Olivia Nuzzi Knows She Messed Up

Summary

The Daily Stoic – "Olivia Nuzzi Knows She Messed Up"

Host: Ryan Holiday
Guest: Olivia Nuzzi, journalist and author
Date: December 13, 2025

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Overview

In this deeply introspective episode, Ryan Holiday sits down with renowned journalist Olivia Nuzzi to discuss the personal and professional fallout from her recent public scandal—a high-profile affair with RFK Jr. that cost her her career and reputation. Their conversation weaves together the themes of personal accountability, public shaming, and the Stoic virtues of honor, self-examination, and resilience. Rather than delve into gossip or nitty-gritty details, Ryan and Olivia examine how one’s values can falter in moments of passion, what it means to process guilt and shame, and how to move forward ethically after a very public mistake. They also reflect on the warping of American reality during the Trump era, the responsibilities of journalism, and the isolation and lessons that come from self-imposed exile.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mistakes, Self-Reflection, and Growth

• Recognizing the Path to Error:
  Both Ryan and Olivia reflect on how major mistakes are often the result of a gradual accumulation of unnoticed minor lapses in judgment and suspended critical faculties.
  • Quote:
    “You don't just wake up one morning and make a huge mistake... it's necessarily many minor or imperceptible mistakes that lead to just a misaligned worldview, or just a misshapen path." – Olivia Nuzzi [18:53]
• Gradual Realization and Gratitude for Disruption:
  Olivia describes the "hand of God" feeling of being forcefully knocked off a self-destructive path—painful, but ultimately something to be grateful for.
  • “It was abrupt and unpleasant...not a smooth landing. But I was grateful for it now because...all of that seemed to accumulate into circumstances or conditions that made an enormous mistake possible.” – ON [18:53]

2. Professional Reward and the Risk of Hubris

• Success Without Guardrails:
  The discussion covers how early and outsized professional success can lead to an inflated sense of one’s own judgment, weakening internal checks regarding right and wrong.
  • “I didn't have to police my own judgments...being rewarded for that over and over again...created a feedback loop.” – ON [22:01]
• Danger of Rule-Bending Environments:
  Working in circles where rule-bending (or breaking) is normalizes lawlessness not just as an individual quirk but the animating spirit of a whole system.
  • “Trump’s lawlessness animates the whole spirit of the place." – ON [23:43]

3. Public Shame, Honor, and Accountability

• The Stoic Ideal of Honor Amid Scandal:
  Both guest and host reject the modern “hack” of escaping scandal with shamelessness; Olivia intentionally chooses to “get through a dishonorable thing honorably.”
  • “My first order was to have dignity amid my big indignity...honor amid my dishonor, or handle my ethics scandal ethically.” – ON [29:47]
• Difference Between Shame, Guilt, and Embarrassment:
  Olivia distinguishes between shame (an interior compass), embarrassment (ego, public perception), and guilt (legal/moral fault).
  • Quote:
    “Shame to me is an interior experience, embarrassment more about an exterior experience... If you have done something shameful, you should feel shame.” – ON [52:00]
• Societal Reckoning and Accountability:
  Ryan and Olivia discuss how the mechanisms for public accountability (journalism, shame, reputation) have withered, and what impact shamelessness in public life has on society at large.
  • “There’s a playbook now...if you just—throw out any sense of personal accountability, you can kind of survive.” – RH [38:14]

4. Personal Ethics—and Limiting Collateral Damage

• Moral Lines When Writing About Scandal:
  Olivia explains her decision to "spare" others and not name names or tell all, establishing self-imposed principles even as people around her encouraged her to write a redemptive, exculpatory tell-all.
  • “I shared what felt like it was mine to tell… There’s no public purpose for [writing about others].” – ON [72:25]
  • “I could never use anyone as a human shield. I could never spare myself and harm someone else.” – ON [29:47]
• Learning from Compartmentalization:
  Both reflect on how cognitive dissonance and professional compartmentalization enables personal rationalizations and moral drift.
  • “I had my beliefs, I had my values...and then I had my day-to-day work behavior, and those two things were not integrated.” – RH [61:07]

5. Support Systems and Public Shaming

• Who Shows Up When Life Blows Up:
  Olivia describes how very few friends deserted her, feeling grateful for those who stayed. She also notes that, like grief, some people's absence is more about their own limitations and fears than about judgment.
  • “I was shocked by the question...that it didn’t even occur to me that people...that there might be any doubt.” – ON [100:15]
• Learning Empathy Through Suffering:
  The “blast radius” of her public shame, Olivia suggests, is a "new capacity for empathy," potentially making her a better chronicler of humans.
  • “If I didn’t waste the opportunity of the public shaming...the size of the blast radius would be my new capacity for empathy..." – ON [79:30]

6. Media, Narrative, and the Breakdown of Consensus Reality

• The Dangers of Narrative Control:
  Olivia and Ryan lament how media narratives—often unmoored from fact or consistency—become “unwinnable” games for those at their center; the best one can do is hold inner standards, recognizing that “what’s fake is ephemeral.”
  • “If you don’t play, you can’t lose. You can’t win either, but you really can’t lose actually… any what’s fake is ephemeral.” – ON [40:07]
• Consensus Reality Fractured:
  In the "anything is possible" era, public meaning and shared standards dissolve, leaving both the public and the press unmoored.
  • “Anything could be believed because anything was possible—and there were no boundaries… because there are no standards, because there’s no consensus.” – ON [98:10]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Overconfidence Breeds Blindness:
  “I was so used to being right… I think it contributed to this incorrect view that I didn’t have to police my own judgments.” – Olivia Nuzzi [22:01]
• On Learning from Collapse:
  “I'm grateful for it now because... if that hadn't have happened... there are many minor or imperceptible mistakes that lead to a misaligned worldview.” – ON [18:53]
• On Modern Scandal and Shamelessness:
  “People have figured out that if you dispense with honor or shame, it's actually a hack for getting out of scandals and triumphing over them.” – RH [33:31]
• On Carrying Shame for Doing Wrong:
  “I cared. I did something wrong and I knew better and I didn't do better.” – ON [34:59]
• On Resilience and Moving Forward:
  “I’m more curious about what's happening than I am devastated by it… my new capacity for empathy." – ON [78:37]
• On Friendship in Crisis:
  “Someone asked me recently, ‘Did you lose a lot of friends during—?’ I was shocked by the question. My great fortune that it didn't even occur to me.” – ON [100:15]
• On Compartmentalization & Self-deception:
  “I had my beliefs, I had my values… and then I had my day to day work behavior, and those two things were not integrated.” – RH [61:07]

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Notable Timestamps for Key Themes

• [18:53] – Olivia reflects on the cumulative nature of error and her feelings of gratitude for disruption.
• [22:01] – On professional hubris and suspending critical faculties.
• [29:47] – Discussing rules for surviving scandal—honor amid indignity, not harming others in the process.
• [34:59] – Olivia on personally caring about her error, not minimizing its importance.
• [52:00] – The nuanced line between shame and embarrassment (interior vs. exterior perspectives).
• [72:25] – Explaining why she chose not to write a tell-all or expose others.
• [79:30] – Turning suffering into increased empathy and wisdom.
• [98:10] – On the breakdown of consensus reality and the media’s role in the age of “anything is possible.”
• [100:15] – On friendship and support systems during public scandal.

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Tone and Atmosphere

• Reflective, Self-aware, Honest:
  Both Holiday and Nuzzi foster a mood of honest reckoning—personal failings are neither dramatized nor excused.
• Stoic Influence:
  The conversation repeatedly returns to Stoic concepts—virtue, accountability, the necessity of critical self-examination, acceptance of suffering, and striving for honor amid public contempt.
• Philosophical, With Dark Humor:
  They incorporate literary and philosophical references (The Great Gatsby, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus), sometimes with wry humor about the absurdity of public life and scandal.

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a rare look at the inner life of a talented journalist grappling openly with her own fallibility, the corrosive effects of shame and scandal, and the quest to do right by herself and others while acknowledging real harm. In a culture increasingly resistant to accountability, Olivia’s embrace of shame, rigorous self-examination, and refusal to burn others for her own redemption stands out. The episode also serves as a meditation on the modern media landscape, the vanishing power of shame, and what it means to survive not just professional but personal upheaval with one’s integrity (mostly) intact.

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For further reading:

• American Kanto by Olivia Nuzzi
• Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday
• Stoic classics: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, works by Epictetus and Seneca

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Note: Timestamps are approximate and may vary slightly by player or edit version.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[C]

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[D]

The biggest political media scandal of our time, since everybody's talking about it.

[C]

