Ryan Holiday’s Stoic Approach | How to Balance Self Improvement and Justice

[00:00:00] Earning your degree online doesn't mean you have to go about it alone. At Capella University, we're here to support you when you're ready. From enrollment counselors who get to know you and your goals, to academic coaches who can help you form a plan to stay on track.

[00:00:14] We care about your success and are dedicated to helping you pursue your goals. Going back to school is a big step, but having support at every step of your academic journey can make a big difference. Imagine your future differently at capella.edu.

[00:00:37] Ryan Holiday is always a favorite guest on this podcast. I don't know, Jay, how many books has he written that we've covered on this podcast? Probably like eight or nine. Starting from Trust Me, I'm Lying, which was his marketing masterpiece,

[00:00:51] to all the books about Stoicism, starting with The Obstacle is the Way. The latest one, which is part of his Stoics Virtues series, is Right Thing, Right Now. Subtitle is good values, good character, good deeds. So many interesting, eye-opening stories about—

[00:01:10] We obviously know that it's, in general, good to do the right thing. But it's often hard. We often don't really understand the benefits to ourselves, society. I mean, again, the stories that Ryan talks about are beautiful. The examples are great. It's entertaining.

[00:01:29] And I really learned something that I think will make my life better. And then, of course, Ryan and I have a gazillion other things we talk about. So here's Ryan Holiday. I like how this book is cut.

[00:02:01] Do you realize it's like different dimensions than the usual business book? Oh, yeah. I think all of them—the other two in the series are the same size, I think. Yeah, but I just noticed it for some reason.

[00:02:14] I feel like this one's a little—maybe because it's a little thicker? I don't know. Yeah. I like the smaller trim size, too. Yeah, and it's a little—like the width versus length is a little different than the average book. Yeah, yeah. I think so.

[00:02:32] I like that. How did they decide on that design? I'm just curious. I think this is the size they decided for Obstacle, and they've been more or less the same ever since.

[00:02:40] And technically—I view Obstacle as the same series as this, but technically Obstacle and the few books after that are different series, right? Yeah, this is the Stoic Virtue series, and the other three are in an unnamed trilogy.

[00:02:54] I kind of feel they all fit together, though, like the Stoic Library. They're similar, yeah. I mean, stylistically, I've made a couple different choices, but it's the same basic approach.

[00:03:05] Yeah, and the way you write these is similar, like kind of through—you tell these virtues or these other aspects of Stoicism through modern storytelling. It feels like they all fit together. I wouldn't automatically think of them as separate series.

[00:03:21] Yeah, okay. I think so. I don't know. This is the first time—so the first three, I had no intention. I wrote one, and I didn't think I would write another, and then I wrote another.

[00:03:33] I didn't think of them as being related at all, and then this was different because I was setting out from the beginning to write four books, four interrelated, interconnected books.

[00:03:44] So I see them as being different just because I thought about the first three as independent each and every time, and then these ones I've always been thinking.

[00:03:55] There's a chapter in this book that I think was supposed to be in the first book, and then I've moved stuff around as I was writing. So I've always thought of these as four connected books.

[00:04:07] Well, excellent. And so this one, right thing right now, towards the end of this book, you said that if you were younger, you don't think you would be able to write this book.

[00:04:18] And I'm curious why that is because that might lead to some of the questions I had while reading this book. Well, I don't know. Maybe I would have been able to, but I wouldn't have, and I didn't.

[00:04:29] It just wasn't what excited me about Stoic philosophy, and it wasn't where my priorities were, and it wasn't the argument that I felt compelled to make.

[00:04:44] So for me, I definitely see this as an evolution in my journey, both as a human being and then also my evolution in the study of Stoicism and in the practice of Stoicism. But I think by definition, most self-improvement books are quite selfish. That's what they're about, right?

[00:05:05] I think they're about how I can get better as a person. And we mean that in terms of lose weight or get stronger or run faster or make more money or get happier.

[00:05:16] Yeah, I sort of feel that the three pillars of self-help are get laid, get paid, lose weight. Yeah, health, wealth, and happiness. Yeah. So this was obviously, you know, justice is not a big topic there.

[00:05:34] Or I guess what we owe or are obligated to do for others and for the world, that's not what self-help is typically about. But you can argue doing the right thing will make you have a better life, and this is what you do argue in this book.

[00:05:53] So let's take your first Stoicism book, Obstacles the Way. And we talked about this book, I guess, 2014 or 2015. It's crazy. I know, it's crazy. So you've been like, it's 10 years you've been focusing on Stoicism. As long as I've been doing this podcast, you've been a Stoic.

[00:06:12] And I remember something you said in that first discussion we had, which is that if you look at Stoicism, it can equally apply to someone of wealth like a Seneca or a Marcus Aurelius or to a slave like Epictetus.

[00:06:27] And the idea being that confronting obstacles could allow us to rise from slavery or be a better emperor. So like you were just saying, you're getting something. And just because you have an obstacle, view it as a vehicle to getting somewhere better.

[00:06:45] And here, you're kind of making me – there's a little bit of an argument that, hey, doing the right thing is going to be better for you. But really, it's doing the right thing for its own sake is just good.

[00:06:57] Well, I think – and it's the 10-year anniversary of The Obstacle is the Way. So I'm thinking about this a lot because I'm doing like an updated version. I wanted to correct some things, and I was supposed to write a new introduction.

[00:07:11] And I think when I was writing The Obstacle is the Way – so the passage of that book is based on – it's basically Marcus really saying, hey, look, stuff gets in the way. We have problems. But these problems are an opportunity.

[00:07:24] So I think you can make a very clear case that you have some crisis or problem in your business, and it's a chance to make your business better. Or the disadvantages that you think your business has can also be advantages in your business.

[00:07:41] And that's, I think, the first, most obvious level that that book is being written. But there's also situations to which there is no obvious advantage. Someone you love is sick or you've gone bankrupt or you've failed, you've embarrassed yourself, you've gone to jail. Shit happens, right?

[00:08:02] And I think it's glib to say, oh, this is wonderful. Good for you. Have fun. I think what the Stokes are saying when they say that that's an opportunity, it's an opportunity to practice virtue.

[00:08:15] That is to be good, to grow as a human being, yes, but also to do good for other human beings. So let's say you drink and drive, you get in an accident, you kill someone, and then you go to jail. That's just called Tuesday for me.

