Persuasion Expert: "You Can Manipulate Yourself Into Doing Hard Things" | Jay Heinrichs (PT. 1)

Summary

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The Daily Stoic Podcast

Episode: Persuasion Expert: "You Can Manipulate Yourself Into Doing Hard Things" | Jay Heinrichs (PT. 1)
Date: November 5, 2025
Host: Ryan Holiday
Guest: Jay Heinrichs (author, “Aristotle’s Guide to Self Persuasion”)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the interplay between Stoicism, rhetoric, and the art of self-persuasion. Ryan Holiday and Jay Heinrichs explore how ancient philosophical and rhetorical techniques can be used to “manipulate” ourselves into doing difficult—but necessary—things. They challenge the boundaries between self-discipline and self-persuasion, discuss the role of identity and habits, and reflect on how suffering and even procrastination can become tools in building a better life.

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Key Themes and Discussion Points

1. Ancient Philosophy, Rhetoric, and The Modern World

(Starting ~08:00)

• Jay deliberately avoided reading Ryan’s “The Obstacle Is The Way” until after publishing his own book to avoid influence, noting, however, how much overlap there actually is between their ideas.

  • Quote: “I deliberately avoided reading The Obstacle Is the Way until after the book was published because I didn’t want it to influence me, really. And, boy, am I glad I didn’t, because there’s so much in common.” — Jay Heinrichs (08:19)

• Discussion of the Stoa Poikile in Athens, the home of ancient Stoicism, and how modern society treats historical artifacts.

• The difference between philosophy (pursuit of truth, virtue) and rhetoric (persuasion, reframing, timing—kairos).

  • Jay: “We’re not talking philosophy in my book. We’re talking rhetoric. So it’s a matter of persuasion, of reframing, of changing your mood, your attitude toward things, and your willingness to do something or stop doing it.” (09:44)

• Comparison between Stoic (virtue-based) and Epicurean (happiness-based) philosophies.

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2. Self-Help, Rhetoric, and Making Philosophy Accessible

(10:30 - 14:50)

• The tendency to sneer at “self-help” as a genre; both authors openly embrace the term, arguing that self-help is both valuable and inevitable if you’re trying to improve your life.

  • Jay: “I was troubled by the very idea of writing a self-help book, but guess what? I was trying to help myself… Although in the book, I deny that it’s a self-help book.” (13:28)

• The importance of making ancient wisdom accessible.

  • Ryan: “If you sort of dismiss what the Sophists do and all you focus on is the truth or the idea, and then you don’t find a way to make it accessible for people, it doesn’t work.” (14:05)

• Discussion about why some philosophical works (like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics) don’t reach wider audiences: dense style, unpronounceable titles, lack of narrative or rhetorical engagement.

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3. The Art of Self-Talk and Self-Persuasion

(15:00 - 20:00)

• The unique rhetorical quality of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: self-directed, accessible, and more like “the original bathroom book.”

  • Jay: “For years my bathroom reading has been Marcus Aurelius. He wrote the original bathroom book.” (17:15)

• The essay as a form: how Montaigne, inspired by Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, invents the personal essay through self-exploration.

  • “The philosopher’s job is to explore the self… Montaigne and Marcus Aurelius are like, ‘I don’t have time for that [explaining the universe]. What do I know? What’s wrong with me? What am I struggling with?’” — Ryan (18:26)

• Aristotle’s On the Soul as Jay’s favorite Aristotle book: “He was looking inside his own body and wondering, where’s my soul? Is it an organ or is it something above me?” (19:02)

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4. Self-Persuasion vs. Self-Discipline

(22:18 - 29:49)

• Delving into whether self-persuasion and self-discipline are distinct, or two sides of the same coin.

  • Jay: “If you’re applying persuasion to yourself, you’re removing discipline altogether…You need to convince this soul that you’re doing the right things… You have to apply all the tricks of the manipulative trade, including convincing yourself that whatever goal you’re setting is the most amazing thing ever…” (22:26)

  • Ryan presses the point that habit and identity may just be discipline in disguise, especially when applied over long periods.

    • “Anything you do every day, anything you turn into a habit, that’s… discipline.” (26:26)

• Identity and habit change, using examples like flossing and napping.

  • Jay: “If you can change that sense of identity, and you can do it with these manipulative tools of rhetoric to change how you think about yourself and the soul… It’s basically having this conversation with somebody who’s not quite you. It’s sort of a better version of you.” (25:31)

• Good and bad habits, and how negative routines can still adhere to the same “discipline” logic.

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5. Setting Goals, Procrastination, and the “Ramp”

(27:49 - 35:38)

• Jay’s anecdote: Trying to run up a New Hampshire mountain in fewer minutes than he is old in years—setting a “stupid and pointless” but motivating goal.

  • “I needed something stupid and pointless in order to experiment on myself, to see if I could convince myself it was possible.” (28:52)
  • On the power of hyperbole as a rhetorical device: “To throw beyond… I love that.”