Journalist Olivia Nuzzi had to resign from her job at New York magazine because it was revealed that she was having an affair with RFK Jr. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I know a thing or two about falling under the sway of people that you look back and you go, what? That's insane. What was I thinking? I look back on my early 20s and I'm proud of some of it and I'm not proud of other parts of it. I talk about some of it. I don't talk about some of it. You know about some of it. Maybe you don't know about some of it. I wrote about a bunch of it and trust me, I'm lost. Which came out back in 2012 as sort of an expose and a tell all slash memoir about my pride through the media and marketing and PR system in the sort of mid aughts web 2.0 bloggy world. It was crazy. I screwed up. I look back and I go, what? What was I doing working for some of these people? What was driving me? I mean, in retrospect, this stuff becomes clear, right? I was clearly imprinting on some of these figures like that were powerful and successful and controversial and they seemed confident, they seemed smart. They had like an energy that I went to like a moth to the flame. Dub Charney being one, a guy who was brilliant and provocative and creative and a genius in many ways, and then tragic and flawed and dark and ultimately quite a scary figure in other ways. I remember towards the end, you know, when he was fired by the board of directors and there were these investigations, I remember, you know, my life was threatened. I remember checking my car for bugs. It was a crazy period. I would just go, how did I get here, what happened? What was I thinking? And, you know, it's not just like it was inexplicable, like, it had consequences for people. I, I, I did things that I shouldn't have done. I talk about this in Courageous Calling, actually, like, where I got asked to do this thing that was not just illegal, but, like, morally repugnant. And I didn't do it. But I, I didn't exactly resign in protest. And I, I didn't because I was, I was scared. I didn't because I didn't want to lose my salary. I didn't want to get fired. Like, in retrospect, it's obvious. Like, why would you want to keep a job that not doing something illegal could get you fired from? But when you're twisted up in it, when you're in the moment, when you have made compromises along the way, when you've turned your eyes away from things along the way, when you've said things publicly, you get twisted up, you get upside down, you get in over your head. So do I regret that period of my life? I mean, yeah. I also obviously understand that it was formative. It shaped me. I wouldn't be here if that hadn't happened. So I guess I'm just saying it's complicated and something I'm still dealing with in processing my own role in it. What I did, what was done to me, what I should have done differently, what I learned, what I took out of it, which is basically all that you can do in life. And we all have our own versions of that. It's not an excuse, it's an explanation. And I say all this to segue to today's guest, who I've known for a while. I appeared in one of her stories once because someone she was writing about had read, trust me, I'm lying. And, you know, we've gone back and forth every once in a while. I'm a big fan of her writing, and you've probably read some of her pieces, too. I mean, her pieces drove the news cycle many instances over the last decade or so. When Donald Trump first met Olivia Nuzi, as she writes in her new book, American Canto, she says Trump looked me up and down and said, very young, very beautiful. And then the same person, when she wrote a piece that he didn't like, tweeted that the reporter was a shaky and unattractive whack job known as tough but dumb as a rock, who actually wrote a decent story about me a long time ago. Her name is Olivia Newsi I guess what I'm saying, if you have no idea who this person is, is that she's been on a wild ride here in the Daily Stoic podcast. We don't usually talk about the events of the news. We don't break news, we don't talk about scandal or gossip. We talk about ancient philosophy, we talk about timeless lessons. We talk about being a person in the world. If you know anything about Olivia's story, you know, well, she got herself into some trouble. In fact, she was supposed to record this like a week ago, but she was in the middle of parting ways with Vanity Fair, the second sort of shoe to drop in a series of shoes to drop in the last year or so. She talks about all of this in her book American Kanto, which I will read the first sentence in the back cover. It says, a mesmerizing firsthand account of the warping of American reality over the past decade as Donald Trump has risen to dominance from a participatory witness who got so far inside the distortion field that it swallowed her whole. Olivia Newsy spent a third of her life observing those in power. She became a reporter in 2014 when the political landscape began to reconfigure itself around a singular personality whom she was uniquely primed to understand. Over the next 10 years, she used her access and eye for detail to chronicle his campaigns, trials and government. And blockbuster feature stories that drove the national conversation propelled her to the heights of her profession. Then in 2024, her personal life collided with the public interest in a scandal that cost Newsy her job and reputation. Amid a full blown tabloid frenzy, Newsy went quiet, drove west and spent the next year in self imposed exile at the edge of the country where she wrote this searing and astonishingly clear eyed account of what she and we have experienced over the last decade. I will say this book is actually very good. I thought the reviews did it a complete disservice. I don't know what exactly is motivating some of those reviewers and writers. I don't know what exactly people wanted, but I thought as a piece of writing, I say this as a person who has written books, written a book about media and their own role in it, and as a person who owns a bookstore and loves this genre of writing. I think it's actually a fantastic book. I think it's worth reading like so many of her articles are worth reading. I'll give you a couple famous ones. I examined Donald Trump's ear and his soul at Mar a Lago, the conspiracy of silence to Protect Joe Biden and then the one that ultimately led to the events that we will be speaking about directly and indirectly in today's interview, the mind bending politics of RFK Jr. S spoiler campaign. So look, if you know about this story or don't know about this story, let me tell you sort of what to expect in this interview. I'm not holding her feet to the fire. I am not interrogating her. I'm not that interested in the specifics and the gossip or the did this happen and what about this and why didn't you do this? I am just interested in what it is like to be a person on one side of something like this. What happens when what the Stokes would call the passions overwhelm your faculties, your values, your decision making process and you get yourself into real trouble? What happens when, again, another ancient term, you unleash the furies of the public's sense of injustice upon yourself? Right? What does it feel like to be publicly shamed? What does it feel like to lose your perch at the top of your profession, both deservedly and undeservedly for things you did do and things you didn't do? We talk about the difference between guilt and shame. We talk about who leans in and who leans out in situations like this. How you learn to trust yourself when you have a pattern of behavior or thinking that does not serve you well, that gets you into trouble. I don't know how much more I need to introduce this. I think it's a great interview. I think the book is great. As I said, she signed a bunch of copies. We have them at the Painted Porch. You can go back and read some of her writing. She's worth following on social media, on Instagram, she's livianuzi. X. Paradoxically, Twitter, she's Livianuzi. And thank you to Olivia for coming out. She didn't have to do this interview. She didn't have to reschedule this interview when her life blew up like a second or third time. But she came out to Austin to do it. Then we walked around the Painted Porch, the video of that bookstore walkthrough posted up on YouTube here. Probably tomorrow, maybe. I'm glad this happened. Seems like she's doing better than I would have expected. So that's good to hear. For people who are following very closely, who are angry or worked up about it, I would say I get it. Like I'm pretty, as I say in the interview, pretty understanding of people who get themselves into situations like this because I've I'VE been there at least a little bit myself. But also, like, there is no one who is less of a big fan of the. The other person involved in this than. Than me. I mean, I think he's one of the chief villains of our time. I think he has done unimaginable harm. I shudder for young children, not just here in America, but in the developed world. The sort of just profoundly wrong and dangerous and deranged things he has done to not just like the medical system, but the public good that is public health and the public good that is our information about public health. So I am not a fan. In fact, I will say just a little inside baseball. Back In February of 2024, somebody asked me if I wanted to come to this, like, dinner he was at with a bunch of other podcasters. Maybe he'd come on the show. And I said, thanks for the note. Hope you're doing well. I could not in good conscience attend, let alone donate money in support of someone who has spread so much utterly untrue and dangerous nonsense for so long. I wish Mr. Kennedy nothing but failure and shame because at this point, obscurity is too much to hope for. So if I can separate my feelings about that to the human being that was involved in all this and have this conversation, I think you should be able to do that as well. And I feel like I learned a lot. I enjoyed the book, and as always, I will keep reading what Olivia is writing because she is a great writer and I hope she keeps doing it. And she signed a bunch of copies of American Canto, which we have at the Painted Porch. I will link to that in today's show notes. Or you can swing by the store on historic Main street here in Bastrop, Texas, to grab it. I grabbed mine at the Seattle airport, flying back from my talk there. I guess this was Thursday. She was gonna do it on Friday, had to cancel last minute. We moved it to Saturday, and then this stuff with Vanity Fair happened, so we canceled it. I wasn't honestly totally sure if it was gonna get rescheduled, but I was pleasantly surprised when she popped up at the Painted Porch here on following Thursday. So that would be, I guess, two days from now. If you're listening to this on Saturday when it comes out again, grab signed copies of American from the Painted Porch or wherever you get the book. She read the audiobook, which I'm sure is a great listen. And let's just get into it, okay? I have a book for you. I thought. I thought about it as I was Reading the book. I'm going to walk you through the bookstore and pick out some. This is actually my copy. But I wondered, have you read by Grand Central Station? I sat down and wept.

[D]

No, I haven't.

[C]

Do you know about this book?

[D]

No.

[C]

Okay. So I was thinking of books that might be interesting.

[D]

Elizabeth Smart. Elizabeth Smart.

[C]

No, no, not that Elizabeth Smart. Okay. This is a woman, she's in the 40s. She falls in love with this poet.

[D]

Uh huh.

[C]

And did it end well? Well, she falls in love with this poet. And love is an understatement for this. She falls in love with this married poet. They have four kids.

[D]

All right.

[C]

Her family disowns her.

[D]

Okay.

[C]

She is, I think deported at one point for like moral turpitude. He continues. The other family, she's, she's a, she's a famous.

[D]

What made you think of me?

[C]

She's a famous copywriter. She's like, you know, this would be like if Peggy fell in love with Don Draper.

[D]

Okay.

[C]

This really happened. And then she wrote this kind fever dream of a novel about it where she. Yeah. She doesn't mention the person's name. She doesn't mention the specifics of it. But it's this beautiful novel about a torrid life ruining love affair. I can't relate to that.

[D]

I can't relate to that.

[C]

I'm sure you can't relate to at all.

[D]

I can't relate to that.

[C]

Her parents have the book banned in Canada where she's from. It just like at one point, I mean, she's so infatuated with this person. She, he's in London, she's in America. World War II is happening and she crosses the Atlantic to go be with him even though she's risking being killed by a German U boat.

[D]

I like that. She was deported.

[C]

Yes. She's either deported or it's like a violation of the man act, like you can't travel. It's just craziness across the board.

[D]

Well, I look forward to reading about this foreign experience.

[C]

Thank you. But it's a beautifully written book. It's like the source material is torrid and life rich, but the art that comes out of it is beautiful but also remains totally mystifying. The reason I thought of you and then the reason I was gonna ask you about it is like she's writing what happened. But I'm wondering as she's writing what happened, does it make any sense to her?

[D]

Right.

[C]

Like did you have that experience? Like could you look back at the events of the last couple years and you recognize that person and there's a logic to it. Or you're just like, it's an out of body experience.

[D]

I wouldn't say there's a logic to it, but there's an illogic to it, I guess. Does that make sense?

[C]

No, tell me.

[D]

I mean, it's not like I think, oh boy, what happened. It's not like I fainted in a field of poppies and woke up on the wrong coast or something, but I can look back and see the suspension of certain critical faculties. And that makes sense to me. But it doesn't make sense.

[C]

Yes, right. Yes, totally. Well, there is. I think people think that your life can be heading in the wrong direction and then you have this sudden epiphany and then you realize you were heading in the wrong direction. Then you change everything and it's usually much more gradual. And then even the exiting out of it is gradual. And then the coming to terms with what happened and why it happened and where it could have gone differently, that's gradual too.

[D]

Well, I felt really grateful for the. I think I write at one point that I felt like the hand of God came and swatted me off the path that I was on. And I felt grateful for that. Like, it was abrupt and unpleasant and, you know, it was not a smooth landing. It was sort of like being ejected from a moving vehicle. But I was grateful for it. I'm grateful for it now because I thought, well, if that hadn't have happened, because it struck me that you don't just wake up one morning and make a huge mistake, right? It's like necessarily there are many minor or imperceptible mistakes that lead to just like a misaligned worldview, right. Or just a misshapen path that you're on. And I look back and when I talk about kind of seeing the suspension of critical faculties, I see my dismissing that or dismissing discomfort in my daily life, right? Like, dismissing thinking that it was possible and that there would be no penalty for like, pushing aside things that I didn't want to deal with. And all of that seemed to sort of accumulate into circumstances or conditions that made an enormous mistake possible.

[C]

There's another moment in fiction that I thought of when I was reading your book. And then I. I also thought about in my own life because I have some experience going down a path that I'm like, what was I thinking? And I missed it. Like, I missed it when I read it in high school. I missed it when I read it a bunch of times. But in. In Gatsby. There's this moment where Gatsby comes to Nick when he's trying to get in his good graces, and he says, like, hey, like, I know you don' a ton of money doing what you do. I had maybe this business opportunity you could help me with. And Carraway says, like, only later did I realize that that was potentially a pivotal moment in my life. That basically Gatsby was trying to draw him into his world. And Caraway sort of dismisses it out of hand because he's not interested in it, but he doesn't. That was his chance to enter the underworld.

[D]

Right.

[C]

Right. And you don't like, the moments where you don't do it or you do it don't seem significant in the moment. You're not like, I'm gambling everything on this because they all feel like small little decisions.

[D]

Yeah. And I think I, you know, I was like this improbable success in the straight world. Right. And a lot of my success came from the fact that I didn't play by rules. Right. And I was willing to walk into spaces where maybe I shouldn't have been or, you know, use my wits or whims to acclimate myself to environments. And when you're rewarded for that over and over again, I think it kind of. I guess it created a sort of feedback loop where I write about Icarus, and someone was asking me about it, like some journalists at the New York Times, I think, recently. And their interpretation, which I felt said more about this person, as often interpretations often do, was that I was talking about being close to, like, other people's power. Right. Circling too close to other people's power. But to me, it was just like I had a. A misunderstanding of my own power. Right. And my own ability to know. I was so used to being. Right.

[C]

Yes. And taking risks, and those risks paying off rather than blowing up and people deferring to me.