[00:08:34] When we say the obstacle is the way, we're not like, oh, this is such a wonderful thing because you can personally grow from it. No, I think the Stokes are saying that in the midst of that failure, that terrible thing that happened that you did,

[00:08:50] perhaps there's a chance now for you to help other people learn from what you did wrong. And so you're getting better, but really what's important is that you, in the midst of this failure, this devastation, this tragedy,

[00:09:06] are trying to help others not go down the path that you went through. So I guess what I'm saying is when we say the obstacle is the way, we don't just mean there's always some opportunity to get an advantage.

[00:09:17] What we mean is that there's always the opportunity to do the right thing after. There's always an opportunity to be good in the midst of the circumstances you're in. I think that's what the Stokes meant.

[00:09:30] And with this book, Right Thing Right Now, a great example of something different than that is your story of Thomas Clarkson, where he's well-off, white, British, and he takes it upon himself to gather information and spread this information about the horrors of slavery

[00:09:53] that many people of his class and community didn't know. So he's doing the right thing without the obstacle happening to him. This is an obstacle in society not happening to him, and he's choosing to rise above whatever circumstances he's in, good or bad, and doing the right thing.

[00:10:12] Well, there's a couple of things there. That's probably my favorite story in the book. This guy Thomas Clarkson basically single-handedly begins the movement and builds the organization that abolishes the slave trade in the British Empire,

[00:10:24] ultimately abolishes slavery in the empire, and thus puts in motion the abolishment of slavery in the rest of the Western world. Now, you're right. He has no dog in this fight. It's basically just he's intellectually curious about this thing and then goes,

[00:10:41] Hey, if slavery is wrong, maybe somebody should do something about it, and maybe that person should be me. But it is true that that's not an easy thing to bring about. I mean, he's fighting against thousands of years of precedent, entrenched economic and political interests.

[00:10:56] But what you could argue, if you want to say how the obstacle is the way, in fighting against those interests, in building the organization, building the movement, pushing against that resistance, what Clarkson also does in addition to triumphing over slavery and abolishing it,

[00:11:13] he also discovers, you could argue, the playbook by which most of modern political change happens. He sort of as a byproduct invents political posters and graphics. He invents modern sort of activist public relations. He invents the consumer boycott.

[00:11:35] You know, he builds this coalition, this group of different interests who come together. By the way, his organization, it still exists today. It still fights human trafficking to this day. So what's also true is that in doing the right thing, it's not going to be easy.

[00:11:53] It's going to be tough. But we often develop muscles or learn things that would benefit. The counter example of this that I talk about in the book is in the early 1990s, the crack epidemic sweeps the inner cities of America.

[00:12:08] And culturally and politically, our response was to make this an inner city problem, was to say that this was the fault of rap music and poverty and black people and black culture, and to basically wash our hands.

[00:12:27] We tried to police our way out of this problem, which basically incarcerated a generation of people and led to a lot of the problems we have now. But as a result of not dealing with this problem holistically,

[00:12:42] looking at the root causes of addiction, looking at the societal causes of addiction, creating a public health system and a safety net that could save people from falling into this trap, we set the rest of society up to be ravaged by the opioid epidemic,

[00:13:03] which starts almost to the day at the end of the crack epidemic. And we saw this during COVID. If America had a better public health system and had generally taken better care of its population, if we weren't overweight, if we weren't malnourished,

[00:13:23] if we weren't so disconnected from all these things, we might have survived COVID better also. This is where doing the right thing is very nuanced and sometimes difficult. I feel like there's two categories of right things. Should I tell a lie or should I tell the truth?

[00:13:40] Or should I kill someone randomly or let them live? Obviously, do the right thing is let them live. The trolley problem, yeah. It's interesting you go from crack to the opioids to COVID because they're connected in a variety of ways.

[00:13:57] With crack, you have drugs coming in from these cartels and these crime organizations. And there's stories about how maybe the US government and the CIA was also somehow connected to that. Who knows?

[00:14:11] But then that led to this sanitized marketing of, hey, criminal gangs are bad to get your drugs from, but pharmaceutical companies are good to get your drugs from. That led to the opioids, like fentanyl, OxyContin. These drugs actually do have good use but could be abused.

[00:14:33] And then of course, we started to distrust the pharma companies from that. Like, oh, by the way, the pharma companies are going to kill us also. And that led to a lot of the confusion on COVID, not only on the virus itself,

[00:14:47] but on the vaccines and on post-COVID and so on. Because we don't trust the pharma companies anymore. So it's like one led to the other. So where's the right thing? How do you know to do the right thing in that context? You're right.

[00:15:00] And I don't think we've explored enough why people were so skeptical of the pharmaceutical companies. It's because, yeah, they've been complicit in— The most popular movie on Netflix is the—was it called The Painkillers? The Pain Doctors. The Pain Doctors, yeah. Yeah, it was a great movie.

[00:15:16] And Matthew Broderick. So it's like there's movies about how we shouldn't trust the pharma companies. Yeah. No, no, it's fascinating. Look, I think—I tried not to get into specific policy things in the book

[00:15:28] because I think that's the first way to sort of alienate and get away from the actual message of justice. But I think what I'm saying here, why I think that metaphor is important,

[00:15:39] is that when you step in and try to help, when you actually care about other people, you build a muscle, right? And conversely, when you turn away from tragedies, crisis, injustices, you are also weakening a muscle.

[00:15:59] And so ultimately problems get so bad that we have to do something about them as a society. And oftentimes it's very obvious when we finally get around to it that had we gotten involved earlier, we would have been able to do something about it, right?

[00:16:14] And I think what I look at in The Crack Epidemic is a trend I think you see across society, which is something bad is happening to someone and we look for ways to create distance between us and them. Or we create a reason to not care.

[00:16:33] Like I have this little, I just saw it, I was working on something and I wrote this down and I wanted to think about it more. Like I was saying we should be careful of explanations about events that justify us not having to do anything

[00:16:50] or not having to think about it anymore, right? And so if you look at something like The Crack Epidemic and you go, oh, this is an inner city problem or this is a problem of this unique culture

[00:17:04] or that this is somehow brought on by the people who are the victim of it, then you don't have to think about it and you can just go back about your life, right? And so we often see problems begin at or with the most vulnerable people in society

[00:17:23] or groups that don't have great political or economic representation. And then by ignoring them, we don't realize that eventually that problem will come for us. This is that famous poem about, look, when they came for the socialists, I didn't do anything.

[00:17:38] When they came for the trade unionists, I didn't do anything. When they came for the Jews, I didn't do anything. And then when they came for me, there was no one to speak up, right? Because everyone else is gone.

