probably a

00:06:58.080 metaphor in it. I remember early on in my life, Robert Greene told me he was all material. He's

00:07:02.760 like, every shitty thing that happens to you is material. Everything you mess up is material.

00:07:08.240 Every person that breaks your heart, every dollar you lose, every sort of missed opportunity is

00:07:13.920 material. There's a Jorge Luis Borges quote that's similar where it's like, you got to use it all,

00:07:19.180 basically. And so the one thing that I think in situations like this is like, how can I channel what I

00:07:25.820 think and feel about this into the output or the work that I actually do? And I think there's

00:07:32.600 probably an analogy there. If you're an investor, if you're a psychologist, whatever it is that you

00:07:37.420 do, and this is not at all a full redemption for the tragedy and the enormous losses that are going

00:07:44.580 to come from what we're experiencing. But it's almost sacrilegious, I think, to decide not to study

00:07:51.200 this and understand it and sort of realize a deeper understanding of humans, of yourself,

00:08:00.060 of leadership, of clients, whatever it is. I think deciding that you're going to experience this in

00:08:05.300 a way that you emerge from it, at least sort of wiser and better at what you do, to me, is sort of the

00:08:12.740 way to think about it.

00:08:13.580 So you've been writing a lot of really great stuff, Ryan, in the past three weeks, building on

00:08:19.460 obviously the themes that you've written on in the past, namely around stoicism. What are some of the

00:08:25.520 most important things that stand out to you specifically with respect to this type of

00:08:31.080 uncertainty around pandemic? And as you point out, it's really now sort of reared two very ugly heads.

00:08:39.760 The first is the head of the pandemic itself and the risk it poses physically to people and all of

00:08:47.100 the uncertainty around that. I mean, we still don't actually know how bad this virus is,

00:08:51.460 unfortunately, because we don't know the denominator of testing. We don't really know if this virus

00:08:55.940 kills 1% of the people it infects or 0.1% of the people it infects. So that's a tenfold difference

00:09:03.400 that makes all the difference. But if that weren't enough, as you alluded to, there is now an

00:09:10.300 undeniable economic tragedy that's being imposed on many people that itself and by itself would be

00:09:19.060 problematic, just as it was in 2008, 2009. So if you could bring Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca

00:09:27.860 back from the dead, bring them here today, walk me through what you think they would say about this,

00:09:34.800 this specific example and situation we're in. My instinct is typically to do that, right? There's

00:09:40.540 this quote from Churchill. He's talking as sort of World War II is breaking over Europe. He's not

00:09:47.420 quite been brought back into power. There's this letter he writes to his friend and he says,

00:09:51.400 the last couple of days, he says, I've been trying to put a thousand years between me and the 20th

00:09:57.760 century. And he was just talking about reading and writing about history. And so he was trying to

00:10:03.060 sort of get perspective. And I think we can do that really easily. And in a way, it's more informative

00:10:10.420 than watching CNN. Like, obviously, you need to watch CNN to know what the local authorities are

00:10:15.180 telling you to do this day or that day. There is value in the news in that sense. Although the news

00:10:20.440 is also sort of compounds hysteria and it passes on propaganda and misinformation. But I think looking

00:10:27.040 backwards gives us in some ways more insight because as unprecedented and new as this is,

00:10:34.860 it's also like one of the oldest things ever. I mean, Marcus Aurelius, who I write,

00:10:40.120 probably the main character in most of my books, died of a pandemic in 180 AD. So it's not as if

00:10:46.360 humans have not experienced pandemics and plagues and sort of massively contagious viruses. And I think

00:10:52.000 Marcus Aurelius is a particularly interesting example. What they call the Antonine Plague hits

00:10:58.440 Rome and it lasts for 15 years. So you want to talk about sort of a humanitarian tragedy of epic

00:11:06.000 proportions and then massive economic and geopolitical ramifications. When Marcus Aurelius writes

00:11:13.060 meditations, he is writing in the exact scenario that a lot of us are in right now, trying to keep

00:11:19.660 ourselves from being exposed, but also trying to do our jobs at the same time. He was a leader in a time

00:11:25.700 where they had a lot less visibility into this thing that was horrifically deadly, very contagious,

00:11:32.880 and spreading fear almost as quickly as it was spreading disease. And what I found in Marcus's

00:11:39.560 example particularly was just sort of calmness, clearheadedness, sort of courage. My favorite story

00:11:47.240 for Marcus, which I've told in a lot of my different books, but at one point the sort of treasury of

00:11:52.600 Rome is starting to run dry. And Marcus walks through the imperial palace and he starts selecting

00:12:00.640 various treasures that belong to the emperor and their family. And he sells them on the palace lawn to

00:12:07.200 pay down Rome's debts. When I say that, it just makes me feel so sad at sort of how far we've gotten

00:12:13.080 from that from a leadership perspective. But Marcus Aurelius talks about, he's like, look,

00:12:17.880 plagues are very bad. No one would say that they're not. But he's like, a plague can only threaten your

00:12:22.480 life. The real problem, the thing we actually have to be worried about is sort of selfishness and greed

00:12:28.320 and panic. These things sort of ruin your character as well as your life. And I think what we're seeing

00:12:34.980 now is people kind of struggling with that tension when we're so sort of removed from mortality,

00:12:41.360 from danger, from anything that makes us not do what we want to do at the moment we want to do it,

00:12:48.120 that people are really struggling with how to sort of temper themselves and how to limit themselves and

00:12:53.940 have self-discipline and put other people's needs above their own. So I think from history,

00:12:59.140 we can see that these are sort of timeless struggles that we've always had.

00:13:04.180 I read something a few weeks ago. I think it was a column that David Brooks wrote in the New York

00:13:09.640 Times. And the gist of it was that there are certain externalities that are very difficult

00:13:18.200 that can be uniting. And certainly Sebastian Younger has written very eloquently about this

00:13:23.500 in his book, Tribe. So in a post 9-11 New York, the suicide rate went down. People were united in a

00:13:32.720 common sense of urgency and a common sense of having been wronged. And it also probably helped to

00:13:39.520 diminish some of the sort of useless pettiness that defines our existence and showed us what really

00:13:45.060 mattered and what didn't. But the point I think that Brooks made in this article was, hey, pandemics

00:13:50.660 are different. It still has all of those same things of telling you what matters, what doesn't,

00:13:56.540 what's a threat, et cetera. But it comes with this bit of isolation that actually tends to be quite

00:14:03.940 negative. Now, I'm not sure I actually agree with David in that setting, because I think that might

00:14:11.580 be true historically. But I wonder if connectivity today is making it a little less so. In other words,

00:14:19.580 it'd be one thing if it's 1918, Spanish flu is ripping through the world, and it's clear that you basically

00:14:26.960 have to hunker down and be fully isolated. But today, even if we had to resort to those levels,

00:14:34.680 you and I have the ability to speak right now, look at each other on a computer screen. There's much more

00:14:39.760 intimacy today than there was then. So what is your take on this specific nature of a pandemic that

00:14:46.920 causes physical distance between people and how that factors into the challenges that we face as

00:14:55.120 humans being quite social creatures? Yeah, I read that piece too. And I think the seed of the

00:15:01.060 point is right, but there's some, you could argue against it in a lot of ways. I was in high school

00:15:06.400 during 9-11, but I remember concerts got canceled and sporting events got canceled and travel got

00:15:12.080 canceled and people were scared and they stayed inside their house. So there is an element of social

00:15:17.500 isolation in those tragedies. It doesn't last as long, but I think we forget very quickly how

00:15:24.760 we were all hunkered down for a short period of time. What I think the difference between... I think

00:15:31.260 it's actually less a nature of, is a pandemic a particularly vicious kind of tragedy or sort of

00:15:38.740 crisis because you can't see it. And in a sense, it almost pits people against each other. It forces

00:15:44.700 you inside. I mean, I think that that's an element of it, but in a way, it also connects us in that it

00:15:51.360 affects everyone all at the same time. The world wasn't suffering from 9-11 at the same time. Even

00:15:56.720 World War II did not actually affect large swaths of the planet. So it evens out. I think to me,

00:16:04.060 the defining feature, and when I sort of look at these things historically, the defining feature

00:16:09.920 between whether it sort of makes us better or makes us worse or how it manifests itself culturally

00:16:15.900 is what the leadership does. And to me, when I look at this crisis, I think it's ahistorical in

00:16:22.640 the sense that very rarely has there been such a failure of leadership at essentially every level,

00:16:30.220 from the geopolitical level to the specific world leaders, to the governors, to the government agencies.