[D]

Right. Like, I got this job at New York magazine when I think I was like, 23 or 24, and I was their first Washington correspondent. And I had never been a Washington correspondent, never covered a White House. And luckily the guy in the White House had never been there before either. Right. And there were some great things about having a fresh perspective, but there were also perilous things about that. Right. But it's a collaborative environment where there are photographers who've been there since, like, the Carter administration, you could say, is that normal? And they're like, oh, yeah, this is. This always happens. Or, no, this has never happened before. But I was used to, you know, I'd say, what do I do about this? To, like, my editor in chief? And he'd be like, oh, you figure it out. Like. And I'd be like, okay. And then I would figure it out. And I was correct most of the time. Right. And I got. I think it contributed to just this incorrect view that I didn't have to police my own judgments. Right. Or I didn't have to just second guess myself as it related to my calculations about right and wrong and whether or not a risk was a good one or whether or not there was a. When I was acting out of ego or fear or selfishness or whatever. And I think that kind of accumulates into this misconfigured worldview when you're not.

[C]

Exactly surrounded by people for whom strong black and white moral judgments and rectitude is a big priority. I imagine it's destabilizing being around other people who are also not just bending the rules, but questioning why there are.

[D]

Rules at all, or just ignoring. It's not even like questioning the rules. It's just rejecting the premise of the rules.

[C]

That's what I mean.

[D]

Yeah. And I mean, I've said this before, but it's like Trump's lawlessness. That lawlessness animates the whole spirit of the place, whatever place that may be. Right. And you feel like, in order, it's like every cop needs a criminal. You have to kind of get inside the mind, and the lawlessness inspires lawlessness. And, yeah, I mean, a lot of the book is about perception, Right. And it's about the distortion of reality. And I was trying to accurately, like, reflect the phantasmagory. Right. Like, and what it just has felt like to be here. And from my vantage point. Right.

[C]

Yes. I had a moment like that. So for people who are listening, they don't know who I am. I worked for a bunch of controversial people over the years, and this was a messy, exciting period in my early and mid-20s. And, like, I remember I read this book again, another work of fiction, which I do think sometimes fiction gets to the truth of it more than nonfiction can. But Bud Shulberg, who wrote on the Waterfront, wrote this book called the Harder They Fall, which is about a boxing promoter and a press agent. Like, so the boxing promoter is corrupt, it's affiliated with the mob, and he's this press agent who's formerly a journalist. Now he's this press agent, and he's sort of in this morally dubious space. And to spoil the ending, it's an amazing book, but it's not really spoiling the ending. At some point, he says, and he keeps. He's really good at what he does. You know, he's good at. At placing stories and creating this narrative. They're building this fighter up so it can take a fall. And he says, towards the end, you know, I told myself that I could deal in filth and not become the thing that I touched. When I look back on my own story, I feel like I read that and that's what changed the trajectory of my life, that I was like, I gotta get out of this. And then I remember I was talking to Tim Miller, who interviewed. You loved him. Yeah, he's great. And we were talking about this because we wrote similar sort of confessional books. And I was like, well, let me go still, like, see, when I read that book.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And I read that book in 2009, so I, like, many years, like, I understood the information. I understood what I was playing with, and then I didn't do anything about it. So we can know the information. We can even know that we're walking a tightrope or that we're playing with fire, whatever you want to use. And then it can take us a while to wake up to it.

[D]

I think you can understand something intellectually, though, and it takes a long time to absorb it, like, energetically and spiritually. But you wrote that book. You were what, like, 25 when you wrote that book.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Trust me, I'm literally right. Yeah. And I reread it when I was writing this, and I had talked to you about some of what I was writing because I was worried too strong a word. But I was trying to sort out the puzzle of how do I deal without feeling like I'm shirking responsibility with things that I was a part of that were kind of just had rotten values, or how do I describe those things without it feeling like I'm putting blame on anybody else or on systems or something? And it was really. It was important for me to reread that book because I remember reading it years ago and thinking, like, man, this guy's crazy. Because it's a really. Aggressive's not the right word, but it's a machine gun of a story. Right. It's really effective because it's narrow and you're not throat clearing. Right. It's like the opposite of how I write in some ways. Right. And I just. I found it very instructive to kind of be confronted with that on the other side of my mistake.

[C]

Well, I Didn't have any literary abilities.

[D]

No, it's well done. It's well done.

[C]

But I mean, you wrote like a real book about your experience. And that was, to me, I don't think I had the capacity then or the sense that anyone was interested in it. I was just trying to kind of go like, this is all the things that I've seen. Isn't this fucked up?

[D]

Yeah. I mean, there's an urgency to the style. Right. I guess that's what I was trying to describe. Yeah.

[C]

Is that something you wrestled with, like. Cause I know I did with the book where you're like, I'm indicting a system which I am also a part of. And there's kind of a. That's a tricky position to be in.

[D]

I wrote this profile. It was like my favorite piece I ever did at New York Magazine. It was about an anonymous Republican and one of the many anonymous Republicans who would kind of shit talk Donald Trump during the first Trump administration. But was a part of the system. Right. And part of that story, and it was part of what informed the choices I made in this book. But part of the story was about how I think I say something to the effect of like, the press provides the alibi as it prosecutes the case. Right. Like, it was selfishly in my immediate interests to rely on people such as that.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Even though every time I would rely on an anonymous person such as that, I was further kind of cementing that system of anonymous contradiction with on the record behavior or decisions and helping to perpetuate this system that's bad for people. Right. And probably bad for American society and was getting worse. And it's not something I wrestled with necessarily with this book. But, like, I wanted to make sure that none of my decisions, I had rules for myself for surviving spiritually, like a scandal and public shaming. And among the rules were just, you know, everything has to be from love, not for love. Right. I could never use anyone as a human shield. I could never spare myself and harm someone else. My first order was to have dignity amid my big indignity or honor amid my dishonor or handle my ethics scandal ethically. Right. And I wanted to make sure I wasn't making any decisions on the page that conflicted with those principles or that anything that was coming from fear or coming from ego. And just like the classic showing, not telling. Right. I mean, that's sort of of was the standard the whole way through.

[B]

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[D]

But.

[B]

You don't choose a Toyota truck to Follow the beaten path. You choose it to find the places.

[C]

In between.

[B]

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[C]

Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Basto County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on. Thought, this isn't going to work. Stopped, parked, it walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bough a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us. Not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids, who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com trucks adventure-detours. I heard you say that somewhere, that you were trying to get through a dishonorable thing honorably. What does that mean to you?

[D]

I mean, I was thinking a lot about honor, right? Like when you're being, you know, rightfully, in that case, ridiculed, you're prompted a lot to think about what you did wrong and to assess what you did wrong, to assess what went wrong. And I think there's something very interesting about a crisis like a public drama, right, where everyone gets kind of distilled to their essential. Like, the lawyers are their most lawyer y the press people are their most press people y. And I felt like. Like my impulse to not sort of judge anyone by their worst behavior kept running into conflict with the fact that I Felt like, well, it's like people who drink, if you drink and you're like an angry, mean drunk. That always scares me about people because I think, oh, that probably is revealing something essential to their character that otherwise is, you know, not accessible or that they're able to kind of keep a lid on. And I don't think it's a small thing. Right. And I guess it's the same under the kind of external stress of a scandal or of public crisis where I just felt like I was experiencing a lot of people making selfish decisions that were dishonest and, like, just screwed up. But I didn't want to do that. And it was a lot of me, like, having to assess really quickly, okay, I'm going to accept this short term discomfort or short term pain rather than eternal suffering. Right. And it's actually easy to do that.

[C]

It's interesting that you would respond that way because I think the fundamental innovation, if you want to call it that, of this moment in culture is that people have figured out that if you dispense with honor or shame, it's actually a hack for getting out of scandals and triumphing over them. Like, if you just, you throw out any sense of personal accountability, if you refuse to cast a stone at yourself, if you just pretend it didn't happen. Actually, a lot of the time, the mechanisms that we have as a society for holding people accountable for things, because most of what is a scandal is not actually illegal, you can kind of survive. And that's. I mean, there's always been shameless people, but that's kind of a new phenomenon.

[D]

No, I mean, shamelessness, like, animates public life in America now in a way that I think it feels not new, but it feels like an exaggeration from how I remember it, you know, in the Bush era or something of my youth. But a lot of people told me, like, just keep going, basically, like these kinds of things, guys don't care. You shouldn't care either. You should just take whatever assignment to go cover the end of the election. And it was an attractive thought. It was like, oh, like, could I just. I could just pretend this didn't happen? And then, like, my insistence that it doesn't matter will eventually, like, manifest.

[C]

Yeah. There's not an appendage on Jeffrey Toobin columns in the New York Times.

[D]

Well, I don't think there should be.

[C]

But I'm just saying, like, there are people who. Things happen and they just keep doing what they're doing.

[D]

But unlike with Toobin, like, I really, I did something Wrong, Right. Those ethics rules are really important. They exist for a reason. And I ran afoul of those rules. And in that way, I hurt the whole industry. And I took that seriously. The kind of, like, public part of what I had done wrong. And then privately, like, morally, spiritually, I took it really seriously. It just seemed like this. It was a big deal. Like, it wasn't even if people were like, oh, who cares? And, you know, the few people who were expressing something like that, you let yourself down. I cared. I cared. I did something wrong and I knew better and I didn't do better. Right? And, like, that struck me as, like, well, it struck me, right? And it just seemed like something I needed to take seriously. And I just. I couldn't really. I couldn't really, like, entertain this notion that I would just continue on and continue to. For a second, I was like, okay, yeah, maybe I will go cover the end of the election for, like, Greedy Carter or whatever. And I just, like, it would front of all of the main rule of, like, I had to be able to live in myself, right?

[C]

Where does that come from? Because that. Where does that sense come from? Where did you learn that? Or where did you pick that up? You think? I don't know. Do you think I'm just. Is that an innate sense? Is that something you get taught? Is that a religious connotation? Because it's something that is clearly absent. And I'm just wondering how we lost it or.

[D]

I don't know. It's interesting. My brother and I were extremely different. Like, he's just really. He's more type A. Like, he was always in sports, and he's a more disciplined person in a lot of ways, Like, a lot of overt ways, and are. In a lot of ways. Our parents were not very disciplined people, right? Like, they struggled with addiction. My mother struggled with. Had mental illness, and they both died young. And they were sort of wildly irresponsible in a lot of ways, right? But they were really good people. And they were really, like, in ways that I couldn't have appreciated at the time that each of them died. Like, I think most girls who were, like. Who really valorized their father, I assumed when he died, I kind of assumed I was grading him on a curve, you know, like, and I wasn't going to interrogate it too hard. I just kind of felt like in one part of my brain, very tiny voice. Like, I'm probably overstating things, right? But that's okay. But I didn't really know very many people, you know, he died when I was, I think, 21 or 22. And then as time went on, the more people I met and the more that I just, like, was on this planet, the more I came around to feeling like, oh, no, he was remarkable in all the ways that I thought and in ways that I didn't know enough to appreciate. And the way that they both were disciplined was like, they were both really hard workers, and they were both. There was a certain honesty to the. Just to the way that they lived and the way that they tried their best to, like, be here. Right. And I guess so. I see that with my brother, too, where, like, for him, you know, it manifests more as just like, you know, personal responsibility and like, he does Ironman competitions and, like. But I think I see sort of the same quality in the both of us. And, like, you have to just deal with. With the world as it is.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

And you can't kind of. You can't wish your way out of misfortune, right?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, that's what I would think, but I don't. Not everyone ascribes to that, clearly.