[00:17:48] And I think that is a parable that we ignore at our peril. Not necessarily as things as graphic or as outwardly violent as the Holocaust or something as enormous as an opioid epidemic,

[00:18:05] but it is a tendency in human nature to not want to have to care about things. But ultimately, it's hard for injustice to be allowed to exist or evil or danger and for it not ultimately to come your way also.

[00:18:20] This is why the Thomas Clarkson story and slavery is such a good story, because they weren't coming for him. And he stepped out of those boundaries to do something. Or another great example in the book is Harold Kushner, right?

[00:18:34] Who every time he's sitting down to write, before he writes, he does some charitable thing. Maybe he writes a check, a small check for charity. Like every day he does something. It's almost like this concept of one for me, one for you on everything I do.

[00:18:49] But I'll give you an example. So when women begin agitating for the right to vote shortly after the abolition of slavery, it seems like just a clear-cut issue of fairness, right? Should women be allowed to vote or not?

[00:19:08] They're not currently, so it's good for men because men are overrepresented politically. And the question of whether women should be allowed to vote or whether people should campaign and fight and struggle to give women the right to vote, this seems like a selfless thing, right?

[00:19:24] And that eventually women are given the right to vote. And this is good, right? It's good for them. But it's this nice thing that society was doing for 50% of the rest of society. But what's really interesting is when you look at women beginning to enter the political process,

[00:19:43] and it doesn't just happen overnight with the suffragette amendment. It was a slow process as different states allowed for it. What happens is the political process begins to be cleaned up, right? This tracks pretty well with the collapse of the political machine,

[00:20:04] the collapse of a lot of political corruption in the U.S. And then suddenly, also you could argue imperialism begins to wind itself down around the same period. We stopped fighting stupid wars over things that didn't matter

[00:20:21] because women were also voting about whether to send their children there or not. And so the whole balance of political power changes. And so men and society as a whole get a better world when women are allowed to vote.

[00:20:39] So the injustice of this thing, the imbalance of it is also corrupting and corroding the body politic at the same time. That wasn't what people were thinking about, but it is what happened. This is also when child labor starts to disappear.

[00:20:56] A whole bunch of improvements in American society come after women are given the right to vote. And so that issue of fairness improves fairness, not just specifically but generally. Do you think it was women being allowed to vote,

[00:21:13] so now candidates have to change their message to appeal to men and women? Or is it the fact that women were campaigning against this injustice before 1920, and so it shed a light on other issues of injustice like child labor,

[00:21:33] which was really an early 1900s thing that was being solved? No, I think it's both. I think a system that is predicated on an illegal sort of seizure of power or the fundamental injustice of stealing from women their prerogatives, their rights, their money, their freedom,

[00:21:56] all these things, it was skewing and distorting the lens through which both men and women were understanding the world. So the correctiveness of this, it just redounds in ways that you wouldn't necessarily have anticipated. In the same way that we think, hey, if you suppress every unpleasant thought

[00:22:21] or you police for political correctness, everyone will get along and truth will flourish. We actually know that a more open, uncensored system creates truth better. I think it's something like that. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast.

[00:22:48] Email me at altitradegmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

[00:23:24] Imagine how a flexible education can make a difference in your life. Acapella.edu. In one of his, you referred to it as a darker moment where he started, it's 1852. He's starting to doubt whether slaves are going to be freed or black people are going to be treated better.

[00:24:06] He's giving this talk and he's depressed or something and Sojourner Truth rises up and- She calls him out. Yeah. And if he didn't have her there, he might not have been able to do the right thing.

[00:24:24] I wonder if one aspect of doing the right thing is making sure you associate with the right people. Although that might come into conflict, like, oh, I'm going to go in and save all the prisoners. You're not necessarily always hanging out with the best people.

[00:24:39] But I don't know. It's sort of like you have to make a decision to be around people who also want to do the right thing. I didn't really think about that. I saw that more as, I guess I saw that somewhat differently.

[00:24:53] I was sort of telling a parable about not losing hope. But you're right, the reason he doesn't lose hope is because someone restores it in him or prevents him from sort of going in this downward spiral.

[00:25:05] And in that way, the decision to have hope yourself or to believe in a better future is itself a valuable thing because it could cheer other people up. It can encourage other people. It could prevent other people from giving up.

[00:25:20] So yeah, I think that the decision to be someone who believes, who doesn't become cynical and nihilistic and give in to despair is a really powerful thing. And I think you can certainly see this in different periods of time in different groups.

[00:25:38] When like a particularly insidious bad idea takes hold, it can take that group in a very toxic, destructive place. I mean, let's look at some of the left-wing terrorism in the 1960s and 70s.

[00:25:55] These people came to believe that the system was hopelessly corrupt and it needed to be torn down and destroyed and that violence was the only means of doing so. And these groups wreaked a lot of havoc and terror and basically accomplished next to nothing.

[00:26:12] And then conversely, you look at someone like Martin Luther King and a number of the activists in the civil rights movement who were infected with a sort of a hopefulness and a positivity and a sense of purpose.

[00:26:26] And this also was contagious and it drove ultimately a lot of social change. But it could be traced down to a collection of individuals who are able to bring out the best in each other. So yeah, I think that's an understated part of it.

[00:26:45] I maybe should have thought about that more. Well, because then you have other examples like Ralph Ellison walking through Harvard seeing the names of the Harvard students who died in the Civil War.

[00:26:56] It made him realize that even though he still suffered from many of the things that he wrote about in his books, particularly Invisible Man, he was standing on this collective set of shoulders that had actually fought for his rights.

[00:27:12] And that encouraged him that he needed to feel like that collective. Well, there's this idea from Seneca that I think about a lot. He says, look, we can't choose our parents, but we can choose whose children we want to be.

[00:27:26] And I think about that all the time in a less sort of birthright sense, but of like deciding who your ancestors are. So one version of American history is a parade of unmitigated evils and awfulness. Right. We stole this land from the natives.

[00:27:44] We broke every treaty you could possibly imagine. We essentially committed genocide. It was a bunch of rich white slave owners who set up a corrupt capitalistic system. You know, they blah, blah, blah. You could tell this very negative version of American history, which is largely true.

[00:28:05] And then you could also look at American history as a striving to live up to some of these impossible ideals. You could look at all the good that's been done.

[00:28:19] You could decide that your founding fathers are not just the people who signed the Constitution and the Constitutional Convention. But also it could include Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, and it could include the suffragettes and it could include Martin Luther King.