• The “ramp” approach: Finding a way to slide gradually into hard things by lowering the initial barrier (mostly mental), and using humor as a way to prime receptivity:

  • Jay: “If you can make your audience, including your own soul… smile or laugh, you’re putting yourself into a more persuadable state. Behaviorists call it cognitive ease. Aristotle calls it receptivity.” (30:55)

• Suffering re-framed as training:

  • “I decided while I was lying there sweating on this table that this was part of my training. And what’s more, I wasn’t training to run up a mountain yet. I was training to suffer. And… suffering was an actual skill, your ability to suffer.” (32:03)

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6. The Persuasion/Discipline Debate (Continued)

(35:39 - 44:44)

• Ryan argues that reducing the stakes (writing “two crappy pages a day”) and lowering barriers is, in itself, a disciplined habit but agrees with Jay that the behind-the-scenes persuasion matters.

  • “Work smarter, not harder… knowing myself, if this is just sheer physical training, I’m not going to have fun, I’m not going to do it, I’m going to be miserable. And so you did a considerable amount of mental work to think around that, to then just get yourself to a place where you are doing the training necessary to do the thing that you want to do.” — Ryan (36:38)

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7. The Power of Mantras, Rhythm, and Repetition

(40:30 - 43:22)

• Jay’s insight: Discipline is about being a disciple (“to follow”)—but we can change whom or what we follow (e.g., our soul with a “different voice”).

  • “So in that respect, what I was doing was following my soul. Now my soul had to have a kind of voice.” (40:31)

• The ritual of mantras or chanting (paeans) in ancient Greek battle—how rhythm and repetition persuade not just crowds but ourselves.

  • Jay: “There is some neuroscience… which shows that that kind of rhythm is not only remembered more, but it actually creates cognitive ease where you believe it more. So I started using paeans on myself… The stupider—it makes a great experiment—the dumber the paean and the more you repeat it… And you can see Madison Avenue has picked up on this: ‘Bet you can’t eat just one’ is a paean.” (41:52)

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8. Stoics and the Limits of Willpower; Writing to the “Nerds and Weaklings”

(43:22 - End)

• Importance of reducing required willpower through smart strategies; using rituals, priming, and reframing to shore up limited self-discipline.

  • “We only have so much willpower. And however you can reduce the amount of willpower required to do a thing, again, this is the sort of work beforehand…” — Ryan (43:22)

• Jay positions his advice for “the weaklings,” the people who aren’t naturally self-disciplined:

  • “One of the ways I define stoicism, modern stoicism, is looking at… the people who are really into stoicism, who really understand it and seem to practice it. I get a sense they were pretty strong, self-disciplined people to start with… I like to write for someone like me, a weakling, a nerd who maybe just loves words so much and would rather be doing that than any kind of painful exercise.” (44:44)

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Notable Quotes

• Jay Heinrichs (on self-persuasion and habits):
  “I’ve painstakingly put together a bunch of good habits. I turn 70 next month, and I’m feeling better than I ever have in my life, in part because I’ve manipulated myself into this probably false belief that I’m younger than I am. That’s not discipline.” (23:50)

• Ryan Holiday (on reframing suffering):
  “Oftentimes the discipline, I would argue, is in what you’re talking about, which is the persuasion and how we think about it and how we frame it…” (35:38)

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Memorable Moments

• Jay’s “Jlight Saving” Time Zone: Creating a private time zone to trick himself into training early—“if you can make your audience, including your own soul, smile or laugh, you’re putting yourself into a more persuadable state.” (30:55)

• Mantras as Self-Programming: Jay repeating, “I’m a brilliant writer, everybody loves me,” in rhythmic chants to self-motivate—“the stupider the paean and the more you repeat it… It’s not just the repetition, I swear, it’s the rhythm.” (42:21)

• On writing for weaklings: “I like to write for someone like me, a weakling, you know, a nerd who maybe just loves words so much and would rather be doing that than any kind of painful exercise.” (44:44)

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Timed Highlights

• 08:19 – Jay’s approach to writing his book, and why he avoided Ryan’s influences
• 09:44 – The distinction between rhetoric and philosophy, and why it matters to everyday action
• 13:28 – On the irony of wanting to avoid being labeled “self-help”
• 15:47 – The rhetorical mastery behind Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations
• 17:15 – Why Meditations is brilliant “bathroom reading”
• 22:18-24:45 – Main debate: Is self-persuasion the same as self-discipline?
• 25:31 – Identity change as the real source of consistent habits
• 29:49 – Jay’s “impossible” goal: the mountain-running experiment
• 33:09 – Suffering as a skill; prepping for higher-order failure
• 41:52 – Rhythm, slogans, and why paeans work on the brain
• 44:44 – Who stoicism “for weaklings” is really for

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Conclusion

Jay Heinrichs and Ryan Holiday deliver a witty, insightful exploration of how classical techniques of rhetoric and self-reflection can fuel meaningful change—even in people who feel naturally undisciplined or resistant to traditional ideas of willpower. Their energetic debate maps out the subtle but important distinction between self-persuasion and discipline, offering both practical tools and philosophical insights for anyone looking to do hard things.

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Transcript

[Ryan Holiday]

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[Jay Heinrichs]

Foreign.