[D]

No, but I mean, is that your problem or mine?

[C]

No, it's not my problem, but it's just. It's an interesting. When that was a widely held societal belief, it acts as a check. And it's. Weirdly, that's actually the fourth estate, not journalism. Like, one's sense of shame or honor or reputation or one's ability to be like, yeah, I guess I did fuck up. That's actually what journalism was invoking, because the idea that, like, hey, if I get caught, that will look bad. And I care about whether I look bad.

[D]

Right.

[C]

As opposed to I only care if people who like me, like me or whatever. And so, like, there's a playbook now, right? It's like, you fuck up or you're. You sense a bad story is coming. It's like you call this, like, the Russell Brand playbook. Like, just become a right winger or right. Or conversely, if you're a right winger, you're like, actually become a never Trumper. Like you. You can switch sides, and then that side will forgive all your transgressions, provided you hate the other side. And this. It's this kind of like, immunity clause you can evoke. Right. Or invoke. And so what journalism used to do would be the. The disinfectant. But you, the disinfectant, had to. You had to care. You had to care if you looked bad in this report.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And when that goes away or it. If that isn't a thing people care about. We keep throwing the exposes in the articles and then we're wondering why it's not working. And it's like, it's not working because they just decided that it doesn't work anymore.

[D]

Yeah. I mean, it's astonishing. And it's also like when I, you know, I found myself in this just due to my own error. Right. This completely bizarre world of, like, sources familiar and like, you know, narratives forming and persisting and kind of contorting just into utter delusion. And if you don't participate in that economy, you know, there's a law enforcement cliche, it's if you're not a source, you're a target.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Right. And one of my rules was, like, knowing that you refuse to be a source anyway, like, because it's like, you know, if you don't play, you can't lose. You can't win either, but you really can't lose, actually.

[C]

You can definitely lose. Right.

[D]

Because it's nothing real. Right. Like, sure, but you can't lose anything that didn't belong to you.

[C]

Right. You can lose the media narrative, which is not yours to control anyway. But you, you win whatever the sort of sense of honor or libert. Limitation standards you set for yourself.

[D]

Yeah. And I just had to, like, one of the things I just always instill, would remind myself is like, any what's fake is ephemeral. Like, I have to believe that. Right. And if I don't waste this opportunity of this rapturous crackup of my life, if I don't waste the opportunity to kind of. To assess it honestly and to like, figure out how to proceed better, then I will be able to correct those things with time.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

But I can't. I just, you know, won't participate in the kind of 3D chess warfare that would be required to win a public narrative. And like, also, it's just in public, there's no justice in public narrative. There's poetic justice in public narrative, but there's no such thing as justice in public narrative.

[C]

Yeah. And when you look at the people who quote, unquote, get away with it, I guess the moral question would be, did they actually get away with it or did they inflict some sort of greater injury upon themselves, which is they lost the opportunity to reform, to change, to understand, to correct.

[D]

That's what I mean by suffering. Right. Like that. To me, that type of suffering is way too high a price to pay to avoid the short term pain.

[C]

Yeah. So what's interesting to me about all that. And I found this as I was reading the book. The book is very restrained. That's what I would say. Like, you choose not to use certain names. You don't. You have rules that you've set for yourself, right, of what you would do and wouldn't do.

[D]

You're just saying, yeah, yeah, I'm thinking.

[C]

So there's like a restrainedness to it, but it's a restrained person writing about a moment or a person who was so fundamentally unrestrained. And that contrast is interesting. And I wonder if you've thought about that at all.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, I, I write about it a little bit, right? Where it's just like when your privacy is violated, there emerges this expectation that you're going to further violate your privacy, right. That, like, you must bear everything in order to receive some sort of absolution. But there were aspects of it. I mean, it was because at first I was like, I'm never going to talk about this, I'm never going to write about this. I have nothing of use to share about that experience. But I'm always writing. And then I'm out in LA at the edge of the country, watching the end of the campaign. And it was just my necessary context for the literal vantage point and the philosophical, intellectual vantage point from which I'm synthesizing what became the Trump era, this 10 year period, right, in which extraordinary things happen, right? He gets elected in the first place. There are two impeachments. He's never been there before. It shows he's booted from office. It's part of what he says is not an insurrection. Others disagree. He becomes a felon. He's shot at, right? Like, and then he's elected again. It's like this epic, insane story. And I always felt like I have to see this thing through. I didn't know when I agreed to cover it, I didn't know that it was never going to end. Right. I was the cub reporter and he was the unserious assignment. And so when I was asked to cover it, I was thrilled because he was a familiar character and I felt like I understood something of his psychology. He's from Queens, he's from the periphery of New York. And that kind of, to me, I was too. I grew up in New Jersey. That explained a lot of, I thought, the way he operated. And then it just never ended. And it was like this ensemble that kept getting. No one ever left the ensemble, right? It kept getting bigger and bigger and more unwieldy and I just felt like I was being crushed under the weight a bit. And a lot of people that I covered round one with were like, I'm not doing that again. And I thought, like, actually I have to do it again because I have to see this through. The context that I possess is important, and there's something important about people having a fresh perspective too. And I do value that. But it's also important for people who've been here and know these characters to be here. And so I was intent on doing that. And then all of a sudden and in some ways I felt like I was at the height of my powers too and I had this kind of new perspective on him and I felt like useful in a way I hadn't in a while. And I had a lot I wanted to explore and report out and assess. And then I couldn't, right, because of my own error. And it just felt like if I was going to write about any of that, any of the last 10 years, the ways in which my personal life and personal story collided with that distortion of reality seemed like really important context for any reader.

[C]

I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One because my 6 year old fell asleep in the car at like 6 o' clock and I transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a Eight Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is Eight Sleep's best product. I've used Eight Sleep for many years now and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically eight Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides, separ. It can raise and lower each side separately. So it helps you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and then wake up better. Eight Sleep buzzes me to wake gently every morning as opposed to some loud blaring alarm. And then I can check the app and it tells me my sleep score. It even helps me optimize my day based on how I slept. If you want to survive the holidays like a pro and just generally sleep best better, head over to eightsleep.com dailystoic and use code DAILYSTOIC to get $350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra. The best part is you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't like it. But I know you will, trust me, your body will thank you for this. Investment in better sleep shipping to many countries worldwide. See [e-mail] DailySTOIC. You've probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation and they direct funding to the highest impact opportun. Over 150,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to give more than two and a half billion dollars over the last several years. And research suggests that these donations will save over 300,000 lives. I myself am one of those donors. I donate to GiveWell every year. It means a lot to me and you can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. And thanks to the donors that sponsor this research. GiveWell doesn't take a cut from your tax deductible donation to their recommended funds. And if this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to 100 dol before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick daily Stoic from the dropdown menu under podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's givewell.org, code the Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. I'm not trying to let you off the hook, but I'm curious what you think about. This is something I thought of when I was reading the book was like, I do agree you were at the height of your powers. I loved reading your stuff and you're very, very good at it.

[D]

Thank you.

[C]

Like, when someone is at the height of their powers, we make exceptions for not even exceptions. We have certain expectations for people who are great, whether it's like sports, finance or whatever, like music. We understand there's kind of a crazy and a chaos that follows. Like, we don't expect somebody who's putting up 30 points a night in the NBA to have or, or selling, you know, a million records a month, month to be like orderly and have it all together and have this strict, like, we. We just sort of expect, like, scandal and craziness follows. And then there's something about our reaction to what you did, your story that it's not a double standard, but it is like a. I'm just wondering if there's something about writing or journalism that we're like, no, no, no. Talent must go hand in hand with having it together, personally, that we're not as surprised when we find out an NBA player has. Is cheating or is doing this or that. You know what I mean? Do you know what I'm saying?

[D]

Yeah. I mean, there just. There aren't that many rules for journalists.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

So, you know, it's like, it's not hard to not run afoul of those rules. Right. And I just, like, did. So I understood last year. I completely understood. And I found a lot of value, frankly, in, like, reading the criticism and absorbing the discourse around it. And even when people were being extraordinarily uncharitable or unkind, often they had something interesting to say. And sometimes. I agree, this more recent chaos that has subsumed the publication of this book is harder for me to take because I felt like, wait, I just did that. I think, did the public ridicule. I fucked up. And I felt like I handled that right. And I tried really hard to not make any mistakes in how I handled my mistake and why is this happening again? And I hit this wall. And then I kind of came around to, as a coping mechanism, thinking that, like, okay, maybe I was operating under this delusion that because I had done the right thing, that I had input good, that I should extract some sort of. Of good. And it doesn't work that way, of course.

[C]

Shouldn't they appreciate that you're on the same team?

[D]

Like, of course it doesn't work that way. Right. Like, it's. And you must do good anyway. And it was important, I think, to be reminded of that.

[C]

Yeah. And I think that's the problem. Right. People are going, hey, if I don't do the right thing, I can get away with it, but if I do the right thing, it's still going to suck. And so we want karma to be real and we want things to be fair and just. And the reality is, like, you can do the wrong thing and get away with it. That happens all the time. And you can do the right thing and still be criticized and not appreciated or not forgiven. That's just how life is.

[D]

Yeah. But I guess it's like, get away with it. In what sense, though? Right?

[C]

Because it's like, I keep your money, keep your platform.

[D]

Yeah, but at what cost? Right? Like, I think the reason why I'm not crushing is because I'm not carrying any shame about, like, my efforts to wriggle out of.

[C]

Is there a difference between guilt and shame? Like, cause you feel. Do you feel guilt about what happened? Clearly you're holding yourself responsible for.

[D]

You brought it up today to talk about this. Well, it's like, I thought a lot about the distinction between shame and embarrassment.

[C]

Okay.

[D]

Like, I think shame is really important. And I know that's shocking for Catholic to think shame is really important. I grew up Catholic, but I think shame is important. I think embarrassment is about ego because.

[C]

You want people to think about you.

[D]

A certain way and it's about public perception. Right. Shame to me is an interior experience, and embarrassment is more about an exterior experience. And I think shame can be really important. If you have done something shameful, like, you should feel shame. You should, should, you know, sit with that and figure that out. But embarrassment to me, like, none of this has been embarrassing to me because my value for this book or for myself as a human being is not derived from the public perception. Right. But in terms of guilt and shame, I don't know. That's interesting. What do you think?

[C]

I don't know. I mean, in the sense you're using shame, which is like, here are my standards, and I feel X because I feel fell short of those standards, or I feel pride because I lived up to those standards, then maybe we're using the words interchangeably.

[D]

Maybe. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. It's like, it's good to be hard.

[D]

On yourself, I guess guilt implies fault, like, right. You found guilty, you're not found shamed.

[C]

Yes. Right.

[D]

You experience shame, I think in a way that maybe you don't experience guilt. Right.

[C]

But it's funny that we call it a public shaming, not a public guilty or public embarrassment. But like, so you're saying it's good, but then obviously the thing do to other people is not good.

[D]

No.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

No, certainly not. And like the. Is it John Ronson, Such a good book, but that's a totally different thing. Right? Like that. I think I consider that more public humiliation than public shame, but I guess it's private shame. Public shame are different things.