00:16:37.480 It's been sort of quite horrendous in every sense. And I was just reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's book,

00:16:45.400 Leadership in Turbulent Times, which is very good. And she had a story in there that I remember from

00:16:50.780 Robert Caro's book on LBJ. But he talks about when LBJ takes over for Kennedy, it's a crisis,

00:16:57.560 at least on the US level, that it's difficult to wrap your head around. I mean, like a beloved

00:17:02.060 president is assassinated, then the assassin is killed, and it was done on television and everyone

00:17:09.280 saw it. And nobody knew who was responsible. Nobody knew what would come next. We were just a few

00:17:15.500 months past the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was a traumatic event without precedent. And here you

00:17:22.240 have a vice president who is not particularly... LBJ was everything Kennedy was not. He was a smoke-filled

00:17:29.860 room guy. He was not photogenic. He did not have charisma. He was not a good speaker. And most

00:17:35.920 importantly, he was not elected. And LBJ tells this in his sort of folksy Texas way. He says, like,

00:17:42.420 look, when I was a kid, he was like, the cattle would get stuck in a crevasse or a ravine or mud. And he

00:17:49.320 was like, it's in these moments that the foreman has to charge in and sort of lead the cattle out of

00:17:57.740 the swamp with confidence and aggression and clearness and sort of all the things that you

00:18:04.320 associate with somebody coming in, taking charge morally, physically, in all senses of the word.

00:18:11.500 And I think what we're experiencing now is less to do with the pandemic and to me, more a result of

00:18:18.720 what happens when something really scary and bad and alarming happens. And you realize we've been

00:18:26.880 operating, we've been in a rudderless ship and remain in a rudderless ship. I think that's what

00:18:32.900 everyone is experiencing right now. And I think you can say that wherever you happen to sit politically.

00:18:38.860 I don't think it's a political question. I think it's a leadership question.

00:18:42.300 What is a person to do? It's funny. You and I spoke in... God,

00:18:47.100 we probably sat down in late October, early November. That was released in January. I mean,

00:18:53.360 basically at the time that you and I spoke, we didn't actually know what this was. Nobody,

00:18:58.360 there hadn't even been a single case. And yet so many of the things that we talked about

00:19:04.400 seem even more relevant than they did at the time. We spoke about kind of consequences of having an

00:19:11.080 overly secure life and how that gives you this false misconception of unlimited time. Well,

00:19:19.340 certainly we're realizing that's not true. We spoke a lot about stillness and I want to come back to

00:19:24.040 that because I tell you, if there's one character you've written about that I can't get my mind off

00:19:29.300 as I struggle, it's Churchill, but I want to come back to that. And then there's kind of this idea of

00:19:35.280 dying well and how it helps you live better. So let's just start with, let's assume someone

00:19:41.960 hasn't listened to us speaking before and they don't know anything about stoicism. Let's go back

00:19:47.460 and kind of encapsulate a little bit about what this philosophy or as Tim, our mutual friend likes

00:19:52.860 to call it, I think he calls it an operating system. How would you describe it in the context of that?

00:19:57.620 Well, I think the sort of central precept of stoicism is basically that we don't control what

00:20:04.820 has happened or what is happening, but we control how we respond to those things. And so in a way,

00:20:11.780 it's kind of this resignation where it's seeding a lot of the things that we would like to be in

00:20:18.560 control of in favor of focusing on the things like that we actually immediately are in control of.

00:20:26.200 And you might think like, oh, you're talking about the reaction. So does that mean be reactionary?

00:20:31.020 No, it's just saying like, okay, what is in my immediate purview? And I'm going to start on that.

00:20:37.860 I'm going to make sure my family's okay. I'm going to make sure financially that I'm making some good

00:20:42.560 decisions here. I'm going to focus on, hey, even if I did get caught off guard or I was naked when the

00:20:50.200 tide went out, how am I prepared for this to get worse? How am I prepared for what may

00:20:56.000 happen after this? So it's this kind of focus on the immediacy, but it's focusing on doing what you

00:21:02.520 can, where you are with what you have. And so you can see like for the Stoics, yeah, they are dealing

00:21:08.260 with pandemics like we're talking about. They're also dealing with exile and war and mob rule and

00:21:15.320 all sorts of plus just the normal stuff, whether it's a problem in a marriage or a business partner

00:21:21.420 that's a cheat, or it's that they fell and broke their leg and now they're stuck in bed for six

00:21:26.480 weeks. Life is capricious and random and Murphy's law is real. What can go wrong does. And so obviously,

00:21:35.680 ideally you want to be prepared for those things, the Stoics say, but it's more about what do you do

00:21:41.000 when stuff goes wrong? How do you respond and how do you focus not on who's to blame,

00:21:47.560 how unfortunate it is, or any of those things? How do you instead focus on, okay, here's how I'm

00:21:54.880 going to move the ball forward? I talk about that in the books and I've read about that,

00:21:59.880 but I'm also just a human being who's trying to figure that out day to day, just like everyone

00:22:05.300 else. What happens when 30% of your income disappears? Or what happens when you've got to now

00:22:10.980 pay for employees that can't work? Or what happens when you watch your years of retirement

00:22:18.460 gains disappear? What happens when you can't go visit your grandmother one more time? Shit happens

00:22:25.860 to people. Philosophy isn't supposed to be this kind of abstract theoretical thing that you do in a

00:22:32.680 college classroom. It's designed for this. It's designed for when you're holed up in your house and

00:22:38.120 you don't like how things are. Yeah. I think that last point, Ryan, is so essential.

00:22:43.140 People like me never found philosophy that interesting in college, probably because I

00:22:48.120 wasn't smart enough. And now my attraction to it is not academic. It's what can I extract

00:22:55.280 from this way of thinking that will help reduce my suffering? Yeah.

00:23:00.760 So going back to the point I brought about Churchill, I've read Stillness is the Key three or four times.

00:23:06.680 I absolutely love it, Ryan. It is actually, of the 57 books you've written, it's my favorite.

00:23:11.980 No, I'm just kidding. It's only 12. How many books have you written, Ryan?

00:23:15.200 I think it's 10. I think it's 10.

00:23:17.560 Okay. Well, I have probably gifted Stillness seven or eight times in the last three months.

00:23:24.120 As I said, I've read it three or four times. And the section on Churchill really speaks to me. And

00:23:31.220 rather than me try to explain for folks who haven't read it, the story of how Churchill

00:23:35.940 went about creating routine and ritual during what I can only imagine is the most stressful

00:23:43.420 experience any one person could have really contemplated for a sustained period of time

00:23:49.660 in the last hundred years. I mean, maybe that's not true, but boy, it would be tough to make a case

00:23:54.920 that there was somebody that for months and years on end felt the angst that Winston Churchill felt.

00:24:03.200 So I find myself thinking, and I want you to kind of explain what that was and how he managed it,

00:24:08.560 because I was floored by sort of the ability that he had to maintain Stillness through that.

00:24:15.660 And that's something I've thought about, which is Peter, as upset as you are about this,

00:24:20.220 as much as the uncertainty torments someone like you, who's a control freak, and as much as you feel

00:24:25.740 the obligation to your patients and you want to make sure every one of them is okay and blah, blah, blah,

00:24:29.920 like that's a pittance compared to what Churchill experienced. And oh, by the way, Peter, you're like

00:24:35.060 three weeks into this. You better buck up and get ready for it. So tell people a little bit, A,

00:24:40.740 if they're not familiar with exactly how the war unfolded and B, with Winston Churchill, the man,

00:24:46.140 prior to the war and then during the war, give us a bit of the story because it's just such a beautiful

00:24:50.880 story. Yeah. I mean, Churchill's life obviously is incredibly privileged in some senses, but then

00:24:57.020 is an unending stream of adversity in pretty much every other sense. I mean, he's born early enough

00:25:04.560 in the 19th century that as a young war correspondent, he witnesses the last cavalry charge

00:25:12.260 of the British Empire and he dies sort of well into the space age. You just see that the scope

00:25:19.560 of history that he experiences. I mean, Churchill's first talk in America, he was very well received

00:25:25.100 and it was highly anticipated. He's introduced on stage in New York City by Mark Twain. And then

00:25:30.840 basically... After having sailed across the Atlantic.