[Ryan Holiday]

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I am here at the office. It is eight something in the morning on a Saturday. The kids are here, my wife is here, a bunch of the Daily Stoke employees are here because we are scrambling to get out the last of the signed copies of Wisdom Takes Work. It's been a lot this launch. First off, I appreciate everyone's support. It's meant a lot to me, like an overwhelming amount of it. Like way more than we anticipated, budgeted for, supplied for all of that. So I appreciate it. I'm humbled by it. And then basically everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Shipping and international postal workers strike. There were some major mistakes with the 3rd Party Fulfillment Company that we use. There was problems with the publisher, there was problems with shipping delays, problems packaging. Then some people made some mistakes. It's just kind of one thing after another and we've been digging ourselves out of this for some time, but we're trying to just take it one book at a time, which is, you know, basically stoicism as well. I can't control what happened. I can't retroactively prevent it from happening. Obviously there can be accountability and stuff going forward, and we're going to have to make some changes going forward, but for now it's just been this scramble to get them out, and so that's what we've been doing. I appreciate the patience, everyone. I appreciate the support most of all. I'm just really proud for you to get this book in your hands and I can't wait for you to read it. And if it's been delayed at all for you, I'm really sorry and I hope it is worth it. I want to read you something real fast. The ancients weren't in agreement about the ways to achieve happiness or even how to frame the idea of the good life. One group of Athenians insisted on defining happiness in terms of behavior. The purpose of life was to live well, they said. And by well, they meant virtuously. Their idea of virtue was not that different from Aristotle's Wisdom, courage, moderation and justice. Standing up for what's right, applying reason to every decision. And these philosophers and students gathered in the Stoa pokele, the painted porch, a covered colonnade that fronted one of Athens large, largest buildings in the Agora. The group called itself the Stoics, and they taught apathe or apathy, a state of mind free from passions. These days there are drugs for that. The Stoics applied heroic doses of rhetoric that would connect them to the universe, which they believed was the overarching rational soul or logos. That's from Jay Heinrich's latest book, Aristotle's Guide to Self Persuasion. How ancient rhetoric, Taylor Swift and your own soul can help you change your life. I learned about this book over the summer and I invited Jay out to Bastrop to talk about it on the podcast. We had a great conversation in part one, of which Jay and I talk about self persuasion versus self discipline. We actually disagree a little bit here, although I'm pretty convinced that we think the same thing. He was making a somewhat semantic difference, but anyways, that's the point of the podcast, is to talk about things. We talk about Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius, why suffering is a skill, and how Jay thinks about Stoicism in the modern world. So let's get into it. You can check out his book Aristotle's Guide to Self Persuasion, which I believe we still have some signed copies of in the Painted Porch, and you can listen to this lovely conversation. We'll get into it. Hey, it's Ryan. I'm doing a bunch of live dates, including one coming up soon. I'm going to be in Seattle, Washington, on December 3, San Diego, California, on February 5, and Phoenix, Arizona, on February 27. The talk I just did in Austin sold out, so this will almost certainly sell out, too. I would love to see you there. Go grab [e-mail].

[Jay Heinrichs]

I gotta tell you that I deliberately avoided reading the Obstacle Is the Way until after the book was published because I didn't want it to influence me, really. And, boy, am I glad I didn't, because there's so much in common. I mean, we're covering really the same things.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you talk a lot about the Stoics in here. It was funny. I was just at the Stoipoky Lane in Athens earlier this month.

[Jay Heinrichs]

I've been there.

[Ryan Holiday]

It's not much. It's just a hole in the ground. Yeah. It's kind of crazy to think that, like, I mean, they also just built, like, a. A railroad through the middle of it. Yeah, they did. Obviously, like, we sometimes lament our destruction of, like, historical things in America, and it's like, at least we didn't build a railway through the agora.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Can't. Of course. We never had an agora.

[Ryan Holiday]

That's true. That's true.

[Jay Heinrichs]

And there is a. There is a painted stoa nearby that you.

[Ryan Holiday]

That's a different one, but.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yes, it is a different one.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yeah, but you can get a sense of the colonnades and.

[Ryan Holiday]

Stronger. Yeah. And you go, oh, this would be a good place to hang out and talk philosophy. I get it.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yeah, absolutely. They didn't have good coffee. Other than that.

[Ryan Holiday]

Why did you think that the Obstacle is the Way would be a problem? I think your book is kind of about the mental jujitsu we have to do to make us do things we don't want to do or see things that we might first be inclined to see as negative, as actually positive. So I guess they're similar in that sense.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yeah, I mean, it's different in a sense that we're not talking philosophy in my book. We're talking rhetoric. So it's a matter of persuasion, of reframing, of changing your mood, your attitude toward things, and your willingness to do something or stop doing it. So it's a little bit different from living a life of virtue, of doing the Right thing. Perseverance isn't really a big part of rhetoric. It's more about timing. Kairos, as they call it. So, yeah, it's different in that sense. The reason why I didn't read your book is I was careful not to read any modern book because I wanted to go back to this. It's clear you do read the classics, then have conversations, then read the other books and realize how good the other people are and how much you miss.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. And you sort of realize when you're reading the modern books that what you're getting is essentially a rehashing of the ancient stuff, which, if you're familiar with, is not as exciting. Like some of the sort of books about philosophy that I read. I'm glad I read them when I was younger, before I'd read some of the philosophy, because then you're getting these snippets for the first time. It's very exciting. It's like when you've read a decent chunk of scientific research and then you read the sort of pop science books, you're like, oh, I already know all these studies. The book's not as interesting. Yeah, but this line between philosophy and rhetoric is interesting. And I'm thinking one of the pushes and pulls in Marcus Aurelius life is these are these two competing teachers. He has Fronto, his rhetoric teacher, and Rusticus, his philosophy teacher. And you can tell they're both kind of vying to be the number one influence in his life. And then obviously, when he goes into politics, probably the rhetoric becomes more important than the philosophy. But where do you feel like the distinction between those two is?