[C]

Well, it's hard because we talk about cancel culture as this thing that we went too far with. It's obviously bad, and I would agree with that. At the same time, society does need some mechanism other than the law. To say like, this is not what we do and there's consequences for doing the thing we don't do. I think that's been the remarkable feature of the Trump age, that it's like, hey, you can hit your wife on camera and still run a professional fighting league. And the irony of also you run a sport where people just slap each other back and forth. It's like a remarkable thing, right? Or you can say horrible racist things in a chat and then not lose your job over the. Like, there has to be some kind of accountability for it. It's not that you should be eternally damned or sent to prison or into exile, but that society does have to have some mechanism by which we go, like, here's the line. When you go over the line, there's consequences for doing that, don't you think?

[D]

Yeah, I mean, I think like, I guess it just happens in a slower, invisible way in social situations, right? Where it's like if you're just, if you're unpleasant on balance, eventually you're not going to be invited to the gather, right? Like your social circle, winnows and winnows. But it does seem like just the attention economy, the kind of rotten values of that are that people who are loud and simplistic, that wins, nuance loses, right? But I always just feel like, okay, the loudest people are probably not who I'm trying to talk to anyway, right? Like I'm trying to talk to the smartest person in the room. And to me that's the most open minded person, the person most interested in and capable of holding nuance and just the most curious person, right? Someone who matches my curiosity. Like I always think about Michael Pollan, who for me is like the North Star and what he. So among things that he's so remarkable at, he's a great, he's a hospitable guide, right? Like he as a narrator, you take his hand and you're reading and he's bringing you on this journey, whether it's, you know, through his garden or you know, into the poppy plant and out into consciousness. He's got this book about consciousness coming out next year that I'm so excited for. I don't know him by the way. I'm just like fan of the work. But I like that I always think about that where it's like he is not condescending, he's assuming, he's assuming that you're here for good faith reasons and that you, that he has something to tell you that you're going to find Valuable and like, that is the gold standard for me. Right.

[C]

So, yeah, I just. It's like you live in a world where you can get caught on camera accepting a bag of cash, whether that's legal or not, whether they'll be, who's the. Like the immigration czar or whatever.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And like the legal system will catch up with that at some point. Or not. But that, that should hopefully. But. But the point is like, I think we're, we're grappling with a society in which the public revelation of that fact does not end anything. It has zero effect. It's like doctors are prescribing antibiotics and they're just not working. And we're just wrestling with antibiotic resistance at a cultural level.

[D]

Right. And then the question is like, what's incumbent on those doctors to stop and think, well, wait, are we over prescribing antibiotics? Right. Should we be more thoughtful in our prescriptions for whatever is ailing our patients? That way we avoid a situation where everyone is antibiotic resistant and then we have superbugs. Right. And so I think when the answer to everything is public shame and cancellation. I mean, our whole system has been. Was set up with a. In a consensus reality.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Where there was a definition of value or the shared understanding of value when there were authorities and there was public trust. Right. And even as the institutions were being built, there was like a good faith that they were being built in good faith. Right. And that like, it's what is a high crime and misdemeanor. Right. It's open to interpretation. But, you know, why is there no law preventing the bulldozing of the east wing? It's like. Well, they didn't think about that. Right. Nobody thought about that. Or there was no east wing. Them. But you know, it's like.

[C]

Yes, well, the founders believed that the system, that the system, the final check on the system was the idea of personal virtue. Right. Like I think Adam says something like, they'll go through the system like a whale through a net. And so we had. It's interesting that they knew that we were vulnerable to the superbugs or the antibiotic resistance resistant man on horseback, so to speak, and that. But they just expected that would never happen.

[D]

I don't. I mean, the. If you can keep it part of the Republic.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

It's is overlooked, I think. Right. And like it's, it's. It's sort of to grandiosely like tie it back to my personal error. It goes back to the. Maybe noticing on one level the suspension of certain critical faculties or letting things with myself and thinking that I didn't need to judge myself in real time for minor things. Right. And then that creates a situation where you make a big mistake. And I feel like in general there's a kind of, I don't know, part of. It's like we just don't have a. We don't have formal mechanisms for. Maybe it's like the collapse of institutions and the collapse of the family. Right. Liberal institutions, the family unit are in theory like the midpoint before we get to law enforcement, justice departments involved. Right. And if those checks aren't in place, broadly speaking, you can't count on them, then I guess it's like what you're talking about, where there's no penalty in real time for misbehavior.

[C]

If I was talking to you in 21 or 22, could you have articulated these sort of values very clearly and then their is a period where you sort of. You override them or forget them or is it more like you've come to understand them in the wreckage of what happened?

[D]

That's interesting. But I mean, I don't think I was consciously thinking about it. Right. So maybe on I could have had some sort of like eggheaded intellectual conversation about it. But also in that period, it's like it was. Everything was sort of hazy. I was still covering Donald Trump, I was covering the pandemic and the end of that first term. And then it didn't really end. And there are all these challenges and trying to kind of make sense of what that even was. And then it's like this lithium fire that the embers of it just sprung up again.

[C]

Right.

[D]

And I was thinking, thinking really very little about my own behavior, where I fit in and my character fit in in this kind of broad corruption of character.

[C]

I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods and we get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner, Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredient standards. So you know, it'll be delicious and good for you. You can also order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds. Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market. Your holiday had pretty headquarters Human, your body has a performance superhighway. 60,000 miles of blood vessels that deliver oxygen and nutrients to every cell. This, of course, is your cardiovascular system. It's the foundational system that powers everything we do. Both elite athletes and longevity experts invest directly in the cardiovascular system because supporting healthy blood flow is critical for energy, energy recovery, mental clarity and overall performance. That's where Human comes in. That's Human with two N's. They started out of research at the University of Texas near where I live and have 15 years of experience making award winning supplements for nitric oxide production and healthy blood flow. Now used by over 160 pro and college sports teams, Human Cardiovascular Health Daily is a plant based and made from clinically studied ingredients like grapeseed and sea kelp extract. It supports nitric oxide production for healthy blood flow and energy while also supporting blood pressure and helping support the delicate interlining of your blood vessels. Just two capsules each morning will power energy and recovery while also playing the long game by supporting long term vascular health and healthy aging. Human has an exclusive offer for our listeners. You can visit human.com stoic for an extra 15% off your first purchase. That's enter code S-T OIC stoic at checkout. That's human with two ends.com stoic for an extra fifteen percent off with code STOIC at checkout. I use in the intro of Trust Me, I'm lying. I, I was fooling around with that word disintegrated. Like we go like it disintegrated in the air, right? It fell apart. But like if you think about disintegrating meaning not integrated, I was like, that's what like I, I, I had my beliefs, I had my values. I was studying this philosophy which now I've sort of dedicated my life to and then I had my sort of day to day work behavior and those two things were not integrated. It's not even that they were compartmentalized, they were just not. They were operating independently of each other. And like the reason they were not integrated is that there's a lot of cognitive dissonance between the two. If they were integrated, then you have to wrestle with the contradiction between what you think your character is and your day to day actions. And so you keep them apart from each other and you just, I mean being busy is a wonderful way to keep them from integrating with Each other, Right?

[D]

And, like, that's one of the things I write about a little bit about being a reporter is like, I'm someone who really only has a fight instinct, and you can just own almost anything. As a political reporter, the stakes are built in. You never have to wonder, like, am I. Is what I'm doing? Does it matter? Right? It matters in a really overt way, even. Even in small, little episodes. And the gift of that is tremendous. The few times I've ever been assigned a story about something else, I've always hit this point where I'm like, wait, but I need this story to be about the universe and mankind. You need stakes, and I need it to be life or death here. And this actor or this is not immediate. High stakes in a way that I'm used to. And that is sort of like a gift in the same way that, like, the great engine for these characters running for office. That's a gift, too, for a writer.

[C]

And there's something, too, about maybe this is what drew you to it in the first place. By looking and judging other people you don't have as that you're putting energy outwards that might otherwise go inwards.

[D]

Totally. Yeah. And I mean, I write about. It's like when I started writing, it was really like the height of the personal essay boom for young women writers. It was like the. Maybe it was like the tail end of the era of, like, Exo Jane, but there was just a lot of that diaristic writing about young female experience and sexuality. I just could not have cared less about that stuff. Like, I just thought the stakes were so low. And I don't care, you know, I care about things that are going to affect other people. And the arrogance of. The arrogance of thinking that you ought to be in charge of anyone else's existence at, like, a scale of greater than, like, a dinner party.

[C]

I should be the most powerful man in the world, right?

[D]

I should affect your life or the lives of people that you love, and I've got it right. That, to me, was just an astonishing premise for anything. I couldn't believe that anyone could think that way. And it was endlessly interesting to me.

[C]

But isn't it funny?

[D]

And it allowed me to just completely turn away from that.

[C]

Seems like there's a sickness to that, right? But how often does the artist go, like, isn't there a sickness in going, the world wants to hear what I have to say.

[D]

Right.

[C]

And they are similar impulses, different scales and whatever.

[D]

But, yeah, it's more like, I think it's like immediate effect or like less perceptible or just less overt. Maybe slower burn effect. Right. But I do. I mean, I think that's part of why it's been interesting how. All right, I've been with like, really negative assessments of this book. And on the one hand, it's just that I anticipated, you know, that there just might be unpleasant reaction. Just the premise alone.

[C]

Right.

[D]

But the other part is just like a choice to be a public facing person. It's a choice to create work and submit it for, like, public consideration. And so you really can't be all that broken up when like the public face is slapped. Right?

[C]

Yeah. You. You control what you write. You don't control what people think about. You write what you write, but that's.

[D]

And not really your risk.

[C]

Still nicer when they listen.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, like one day I hope to experience that again, but it's like you assume the risk that it's going to be unpausive and it's still a privilege to do it. Right. And it's not a great tragedy.

[C]

Okay, so I have a question. So you have. There's this section in here which you've talked about before, but let me, as I wrote a note on it, and I would be curious what you think. You said it was determined the only way for me to survive such a public relations crisis. Tell all. Spare no detail. Spare my job, my life as it was. This was the offer on the table. You could write your way out of it. The man for whom I worked told me. I did not consider this. Have you read Molly but Bloom's book, do you know who that is? Oh, Aaron Sorkin made a movie about her, but she was that famous. She ran those underground poker games in LA in New York City, that all these famous and important people.

[D]

Kevin Spacey movie.

[C]

No, that's a different gambling movie, but she's an Olympic level skier. She loses. She blows out her knee and applies her skills to doing something that you're not supposed to do. Right. It's illegal, no one's dying. But it's not right. And she becomes quite wealthy and successful running these underground poker games. And eventually she gets caught, as everyone eventually does. And basically the FBI comes to her and says, look, you can keep your illicit gains if you tell us who was involved in what you did. And she famously gives up the money rather than tell people what she did. Now, one argument is like, you're not. You're not doing it because you don't want those people to come after you. But in both the book and the movie, and I've gotten to know her a little bit, she just felt like it was the wrong thing to do. It was her. I did the crime, I'll do the time. That was my view of it. Now, I'm always interested when people take certain moral stands that I don't totally understand. Like you might go, hey, you're all criminals or all committing a crime. And why wouldn't you say it? And I think people might say to you, like, this is. I thought that was interesting, because this is a central argument of the book, is that the conceit of the book, which is that you don't spare yourself, but you don't really talk about anyone. You talk about other people, but you don't name other people. And you don't. You don't.