00:25:34.320 Yeah, in a boat, right? And the last time he visits America, he flies in like a 727 or something

00:25:40.780 like that. So you get this enormous scope and span of history that's punctuated with he's not a bright

00:25:47.640 kid. Nobody has high hopes for him. His mother is sort of promiscuous, has a terrible relationship

00:25:54.000 with his father. His father dies. They think of syphilis when Churchill's like 20, assuming that his

00:26:00.020 son will never amount to anything. Churchill's taken a prisoner of war at like 22 years old, nearly dies in

00:26:07.840 Africa in this prison camp, escapes. He writes a series of books. He stands for his first election

00:26:13.880 and then sort of climbs his way to the top of sort of British politics and ends up being sort of the

00:26:21.740 fall guy for the Gallipoli campaign in World War I, has a nervous breakdown, thinks his career is over,

00:26:30.120 sort of emerges a little bit back and then ends up sort of destroying his political career by advocating

00:26:38.060 very strongly against the rearmament and the rise of Germany and spends what they call sort of 10

00:26:44.320 years in the political wilderness. He spends basically 10 years sort of run out of town. He's

00:26:51.040 radioactive. Everyone thinks he's an idiot. They think he's lost his mind. And he is 100% right and no one

00:26:59.280 listened to him. And Hitler rises to power. Germany rearms. World War II is the inevitable result of

00:27:06.460 this. And it could have been prevented and nobody listened to Churchill. And Churchill is only brought

00:27:11.000 back in after he is ignored for 10 years. And then, yeah, he sees himself. He basically saves the free

00:27:19.340 world, puts Western civilization on his back, draws the United States into the war, famously wins the war,

00:27:26.460 and then is rewarded for this by promptly being thrown out of office days after the war comes to

00:27:32.780 an end. And that's not even the end of it, right? It goes on and on and ends up dying as a very old

00:27:37.440 man, having sort of another series of triumphs and setbacks in that. And then I would say, if you just

00:27:44.260 look at... So that's the span. This guy wrote 10 million words in his lifetime, was one of the highest

00:27:49.400 paid, most successful writers in the world during his lifetime, holds office for 60 years, Nobel Peace

00:27:55.760 Prize, invents the tank. It's just an incredible life. Probably one of the most ambitious, busy people

00:28:03.220 of the age. I think proof of the great man of history theory, like the world we live in today is a

00:28:10.000 result of Churchill saying, fuck Hitler, I will give my absolute last breath defying this person. There's a

00:28:18.120 famous story I love. His daughter-in-law says, like, as it looks like the Nazis will certainly

00:28:23.740 land and invade Britain, his daughter-in-law says, like, what could we possibly do, Winston? Like,

00:28:30.600 how could we possibly... What do you expect us to do if this happens? And he looks her in the eye and

00:28:36.120 he sort of growls and he says, I expect you to go in the kitchen and get a butcher knife and take one of

00:28:41.420 them with you when they come in the front door. His point was like, we are going to fight this thing

00:28:46.440 down to the absolute last man. And that stand, which was partly a bluff, but also sort of 100%

00:28:54.220 real courage and commitment, turns the tide of history. And so I'm fascinated by Churchill because

00:29:00.540 that is an epic life. I want to add one thing to that, Ryan, before you get into the next part.

00:29:05.900 So I don't want to distract the thought. But the other thing that is amazing to me is,

00:29:10.220 here's a guy who a decade out calls Hitler. He basically says, this guy's a fascist and he's

00:29:18.400 going to do really, really bad things. And your point, he is completely exiled. And by the time

00:29:25.500 Chamberlain is finally forced to resign and they very reluctantly bring Winston Churchill back as the

00:29:34.940 prime minister, I mean, the Germans are basically knocking on their door. And what I find, it's another

00:29:41.320 subtlety of this, which I have to remind myself of. I have a tendency in a situation like this to say,

00:29:48.100 this was inevitable. How did we not see this coming? How is it that we shut down the branches of government

00:29:56.980 that should have and would have had us prepared for this? How is it that we didn't put, you know,

00:30:02.260 I could rattle off all the things we did wrong? And so when Churchill inherits a huge mess,

00:30:09.780 it seems almost unfair. It's like, well, now I have to be the one to fix the mess that I told you

00:30:15.520 for the last eight years was going to be the big mess. But again, the great ones don't seem to dwell

00:30:20.400 on that because there really isn't a lot of benefit that comes out of that backwards looking thing. So

00:30:26.460 do you want to say any more on that in addition to sort of everything you've already said?

00:30:30.360 Yeah. Churchill had this sort of code that he lived by, and I'm forgetting the exact phrasing of it,

00:30:35.600 but it was basically, it was like savage in fighting, magnanimous in victory, sort of gracious

00:30:42.280 in defeat. And part of that, what I think is not only did nobody listen to him, but they like

00:30:47.720 viciously punished him. They like destroyed his life basically. And then said, hey, now that the battle

00:30:53.360 is already lost, we're willing to sort of put you in charge. What I find remarkable is, was Churchill's

00:30:59.900 sort of empathy and compassion, even for those leaders. He kept some of them in his cabinet. He

00:31:05.760 managed to work with them. There was no recriminations, no punishments. He was Lincoln-esque in his

00:31:10.760 ability to sort of go, okay, this is just the hand I've been dealt. And there's a famous expression,

00:31:16.280 a famous statement he makes about the French general who surrendered to the Nazis. Obviously,

00:31:22.140 he's like, this guy's got to go. We're not collaborating with this guy. But he says something

00:31:25.560 like, let us be sympathetic that we never faced the predicament under which he broke. And so there

00:31:32.200 was this, for all of his combativeness and determination, there was also an understanding,

00:31:37.900 I think, in him having experienced a long tumultuous life. Shit happens. What matters is,

00:31:44.060 how are we going to solve this? And I think when you look at what he did, was like he rolled up his

00:31:50.460 sleeves and got to work. And even those 10 years, it's not like he spent 10 years of idle time.

00:31:56.840 One of the reasons, ironically, that Churchill was so able to understand Hitler,

00:32:01.880 Churchill was like the only one of the leaders in Britain who took the time to read Mein Kampf

00:32:07.180 and actually study it and look at it. And so Churchill had, in a way, that 10 years of exile

00:32:13.760 was the best thing that could have happened because it put him in a position to not be tainted

00:32:20.640 by the incompetence of the people that sort of brought everyone into this mess. It gave him a much longer

00:32:26.940 and larger perspective. And it put him in a position to sort of figure out what to do next.

00:32:32.800 And what I'm fascinated by, even if you sort of take out the war stuff, how was Churchill,

00:32:38.700 just to write 10 million words in your lifetime, just to do that in an addition to a political

00:32:44.580 career, how does he pull this off? He was a sort of a creature of habit and routine. He had this sort

00:32:49.940 of ritual. He would write at the same time every day. He would nap at the same time every day. He

00:32:54.980 would eat and dress, dressed for dinner. He had this rule that I've been joking with my wife about.

00:33:00.400 He said, spouses should not see each other before noon. That was the secret to a happy marriage.

00:33:06.280 He took long walks during the day. I was actually just in, this is maybe two months ago. I was in,

00:33:12.780 three months ago, I was in London. I had a talk in London. I was in London for maybe like 18 hours.

00:33:17.620 And I went, landed at Heathrow, took a Uber to Chartwell, which is Churchill's estate,

00:33:23.060 and then went back, gave my talk and flew home. But to experience, when you look at where Churchill

00:33:29.000 lived, it starts to make sense. He had his goldfish pond that he would visit every day.

00:33:33.420 He had the swans that he would feed. He had a little studio that he attached to his house that

00:33:38.120 he did his painting in every single day. He had even his estate or his house is surrounded by this

00:33:43.860 brick wall. He laid the bricks for the brick wall himself. He would write every day. He would paint

00:33:50.320 every day. He would lay bricks every day. And he would work every day. And this sort of

00:33:55.260 rhythm or ritual, I think was what allowed him to get into the headspace, to tap into the flow state

00:34:03.540 required to do what he did. I find, and you wrote obviously about this in terms of JFK during the

00:34:10.920 Cuban Missile Crisis. But to me, it's something about the way Churchill handled this because it was

00:34:16.580 much longer. Maybe it's in terms of the normalized value of stress, the Cuban Missile Crisis was greater,

00:34:23.980 but it was over in 13 days. This was years. And I just find it amazing the discipline in making time

00:34:33.200 to be still and how that mattered. And obviously he wasn't writing. He wasn't as prolific from a

00:34:38.760 writing standpoint during those bombing campaigns and such, but he took his bath every day, for

00:34:44.900 example. And it's funny, I was sort of talking to my daughter about this the other day because

00:34:48.920 we see like every kid around now, she's going through, you sort of, she's homeschooling

00:34:53.560 effectively. Right. And, you know, she was lamenting how much work she had to do. And I was

00:34:57.340 like, I sort of introduced her to, I can never remember if it's Parkinson's or Peter's law. I think