[Jay Heinrichs]

That is such a great example. That's like, you know, the angel and the devil on his shoulders, rhetoric being the devil. Well, so Aristotle defined rhetoric better than anybody and pretty much before anybody did it.

[Ryan Holiday]

Well.

[Jay Heinrichs]

And so he defined rhetoric as distinct from philosophy in the sense that deliberative rhetoric, which he hoped was the rhetoric of politics, is the rhetoric of choice and decisions, of talking about the future. Now, Aristotle realized that everything is contingent. There is no rule book that can apply to everything you've written about this. So he decided that there needed to be the specific skills that he picked up from the Sophists, the wise ones, as they called themselves, who taught the art of manipulation. And so the idea of persuading people who disagree in a way that would lead to better choices or public decisions or consensus, that's distinct from philosophy, which was a pursuit of a truth, preferably a single truth. Both are equally valid. But if you're going into politics, you're gonna be a Roman emperor, you kinda want the manipulative part.

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, it makes me think what's so interesting about philosophy today and why it probably feels inaccessible or irrelevant to most people, is a failure of rhetoric. Right. The ability to take the truth or the idea and make it compelling or interesting to people or to make it practical to people. This is really where philosophy has fallen short. And it's almost like deliberate. Like philosophy is deliberately obscure and inaccessible rather than practical. And the funny thing is when you write books like yours or mine, where you make philosophy or these ideas accessible, the epithet for it is that it's just a self help book. As if that's not a good thing. Right. Like self help is something you kind of say with a sneer, like self help is here and philosophy or art or literature is up here. Yeah.

[Jay Heinrichs]

I was troubled by the very idea of writing a self help book, but guess what? I mean, I was trying to help myself. I was writing about how to apply rhetoric to help myself. I had no choice. It had to be a self help book. Although in the book I deny that it's a self help book.

[Ryan Holiday]

Right. Very satarco. Yeah. You don't want to be tarred with that pejorative. It's like a book that helps people. I don't want to be doing that. It seems weird that, that that's what you don't want. But just because of where it sort of sits in the market and then obviously there's grifters and stuff out there that sort of give the genre a bad name.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yes. Like the Sophists.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes. Like if you sort of dismiss what the Sophists do and all you focus on is the truth or the idea, and then you don't find a way to make it accessible for people. It doesn't work. I mean, like, I just think about like even Aristotle. If his most important work didn't have an unpronounceable name, might it itself be as popular as say, Meditations? Probably. You know what I mean? Like, like it's like, oh, are you reading Aristotle? What are you reading? I'm reading Nicomachian Ethics. It's like, oh, let me rush out and buy that.

[Jay Heinrichs]

And plus it's terrible reading, but.

[Ryan Holiday]

And it's supposedly written to his son, but it doesn't take any of the form, form of like, you compare this, what he's writing to his son with even, I don't know, Seneca's letters, which is the same performative medium, but one is actually reads like letters and the other reads like a philosophy treatise. And so only basically academics read one and lay people read another. Yeah.

[Jay Heinrichs]

And if you go fast forward a little bit to Lucretius when he is doing this marvelous poem on epicureanism. So much fun. I mean, he says it's like putting honey in the dose of wormwood to make a kid drink it. Yeah, I mean he realized. Yeah, exactly.

[Ryan Holiday]

And I guess that's what makes meditation such a remarkable work is here you have someone who's on the one hand eschewing rhetoric. He's not trying to convince you, and yet he's so clearly trained in rhetoric that even his self talk is better than most performative talk from the other philosophers and writers.

[Jay Heinrichs]

That's such a great way to put it. But you can even see that Plato doing that, hating rhetoric while applying every rhetorical tool to it.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, I mean, I don't think Fronto Marx, ru. Rhetoric teacher, could read Meditations, a philosophy work, and not go, this is mostly me like, like his, his fingerprints are all over it. There's, it's this perfect fusing of the philosophy and the rhetoric again, so remarkable that it's, it's self directed. As you're talking about the art of self persuasion, he's trying to convince himself of the ideas over and over and over again.

[Jay Heinrichs]

That's a great. There's self help for you. But you know, not only that, but some of the rhetorical tools he uses, like figures and tropes are absolutely what he had been taught rhetorically.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes. These sort of beautiful metaphors and images that sort of repetition of stuff.