[D]

It's obvious who they are.

[C]

I'm sure you have receipts that you did not show, right? And that's a moral choice you're making. I'm curious what you think of her moral choice and then how you think about your own choice.

[D]

The two things I was thinking when you were talking about her, the first is just, I guess it's like it would be a sort of reverse entrapment, right, for her to do that.

[C]

But reverse entrapment? What do you mean?

[D]

I mean, like, she's the one who created the environment in which these people engaged in this illegal activity, right?

[C]

But some of them are bad people. This would be the argument.

[D]

I understand her feeling like that's not right. But then also, I know I'm thinking about, like, Tony Soprano, right? And like the pilot to the Sopranos, one of the great pilots. And, you know, he says something to the effect of, you know, people used to go into their time, right? And it's interesting. I get it. I do. I get that. And it's also, like, using others as a human shield, that type of thing, right? Like, why that feels so wrong. And it's to me, though, it's. At the time that I was faced with that ultimatum, right? I was in this conference room in lower Manhattan. I thought that I was going to be talking about something completely different. And then all of a sudden, I'm faced with this, being confronted over this affair. And the ultimatum was basically like, sell out yourself and the other party here and then you're forgiven, basically, right? That's your penance for this error. And at the time, it was like, I didn't even know what. I couldn't have synthesized my experience. Like, my experience was ongoing and there were all these other factors, too. Right. Just in terms of, like, my. The security violation and the way it was colliding with my work, absent the confrontation from my employer, and then just the betrayal that I experienced that was sort of in process, but had not yet like, fully, fully occurred, both from the person I called, the politician who obviously is the health secretary now, or from the person I called the man I did not marry. Right. But I didn't even know really what to tell at that moment in time. Write a tell and say what exactly? And there was no good set of facts. There was no version of events in which I was some sort of victim or in which something had happened to. Right.

[C]

And so there's a book you could have written that I think generally would have been more redemptive. I just mean across the board and.

[D]

Then talking about the book separately, I mean, I just kind of felt like I shared what felt like it was mine to tell. Right. And what felt like necessary context for what had occurred both with me and my character. Right. And the dynamics of that relationship. Right. So, like, I don't talk, for instance, much about the man I did not marry. I don't write about why I needed to leave that relationship. You might be able to guess at this point, but there's some clues. But that to me, there's no public purpose for that. Right. That would have just been about me and my own, like, soothing myself somehow.

[C]

And it could make you more sympathetic.

[D]

Yeah, but who cares, right?

[C]

I mean, people. I'm walking you through what people would say or think. Right. Like, why, what the motivated reasoning of people who might make the other choice would be.

[D]

Yeah. I mean, I think the version that would have been much more satisfying, which is nothing I would never have considered doing, it would have been, you know, like, chapters with people's names in which I, you know, on such and such date, I met so and so. And this is what they did. And here's why I am now condemning their character. But I just didn't feel that way also, like, I wasn't angry at anybody else. And even now, like, I'm not angry at anyone else. I'm not angry at. At the person that I did not marry. And I was not angry at him last year and wasn't angry at the health secretary for personal reasons. And I think being able to make the distinction between I disapprove of that person's actions or I'm dismayed or disturbed by something that someone has done, but I can kind of isolate that and assess that for what it is at its appropriate size, and it doesn't have to. To destroy me or affect my decisions and how I conduct myself in a book or in conversation, to me, that's really important. You know, And I just never. I felt like I had a lot to say about the last 10 years, and I had kind of. I felt a sort of urgency. And I also just. I didn't have a job for the first. Right. Like, you're someone who knows about stillness.

[C]

Obviously, there's some forced stillness.

[D]

Yes. Stillness is important to you. And I had really never. I had avoided it as all costs.

[C]

Right. I sensed that your life was chaotic and busy as a way of not wrestling with or dealing with things that. Some of which probably appear in the book and some of which you're probably still wrestling with and dealing with.

[D]

Oh, we'll always be.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

But I also. It was like, you know, the kind of the hamster wheel of the Trump administration, the first Trump administration. That busyness and the kind of, like, righteous feeling around it that there is something sort of addictive is the wrong word, but really attractive about that. And then it's like it's this linear thing, and everything else is organized around it having a task. And like I. Someone who likes to have a caper, I think you've got to have between one and three capers at all times to be happy. But that constant motion was a really good way to avoid looking too critically at myself and my surroundings and questioning. It was easier for me to flee. And then all of a sudden, I have nowhere to go. I have nothing in particular to do. I have no real responsibilities. And I found I didn't really have a choice other than to figure out.

[C]

But we're remarkably good at finding things to like. The other option is you double down on craziness and dysfunction and bad choices. Like, you also could have done that.

[D]

Yeah. What would that have looked like?

[C]

Sure. It would have been explosive.

[D]

And I. I don't have the imagination for it.

[C]

I don't think it's funny because patterns are clear retroactively. Right. Like, I think about some of the people that I worked for and with Dov Charney being one. And so as why I'm reluctant to sort of judge other people for their attractions or their time in other people's orbit, because in retrospect, it makes very little sense to me. But in the moment, it not just made sense. It was, like, exciting and exhilarating, and I thought I was doing mostly good stuff. And I remember one time I was Talking to my aunt and she, she was like, it's interesting that you and your sister both ended up working for like this certain personality type. My sister at one point had a boss not that dissimilar to mine. And I was like, yeah, whoa, what does that say? Like, here I am thinking I'm making rational or self interested career decisions and then I'm like, actually in this Freudian psychodrama, for instance. And then, and then I'm like, whoa, I wish I had, like, probably no amount of pointing that out would have prevented me from doing it. But it's so, it's so obvious in retrospect that it's just like, ugh, whoa, what was that? Have you thought about that for you at all?

[D]

Oh yeah. And even like over the last, we were talking about the kind of present chaos externally and I was thinking like, okay, why am I back here? Because it does feel like all of a sudden I'm back here.

[C]

Yeah. The one common variable in all these situations. Yeah, right.

[D]

It's like I am the common denominator. And you know, I walked through the door and like I was back at the welcome mat and you know, it was sort of disorienting and I was thinking, well, what did I not learn last time, right? What do I need to learn this time? Because whether you think there's some sort of divine organization to all of this or it's an accident of the universe, wherever you fall along those lines, like materialist, metaphysical, I just, it struck me that it was a loop, right? And so why am I at the start of the track again? And I, theoretically, I should know better how to be here this time.

[C]

Are you like, I want to get off this ride?

[D]

At first, yes. At first I was like, I did not. Like I didn't sign up for a round trip. But then now I'm kind of like, wait, why am I back on this? How did I get on this ride again? And do I like the ride?

[C]

Sure.

[D]

Like, what do I not understand about how the ride works? Like, I'm more, I guess on balance I'm more curious about what's happening than I am devastated by it. And I have to assume, or there needs to be for my survival, some utility. Right. And I felt like the whole time with the scandal around the affair, that it was like, again, if I didn't waste the opportunity of the public shaming and the private shame, that it would be like my new capacity for empathy, if that makes any sense. It felt like this kind of wrecking ball had hit me in the chest and that the size of the blast radius would be my new capacity for empathy if I did not react from ego or from fear, and that it would make me better at what I do, and it would make me a better chronicler of people if I let it.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

You know.

[C]

Yeah. If you have any sort of history of making bad decisions or definitely people in recovery deal with this where you're like, how do I trust my self, my instincts going forward when the one thing I know is that I shouldn't trust my instincts or what I'm attracted to or what I feel inclined to do?

[D]

Like, I need a conservatorship. Right. And so, like, what does my judgment count for then? Right. If I could admit that there are some serious gaps here, how do I regain trust with my. Right. And I guess part of, like, working through those things and assessing, you know, there's a lot in this book that I reveal that, like, does not. That nobody knew about that makes me look terrible. Right. Like, and I felt. Part of it just felt like that was my penance for having made mistakes. And, you know, if I lied, I put it in the book and, like, I explained that I lied and. Or I just did something, like, totally boneheaded that was wrong in retrospect. Right. But for me, it was less about, like, it was like, I think I. I thought it didn't matter a lot of those things in real time. In real time? Yeah. Like, it felt so peripheral and so private.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Right. It's just hilarious now that we're talking about it here, but, like, it just didn't feel important. And then part of, like, the realization was just like, no, of course. Like, every little thing matters so much much. Right. Like, everything that happens here matters, and every choice I make matters. And it's. And whether or not I can appreciate it in the moment or whether or not it ever looks that way in retrospect. Every little decision I make could be kind of like the flap of the wing that knocks you off your path or puts you onto a better path. Right. And that realization was really important part of the process.

[C]

Yeah. I find that the excuses and rationalizations that made sense in the moment, they don't age well. So you tell yourself it doesn't matter. You tell yourself no one's looking. You tell yourself everybody does it, whatever it is. And then, you know, if you get caught a year later, that's bad. The harder thing I found is, like, what if you never get caught? Right, Right. Like, and you obviously talk about some stuff in the book. But I think there's this line from Epictetus, one of the Stoics. He says, you know, whenever you find yourself criticized or attacked by someone, tell yourself, if they really knew me, they'd say something much worse. And like. Like, oftentimes you're not caught for the wor that you've ever done, or they're not able to ever fully understand what happened. So there's this part of you that just doesn't know what to do with the things that you told yourself didn't matter. And maybe they didn't matter, but they matter to you, and you carry them with you.

[D]

Yeah. Also, I mean, there just was very little conscious thought about a lot of it.

[C]

Right.

[D]

Like, I fell in love with someone. As unbelievable as the facts of it may seem to a lot of people, which I understand. Like, there was no real rational thought process around it. Like, I just loved someone and cared about them and suspended certain critical faculties the way that people do when they're caught up in how they feel about someone else. And that's not to, like, say that there's no free will involved in any of that. Not to activate the free will doesn't exist crowd. But do you think it exists?

[C]

Yeah, I think. I don't know what we're doing here if it doesn't.

[D]

Well, I know you want it to exist. Right. It's hard to be a stoic. Yes, it doesn't exist, but, like, how open are you to the idea that it doesn't?

[C]

Some philosopher said once, and I. It's kind of how I try to live my life, which is to assume that you have free will and nobody else does. So. So it's like all your choices of great moral consequence and then everyone else's choice, they didn't have a say in it. And there's a kind of. Not pity, but an understanding and an empathy for, like, it couldn't have gone any other way. Which is kind of what I took out of my Grand Central Station. I sat down Web. And even book, which is. You go like, man, love is like a hell of a drug. It's blinding.

[D]

It's.

[C]

It can be deranging. And sometimes it's for the best. And other times, you know, I'm glad that didn't happen to me. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, that's kind of. That's kind of how I try to think about it. Obviously, there. There's different scandals where it's like the person is sort of overtly a. I don't Know when the person is victimizing another person, when it's less that and more just like an error in judgment or an overwhelming of one's facilities, I tend to be a little bit like, there but for the grace of God.