00:35:03.120 it's Parkinson's law, which is work expands to fill available time. And I kept trying to say like,

00:35:07.900 you have to make room for moments of detachment every day, regardless. I mean, it's just non-negotiable

00:35:14.660 because otherwise you could spend the whole day buried in your history lesson or whatever

00:35:19.060 other thing you're doing. And as important as that is, it would be very easy to say,

00:35:24.480 whatever it is I'm doing right now, whether it's trying to stay in touch with my coworkers or trying

00:35:30.660 to figure out a way that we're going to pay that next bill. I mean, those things are vitally important,

00:35:36.060 but it's not necessarily clear to me that you're going to do a better job of those things. If you

00:35:41.080 neglect that sort of self-care that comes from being in nature, being still detaching from it,

00:35:48.180 right? It's like a bipartisan complaint we have about presidents that they, it's like,

00:35:52.900 why are they playing so much golf? They're spending so much money playing golf. It's so

00:35:56.440 much taxpayer money playing golf. And I don't think it's a coincidence that presidents choose

00:36:02.160 that game and that they pretty much all universally play it. Going back at least to Eisenhower and

00:36:07.880 before, it's because what other excuse, and I think CEOs similarly gravitate towards golf,

00:36:14.960 because if basketball is your game, you get maybe 30 minutes of basketball, right? Or if running is

00:36:21.440 your game, you get five or 10 miles. But golf is a game that takes three or four hours. And it's three

00:36:26.740 or four hours where you're not supposed to be on your phone, where you have to sort of mentally focus,

00:36:30.480 you have to be present. It forces you to control and master your mind in a non-work context. And

00:36:38.200 Churchill happened to be famously terrible at golf, so he painted instead. But he said, actually,

00:36:44.840 like the most important thing that powerful people can do is have one or two hobbies. I would argue

00:36:51.080 that's something that's a problem for Trump. If Trump had more interests, whether it was reading or

00:36:56.260 sports or even socializing, he'd be watching less cable news and be able to see the bigger picture.

00:37:03.380 As a nonpartisan example, I was the director of marketing in American Apparel for a number of

00:37:07.280 years. And that was a company that self-inflicted. And then also the financial crisis was sort of in a

00:37:12.060 perpetual state of crises and sort of chaos. And I remember talking to one of the girlfriends of the

00:37:19.900 CEO, his name was Dove, we're in his sort of huge mansion. It's like totally empty of furniture. He's

00:37:26.300 not married. He works 24-7, 365. He's sort of perpetually on the never taking a vacation. He's

00:37:34.180 perpetually on the edge of sort of descending into insanity. And I said something like, does he have

00:37:38.920 any hobbies? And they were like, just sex. Like sex was his only hobby. And I think that was directly

00:37:45.040 correlated with a lot of the self-inflicted unforced errors that he made as a leader because he was

00:37:52.400 never stepping out. He was never disconnecting. He had no structure. Everything was always urgent.

00:38:01.280 Very minor example. There's something I'm dealing with some supply chain issues with my company.

00:38:06.580 And it was like someone who works for me called me. They were asking me about it. I was sitting down

00:38:11.220 for dinner with my family to be able to go like, hey, I'll call you back in an hour. I'm having

00:38:15.540 dinner with my family right now. Obviously, that's what you should do from a family perspective. But

00:38:19.760 that forced one hour break made me handle that situation better. Because if you'd forced me to

00:38:26.320 deal with it at that moment, or if I was a bachelor eating Chinese food in my house when I got that call,

00:38:31.500 I would have lost my temper. I probably would have made a rash emotional decision. I would not have

00:38:36.540 forced myself to take an hour to sort of let it sit, right? And so one of these things these hobbies do

00:38:42.780 and relationships do and a little bit of sort of order and structure in our lives do is they kind

00:38:48.740 of just protect us from just reacting and reacting and reacting all the time.

00:38:54.420 You've written both in your book and in your newsletters about alive time versus dead time. And even

00:38:59.780 though you didn't use those terms, a moment ago, you basically gave a great example with respect to my

00:39:05.420 favorite Churchill, which is he's booted out. He's in exile. He's a political pariah. He's the scum of

00:39:12.820 the earth. And you'd think, I mean, he could have done the equivalent of watching Netflix every day

00:39:18.460 in the 1930s, but he didn't. What did he do? He's reading everything that he can read about this crazy

00:39:26.880 guy in Germany. He's writing, he's being as prolific as anyone can be. And it prepared him for when the

00:39:34.920 chance came that he was going to come in and basically help save the world. And so what advice

00:39:40.320 could we offer people, myself included, by the way, I'm just going to be completely transparent

00:39:45.080 about my own selfishness and having this podcast with you, Ryan. It's mostly just a therapy session

00:39:49.260 for me. It's really tempting sometimes to just turn on YouTube and Netflix and take a break from the

00:39:57.200 news. The news is pretty upsetting, but is there any harm in just watching Breaking Bad for the fourth

00:40:03.540 time? How would you help us guard against the temptation to seek pure distraction? And how

00:40:10.980 would you counter that and why? What's interesting about Churchill is it's not like he was only

00:40:15.940 preparing. Churchill also, by nature of his writing and the speeches that he gives and the radio broadcast

00:40:21.920 that he does, becomes almost more famous in America than he is in the UK. And I'm not sure he would

00:40:28.740 have been able... His credibility with Americans was so great, greater than it was with his own people

00:40:34.940 at that time, that when it comes time to sort of sell the transatlantic alliance, that work that he

00:40:41.660 did was sort of very... paid enormous dividends. And this idea of a lifetime dead time, it's like,

00:40:48.120 look, you didn't control the fact that you're stuck in your house. You don't control that most operations

00:40:52.820 are set down. You don't control any of this, but you do decide what you're going to use this time for.

00:40:57.380 I guess the question is, when else are you going to get... The good news is basically for a lot of

00:41:04.880 people, very little is expected. I mean, some people, nothing is expected because they are

00:41:09.600 unfortunately not employed at the moment. But what's unique about this period is we are being,

00:41:16.720 I think, pretty understanding about the fact that things have ground to a halt without anyone's consent.

00:41:21.840 And so nothing is expected of you. So how are you going to use... You've essentially been gifted

00:41:28.780 time. And how are you going to use that time? I think it's absolutely appropriate to use some of

00:41:33.960 that for self-care, for relaxation, for tuning out, because that's not a terrible use of this time

00:41:40.220 anyway. If Churchill had emerged from those 10 years in the wilderness, and the only advantage had

00:41:47.260 been he was well-rested, I think that would have been beneficial, right? How is he able to basically

00:41:54.100 be active in politics up until his death, when I think most people would have burned out? I think

00:41:59.900 that 10-year period was not a vacation, but it was, what do they call it in the NBA? Load management.

00:42:05.920 It forced him to recharge and rest and sort of figure out what was important. So I think,

00:42:10.820 at the very least, we can use this time for that. But now is also time to really question a lot of

00:42:17.740 things about our lives, about the decisions we make, about the businesses that we have, about the

00:42:22.920 goals that we've been striving towards. It's also a chance to experiment with new things,

00:42:29.060 to try new things. I mean, as a very small level, right? I don't know about you, but I've gotten a

00:42:34.700 million requests to be on people's Instagram lives. And I saw this meme where they were like,

00:42:39.880 it took a global pandemic to get anyone to try Instagram live. But that's sort of what I'm

00:42:45.460 talking about, if only in the sense it's like, oh, because people now have a minute, they are

00:42:50.000 experimenting with and trying things that under ordinary circumstances, they would have never

00:42:55.960 allowed themselves to try. And so I think that's a good use of this time for people. What I'm trying

00:43:01.220 to do is focus on writing, on reading, and just sort of spending time with my family. Those are sort of

00:43:07.300 my big priorities. I'm also using it as practice to like, the financial blow has been so significant,

00:43:13.080 it almost makes everything seem comical. And so I'm almost using it as practice to say no to stuff.

00:43:20.760 Do you know what I mean? It's like, oh, if I can take this, I can do a lot less generally. Do you

00:43:25.360 know what I mean?

00:43:25.780 Yes, it gets back to that point earlier, which is, if you had said to me in February,

00:43:32.600 Peter, you know, I think it would be a good idea if from late February until late June,

00:43:37.700 you did not travel. I would have said, oh, that's a beautiful idea, Ryan, impossibility.