[00:28:41] And you could see it as this unfinished march of people making genuinely striving to make things better and to be better. And so the question is not just which of these narratives you believe, but which one do you feel like you're an heir to?

[00:29:02] And so I was quoting, there's a famous World War I poem that I was quoting when I titled the second part of the book. But it's, to you from failing hands we throw the torch.

[00:29:16] It's this idea that like you take it as far as you can or the generation before you took it as far as you can. And then they're handing you the torch and then you decide to carry it forward.

[00:29:28] And I think you could look at where America is today and you have different factions carrying forward different torches. Some of those are good torches and some of those are bad torches.

[00:29:38] But we as individuals have to decide which ancestors we're going to be descended from and which traditions we're going to carry forward. And you could think there's not to be American. There can be a world history argument as well.

[00:29:52] Did you think in general right has won over wrong generation over generation going back like all the generations? Do you think there's any generation that's worse than the generation before it? I would say that there are definitely— And that's a broad worse. Put it in quotes.

[00:30:09] I mean, there's definitely been moments of severe backsliding for sure. Would you choose to be alive at any other time in history? To me, that sort of answers that question. If you had to roll the dice— The answer is no though because of plumbing.

[00:30:27] Well, look, do you know John Rawls' theory of the veil of ignorance? No. So he's a more modern philosopher. So look, if you knew for certain you were going to be a rich white guy,

[00:30:43] there might be other eras in history that it might have been better to be you. But if you put all the possible fates, all the different levels of society in a hat,

[00:30:57] and then you said you have to pick one, and then you have to pick a time to be that person, you would almost certainly pick now because the bottom is higher now than it's ever been in history. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that's certainly true.

[00:31:18] So the idea is that as a collective, things are indisputably better than they've ever been. But you know, even— It's actually an interesting intellectual challenge in the sense that,

[00:31:30] okay, is there any kind of status you could have where being in a different time might be better than now? And so you pose that maybe rich white guy, it would be better if you were in a different time than now, perhaps because of a variety of things.

[00:31:48] But I'll go back to a question you posed to me. I think it was 2016 or 2017. We were having dinner and I wrote about this question, which is we were talking about jealousy. And you said, you know, you might be jealous of different aspects of someone,

[00:32:02] but is there anybody out there you would actually want to really permanently change places with? And the answer was no. And so I'll pose the same question back to you historically. Is there anyone from the past you would ever—

[00:32:16] and this answers your question about, oh, if you were some status that you could be in an earlier time. Like, I wouldn't want to be a king of France in the 1700s when they had absolute power because—

[00:32:29] No, you'd have been freezing in the winter and sweating your balls off in the summer and you would have probably had syphilis. And yeah, it would have been awful.

[00:32:40] It's funny, there's a Taylor Swift song on the new album where she has a line about arguing about this exact question, about what era you would rather be born in. And she says, I would have rather lived in the 1830s except for without all the racists

[00:32:54] and without women being sold off like property or sold off to the highest bidder. And I think that kind of gets to the core of it, which is that actually, yeah, no,

[00:33:04] there's no other period that you would want to live in where you wouldn't be making some very big caveats, right? Because, yeah, things are better. We can take a couple things from that. One, we can be grateful for what we have.

[00:33:20] But specifically, we should see that people made it this way, right? That things are better now than they were 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, 500 years ago. That's not a natural process. There was a quote famous with the civil rights activists that Martin Luther King popularized.

[00:33:45] He said, the arc of justice is long, but it bends towards truth. And you can hear that quote and think, OK, I don't have to worry about what's happening because the arc of history is long and it bends towards truth. That's bullshit. It is bent towards truth.

[00:34:02] People are pulling on it, right? Things weren't naturally getting better in the 1950s and 1960s, and Martin Luther King Jr. was there to catch it, right? Martin Luther King significantly directed the trajectory of truth. He changed things. Abraham Lincoln was not surfing a wave of anti-slavery sentiment,

[00:34:31] and he happened to be the guy in the White House when the Civil War happened, and then ultimately the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed. Lincoln was the driver of said movement.

[00:34:49] He was probably the only person that could have successfully steered the ship of state in that direction. We're not so fond of the great man of history theory these days, but the truth is history is changed by individuals, groups of individuals also, but individuals.

[00:35:09] Thomas Clarkson is one of those. Thomas Clarkson bent the arc of justice in a direction it was not going to go on its own. Yeah, because I was thinking of this exactly when you wrote that story about Thomas Clarkson

[00:35:22] because you say in there that slavery might not have been abolished in England in the 1830s if not for Thomas Clarkson, and I never really thought about that. I always thought it was a natural just sort of thing that England abolished slavery around then

[00:35:40] because they, like you say in the book, they had less direct contact with it. They didn't see the horrors of it, so also they didn't see other aspects of it, and it was easier for them to distance themselves from the decision, so they abolished it.

[00:35:53] But then this is the first time I'd ever read about Thomas Clarkson, and you did make me think. I never even heard of him. Yeah, I didn't either, but I knew when England had abolished slavery, and so it turns out it wasn't just a natural thing in history.

[00:36:07] It was this guy going above and beyond and creating, like you just mentioned, the modern protest movement which did it, and that was fascinating. I wonder also how nuanced it is. We ask this question all the time. You mentioned Thomas Jefferson in the book.

[00:36:26] You mentioned the good aspects but also the horrible aspects of him, and I think history now tends to punish the horrible aspects more than it congratulates the positive aspects, but I don't know if it should do.

[00:36:42] I don't know what the right thing is or the wrong thing is there, but people change. So doing the right thing is very nuanced depending on time and culture, and I hate to use the word, but context.

[00:36:54] Like LBJ you mentioned, LBJ in many ways was a horrible guy, but he passed all of these, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and all these other things. And so doing the right thing is often very nuanced. You can't just be kind of the philosopher.

[00:37:18] There's very few philosopher kings out there. Well, what I take from LBJ, and there's a bunch I want to touch on. What I take from LBJ is not, hey, you have to be an imperfect asshole monster to get things done.

[00:37:31] What I take from the story of LBJ is what would the world look like if people with good hearts and the right ideas were slightly, not to his level, but just slightly more politically competent? What if they actually understood how the levers of power worked?

[00:37:53] What if they could be a little bit more pragmatic? And what kind of change and improvements are left on the table because people are idealistically pure or unable to horse trade or be strategic? And a lot of times we look at the changes.