[Jay Heinrichs]

The rhythm.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes. And then to go like here you have this guy who's very busy writing in Greek, not Latin, to himself, not expecting it to be published. The idea that an average person with even a sub average education could pick up a translation in their language and be like, I get some of this is pretty remarkable. You do not have to be a trained classicist. You do not have to, you know, you don't have to read the preceding works or the following work. Like you can just pick it up, know nothing about philosophy, know nothing about stoicism and go, oh, there's stuff in here for me.

[Jay Heinrichs]

You know, it's funny, I actually live in the middle of nowhere and I write out of a cabin in rural New Hampshire and I have a literal outhouse outside. And for years my bathroom reading has been Marcus Aurelius. He wrote the original bathroom book.

[Ryan Holiday]

It's a book that you pick up and take little chunks of. You don't read it from COVID to cover. It's a collection of epigrams and anecdotes and little insights. It's not. Yeah. If you're going through Play DOH on the toilet, you're like, wait, what did I read last time? Or where. You know, it's not designed to be consumed in snippets.

[Jay Heinrichs]

No. And, you know, longer term, bathroom reading is someone you're a fan of Montaigne, and you get the sense. And who is a big fan of Marcus Aurelius and even had quotations of Seneca painted on his wall.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Without Marcus Aurelius, I don't think he would have invented the essay because the essays are sort of long form epigrams.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. They're ruminations on a theme. It's basically a very extended commonplace book. His essays.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Ryan Holiday]

And it's the idea that the philosopher's job is to explore the self. Right. So often I think philosophy, or most philosophy, is trying to explain the universe, explain what you should be doing, explain what you need to understand. And I think both Montaigne and Marc Aurelius are like, I don't have time for that. What do I know? What's wrong with me? What am I struggling with? And it's trying to get to some flicker of self awareness.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yeah. What's interesting about Montana is that he talked about assaying himself like Barbie. He wondered what was he made of.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. Yes.

[Jay Heinrichs]

And so that became why we call it the essay, because he was assaying himself. So it wasn't a matter of formulation or a sense of how you should live the good life. He basically said, I represent all of humanity. And that got me back when I was thinking about this, to my favorite book of Aristotle, which is on the Soul. It's his weirdest book, and I found it the most readable, partly because I got a sense he was having fun with it. And that's what Aristotle was doing. He was looking inside his own body and wondering, where's my soul? Is it an organ or is it something above me or what's going on with that and how do I connect with it?

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes. And you see in him, I mean, he is rhetorically a genius. He's also an incredible writer who knows all the tips and tricks of the trade. And he's really good at it. He's just. He's applying it inwardly with humility, as opposed to the way a demagogue or an expert might do it, which is like, let me tell you what I know. He's saying I don't know what I know. Let's find out.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yeah, which is a great start if you're truly into your own self help.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, I think that's right. The world is full of tours, but.

[Jay Heinrichs]

You don't choose a Toyota truck to follow the beaten path.

[Ryan Holiday]

You choose it to find the places.

[Jay Heinrichs]

In between the detours where each adventure pulls you toward the next and wrong turns turn out right. So why would you ever take a tour when you can could take a detour? Toyota trucks?

[Ryan Holiday]

You've probably heard of eight Sleep by now because I talk about it all the time. I woke up on my eight Sleep mattress pad this morning and I've slept on one for years. Eight Sleep is a company that is about improving your sleep and they have dramatically improved mine. The Pod 5 is the newest generation of Eight Sleep's signature product, the Pod, which is a smart mattress cover that you put right on top of your existing mattress. Their results are hour of additional quality sleep per night. Eight Sleep also just came out with their new Pod pillow cover. It syncs with your Pod system and automatically adjusts your head and neck temperature in real time based on your sleep patterns. And like the mattress cover, you slip it over any pillow you already love. Just head over to 8sleep.com Dailystoicnow and use code DAILYSTOIC to get $350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra. And the best part is you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't like it. I think you'll love it. Your body will thank you for this investment in better sleep. Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, and you can see all the [e-mail] daily stoic so I was curious, what do you think the difference between self persuasion and self discipline are? Or does one lead to the other? Or how are they related?

[Jay Heinrichs]

I love that question, and I'm going to give you my own personal take on this. Many scholars, and I'm not one, disagree.

[Ryan Holiday]

Okay.

[Jay Heinrichs]

But I think that if you're applying persuasion to yourself, you're removing discipline altogether. Or sooner or later you impose discipline because it's easy. But so this is where epicureanism, as it evolved directly from Aristotle, differs from the Stoics, which is the sense that they weren't trying to live a virtuous life, they were trying to lead a happy one.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Jay Heinrichs]

And so you needed a series of steps that involve some good behavior along the way. The difference was if you're applying rhetoric to convince your soul that you're worthy of it. You're trying to live up to this higher self, as Aristotle described it. You need to convince this soul that you're doing the right things. Now, in order to do that, you have to apply all the tricks of the manipulative trade to do that, including convincing yourself that whatever goal you're setting is the most amazing thing ever, and then ramp yourself up to it very slowly and easily. The other thing you do in terms of rhetoric is you reframe the very idea of suffering. So you're not trying to time when you're going to suffer or prepare to suffer in any way. You're actually seeing the suffering itself as something very different and even possibly enjoyable. The idea of discipline, in other words, really bothered a lot of the Epicureans. And I have to say, it bothers me, too. I've painstakingly put together a bunch of good habits. I turn 70 next month, and I'm feeling better than I've ever had in my life, in part because I've manipulated myself into this probably false belief that I'm younger than I am. That's not discipline.