00:43:44.080 Don't you know, fill in the blank, right? Don't you understand, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:43:49.120 And of course, then it's imposed on you and you realize, well, actually,

00:43:52.420 these things are much more possible than we believed. And therefore, we've kind of imposed

00:43:59.360 our own barriers to sanity at times. And that means, yeah, we could probably live with less

00:44:05.760 and we can do less. So as awkward as this is, this feeling, this helplessness,

00:44:12.360 A, there's not a huge amount of value in just being upset about it. I mean, it feels good in the

00:44:19.860 moment, but it doesn't really produce much benefit in the long run. Stoicism says so much

00:44:25.540 about this. And one of the things that it talks about that we don't like to think about is having

00:44:30.700 a plan if things get worse. How do you think about that personally? And how can others kind of apply

00:44:37.160 that insight to themselves?

00:44:39.600 Yeah, it's certainly not pleasant to think about how it could get worse when it's already so bad.

00:44:44.740 But again, we want to focus on moving forward rather than sort of staying in the same place or

00:44:51.180 looking backwards. I think what this is teaching a lot of people, myself included, is that we thought

00:44:57.700 about everything but this. There's a great line, Seneca quotes Fabius, who's one of the great generals

00:45:03.640 in Roman history. He defeated Hannibal. And he says, the only inexcusable thing for a military

00:45:09.660 commander to say is that I didn't think it could happen. It's not that you can't lose. It's not

00:45:15.460 that you can't mess up. But what you can't do is confidently say, here's the realm of what's

00:45:21.500 possible and what's not possible. And so I think what this is reminding me of, what we're sort of

00:45:27.660 making plans at my house for is just like, hey, look, don't be prepared for a rainy day where you're out

00:45:34.280 of work for two months. In a sense, that's almost something that you're more able to quickly adapt

00:45:39.740 to and resolve. But are you prepared for shit to really, really hit the fan? And I think that's

00:45:46.020 where a lot of us were more caught off guard. Actually, here's a great example of this. And I

00:45:51.520 think we're going to have to figure this out as a country. The American system of being sort of 50

00:45:57.740 strong states backed by a stronger central government, it was designed to be really

00:46:04.140 adaptive and resilient because, okay, a hurricane hits New Orleans. Now New Orleans can get the full

00:46:10.800 benefit of the American federal government. Florida gets hit by a hurricane. California gets hit by

00:46:16.740 wildfires. Wall Street is struggling. Our system was designed for isolated but serious short-term

00:46:26.180 black swans. What we are really clearly struggling with is massive interconnected problems that are

00:46:35.280 affecting everyone at the same time. And I think you could argue that on an individual level. Hey,

00:46:41.120 I've got life insurance in case I die, or I've got some savings in the bank in case my wife loses her

00:46:48.640 job, or we have a babysitter on call in case there's an emergency. We have a couple things here or

00:46:56.100 there. But what we're much less prepared for is everything to go wrong at the same time.

00:47:02.820 And I think that's something we're going to have to adapt and figure out how to do,

00:47:06.500 especially because it's that same weakness that sets us up to be very poorly equipped to respond to,

00:47:15.200 say, climate change or an invasion from a foreign threat. We are just not in a position

00:47:21.200 to deal with serious catastrophe. It's like we're set up only for minor catastrophes.

00:47:29.220 Yeah. The difference between centralized and decentralized organization,

00:47:33.820 again, I try not to spend much time thinking about all the reasons we're in this situation,

00:47:38.560 but I can't help but sometimes think, I hope we don't forget this. I hope we don't go back to

00:47:46.060 business as usual when this is over. I hope that a year from now, this lesson hasn't been forgotten.

00:47:53.900 Does stoicism tell us anything about the likelihood that we as a society will learn from this?

00:48:00.760 If you really look at history, the truth is like, yeah, we don't learn very much.

00:48:05.280 But I think stoicism is, there's a Hemingway quote I love, and it's in Farewell to Arms. He says,

00:48:11.520 the world breaks everyone. And afterwards, sometimes the broken people are stronger

00:48:18.980 in the broken places. But the people that don't break, the world kills. And so that's something

00:48:27.480 I've been thinking about because the myth of stoicism is that it makes you unbreakable.

00:48:32.480 It's the David Goggins thing. You can't hurt me. It's the James Stockdale superhero,

00:48:38.300 unbreakable, sort of sheer, almost inhuman strength and endurance under crisis. And in a way,

00:48:46.720 that's almost too aspirational because it doesn't feel real. I don't think stoicism is about making

00:48:53.360 you unbreakable. I think it's about making you stronger. But I think the reality is really bad

00:49:00.900 stuff happens, and we have no choice but to sort of assent to it. No amount of defiance,

00:49:06.200 as we are seeing from a leadership standpoint right now, no amount of defiance and denial

00:49:11.120 stops a pandemic. No amount of invective stops a pandemic. You roll over and you take it to a

00:49:18.740 certain degree. It's about sort of damage mitigation more than anything. But where I think philosophy

00:49:25.080 really comes in, what it's actually about is emerging from that better and stronger.

00:49:33.160 And so to me, the ultimate tragedy would be for the people that are unfortunately going to pass

00:49:41.720 from this. And that could be you or me or people we both love or just countless faceless strangers

00:49:48.700 we've never met. The worst thing we could do to those people would be to emerge from this

00:49:55.860 and essentially learn nothing, to go back to business as usual.

00:49:59.620 And I don't just mean that in, are we going to have better preparation for disasters?

00:50:06.260 The thing I keep coming back to, the thing that makes me saddest and that I'm sort of struggling

00:50:11.020 with trying not to be resentful about and trying not to be angry about, is that we, I don't just mean

00:50:17.560 in the United States, we put these leaders in charge, even though their flaws were very well

00:50:25.700 advertised, even though their lack of competence was almost something they bragged about, even

00:50:31.700 though the sort of obvious holes in their strategies and skill sets were there. We put those people in

00:50:38.100 charge because they agreed with certain policies we wanted, because we thought they would juice the

00:50:44.820 stock market, because we wanted to stick it to the other side. We made a deal with the devil,

00:50:51.440 and I'm talking about a lot of different countries. We put woefully unqualified leaders,

00:50:58.260 but more importantly, even if they were qualified, because some of them were, we put leaders with

00:51:03.340 enormous character flaws, people of genuine bad character in charge. And we knew it, and we knew it,

00:51:11.760 and we said to ourselves, I would never want to be this person. I don't want my kids to be like this

00:51:17.940 person. I don't like what they say. I don't like what they do in their personal life. And we said,

00:51:24.260 I know that they don't actually believe in the things that I believe in, but they're paying lip

00:51:28.660 service to them. We said, all of that is okay. It doesn't matter that they're a shitty human being.

00:51:34.680 What matters is they're going to get what I want accomplished, or they are going to make me more

00:51:42.820 money, or reduce my taxes. And as you're seeing now, because what leaders are actually supposed

00:51:49.240 to do is be there when shit hits the fan, we are seeing the ramifications of that. Look, it wiped

00:51:55.940 out all the gains of the market, and there's nowhere to go but down from here. And so I think that's

00:52:01.780 really what we have to learn. To me, I think it was a betrayal of my parents' generation to my

00:52:08.340 generation. But I also think I hold myself responsible too. I think we mortgaged our

00:52:14.800 children's future by not wanting to get involved, by not wanting to say anything. This doesn't just

00:52:21.260 affect us. It's going to have generational impact. And to me, that's what's got to change.

00:52:27.620 Bringing it back to right now, because at the time that we're recording this, which is

00:52:32.460 very late in March, my kids ask me every single day, how much longer, how much longer? And I think,

00:52:40.460 honestly, for them, it's mostly just they miss their routines and rituals. They miss going to

00:52:45.540 school. It's not like they're suffering. And I say, I don't know. I really don't know, guys.

00:52:50.080 You know, it could be this long, could be that long, but I really don't know. I'll have a better

00:52:53.500 idea in two weeks, blah, blah, blah. You're fortunate. You live on a farm, and you live outside of a city.