[00:38:15] By the same way, same token, we look at the past and we go, things are always getting better, so they're just going to keep getting better. We often look at causes that triumphed and we go,

[00:38:26] they triumphed, they succeeded because they were morally correct, which isn't true at all. They usually succeed because of political acumen and skill and willpower and drive. It's interesting, right? Again, you think, of course, slavery was always going to go away.

[00:38:45] But actually, I mean, there were countries in the Middle East that continued to use some form of slavery up until the middle of the 20th century. And there are some sort of legal forms of slavery that exist even to this day. You think of something like segregation.

[00:39:02] Of course, segregation was going to go away. Well, it went away in America in the 60s, but it lasted in South Africa for another 40 years or 30 years. So just because something is inevitable doesn't mean that sooner is not better.

[00:39:18] And the people that bring it about are not doing a great service. But I think we have to figure out what the right thing is. That's, of course, part one. And then part two is how do we actually bring that into reality?

[00:39:33] You don't just—being right is not sufficient. So I was really fascinated by the example of Harvey Milk, who again I saw, I just simply knew as this, you know, groundbreaking sort of figure in the gay rights movement.

[00:39:50] But I didn't think of him so much as a politician, but that's what he was. I mean, he was famous for being the first openly gay elected city council member in San Francisco. But that is a political position.

[00:40:03] And Harvey Milk got into that by being an effective, intelligent politician. And his first sort of foray into politics was helping Teamsters boycott Coors Beer through his connections with gay bars in San Francisco.

[00:40:22] And he said, look, I'll help you do this if you hire some gay truck drivers. And just the sheer horse trading of that, it doesn't seem sexy, but that's the foundation upon which his political career was built.

[00:40:37] And then he was talented in the sense that the first two times he ran for city council, right, he lost. But like the first time, after the first time he cut his hair, and after the second time he started wearing suits.

[00:40:50] So he started looking like what he wanted to be, and that's how he won. So I view that as talented politically is when you learn how to kind of subtly accommodate large masses of people. Kennedy said famously, like too many parents want their kids to be president

[00:41:09] and no one wants their kid to be a politician. But presidents are politicians. That's how you get there. You don't just sit over here as this perfectly formed ethical figure and then magically find yourself the head of state.

[00:41:25] I mean, the only one time that happened is Marcus Aurelius. You had this philosopher kid who is randomly selected to be king. The reason we don't do it that way is that nine times out of ten, it ends incredibly badly. Life doesn't have a pause button.

[00:41:57] That's why Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you set your own deadlines and adjust them if something comes up. Imagine how a flexible education can make a difference for you at capella.edu. By the way, incidentally, have you ever seen the Kennedy-Nixon debates? Mm-hmm.

[00:42:18] Like on YouTube, I would encourage everybody to after you watch whatever the next presidential debate is in 2024, watch, go on YouTube and watch the Kennedy-Nixon debates from 1960 because it is fascinating the differences. Like they are gentlemen to each other. They are respectful. There's no insulting.

[00:42:38] I don't think there was a single insult. I mean, they disagree with each other, but they didn't insult each other. And they talk for five minutes at a time about obscure issues and agriculture and whatever.

[00:42:50] And it was just fascinating to watch a different style of political debate than now. Well, you know what's even—have you read any of the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Yeah, yeah. They talk—that was like a five-hour debate.

[00:43:03] They each talked for like two hours extemporaneously off prepared—basically some prepared notes. It was so long, people like went home and had dinner and then came back. These were like these intellectual giants lecturing in these cow towns in the American Midwest. We think we're so advanced.

[00:43:26] You realize that, yeah, probably politically we've gone in the opposite direction in some ways in terms of the level of discourse. It's also—I mean, Daniel Boorstin would argue this is—Daniel Boorstin and Neil Postman would both argue that this is all the fault of television

[00:43:41] because politics went from a sort of a venue in which ideas were being discussed in long form or in oratory to, you know, television soundbites. And that's impossible—that favors a very specific kind of messaging, one that is not always in line with truth or moral clarity.

[00:44:08] Well, I think—and this has been measured for a long time, just the amount—so presidential elections are obviously covered a lot by the news media. And you look at each segment and how many seconds are issues discussed.

[00:44:24] And let's say 40 years ago it would be 60 seconds worth of issues would be discussed in a segment. Now it's down to like four or five seconds of issues are discussed, or maybe even smaller. I remember like 10 years ago it was about eight seconds.

[00:44:38] And so you wonder—at some point it's just about branding rather than real discussing of issues. And that concerns me. Well, I mean, you and I are talking. We're going to talk for an hour or whatever. We're getting into some depths.

[00:44:56] And you've actually like read my book, and you and I have known each other for 10 years. There's a bunch that's happening here. I'm supposed to do the Today Show like the day the book comes out. And I'm preparing for a four-minute segment, right?

[00:45:11] Like this is a thing—I've been working on this series for five years. I've been working on this book for two years. I've been researching these ideas for over a decade. I've got to distill it down into four minutes.

[00:45:21] And four minutes is an eternity compared to a 140-character tweet, you know? So you keep drilling down and down and down. Of course we're going to lose the substance on a lot of issues.

[00:45:34] It's just a really hard way to discuss the complicated nature of all of these issues. Yeah, it's almost like for the Today Show—I mean, I used to go on CNBC quite a bit or many business shows. And I still do occasionally.

[00:45:49] And you get like a minute or two to discuss stuff, which means you're only talking out of that minute or two 20 seconds because there's other people in the segment, just like there'll be people interviewing you in your segment.

[00:45:59] And it's almost like you have to distill this to one idea from the book that you want to get out. And you know this. You're more of a media expert than me.

[00:46:10] But you have to think of what is that one idea where people listening to this, they're going to watch the show and then their day is going to change because of what you said? Yeah, but you know what? Not to get too nerdy about this.

[00:46:23] I know I just said something positive about podcasts, which I actually do think are largely a very good medium. I think we're also seeing though in podcasts the way that like two people can bullshit for like three hours and people listen and it sounds like substance.

[00:46:40] And then you realize like one of those people is certifiably insane or just like has zero idea what they're talking about. But because the host or whatever isn't holding them accountable because it's supposed to be this conversation,

[00:46:56] they have the ability to propagate and dress up what is really flimsy or fringe shit. So it's interesting. And I agree with you. Look, there are a lot more podcasts than there are people who are entertaining.

[00:47:14] And ultimately the goal of a podcast is to entertain the listener so they keep listening. And I entertain by talking to Ryan Holiday who wrote all these great books and has a book coming out called Right Thing Right Now.