[Ryan Holiday]

You don't feel like you have discipline? I have habits, okay?

[Jay Heinrichs]

And Aristotle being the inventor of habit philosophy got me there.

[Ryan Holiday]

And you don't think habits are a result of discipline or a form of discipline? I guess I'm failing to see the distinction. I feel like discipline is. This is what I think I should do. Maybe I don't want to do it, but I'm doing it anyway. And whether you're doing it out of habit or you're doing it out of the sort of morning discussion with yourself, it seems like we're getting to the same place.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Spoken like a true stoic. Now, the difference. I like to use the analogy of flossing. I have flossed for many years.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Now, in the beginning, it did seem like something that really sucked.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Jay Heinrichs]

I mean, the idea. I mean, if you think about it in detail, it's kind of gross, painstaking and that sort of thing. I did it because I was driven to do it. I was. My dating life was falling apart because my gums were bleeding. It was disgusting. So I did it for a very specific goal. And I managed to convince myself that it really wasn't so bad to floss my teeth. Now I've done it for so many years. It's a tantal to my identity. This is what Aristotle believed was really important. It's just I'm a philosopher. That's all I am.

[Ryan Holiday]

I'm a woodworker I'm a flute player. Whatever.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Exactly. Now, a lot of people will say, when it comes to another wonderful skill that doesn't take discipline, except maybe in the beginning, is napping. I'm a champion napper, as every old guy like me should be. And the thing is, a lot of people say to me, oh, I don't nap. And what they're saying is, I am not one who naps right now. If you can change that sense of identity, and you can do it with these manipulative tools of rhetoric to change how you think about yourself and the soul is one way to do that. It's a little way to divide your daily self from that soul, that Aristotelian soul. If you can do that, it's basically having this conversation with somebody who's not quite you. It's sort of a better version of you. And at that point, you can convince it, using all these tools that maybe you are the kind of person who naps after all, and you're not doing it saying, I'm going to lie down and make myself nap. It doesn't work.

[Ryan Holiday]

But as someone who flosses every day, you don't see that as a little act of discipline, or you're saying there's no discipline involved because you've convinced yourself that it's part of your identity and now you just do it. I guess I would just argue that that's discipline. Anything you do every day, anything you turn into a habit, that's, I guess we could say positive is discipline.

[Jay Heinrichs]

But, you know, bad habits can teach you what good habits are.

[Ryan Holiday]

Sure.

[Jay Heinrichs]

So, for example, I have a cocktail every night. I shouldn't. That's bad. And yet if I don't have the cocktail, that's straying from a habit that I've ingrained in myself. And so the same thing with flossing. I just feel bad if I don't floss. I don't feel as if I should floss. I sort of can't not floss.

[Ryan Holiday]

Right. If we just say anything you do habitually is discipline, then obviously we're saying you have this. The discipline to do bad things. I think. I guess I would maybe define discipline as any time you're doing a thing that maybe is painful or difficult or not gratifying in the short term but has benefits over the long term. That is discipline.

[Jay Heinrichs]

It can be from a stoical standpoint. On the other hand, one of the things. So one of the things I read about my book is that I really needed to work out and I needed to do a heck of a lot of pt. I had a hip that was very difficult to overcome.

[Ryan Holiday]

It seems like you're breaking down from the book. Your body is falling apart.

[Jay Heinrichs]

I was falling apart.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Jay Heinrichs]

I mean, I was also suffering from a severe dose of self pity in every way. I had had a nice career and people weren't returning my phone calls anymore. I was in that old guy, privileged, white man problem era of my life. I needed, first of all, in order to not discipline myself, in order to make myself do the things I wanted to do, I had to do two things, and this is pure Aristotle. One was to set a goal that was a whole lot more interesting than walking again. I was walking with a bad limp and sometimes not at all. I wanted to be able to run again, which was much more difficult, bigger goal. And, you know, the Stoics talk about that too. As you know, I wanted to be able to run up a mountain in fewer minutes than I was old in years and be the first person over 50 to do it. And this was one of the big challenges.

[Ryan Holiday]

Where's this mountain, by the way?

[Jay Heinrichs]

It's in New Hampshire.

[Ryan Holiday]

It sounds amazing.

[Jay Heinrichs]

It is amazing. Yeah, you've gotta come and visit.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jay Heinrichs]

It's one of the most beautiful mountains in the northeast, but it also happens to be just about the right height and angle for the perfect measure of VO2. And so Olympians test themselves on this. Now, only a dozen people had ever run their age, which is reaching the top in fewer minutes than they're old in years, which is a marvelous fallacy that works great. And so I was told by two physiologists that it was actually physically impossible. Nevermind the fact that I couldn't even walk right, which turned into a trope for me, a hyperbole, which in the Greek, if you translate it, comes from the words meaning above or beyond, hyper and bully, which is where we get the word ball from. So to throw beyond this was. I love that I needed something stupid and pointless in order to experiment on myself, to see if I could convince myself it was possible. All right. None of that involved discipline. That was sheer fun. Like a word nerd kind of fun.