[D]

Go I. Yeah, I mean, I felt like, I guess I felt a little liberated to write of his character as I experienced it and as I kind of watched it progress or devolve. Right. And because he had maligned me and lied about my character. Right. And so I felt, felt like I owed him fairness and I owed myself affording him fairness. Right. But on balance, the public interest in offering my context for what occurred and where it fit within this broader story of this ten year period of Trump's rise to dominance and like, the distortion of reality that outweighed any, like, any feelings of, oh, well, I can't do that, you know, I can't do that. And like, because I was no longer violent, violating the contract had been violated. Right. Like, and that doesn't mean that I felt like I had, you know, there were no rules and I, you know, didn't have to abide by my own code of honor around it, but I did feel like I had total freedom to sort out exactly what I felt like was useful for this story and for explaining, yeah. Explaining what had happened and who he was to me and how I saw him. Right. And I mean, it's a weird story.

[C]

It is like, it is weird. You know, it's weird all the way around.

[D]

It's a weird story. Yeah.

[C]

There was a scandal in the Truman administration and he had some sort of old cronies that, you know, did some stuff. There's this famous exchange between him and Secretary of State Dean Akison who says, like, you know, Mr. President, I think you've been loyal to people who have not been loyal to you. And there's something about that that strikes us as very unfair. And then I've been come to go, like, loyalty is not supposed to be a two way street.

[D]

No, I mean, that's how, on balance, you know, one of the things I kept coming back to was like, my standards for myself are not affected by other people's standards for themselves or for others or for, you know, what they might be willing to tolerate for me. Right. Like what, what is justified is not the same as what is. Right. And, you know, definition of having a principle is that it's unaffected by external stimuli. Right. Like, your behavior is not going to take change. Like how I feel about, you know, X matter. And that was like an important Guiding principle for this and just for this entire era of my life. No one ever talks about young cronies.

[C]

Yeah, that's true. Because usually they're. They're somebody you go way back with.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

That'S true.

[D]

Well, we apply, like, we attach terms related to age in funny ways. Like you always hear about ancient grains or like a young coconut.

[C]

So much of this is marketing to get people to care about one thing or see it differently than another thing. And I mean, I don't mean marketing so much as, like, it's coming from corporate interest, but there is just this endless amount. Everything is covered in euphemisms and qualifying and hedging and. Yeah, that's part of, I think wisdom is the ability to kind of strip those things out and be able to see them for what they are.

[D]

Right. Yeah, I know. I've been thinking a lot in preparing to come here, thinking a lot about Marcus Aurelius, obviously. Right. And part of what was interesting about writing through the experience of the affair was just like, okay, were my feelings ever real if he was never real?

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Right. And I still don't have a satisfying answer for that. Right. Like, but I felt like I had to kind of document with as much integrity as possible, like what it was and what it felt like and what, you know, I was experiencing at the time and what it looked like at the time. And like, I'm sure my feelings about it and my assessments will be really different in five years or 10 years, you know, or God willing, 25 years or something. But it was interesting. But I also, it's like, if we judge Aurelius over, like, who he was privately to himself. Right. And we do. Broadly. Right. Like, I do. If you seem to. Right. I'm not gonna weigh whatever rumors or legend about his personal and taste for vengeance.

[C]

Right. Yeah. Where also a lot of people think he was like, repeatedly cheated on by his wife. And I go like, is that a real thing or is that a 2000 year old rumor?

[D]

Exactly. Right. It's tough to. And so it's like, I'm not gonna weigh that against the body of evidence about his character or his intentions that we have. Right.

[C]

What about Commodus? His son sucks.

[D]

Oh, yeah. Well, but.

[C]

And he does give him the.

[D]

But a lot of great people have less great children. Why is that? And are you really great? If your legacy, your most direct.

[C]

Prof.

[D]

One of. One of the. Like, if your legacy, your most direct legacy, if that's someone else, are you responsible?

[C]

Are your kids a reflection of you and Your character, it's like. It's like, yes and no.

[D]

It's a complicated. I think it's kids, right.

[C]

No, no, I'm saying it's a yes and no. It's both. Right. Well, I mean, obviously they're learning their values from you, and. And if you're a horrendous hypocrite, that will have some effect on them. And at the same time, they're their own people who make their own choices. And like, you know, we obviously, we both hold parents responsible for their actions of their kids and then understand their kids are doing their own thing.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

It's a tricky business. It's a tricky business is what I'm saying.

[D]

It is. And it's like, it strikes me just like anecdotally in my mind there's, like, really conflicting in, like, our courts of law. Right. Like, sometimes a parent's held responsible for a child's crime.

[C]

Right.

[D]

And sometimes they're not. And it's interesting. I mean, one of the. One of Donald Trump's great. One of the only cases for him having a good character was always like, well, his kids seem to love him and are in his life and are not dead or in jail. Right. Like, early on, that was like a. Yeah.

[C]

Hillary says this in the debate. I thought it was one of the dumbest things that she ever said, but. Okay.

[D]

Right. It's like, how bad could this guy be if his kids are all functioning and seem like at least moderately and sometimes extremely employed? And I never found that super compelling as it related to him. So is the inverse that compelling?

[C]

Right.

[D]

Maybe not. I think you said once, though, it's just like, great men are often really busy.

[C]

Yes. They're just gone a lot. I think that would. If your dad was. If you're like, why is that kid the way that they are? You'd be like, well, his dad was president, empire billionaire, whatever. You'd be like, that explains it, you know, good or bad.

[D]

Yeah. Although it's like, I also just really believe in how powerful individual choices are. Right. And, like. And I really believe that, like, what happens privately within a context between two people or within a family or a classroom or a big institution very well may change the course of human history. Right? It has. And so it's hard to kind of reconcile those two ideas, but.

[C]

No, it is. Well, it's almost here. Christmas is just a couple of days away, and maybe you're scrambling. You're like, what should I get my dad? What I should. I should get my mom. I gotta get Something to my sister. People love showing off pictures of their kids and that's where today's sponsor comes in. I've gotten one as a gift. I've given it as a gift. The Aura digital picture frame. It's easy to use. It never gets old. You're constantly updating it with new pictures. Aura Digital picture frames are so much better than any digital picture frame I've ever seen. It's got a high resolution. It's got a color calibrated display. You can add video. You can have two pictures come up at the same time. Picture and a video. It'll pair photos together for you, like two pictures of the same person or from the same day. It's really easy to set up. You just download the app, connect the frame, and then you can pick photos and videos right from your phone from anywhere in the world. And there's a reason Oprah added it to her favorite things three different times. For a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off. Or as best selling carver matte frames named number one by wirecutter by using promo code STOIC at checkout. That's a U R A frames.com promo code stoic. This deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. This time of year is wonderful. It's quiet, it's. It's peaceful, it's beautiful. It's also stressful and bleak and dark. And then there's the whole family stuff. You gotta make sure you're taking care of yourself. And you gotta make sure you're taking care of your mental health. This time of year can be not just stressful, it can also be lonely. And therapy can help you make space and time to focus on getting well and feeling good. Consider trying BetterHelp online therapy in December as a way to close the year with clarity rather than chaos. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, having served over 5 million people globally. And it works. It's got an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. This December. Start a new tradition by taking care of yourself. And Our listeners get 10% [e-mail] Dailystoeppod that's better H E L P COM Daily Stokes Stoic Pod. I'VE had this unique experience of not just going through some of the stuff myself, but then because I wrote a book about. It's kind of about media scandals. And then also I wrote this book about stoicism. Like, weirdly, I get calls from people when their life blows up. Right. And so I've got.

[D]

I called you.

[C]

Yours was like, hey, I'm writing a book. Do you have any advice? Yours wasn't like, what do I do? I gotten some like, oh, I'm very worried about this. This person is calling me at whether they deserve it or not. Like they're a leaf blowing in the wind, and this could go in a bad direction. So I've just talked to people who are in the middle of these public shamings, and we could talk about it a bunch of different ways. But one of the things I have found interesting is the kind of support network that pops up. Like, James Fry is interesting. He has, like, taken it apart upon himself to reach out to people who are in the middle of those things. I think it's part of his recovery. He's just like, hey, I know what it feels like to know that the world thinks you're a piece of shit and is rooting for this to get worse for you. Right. And so I've been fascinated by. In the moments where that's happening, the people that lean in and the people that go away. I imagine you learned a little bit about that.

[D]

Yeah. I mean, this one. This one was interesting. There's some people who are. It's like grief, where some people are just really frightened.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

And don't know what to say and don't want to think about it because it's just scary. It's like, wait, but my whole existence is about denying mortality. Like, I can't come near you right now, and that I don't fault anyone for ever. It's just like, you know, you can't. Like, people aren't accountable for their limitations, I don't think. And no one really surprised me. I mean, some people have had really good advice. Some of the advice is kind of infuriating in its own way, but they mean well. And so you can't, you know, judge it, I don't think. But. No, but, you know, someone had said to me early. Early on, like, you don't have a constituency, so it's gonna be really hard. And I was like, what do you mean? It was like, oh, well, you're not aligned with the right wing or the left wing, and various factions within those factions hate you.

[C]

And also, I would say audience is intermediated by a publication as opposed to like, totally.

[D]

Right? Yeah. And I like that, you know, Like, I like a barrier, like, and I like some distance. And there's a lot of space in the book. And I think maybe in some way it was like, to me it just feels like kind of the charitable thing to do for a reader. And like, I don't want to tell anyone how to think, but it's also maybe a way for me to like, fabricate some space for myself too. Right. Like, this goes in both directions. But the lack of that was interesting. And people who've really. Who've been through it or who've been through it. I found that like, sometimes people who are public people in some capacity and understand something of being publicly shamed still, it's not like not everyone's reached, like, total. I don't know what the term for it would be. Like, the point at which they could kind of like turn the dial from AM to fm. Like the break, right? The Carlin break or the Dylan break. The point at which they just baseline don't believe a lot of what they read. Or it infects that distrust sparked by their own experience and the distortions related to it or their perceived distortions related to it, creates this more general distrust. Like my brother on the phone earlier was saying to me, like, reading certain things about me in the press and something in particular today, I guess, and he was like, it's just making me like, have less faith in general with what I read. Because I know so, like viscerally that this is so untrue.

[C]

Do you know about the Gale amnesia effect?

[D]

No.

[C]

So the Gal amnesia effect, I'm probably mispronouncing it, but it's basically like when you read an article or you watch something from the press about something you know a lot about, you see all the problems and, you know, inaccuracies and insufficiencies. And then you turn to its coverage of the Middle east or the stock market or whatever the thing you don't know about is, and you're like, sure, that seems true. The amnesia effect is our willingness to see how terribly wrong it is in one, or unfair, or biased, or the weaknesses in the area that we have the expertise, and then we conveniently forget that elsewhere, or with time, we forget it elsewhere. You could argue AI has a similar effect where it's like, if you ask it something you really know about, it's woefully insufficient. But then you're like, here, plan my vacation, right?

[D]

Right, right, yeah. It's interesting, I think I write in the book about how in this time period, this 10 year period, it's like anything seemed possible. And on the one hand, that is a literal inspirational slogan, anything's possible. But it also landed as a threat. Right. It was like anything could be believed because anything was possible. And there were no boundaries all of a sudden because there are no standards, because there's no consensus, because we're not living in a consensus, consensus reality.

[C]

And there's no consistency either.

[D]

It's wild because consistency requires boundaries and consensus and there has to be some shared understanding of value and those things no longer exist. Right. And that is fascinating to me. Right. And that's sort of what I have personal responsibility for it and like, I have free will, I think.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

But like I, nevertheless, it was in that environment and to see, assessing all of that closely in which I made a mistake. Right. And that was interesting to me when.