[00:47:28] But we do that, you're an entertainer also, we do that by telling stories. So we've probably told several stories that people might not have heard of before or are now hearing in a different way or thinking about things in a different way.

[00:47:42] I recognize that my goal is to entertain because I have to give this talk next week at a conference where I've done 1,500 podcasts now. So I've interviewed 1,500 very, very smart, talented, successful people.

[00:47:58] Some of them more than once, like this is like the billionth time we've been on the podcast. And I have to say what I've learned. And the first thing that comes to mind is don't eat processed sugar. Like that is a bad thing.

[00:48:13] I know that for sure now after 1,500 episodes of this podcast. But there's not that many other things I really know. I mean, okay, yes, be grateful. And I've learned some very specific things. Get up early. I don't know about that.

[00:48:30] You know, eight hours, seven hours, six hours, nine hours of sleep, unclear. 2,000 steps, unclear. How much exercise per week and should it be high intensity? Should it be cardio? Should it be weights? Unclear. So Mediterranean diet versus keto, unclear.

[00:48:46] I was just thinking because I could pick this one because it's not a political example. People tend to see things differently through different lenses. I was watching some clips of Terrence Howard on Rogan. And you're like, this man is not well. Like this person is straight nuts.

[00:49:04] But, you know, over two and a half hours if you have a modicum of charisma, which he does as an actor, there are some people that are listening to that and going, this man is a genius. And he's not a genius. He is whacked out.

[00:49:19] Like I having met people, he is in the middle of some kind of manic episode or, you know, not wellness. And it's just fascinating. There are no perfect mediums, I guess is what I'm saying. We can shit on television for being, you know, too brief or cinematic.

[00:49:38] You know, we can tweet on so we can shit on social media for being this, that or the other. The reality is we're in a constant battle against nonsense and trivia in every medium that's ever existed.

[00:49:50] And I think this is actually one of the weird breakthroughs of the 20th and the 21st century. You know, you read Orwell or Huxley. There was this fear of censorship being the problem, right? That authoritarian governments, Fahrenheit 451 is about this too, you know,

[00:50:09] that authoritarian governments would constrain the supply of information to keep the population doing X, Y or Z. And then you realize actually, and you look at authoritarian regimes across the world, Russia, etc., that actually it's too much information that is the way that we control people.

[00:50:28] It's through flooding the zone with shit that we can make people apathetic or confused. And so, I don't know, this is getting far afield from the topics of the book, but I think it's interesting. No, I think it is very interesting.

[00:50:41] And don't worry, I'm going to bring it back. But it's not only too much information. That just went up exponentially with like deep fakes are no longer a conspiratorial thing.

[00:50:51] Like maybe approximately half the videos now I see of Biden are Biden and his voice and his mouth saying things that he'd never actually said. This is true for Trump. This is true for Taylor Swift.

[00:51:04] There's a whole account of LeBron James like hanging out with Hitler, deciding how to like fight the Russian front. And it's in LeBron James' voice. So, it becomes to this point where you actually are being told, look, you just can't trust anything. It's all entertainment.

[00:51:21] You can't listen or trust anything. And I don't know where that ends up, but this gets back to your point of, you know, this is all about messaging. And, you know, all of these media are forms of disseminating information, but also forms of entertainment.

[00:51:39] So, let's say a talented, hopefully talented entertainer wants to get people to understand what it is to do the right thing. Okay. That person could write a book, like you're a talented writer and you're an entertaining writer. So, you write a book about it.

[00:51:55] You don't just cite academic studies. Well, if you do the right thing, your oxytocin levels go up and that's why you should do it. And I then get the opportunity to interview you. Hopefully, I do a good job and an entertaining job.

[00:52:10] And I think that's how things get done, is the combination of some insight and knowledge that fills a hole in our societal knowledge and some way of disseminating it that travels over this bridge of storytelling and entertainment.

[00:52:26] So, you've got to be talented at both, is accumulating and curating inside yourself knowledge, but also being entertaining. I hate to say it that way, but that's the word. No, no, you're right. And this is what Clarkson did so well, right? Clarkson works with these great artists.

[00:52:41] He drew the picture of them crowded in, like how, I didn't know that, how they were packed into the slave ships, like basically just lying side by side with nothing, like only inches above them and they can't move the whole trip.

[00:52:56] Well, and it's funny, I remember seeing that picture when I was in school and we were learning about slavery. So, here this guy 200 years later is still informing people about this moral issue because he didn't just go, hey, we all know slavery is wrong.

[00:53:12] He basically starts from a premise which originates from Socrates that most people are not wrong on purpose, right? Most people are not doing wrong on purpose. They don't know, like they actually don't know. Their opinion is based on either bad information or no information.

[00:53:30] And so he realizes that slavery is already illegal inside England. So, all the slavery is happening thousands of miles away to people who don't look like you.

[00:53:43] So, if I'm a blacksmith in England in 1790, what do I give a shit about a slave in a sugar plantation in Barbados? I can't even conceive of who that person is, why I should care about them, let alone understand what's being done to them.

[00:54:02] And so Clarkson tackles it on both ends, humanizing a slave. There's a famous image of a slave with a banner over him and it says, am I not a man or a brother?

[00:54:12] And he's basically getting people to see these people that look very different as fundamentally as human beings. And then on the other hand, as you said, he really diagrams like what the slave trade looks like. And he shows how inhuman and cruel the slave ships were.

[00:54:34] And I thought this was really interesting and smart. He also points out how many sailors die on slave ships. So, he's not just saying, hey, this is wrong because all these slaves are dying. A lot of people don't care about that.

[00:54:50] He's saying, hey, did you guys know like 20 to 30% of the crew dies on every slave journey? That's bad for your sons. He's making a self-interested argument. He's deterring people from participating in the slave trade.

[00:55:06] And so he was really an effective communicator and that was such a huge part of it. Now, it also brings to mind for me though that in this book you tell very big stories.

[00:55:19] Not big in length but big in terms of impact stories about doing the right thing right now. But on a daily basis, and you refer to this, but the stories are always big because they have to kind of match what we know from history.

[00:55:34] On a daily basis, there's thousands of micro moments where we have to do the right thing. And Louis C.K. has this great joke where he says, nobody wants to do anything less than their favorite thing at any point.

[00:55:50] So, if you're all the way in the right lane and there's four lanes but you need to make a left, you forgot to get left earlier.

[00:55:58] You will stop all traffic and squeeze your way through and block all the lanes in order for you to make a left turn rather than just going one block further and gradually getting over to the left and making a turn. Because it's not your favorite thing.