00:52:59.800 So you can always spend time outdoors. And I know for you personally, even before this came along,

00:53:06.580 that was the epicenter of your grounding. You and I sort of have that in common, which is I think

00:53:11.980 we sort of like solitude outdoors. What about the people who are listening to this who don't have

00:53:18.300 either of those options? You are living in a small apartment in New York City, or you're living in any

00:53:25.460 city, and you look out your window, and you can see people locked up in their house. I mean,

00:53:30.500 from a medical standpoint, my view is everybody should still be outside every day, regardless of

00:53:35.900 where they live. And one just has to take extreme care when those are areas that are high risk, like

00:53:41.580 New York, and in which you have to be careful what you touch and how close you get to people. But

00:53:46.600 what other sort of practical insights do you offer people that don't have the luxury of

00:53:51.360 being on a farm and being able to work from home? So we're back to the, you're thinking about applying

00:53:57.600 for unemployment. I just read today that over a million people in California have filed for

00:54:01.760 unemployment. At least that's according to a story that I read. Who knows at this point,

00:54:06.320 half the things I read, I don't even know if they're being taken out of context. But there's no doubt that

00:54:10.820 there is a staggering number of people that are in the process of filing for unemployment,

00:54:15.680 managing a life at home with kids that are out of a routine that means you now have another job,

00:54:23.960 which is trying to help educate your kids and basically homeschooling them. And just none of

00:54:29.460 this seems amenable to stillness, right? None of this seems amenable to letting your mind get out of

00:54:35.920 its own way. So how do we force it? Yeah, my sister is in a apartment in Park Slope, and I've been

00:54:41.900 trying for a month now. It's probably too late. I was trying to get her to leave. That's one of the

00:54:48.020 interesting things to me, I think a lesson that we have to learn. And again, putting aside sort of

00:54:54.480 following the health authorities, et cetera, but just the sort of amount of sort of passivity about,

00:55:00.100 it's like we saw the train coming and we froze, or we just went about our normal business as if we had

00:55:08.180 no agency. I would say one in 20 of the people I talked to had any sort of plan for how they were

00:55:16.440 going to weather what was so obviously coming, some form of quarantine, right? And if people had

00:55:22.600 been a little bit smarter about it, sure, there might've been some spreading of the virus, but

00:55:27.440 maybe New York wouldn't be so overloaded if the people who didn't have to be in New York right now

00:55:32.400 were not sort of going about their business, doing the de Blasio strategy of working out into the last

00:55:39.080 possible moment at the gym and then accepting the quarantine. Do you know what I mean? So I think a

00:55:45.240 lot of people are unfortunately stuck in less than ideal situations. What I'm trying to think about,

00:55:50.040 I'm trying to message friends of mine that I know, at least in Austin, just as some, it's like,

00:55:55.120 look, you can come to my house and walk around the farm or go in my pool. I will wave to you from

00:55:59.940 inside and then I'll wait for you to leave before I go back outside. I think that's something we're

00:56:04.300 going to have to figure out sort of culturally and relationship wise is like, how do people that

00:56:09.980 have resources or have sort of access to things, how can we get in a place where we share them

00:56:16.780 sort of effectively? So without endangering anyone, I've got a place in Florida that's sitting there

00:56:23.280 empty that would be better than a place in Park Slope, but that's sort of reality of the situation.

00:56:28.760 For me, a couple of things that one of the last purchases I bought on Amazon before,

00:56:35.020 as this was starting to sort of happen is you're stocking up and stuff. I bought like an old school

00:56:39.360 alarm clock and I have young kids, so I always get up early, but for a long, I don't keep my phone in

00:56:45.880 my room because I try not to use my phone in the mornings. But so it would be like, okay, yeah,

00:56:49.920 if I have to get up by 5am to catch a flight, I would set the alarm in the other room or whatever.

00:56:55.120 But I was like, you know, as part of this, part of sort of the routine, I was like, I'm going to set

00:57:00.320 an alarm and I'm just going to wake up really early every morning intentionally. I don't have

00:57:05.620 to. I could just wake up and drag myself through the morning and just be kind of like killing another

00:57:11.060 day. But one of the things I wanted to do was just decide to be like, just deliberate. It's like,

00:57:17.080 I can't be deliberate about where I'm spending the time. Like I have to spend the time here,

00:57:21.760 but I want to be deliberate about the order that I have in that. I don't know if you read

00:57:27.820 anything about Hurricane Carter. He was this- Yeah, Reuben Hurricane Carter. I know his story

00:57:32.060 very well. Yeah. My brother actually met him. Really? I think he's a fascinating person,

00:57:38.020 sort of wrongfully accused, spends decades in prison for this triple homicide that

00:57:41.780 almost certainly did not commit. And one of the things I remember reading about him doing,

00:57:47.240 just as a more extreme way of what we're talking about, he was like, okay, I'm physically in prison.

00:57:51.560 That's not my call. He's like, but I am going to rebel in every other way that I can. He's like,

00:57:57.220 I'm going to be awake at night and sleep during the day. I'm going to wear my uniform this way or

00:58:02.360 that way. I'm not going to ask for this favor or that favor. He decided that how he was going to

00:58:07.300 wrap his head around the lack of control that he had was he was going to assert control in other ways.

00:58:14.200 And I think that's an interesting approach that might be worth thinking about for people. So

00:58:17.860 how can you find some ways to assert agency in the midst of all of this powerlessness?

00:58:24.300 And I think you'll find that that's really reassuring.

00:58:28.480 I like that idea a lot. I mean, those of us with kids, I think are naturally in a point where we're

00:58:33.620 still getting up at the same time and things. But when you wake up making your bed first thing in the

00:58:39.120 morning, these things sound stupid and trivial, but I agree with that. I think having a schedule

00:58:44.680 allows you to maintain some control over something. Exercise to me is also a really big one.

00:58:50.500 I think obviously for most people, it's harder to exercise now because for most of us, it's going to

00:58:57.400 the gym that is exercise, which has now been taken away. But there are tons of great apps out there

00:59:03.420 that are basically saying, look, here's how we're going to modify this. And here's what you could do

00:59:08.160 with limited equipment, or here's what you could do with simply only your body weight. And to simply

00:59:14.600 take 20 minutes a day and do that, no matter what, and say, hey, look at 10 o'clock this morning,

00:59:19.660 I am absolutely doing my app-based workout. Even if worst case scenario, that's a day that I just

00:59:25.840 can't get out there and take a walk for whatever reason. It's hard to imagine not being able to make

00:59:30.840 20 minutes to do that. And yet it's much easier to spend that extra 20 minutes tooling around on Netflix

00:59:36.580 or YouTube. And yet the dividends of that 20 minutes are huge, not just sort of physiologically,

00:59:42.960 but I think psychologically. And I think, I mean, I hate the word spiritual because I'm not really,

00:59:47.640 but I think you know what I mean when I say spiritually as well.

00:59:50.340 No, no, I think that's right. My wife likes future, which is like a sort of remote. You have a personal

00:59:55.700 trainer that gives you a workout every day, but you don't actually see them and they design it based

01:00:00.860 on what you have in your house. I hope it drives people towards some of the more sort of

01:00:06.320 solo endurance sports too, because I think there's all sorts of psychological and philosophical

01:00:12.220 benefits to distance running or distance bike riding or swimming, if there's some way that

01:00:17.880 you could do it. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to do swimming since this has all happened.

01:00:23.180 There's no real like rivers or lakes that are available at the moment or oceans. But I think

01:00:28.880 realizing like, oh, just sort of practicing that muscle of like, I'm going to tell my body what it's

01:00:34.360 going to do, I think is probably as important or relevant as ever in this moment. And I like,

01:00:40.620 yeah, in New York, the one or two exceptions to the quarantine is like going outside for your

01:00:46.360 physical or mental health. You've got to take advantage of that. And when we're talking about

01:00:51.400 sort of a lifetime dead time, like what good can come out of this, you were saying like a lot of

01:00:55.480 people are sort of already on a schedule with kids. We were always on a schedule with our kids,

01:00:59.560 like they had to go to school at a certain time, but we just sort of always had sleep training was

01:01:03.880 really tough for us. We made a lot of allowances. We sort of just leaned into the chaos of it a

01:01:08.800 little bit. There wasn't a ton of structure. What we use this for was a chance to really force that

01:01:14.360 and practice it. And I would say like, it's weird. We're just experiencing. So it's crazy and

01:01:20.060 disrupted as our lives are in some respects. In other respects, the machine is operating more smoothly

01:01:26.300 than ever. We're doing the same things every day, eating better. Bedtime is more on the dot.

01:01:33.480 And so again, no one would say like, hey, the global pandemic is now a positive because I've got

01:01:40.100 a better routine at home. That's cold comfort. But you can find redeeming qualities inside of the

01:01:48.580 shit sandwich, so to speak. You can say, hey, you write off the losses as a sunk cost,

01:01:53.480 but where you're able to find some good is that you made these marginal improvements across a

01:01:59.240 bunch of aspects of your life that will hopefully last longer than however long this goes on.

01:02:05.540 Ryan, how has your journaling changed in the past couple of weeks? You're a prolific journalist.

01:02:11.720 Well, journaler, I don't know what the word is there when you-

01:02:13.980 Yes. I guess journaler, yeah.