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, that doesn't involve discipline because you haven't done it yet. You're just the idea of doing it.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Exactly. But that was part of setting myself up. So not doing what I was supposed to be doing was the first step. And Aristotle actually writes about this. I call it the ramp. He doesn't. But the idea that you begin at such A low angle to the point where you're just almost procrastinating. The very first thing I was doing was setting a goal. A very well defined goal. Okay, now how am I going to do it? That's planning. The biggest problem I had was time, as we all have. So I decided I would create my own time zone. And, you know, my name is Jay, so I decided to call it Jaylight Saving. And again, here's something that's rhetorical, that doesn't involve discipline, which is that if you can make your audience, including your own soul, or you, as the case may be, smile or laugh, you're putting yourself into a more persuadable state. Behaviorists call it cognitive ease. Aristotle calls it receptivity. So I was making myself receptive just by making myself laugh at this stupid idea of my own time zone. Of course, the problem with that time.

[Ryan Holiday]

Zone is no one else is in.

[Jay Heinrichs]

It except my wife, who gets up early. So I did it by waiting, which is a great thing to do. If you don't wanna discipline yourself, procrastinate.

[Ryan Holiday]

Okay?

[Jay Heinrichs]

And every good writer, I'm gonna ask you, if you do this is a brilliant procrastinator. Like, you're really good at doing things other than writing.

[Ryan Holiday]

Deciding what day I'm gonna start, which is never today. I'm starting this on my birthday. You know what I mean? That's what makes you a successful writer.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yeah, sorry. So that's part of the. That's the whole ramping process. So I waited until the daylight savings changed in the fall to give. You know, the government granted me an hour of the day. And then I. The next year, I did the same thing. Now, in the meantime, I was really starting to do the PT and the workouts and stuff, until finally I spent a year training. Now, one of the things I did was to reframe the very idea of suffering. And it started with this. This doctor giving me hundreds, literally hundreds of dextrose sugar water shots to kind of flood the zone of my nerves. I won't explain why, it's gross. But I decided while I was lying there sweating on this table that this was part of my training. And what's more, I wasn't training to run up a mountain yet. I was training to suffer. And, you know, the Sophists believed that suffering was an actual skill, your ability to suffer.

[Ryan Holiday]

Certainly the Stoics would agree with that more than the Epicureans.

[Jay Heinrichs]

They would. Yes, that's true. The Epicureans would do everything they could to avoid suffering. You're Absolutely right. But that being said to me, none of that was discipline at all. There was a desire that came from this wonderful, silly goal. The other thing that I found was I wanted to be prepared for a higher order of failure. And you've written about this, which is this idea that this was literally an impossible goal. I had to convince myself that it was possible while at the same time realizing that failure, which would come from obstacles beyond my control, a very stoical principle, would still put me ahead. Like, imagine if I could run again. It wouldn't matter if I ran up this Mount Moosiloch in New Hampshire, but I would be able to enjoy myself running. I could ski again, all the delights I used to have.

[Ryan Holiday]

But. So you did all these rhetorical tricks to persuade yourself and to, you know, make it less intimidating and whatever. But at some point, you had to both do the training and then do the run. Isn't that discipline?

[Jay Heinrichs]

Well, okay, I'm still procrastinating here. So the very first thing I did was to sit down and read.

[Ryan Holiday]

Okay.

[Jay Heinrichs]

So I took my Jlight saving hour of the day. It became 4:30 in the morning, and I began my training by reading physiology books. So then this is part of changing my identity and getting in touch with my far superior soul, superior to my daily self. So I was looking at what Aristotle calls my phronesis. I translate as craft. It's often called practical wisdom. Like whether you know what to do, whether you can solve a particular problem where you have not just a book learning, but the experience. Well, okay. I'd been running. I trained in the past, in my youth. But I thought, I want to know exactly what's going on with my body, especially an aging body. So I started reading journals. I started. And none of that was training. I was deliberately avoiding doing the actual PT and exercise.

[Ryan Holiday]

But you did train at some point, right? Yes.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Weeks later, I started doing really easy things like foam rolling and yoga and stuff. And actually, the physiology reading was so difficult that I found yoga way easier. So in a way, the ramp kind of leveled itself a little bit. All right. Then gradually it became not such a big deal. I was getting bored with yoga, which I hate. So I decided to start the PT I was supposed to be doing, which is painful. I started doing that more because that sure beats yoga. So each step of the way, I was trying to keep the angle of that ramp as short as possible. Okay. But still, you're right. There was a degree of discipline, but I wouldn't call it that, because at the moment I started doing that. I was starting to feeling sorry for myself and thinking, I'm not doing that. This is actually kind of fun and interesting. I have my own time zone. I have read all about physiology, and I'm learning all kinds of cool stuff, which is super fun. And then on top of that, I'm going to end up at the top of that mountain, even though I was still doing just, like, basic PT stuff.