[00:56:13] And so that's just the general, his point was that's just the general tendency of people is they'd rather do their favorite thing than the right thing. Because there's only subtle differences between your favorite thing.

[00:56:24] Like that person, yes, he disturbed people because he didn't wait one more block to make a left. But it didn't matter that much. It just bothered people for a few seconds.

[00:56:34] And so really kind of, it's almost like a muscle you have to exercise where how can I do, how can I make sure I really am doing good things when I didn't even think about it and why should I do it?

[00:56:48] Yeah, I heard a powerful question once that I think a lot about which is like, what would the world look like if everyone did what I'm about to do? Right. So, the golden rule is obviously important.

[00:57:01] But a lot of times we don't think about the golden rule because it just doesn't exactly apply. I was thinking of, I was reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk. And he was like, he told this sort of offhanded story about, you know,

[00:57:19] Elon Musk flying his private jet to New York to pick up his dog. Like he sent an empty plane to New York to then fly down to him with his dog in it. Just like typical sort of rich person, very rich person things.

[00:57:33] And to me, that's a good example of what the kinds of things humans do when they don't think about, hey, what would the world look like if everyone could or would do this? Right.

[00:57:45] And so how do we just take the time to go, okay, this is obviously easier for me. But if everyone did what was easier for them all the time, the world would either be uninhabitable or things would grind to a horrendous halt.

[00:58:00] And so, look, I'm not perfect at it by any means. But I do try to think about that. And I try to catch myself when I'm about to do something that's very easy for me but hard for other people.

[00:58:12] One of my favorite stories, I don't even know if it's in the book. I told this story about Antoninus who is Marcus Aurelius' stepfather. That the reason Hadrian chooses him to be Marcus' sort of regent is that he sees him,

[00:58:27] when Antoninus doesn't think that anyone's looking, helping like an elderly man up a flight of stairs. He's just helping himself. So I love that story. I told that story in the book. But there's another story about Antoninus when Antoninus was the emperor.

[00:58:39] He's the most powerful man in the world. And he was one of the only Roman emperors who didn't travel extensively throughout the provinces of the empire. And he was asked why he didn't do this.

[00:58:53] And he said he didn't do it because he knew what an incredible inconvenience it was to host the emperor. Like how many people had to travel with him, how many cows had to be slaughtered to feed all those people, how expensive it was to shower him with gifts.

[00:59:10] He didn't want to be this huge inconvenience for everyone. And I was thinking about that pretty much every president, Republican and Democrat, especially the modern ones. Like they fly home for the weekend or they golf 150 times in four years.

[00:59:30] They do all this stuff which sure it doesn't seem like a big deal. But they don't seem to consider like how many school recitals the Secret Service has to miss as a result of that. How much money that costs the country they live.

[00:59:45] Do you just think about how hard it is for the president to go somewhere? And then the flippancy with which the president will be like, you know what I was thinking about sleeping in this place tonight instead of this place even though it's basically exactly the same.

[01:00:00] Because that would be better for me. It's just extremely inconvenient for everyone else. Yeah, so the idea is in a situation I'm going to make a decision to do something. What would it be like if the rest of the world does what I do?

[01:00:17] Or what would it be like if I take this to an extreme? Like if I'm the president and I travel every day to everything I want, it would just ruin the lives of like the thousands of people who work for me.

[01:00:26] They'll never see their kids again and so on. And it's so unnecessary. What are the costs of my decisions on people other than me? And being conscientious of that. And I would say, by the way, there is a benefit to thinking in this way.

[01:00:41] And it's like the Frederick Douglass Sojourner truth thing is that when you start thinking this way, you start naturally hanging around with other people who think this way, I think.

[01:00:54] If I am just trying my best to do my best, okay, first off, it's going to affect the people around me. Like my kids, my friends, my spouse, and so on. So suddenly they become the people I hang out with and they're becoming more like me,

[01:01:10] just like I'm becoming more like them. And so there are benefits in that you kind of elevate your sort of well-being of the people around you, which in turn, the community around you, which in turn elevates your well-being. Well, it's also not healthy, right?

[01:01:29] Like it's not healthy to travel around and be fetted as this super important visiting dignitary all the time. It's not good for your psyche, you know? When you sort of go, hey, do I actually need to do this? And then the answer is no.

[01:01:45] And then you realize that, oh, I'm actually a little bit more self-sufficient than I thought. My needs are less than I thought. The decision to be conscientious and to think about how our behavior affects other people, it's actually empowering and clarifying for us also.

[01:02:01] It's not like you're not just becoming this martyr who's just not doing things for the benefit of other people. You're also learning like how unnecessary a good chunk of most of this stuff is. And it's also a good metric for decision-making.

[01:02:15] Like you could say, okay, well, I could do the money thing right now. I could do the right thing right now. I could do the bad thing right now. I could do the most indulgent thing right now. Which one will I do?

[01:02:27] And doing the money thing right now maybe leads to some degree of success and fulfillment in your 20s, 30s, maybe later. But we always know that always doing the money thing and only that and using that as your metric is not going to lead to happiness.

[01:02:46] And you could go just category by category, which one is most likely to lead to some sort of personal happiness. It's probably doing the right thing. By the way, in the case of Hadrian, doing the right thing in front of him led to being emperor.

[01:03:01] So it is a path to success as well. As opposed to tripping my father-in-law down the stairs, helping him instead, made that guy emperor or regent.

[01:03:14] But it leads me to a final question, which is I think after going back and forth on this issue for decades, I think I'm actually a poor judge of character.

[01:03:27] When I meet somebody, if they seem nice to me, I'm just going to think, oh, this is a great person. I'm going to trust him on what he's saying. And then I find out later, oh my God, this guy is a total criminal.

[01:03:41] And I make this mistake a lot. Me too. And by the way, Marcus Aurelius does too. His children were awful emperors. So how can I not be sort of optimistically stupid and still do the right thing? Yeah, you know, there's that biblical idea of being wise as serpents.

[01:04:06] There is sometimes a naivete in people who want to see the good or are themselves good. They can be taken advantage of. They can assume that other people are operating by the same principles or the same values. And that's like just not the case at all.

[01:04:26] I do think cynicism isn't the right response either. But there does kind of need to be some awareness and some understanding that, you know, there are things that go bump in the night. There are bad people out there. You do want to forgive.

[01:04:45] You do want to offer people grace. You do want to see the best in people. At the same time, we were talking about Harvey Milk.