01:02:16.680 Yeah, yeah, journaler. Have you noticed anything in your journaling of late that maybe wasn't there

01:02:22.460 prior? Yeah, journaling is weird for me too, because my writing is also an outlet where I

01:02:28.600 get to work out a lot of thoughts. So I really have just felt on fire as a writer recently. I'm

01:02:33.840 currently researching some books, but I'm not writing for any book projects. So I found that

01:02:39.240 the Daily Stoic email that I do every day and Daily Dad, I've just been in the zone,

01:02:43.600 more productive than usual. It's better than usual. So I've really felt good about that.

01:02:48.640 For journaling, I've felt I'm really trying to think about, I'm really trying to use it as a

01:02:55.200 place to sort of remind myself and reiterate to myself how I want to be inside this. Sort of

01:03:02.620 reminders of, hey, you're worried about X, Y, and Z. One way not to think about that is to think about

01:03:08.040 other people instead. So I'm trying to just sort of buck myself up a little bit in the morning,

01:03:13.040 kind of remind myself of what's important to me. I'm trying to use it. Again, I think journaling is

01:03:19.560 not just this stream of conscious sort of thing you're doing. It's not performing for history.

01:03:25.840 To me, it should be, it's like playing scales on the guitar or on the piano. You're running yourself

01:03:32.420 through it over and over again so that it gets more imputed into your memory and kind of into your

01:03:38.980 being. Yeah, it sort of makes sense. Again, I think you get to write every day for those of us

01:03:47.220 who don't or when we're writing, like for me, I'm writing all the time, but it's usually kind of

01:03:51.620 technical stuff. This outlet has become something that I think is a, I don't know, I'll tell you what

01:03:58.580 brought it to my mind recently. So when maybe about three weeks ago when we sort of pulled our

01:04:05.320 kids out of school and just decided we were going to do something that at the time seemed outrageous,

01:04:10.340 but basically play the lesser of two risks, my daughter was like, this is crazy. There's no way

01:04:16.620 I'm not going to be able to go out and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, Olivia,

01:04:21.200 what do you think about Anne Frank? And of course she didn't know who Anne Frank was. So I was like,

01:04:25.500 all right, well, I want you to tell me by the end of today who Anne Frank is and let's talk about her.

01:04:29.480 So of course she goes about, read about her and stuff. But the interesting thing is my daughter

01:04:33.940 didn't know what an attic was. I said, Olivia, do you want to come see our attic? She goes,

01:04:39.980 we have one? I said, oh yes, we do, honey buns. So I got the ladder out, took her in the closet,

01:04:45.980 took her up to the attic. I mean, she just about had a cow. She couldn't believe how small and

01:04:51.060 miserable the attic was. And that this girl spent years up in an attic writing this journal.

01:04:56.580 With another family.

01:04:57.500 Yeah. Yeah. And like you read what she wrote in her journals and it's unbelievable. You cannot

01:05:03.840 believe a child could have written this. You can't believe how she could turn to that journal and say,

01:05:10.600 you are my best friend. You are the person to whom I can say all these things. I mean,

01:05:14.300 it's just, it's unbelievable. And again, it just, I don't say that to sort of begrudge the way we've

01:05:19.740 raised our daughter to not appreciate how good she has it relative to a girl growing up in the second

01:05:24.920 world war, but it is a little bit of a phase shift. And it just brought back to my mind a few

01:05:30.420 weeks ago, how powerful this tool can be. And it brought me back to our first discussion actually

01:05:36.320 about it. Yeah. It would be difficult to be a 13 year old girl at any time. And then to be a 13

01:05:42.900 year old girl in an attic in a country you're not from, right? Cause she'd already fled Germany to

01:05:48.760 the Netherlands. Then you're trapped in this attic with another family. It would have been horrendous.

01:05:54.480 And her journal is so good that it's actually something like Holocaust deniers use. They're

01:05:59.800 like, it's impossible that a 16 year old girl could have written it, but she was just a precocious,

01:06:05.280 brilliant girl. And what I think is interesting is that she wrote that journal partly inspired.

01:06:11.480 I think it was the queen of the Netherlands wrote, put out a call over the BBC saying like, Hey,

01:06:18.580 we're eventually going to get through this. We want your help. Please keep a record of what you're

01:06:24.880 experiencing and doing. And so that idea of finding purpose in something that you're doing,

01:06:31.380 even if she had no idea the impact that her journal would actually ultimately have, she had no idea that

01:06:36.820 it would be sort of final legacy, that it would be the sole sort of creative work that she'd be allowed

01:06:42.100 to do, which is all tragic and totally unfair. But I'm sure that because she not only wrote the

01:06:48.640 journal, but then she would go back and revisit the journal and she clearly edited it and she

01:06:53.380 responded to parts and she organized it. It was a project. And so I think that is something we're

01:07:00.400 thinking about with our kids is just what goals or things can we give them to throw themselves into

01:07:08.280 that allows them to sort of escape from this in a little bit. And I don't think that's terrible

01:07:14.080 advice for adults either. So what's a PR you're going to try to make in your deadlift if you have

01:07:19.900 weight rack at home? Are you and your wife going to try to lose five pounds? Are you going to try

01:07:24.800 intermittent fasting? Are you going to try to read the entire Harry Potter series as a family?

01:07:30.240 You can create things to throw yourself into that allow you to feel some momentum and

01:07:37.820 accomplishment and purpose. And if I knew how to do this, it'd be something I was doing.

01:07:42.240 But like, you know, just the people that are making masks right now. I mean, that's to me,

01:07:46.060 another great example of trying to find where you can contribute and where good can be done

01:07:53.100 rather than wallowing in your resentment or anger or boredom.

01:07:57.980 You're generally a pretty disciplined guy when it comes to social media. Have you created any new

01:08:03.720 rituals or routines around avoiding it or selectively utilizing it for some benefit but not getting

01:08:10.740 sucked into it?

01:08:12.060 Yeah. So I don't check Twitter because I've found that it sort of triggers me the most.

01:08:16.920 And I don't have Instagram on my phone and I don't check Facebook either. So I've been sort of

01:08:22.280 very actively not using those platforms. At the same time, I have been sort of stepping up

01:08:28.380 what I put out on those platforms. So I've been starting to do sort of lists of things or explaining

01:08:35.120 stoic topics on the different media. I've been enjoying the creative element of them, but trying

01:08:41.040 to distance myself or protect myself from the, let's call it the sort of manipulative and anxiety

01:08:51.360 inducing sort of characteristics of social media.

01:08:54.580 Yeah. What are you most optimistic about in the next couple of months? And what are you most

01:09:00.660 concerned about in the next couple of months? And that can be either about you personally and your

01:09:05.680 family or just broadly your fellow citizens.

01:09:09.960 I mean, upside, I hope this redefines the role of the president for a lot of people. Hopefully this

01:09:15.600 redefines the importance of a lot of the alliances and relationships internationally that we have with

01:09:21.760 a lot of different countries. And those things were, people were, Trump was not wrong in sort of

01:09:28.380 questioning some of them, but also sensing that the public wasn't that possessive of them. Hopefully

01:09:35.120 this redefines internationally how we operate in just our understanding of China, our relationship

01:09:42.020 to other countries. I'll say like, I'm very glad that for Daily Stoic, all of our products we

01:09:47.800 manufacture in the United States, because it has dramatically protected our supply lines and

01:09:54.400 allowed us to have inventory on hand. It's allowed us to keep the lights on in the business. It's

01:09:58.540 allowed us to connect with and sort of work more collaboratively with the people we work with.

01:10:04.300 I wish that maybe some of the stuff was even closer to home. Like I wish I had even more oversight

01:10:09.240 or control. I think positively, I think this is a wake-up call in a lot of ways. I think it sort of

01:10:15.960 knocked people out of the stupor or the slumber that we're in. I hope that's a positive. Tyler

01:10:21.780 Cowen wrote an article, and I think he's crushing it, by the way. Anyone who's looking for smart stuff,

01:10:26.980 I think Marginal Revolution and Tyler Cowen is putting out awesome stuff, as always. But he was

01:10:32.500 saying he thinks the pandemic has killed the sort of progressive woke left, that it sort of woke us up,

01:10:39.300 like why are we arguing about transgender bathrooms and neglecting this or that? Why are we fighting

01:10:45.920 about cultural appropriation and not sort of coming together on things that matter? Why are we talking

01:10:51.540 about healthcare for illegal immigrants and not, do we have enough ventilators in emergency rooms?