[C]

The reason I was asking about, you know, who reached out is not that I'm not looking for names, but there is a beautiful scene in Oscar Wilde's book De Profundis where he talks about this moment. He's being transferred from one prison to another. He's, you know, his life is ruined over, you know, what we would now say are, you know, nobody's business. But at the time, you know, everything is taken from his wife, his family, his money, his reputation, and he's being transferred from this one prison to. And a friend, something Robertson, forgetting his name, his friend, he walks down the hall and his friend's just standing there and he just kind of like smiles and nods his head and he says, like, in this moment there's. That is everything that Jesus was supposed to represent. Like, that is. That is the Christian tradition there that like in your darkest, most abject public humiliation, the person who says, like, I see you and I haven't for sin. And I do think, obviously public shaming is bad and inexcusable and we can't do so much about it as a society, but we can as individuals decide to be that person when someone we know is going through something like that.

[D]

I mean, I feel like I've been really fortunate in a million different ways, and that's one of them. Someone asked me recently, like, oh, did you lose a lot of friends during? I was like, no. What? Right. Like, I was shocked by the question. Then I thought like, oh, wow, like my great fortune that it didn't even occur to me that people with whom I'm. I consider myself really close friends that there might be any doubt. Right. Like, and I thought that was. It was like a. I felt stupid and then just so lucky that it hadn't.

[C]

Even more unusual than you think it is.

[D]

I mean, I guess, you know, or it's just like, my friends know how stupid I am. Right.

[C]

Like, were there people that in the moment were like, what are you doing? Like, before it happened? Like, I sometimes go, like, I wish someone would have told me.

[D]

And then nobody knew it was a.

[C]

Secret, but did they see a direction you were going? Like, I just think about moments and go, I wish someone told me. And then they were like, we did try to tell you.

[D]

I also was just making myself scarce, you know, and it's like, I think when you're keeping any kind of secret, you keep a lot of other secrets. Right. In the process and, like, as our secrets. Yeah. And something. I mean, something I write about in the book because my mother and, like, the dynamics of the house I grew up in. On the. On the one hand, they're like honest people, and on the other hand, we're all sort of keeping. Living in this weird. Within this weird secret of her mental illness and her alcoholism. And it was. A lot of my existence was about the upkeep of lies. Right. To. To protect her and protect. I don't know what. But I was spending. I just remember being exhausting. Right. But there's something sort of comforting about that, too. And it's like, oh, you know, am I replicating this pattern of, like, falling back into a dynamic such as that? And Seems so. Right. And I think I write about, to my mind, there's this sort of paradise within the privacy of a lie. And in preparing to roll out this book, I remember I was meeting with a PR person. I was anticipating a crisis.

[C]

Yeah. Really? It's quite a prediction.

[D]

Yeah. And they said something to the effect of, like, oh, well, you want to fix. Assume you want to fix your, like, Google results. It's a lot of, you know, crazy stuff in there. And I was like, I kind of felt terrified by the notion of that because there's a sort of anonymity in having a lot of bullshit about you out there. Right. Like, there's a. In some ways that's much less scary to me at this point than, like, this. Right. Or. Yeah. I don't know. Know. It's. I can't remember what the question was.

[C]

No, I just. I wonder sometimes when I know people that are, like, twisting in the wind, what the obligation is, you know, like, because it's Obviously, there's a spectrum, right? There's like a. They're totally innocent and they don't deserve this. And then there's the, like, they really did it to themselves. And then there's the bro. I think there was a time to stop emailing Epstein. Okay. You know, like, there's the broad spectrum of, like, how, you know, decide to deal with someone who is in the hot seat.

[D]

Yeah. Although, actually, I was gonna say something about Epstein.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Same territory. I wanted to change the narrative, so I wanted to talk about Israel and Jeffrey Epstein. That's okay. But I, you know, I don't know. I kind of think it's like grief, though, where it's like. My view is that whatever private judgments I make may have about anyone's behavior, you can always be a human being. Right. And that doesn't mean that you have to defend them either privately or publicly. But I'm going to be a human being first and form criticisms once I have enough information. But usually there's nothing close to a complete set of facts available when someone's first in a public shaming. And that's, you know, usually been my point of view about it. And sometimes I'll get, like, a message and I'll think like, oh, guess it looks that bad, huh?

[C]

That, like, would you say, like, when Monica Lewinsky is checking in on you, that's bad.

[D]

But, you know, it's interesting because so many people have brought her up to me, and she's so lovely, and, like, I'm just. I really am just, like, awed by her ability to come out of that with just all of this kindness and grace intact and all of this empathy and. Because you could see very easily how it could have gone another way. But I felt very much like, okay, well, because people keep mentioning her to me, and it's like, well, what happened to her, happened to her. Right. Her prefrontal cortex is not developed. Like, there was enormous power imbalance. Whatever else was true about that. Like, it happened to her and I happened to me. Right. So it feels very different.

[C]

It does. Although I would say looking back on, you know, couple centuries of scandals, it is very rare to find one historically contemporary, where you look back and you go, we were not hard enough on that woman.

[D]

Like, yeah, we need a witch to burn. Yeah, we always need a witch to burn. And. But also, like, I can withstand burning. It's all right. But me, you know.

[C]

Yeah, that makes sense. That's a rule. I try to think about just as a person when I'm to trying. I go like, how is this now that we have some distance on any number of them? Are we like that. That instinct, whatever that is in the human tribe does not age. It does not age well. It ages like milk.

[D]

Not typically. Yeah, yeah, it's nice. We're consistent about something.

[C]

Yes. Yeah. Conversely, it's not so true the other direction. We often do let certain men off with a slap on the wrist and then come to regret it. You know, like, I mean, look, generally, probably public shamings are not good, but I. I would just say, like, when you look at things that we get upset about, we're usually like, yeah, we were too, too hard not to.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, the kind of like sexual fervor animating the public discourse is. Is interesting. And that just sort of feels like, okay, I'm in a very old story here, right. Like, I am it right now in this story, or I'm back, I guess, for like season two. And that's interesting. And it doesn't. Even though it feels violating, it doesn't feel personal because it's not right. It has almost nothing to do with me, like, in the actual facts of anything but that, you know, I don't know. I kind of. I get it and I'm interested enough in it to again, like, to not be cowering about it. And I mean, it's complicated because it's like, I get why, you know, I get why it's a tough one for people to process. And I also, I'm orbiting pretty close to Earth, right? Like, I am a nearer villain to like, treat like a pinat versus, like anyone like in the federal government or, you know, it's just, it's easier to.

[C]

Right. Like, one of the people that sort of went through the Both books for me, that it was always like, Billy Bush read both of both my books like that back to back. The Stoes is one of them in the media ones. And you go, yeah, like, in retrospect, we sort of came down on the dude who didn't do the thing.

[D]

Yeah, but he's a translator for. Right. Like, he is the middleman and I was the. He's more accessible middlewoman, like, translating these people. Like, the great privilege of what you do is as a journalist is like, you go places and you step in rooms and talk to people who are of interest and consequence to the general public. But most of the general public doesn't have the time, interest, desire, ability to go and do that. And you must report back for them. And you've got to be thinking about like, well, what do they need to know, right? And it's a privilege, privilege to do that. And I fucked up in such a way that I put that kind of contract in doubt. And then so I understood the last time last year, like I understood the kind of, you know, general.

[C]

Well, access is a tricky thing, right? Because I'll say maintaining the access, using the access, knowing when to make the break, when to. When to do what Janet Malcolm says is the sort of dishonor. Like the. When do you, you when do you. When do you. When is the betrayal?

[D]

Well, I always think about Janet Malcolm. I always reread the Journalist and the Murderer and. But I also think of, I think it's Jean Marie Laskas who said, when I report, I fall in love. When I sit down to write, I get divorced. And I never have felt that way. Like I, I don't. I always felt like if I think it's like really the gay to least model of if the subject is surprised, that means I have failed in some way. But I like to argue and like if I disagree with, with someone's philosophy or in something or something they've stated, like I want to talk about it because I want to understand the nature of the disagreement, like why they feel that way. And that's what to me what the access is for. But also it's like as much as this was about my mistake within the context of this election, it was this isolated thing where I just fell in love with the wrong person. Right? And so it wasn't like a broad. My work has never been in doubt, right. Like for whatever it's worth and maybe not much like, you know, the magazine I was working for, New York Magazine, like know, had some scary law firm, like conduct their review of it. And like it's not like my broad coverage and like the 10 year period that we're talking about here has ever been in doubt, right? Like nothing's ever been retracted. Like there's no. So that's been a little frustrating just seeing kind of like the. But trust and respect are fragile things, right?

[C]

In retrospect, do you see that you have a tendency to compartmentalize? Like, that's kind of what I noticed. It's like you love this person, but what this person is doing, not just to you, but like their, their actual stated sort of like policy goals. Like there seem to. Those seem to be again disintegrated or even like some of the people that you're like talking to in the book after it's all happening. I'M like, oh, okay. Like, I don't know that it seems. Is that the journalist part of you that is able to like, probably, yeah, probably.

[D]

But also it's like, I mean, parsing this, like, is probably stupid, but for whatever it's worth, like, in the period of time that we're talking about, it's not as if, you know, this was like a kind of peripheral third party effort. Certainly he was not under the impression that it was going to end up how it ended up for a very long time. Nor was I. Right. Nor was anyone else. And it wasn't as if we sat around and talked about the MMR vaccine. Right, Right.

[C]

But his negative impact on the world predates and would exist without becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services on vaccines.

[D]

I understand what you're talking about, but then it's also like. And part of this is, you know, operating under the delusion of just like wanting to assume the best of someone that you love. Right. But it's like, I do see that, you know, on the environment, on just Monsanto alone. Right. Like, those are big, important things that like, I valued and like, I thought were admirable. Right. And I also just like, I think because I was so good at compartment, like, my job is to talk to people with whom I have, in most cases, enormous differences, Right. And to be able to have a productive human conversation and try and understand something of them as a human being, understand their psychology. You can't really go into that just with judgment, right? You can hold your disagreements and those don't go away. But like, if you're just sitting there vibrating with contempt because of the differences of opinion, it's never gonna work. And I got really used to that. Right. And I think it made it much easier to, to kind of like just focus on the human being and discount the rest. But I also, like, I wasn't sure for like, you know what? We didn't talk, you know, we talked about music and poetry and, you know.

[C]

Yeah, and this sounds more judgy than it is, but it's like that expression, your mind's so open your brain fell out. Like.

[D]

No, I think that's fair. I think that's fair. But it's also just like that, you know, it's not a rational thing to fall in love in general. This is perhaps particularly irrational, but like, it's going to end in some sort of immense pain. Right? And so no matter what the premise is or the premise of just like counting on another human being, all of these things are baseline irrational. But Also essential to the human experience, right?

[C]

Yes. Well, I don't know where to land this thing. I don't know if I missed anything.

[D]

I think I didn't.

[C]

No, no. I'm just being general. You want to go check out some books?

[D]

I would love to. Okay.

[C]

On the bookstore. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on itunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided if at all possible. I understand as a content creator, why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the student studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad free. No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversation you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium and we are offering a limited time discount of 20% off your first year. Just go to Dailystoic.com premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.