[01:04:51] I mean, he's ultimately murdered by one of his colleagues that he tried over and over and over again to see the best in and work with. I think at the end, he probably wouldn't have had it any other way.

[01:05:06] He saw that sort of hope being essential, being what made life worth living. But I'm like you. I have assumed the best in a lot of people. I've also been gullible at times.

[01:05:20] Like I found this just in the number of controversial clients that I've worked with over the years.

[01:05:25] For a startlingly long period of time, you could say a self-interestedly long period of time, I guess, I really did believe they were all sort of being mistreated, that they were just misunderstood or that they had gotten a bad rap, you know, that the coverage of them was always unfair.

[01:05:49] And then I kind of became like the defense attorney that after a long enough time realizes like, hey, probably not all my clients are innocent. You know, like they can't all have been framed by the police.

[01:06:05] And I think for me, there was things that I didn't want to see. And then also there were reasons that I wasn't seeing it like that Upton Sinclair line about how it's hard to see what your salary depends on you not understanding.

[01:06:23] And I think sometimes we can not see things because if we see them, it means we'll have to do something to go back to where we started.

[01:06:33] If we can dismiss it as either not real or somebody else's fault or whatever, then we can just keep operating as we've always operated and we won't have to get our hands dirty.

[01:06:48] Yeah, or quit your job, for instance, that your family depends on, you know, in terms of Upton Sinclair's quote. Yeah, exactly. So right thing right now, what's the next book? So Courage, Discipline, Justice. The last one is Wisdom. That's what I'm writing about now. That's a hard one.

[01:07:12] It's the hardest one. I knew it was going to be the hardest one and that's the one I'm on now. Because I always get back to what I'll call the Thomas Jefferson paradox. Clearly, however you define wisdom, Thomas Jefferson had wisdom. But he also had these deep flaws.

[01:07:30] And it's not just smart, right? It's not just IQ. He understood how to organize an entire government in this framework that still exists hundreds of years later. And by the way, every other modern country is modeled after that as well.

[01:07:47] So there's some wisdom there, but he had also these incredibly deep flaws that are in modern society as unforgivable. Maybe then as unforgivable. Forgiveness is a weird issue. No, he was a staggering genius.

[01:08:01] And at the same time, you know, he didn't like getting his own cup of coffee in the morning. And he liked to be able to have sex whenever he wanted. Right, have children with the woman who got him this cup of coffee.

[01:08:17] Yeah, and so that's what's so powerful about that Upton Sinclair quote, right? It's very hard to get someone to understand something their salary depends on them not understanding. And there's actually a fascinating passage that Jefferson wrote where he goes,

[01:08:33] you know, I'm such a big fan of Epictetus and Terence and Publius, these Roman and Greek slaves who were great philosophers. And he's like, obviously it was wrong to enslave them. So how can we be enslaving people here in America?

[01:08:52] What if there's a black Epictetus, he was saying, you know? So you see him wrestling. It's like it's almost there. He's almost able to do it. And then he goes, no, no, no, black people are different biologically.

[01:09:07] That's why. It's okay because they're an animal and I'm a human, right? So he comes face to face with this truth that challenges the foundation of his comfort and his privilege and his wealth.

[01:09:25] And he has to look away because to accept it would mean how am I going to pay for this house? And he can't do it. And look, that's obviously morally inexcusable.

[01:09:38] But I don't know where this jacket was made, you know, and I'm not thinking about where this jacket is made because then I'd probably have to stop wearing it and go buy a different jacket. Right. So there are... You know where your phone is made, though.

[01:09:53] I know where my iPhone is made. Yes. But I still have an iPhone. What should I do? What's the right thing? When we look at the ancients or the not so ancients, the exercise should not be moral condemnation and then letting ourselves off the hook.

[01:10:14] It has to be to think about how we can make better decisions in the present. Well, right thing right now. Again, great book, great storytelling, great examples of... It made me think of a lot of things and always with your stories I learn something new.

[01:10:36] Like some of these stories you've... I mean, you've written stories about, you know, Haim and Rick over before, but I always learn new things. There's new things in this book than in other books. There's new things about LBJ and there's many new stories and characters.

[01:10:51] You know, one thing that I'm curious about, something for you to maybe... Maybe it's related to wisdom, but changing your mind. You know, a lot of times, like take an LBJ. At some point he changed his mind about civil rights.

[01:11:08] I mean, he came out of the deep South and Texas and the voters he had to appeal to didn't want civil rights. And then at some point he changed his mind or, you know, someone like Abraham Lincoln changed his mind over time

[01:11:24] and understood a little bit more of the complexities of slavery and how to deal with it. And Malcolm X is a good example. You talked about Martin Luther King, but Malcolm X ultimately came over to Martin Luther King's idea of things

[01:11:38] in terms of violence and peace as a use for making change. And Malcolm X changed his mind. You could argue he was wrong before and right later, but really it's the wisdom that kind of connects those two pieces.

[01:11:53] No, I'm way ahead of you and we are on the same page because I have a chapter in the Wisdom book about changing your mind. And I talk about Malcolm X because it wasn't just that Malcolm X changes from one strategy to another.

[01:12:06] Malcolm X has to basically realize that he was in a cult and break away from that cult and embrace an entirely new way of thinking. You know, we're afraid to change our mind. He knew that he would probably be killed for changing his mind

[01:12:22] or was having to at least turn away from all of his supporters and his income and his community. And he had the sort of courage to do that as well as the brains to do that. Yeah, I'm fascinated by people who change their mind.

[01:12:41] I think it's an underrated skill. And by the way, with the risk of negative benefit, like you say, he was killed. Now sometimes changing your mind could make a great advance in technology and innovation and business.

[01:12:54] But sometimes changing your mind, you know, could go fully against that Upton Sinclair quote, like in the Malcolm X case. Not only does he lose his job, he loses his life. Yes. And so that's an interesting thing. So look, I wish you luck on Wisdom.

[01:13:09] Right Thing Right Now is a must read. I hope everyone goes out and buys it the way I buy everything. I literally, Ryan, I just sit around waiting for your next books to come out. And I'm not even kidding.

[01:13:20] You could ask Jay, like when's Ryan coming out with another book? I want it back on the podcast. So, oh man. And I always love reading them.

[01:13:29] And I learned not only about the stories, but I always study your writing technique as I know you do with other writers. And thanks once again for coming on the podcast. Ah, thanks for having me.

[01:13:41] I feel like it's been forever since I saw you, and hopefully we can link up one of these days.