01:10:58.120 At the same time, I think one worry would be actually it doesn't kill the sort of revolutionary

01:11:04.040 extremes on either end of the party, but they seize upon the wreckage that emerges from this and are

01:11:12.300 actually empowered. That's something I'm worried about. And I think a little bit selfishly, but I

01:11:16.920 also think it's going to have big ramifications. I'm a millennial sort of smack in the middle of the

01:11:22.500 millennial generation. My generation, 9-11, catastrophic wars in the Middle East, which wasted trillions of

01:11:31.940 dollars, the financial crisis, the financial crisis, and now whatever we're going to call this financial

01:11:36.680 crisis. I mean, it is a betrayal of one generation to the next generation that I'm not... We talk about

01:11:44.120 the lost generation in the 1920s. I mean, people I know were just getting their shit together. They just

01:11:53.660 bought their first house in already expensive markets. They just started putting money away for their

01:11:59.880 retirement. They were just recovering from the last time the world was melted down by irresponsible

01:12:07.120 adults. And boom, it just fucking happened again. I'm going to be okay, at least right now, but I'm

01:12:14.780 certainly not so okay that I'm not thinking about, yeah, what does it look like? What does it do to

01:12:19.960 Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security that even the people that survive this are going to have

01:12:25.580 long-term health damages? What does it do that people who are about to retire just watched years

01:12:31.100 of their gains evaporating? If there's anything I'm worried about, it's actually more the economic

01:12:35.760 than the medical. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. What are you worried about? I think in the short

01:12:42.500 term, I'm certainly worried about a handful of geographies that I don't think under non-optimistic

01:12:50.700 scenarios will have this supply to meet the ICU demand. So I think New York is very likely going

01:12:59.400 to be overrun. And I think that that's obviously disconcerting because it puts doctors in a position

01:13:05.400 that I don't think anybody ever signed up for when they went to medical school, which is, and again,

01:13:10.960 it's something that's so foreign to us in the United States, but it's not foreign to doctors outside of

01:13:15.140 the United States, which is the truest form of triage. How do you look at two people that if you

01:13:20.080 had endless resources, you could probably save both, but in a situation where you don't have

01:13:25.960 endless resources, you have to prioritize one over the other. There's no, you didn't take a class in

01:13:31.280 that. And even if you did, it wouldn't have helped much. I'm just, I guess I'm glad I'll never have to

01:13:36.040 make that decision, I suppose. But a bunch of people might have to make those decisions. And that's,

01:13:40.580 I find that very, I find that frustrating through the lens that we've discussed, which is a little

01:13:47.340 bit more preparation, not a lot, believe it or not, but a little bit more preparation could have

01:13:52.020 thwarted that. I think the economic consequences of this are, as you said, at least as staggering,

01:13:59.040 if not more staggering than what comes of it, though, again, it's still so unclear what is coming of

01:14:05.040 this. And unfortunately you can make a model say anything. And that's a little frustrating because

01:14:11.980 there's models out, you can basically find a model that will say whatever you want it to say. So

01:14:16.040 that's not entirely helpful, but, but there are scenarios under which this thing is a problem that

01:14:22.840 could on the one end result in a million deaths in the United States, which would be enormous,

01:14:28.940 right? That would be a third of the total. That's like basically adding a third or 30% more deaths

01:14:35.000 to the all cause mortality we experienced. That's hard to fathom through this lens at the other end

01:14:41.360 of the spectrum. This could end up being a small fraction of that. It could be, it could end up

01:14:46.300 being the same number of deaths that you would get from influenza. Again, I don't think either of those

01:14:51.740 extremes, by the way, are what's going to happen, but they could. And in the latter case, it would be,

01:14:58.720 boy, that was, we paid an enormous economic price for that. You bring up an example of

01:15:04.780 comparing this to the 2008 recession. Well, it's going to look and feel a bit different.

01:15:09.940 And that scares me a little because I don't think we have a playbook for this one. Maybe it's not as

01:15:16.440 necessary. I mean, the, you know, as of when we're recording this, the federal government has

01:15:21.000 announced basically a $6 trillion stimulus package of which 2 trillion is in hard assets and 4 trillion of

01:15:29.120 that probably less so. But that's so much money. And it gets to the point you raised earlier, which is

01:15:35.600 unless you can keep interest rates at zero, the debt service on debt we've accumulated over the past

01:15:42.820 18 years is unbelievable. And I've asked people that I think are some of the smartest people on

01:15:50.240 earth when it comes to fiscal policy. I just asked them point blank, tell me what we do when we can't

01:15:57.200 pay our debt. Tell me what it means for the United States to default on its debt. Those things are

01:16:02.880 troubling. So all of that said, I still come back to something which Sam Harris and I talked about a few

01:16:09.360 days ago on the podcast, which was, it's okay that those things are upsetting and it's okay that I can

01:16:16.300 worry about them a little bit. I'm trying to check myself to make sure I'm not worrying about them at

01:16:21.500 the point where it ceases to be productive. Worry is only productive when it motivates me to do

01:16:26.560 something. And at this point, I'm pretty freaking motivated to do something. I'm doing everything

01:16:33.020 I can with my little narrow band of skillset to do everything I can. And therefore I realized that

01:16:40.220 there is little to be found in worry. And so what I've been doing is making a point to spend time

01:16:47.000 with my wife and kids every day and reiterate to them how happy I am to be home with them.

01:16:52.680 And in part, that's just telling myself that as well. It's sort of trying to combat that anxiety that

01:16:59.900 still slips into me, especially when I'm sleeping, frankly, and my dreams are pretty,

01:17:05.620 pretty distressing, but I'm just trying to basically curb the worry and focus on what's

01:17:12.300 here and what's here at the moment. And believe it or not, I've actually had weird thoughts, which is

01:17:16.600 when this thing's over and I have to get on a plane and go back to New York, I don't think I'm

01:17:20.500 going to look forward to it that much, not because of New York, but because it's like,

01:17:23.520 yeah, back to traveling again. Yeah, no, this could be a new normal that we appreciate more.

01:17:28.900 Maybe we all were flying more than we needed to be and working more than we needed to be.

01:17:33.900 And yeah, saying yes to things we didn't need to know about because we'd never sort of been fully

01:17:40.160 forced to appreciate what home and life was. And to me, yeah, that is a positive that emerges from

01:17:47.740 it. Again, not worth trading a million lives, but certainly a positive we can sort of pull from the

01:17:54.480 wreckage of this. Yeah. Well, Ryan, I made a plug for it in the past that I'm going to do so again if I

01:18:00.680 was very bullish on people becoming daily subscribers to the Daily Stoic. I'm even more

01:18:09.400 so today. What's the best way that people can sign up for that if they haven't done so?

01:18:13.960 Yeah, you can sign up at dailystoic.com or dailystoic.com slash email. And then the other

01:18:19.400 one I do every day that I've actually been liking just as much as Daily Dad, which is dailydad.com.

01:18:24.180 And people can follow you how on Twitter?

01:18:29.000 Yeah, I'm at Ryan Holiday and then also at Daily Stoic if you want a piece of stoic wisdom every day

01:18:35.300 as well.

01:18:36.280 Okay. Any of your books at this moment you think people should go back and reread or read for the

01:18:43.160 first time?

01:18:44.380 Yeah, I mean, I think Obstacle is the Way is probably particularly well suited if you're,

01:18:48.700 especially if you've sort of been knocked on your ass here and you're trying to figure out

01:18:52.280 what next. That's what that book is sort of designed to try to tackle. And then if you're

01:18:58.420 maybe more like you and I are and some of the things you and I were talking about are just the

01:19:02.420 stress and anxiety and worry and calming that kind of racing part of your mind,

01:19:08.160 Stillness is the Key is the most recent book. And that one sort of talks about a lot of things we

01:19:13.300 were talking about today.

01:19:14.240 Well, Ryan, thank you for making time today to talk and thank you for sharing your insights.

01:19:19.940 They mean a lot to me personally and I think they're going to mean a lot to folks listening.

01:19:23.520 Oh, I appreciate that. No, this was fun. And again, by the way, this is a, I don't know about

01:19:27.300 you, but I didn't think my mind was not racing. I wasn't distracted. I wasn't catastrophizing

01:19:32.240 because we spent an hour and a half actually engaged with each other. And I think not everyone

01:19:38.100 has a podcast, but one way to calm that racing mind is to go have a real long conversation

01:19:43.880 with a human being. And I think you'll be surprised at both what you find and then how much you get

01:19:49.460 out of that experience. Yeah. I think that's a great point. Connectivity matters.

01:19:54.940 Yes. All right, Ryan, best of luck rested today.

01:19:58.100 Thanks. Appreciate it.

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The Peter Attia Drive - March 27, 2020

#101 - Ryan Holiday： Finding stillness amidst chaos

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