[Ryan Holiday]

What is interesting, because I think we tend to think of discipline as a physical thing, right? So discipline is the running, the lifting weights, the not eating the foods or whatever, doing the flossing. But oftentimes the discipline, I would argue, is in what you're talking about, which is the persuasion and how we think about it and how we frame it. Like, there's a writing rule I love, which is like, two crappy pages a day. That's the ramp. So if you go, I have to write this book, and I have to do it in two months, and that's 5,000 perfect words a day, you're going to despair and not do it. But if you just say, hey, I just need to make a small contribution today. I just got to show up, and by dramatically lowering the stakes, or to use your analogy, the angle of the ramp, then you just do it. And oftentimes you end up doing more than you thought, or you've tricked yourself into thinking that you're not doing it, when in fact you are doing it. You finish a book by showing up every day and just writing a little bit, and then. And you edit it and refine it, and you get where you want to go. But to me, that is an act of discipline also, because what you're doing is sort of going, well, here's the level I would be thinking about. Here's what I would be doing. But by sort of out thinking or over or thinking around it, I'm able to come up with it. I'll give you an example. I think also flossing is gross. It sucks. It's a habit that's hard to start, especially when you got to get the little box and pull out the thing, wrap it around your fingers, and go like this. And then it's like somebody invents the little sticks or, you know, they invent, and then all of a sudden, they've taken a thing that was difficult and they make it 40% easier. And now the. The discipline required to do. It's like work smarter, not harder, right? And I think. I think that deciding to work smarter, the work that you did, knowing it's like knowing myself. If this is just sheer physical training, I'm not going to have fun, I'm not going to do it, I'm going to be miserable. And so you did a considerable amount of mental work to think around that, to then just get yourself to a place where you are doing the training necessary to do the thing that you want to do. The holidays are coming up. That can take a lot out of you. You got family, you got travel. Maybe you're not eating right, you're rushing to finish stuff for the end of the year. Maybe you're not noticing stuff that's happening in your body. Markers or signs or indicators that something's wrong, that you need to be doing something differently, you need to be sleeping more, you need to get this checked out. And that's all. What Function helps you with Function is the only health platform that gives you data that most people never get and most importantly, it gives you the insights to do something with it. With Function you get access to over a hundred biomarkers, from hormones to toxins, markers of heart health, inflammation and stress, and you can even access MRI and chest CT scans, all tracked in one place. Over time, It's a near 360 degree view of your whole health, everything that's happening in your body. Look, the holidays are a stressful time. There's a lot happening in the world. We all have a lot going on. Sometimes you don't notice the changes in your body. You don't notice the markers or the indicators that something's wrong. Function helps you track it so you can reset and actually feel present this season and be in peak health. Function is a 360 degree view and what's happening in your body and 1000 Daily Stoic followers will get a 100 credit towards their membership. Just visit functionhealth.com Daily Stoic or use gift code Daily Stoic100 to sign up to own your health. Deciding what workout to do or how much weight to use. These are all roadblocks, ways that we sort of get in our own way. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. Tonal will pick the perfect weight, track your progress and suggest what to do next based on your muscle readiness, taking the guesswork out of getting a great workout. Tonal provides the convenience of a full gym and the guidance of a personal trainer anytime at home with one sleep system designed to reduce your mental load. Tonal is the ultimate strength training system, helping you focus less on workout planning and more on getting great results. You don't have to second guess your form. Because tonal is giving you real time coaching cues to dial in your form and help you lift safely and effectively. After a quick assessment, tonal sets the optimal weight for every move and adjusts in 1 pound increments as you get stronger. So you're always challenged. Black Friday early access is on for a limited time. Tonal is offering our listeners 750 bucks off a Tonal 2 purchase promo code TDS for $750 off.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Let's look at the word discipline.

[Ryan Holiday]

Okay.

[Jay Heinrichs]

And because I think you're leading to some an area where we probably agree.

[Ryan Holiday]

Probably. I just think this is interesting. Yes.

[Jay Heinrichs]

So when you are practicing discipline, you are becoming a disciple of something. You're following something or somebody. So in that respect, what I was doing was following my soul. Now my soul had to have a kind of voice.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Jay Heinrichs]

So what I employ.

[Ryan Holiday]

Changed the voice.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Changed the voice. Yes. Now what I change it to is something very specific. So we're gonna flash back again now to ancient soldiers going into battle. Back in ancient Greece, soldiers would begin praying to the God of healing on Olympics paean in order to protect them. So you imagine these soldiers running into battle saying, please, pin, don't let me be the one who gets speared. But pretty soon, or maybe right away, we don't know, they were shouting these prayers in a highly rhythmic way which they thought was magical, which is, you know, our charms come from this idea of song, of singing something. So Cicero wrote about this saying, the paean actually was a group of short and long syllables. Now, in ancient Greek, it's really difficult to translate this in anything sensible, but it's pretty clear he was using terms like a paean would be something like golden haired, far shooter, son of Zeus. And you imagine someone shouting that it actually. And there is some neuroscience behind this, not a lot, which shows that that kind of rhythm is not only remembered more, but it actually creates cognitive ease where you believe it more. So I started using pins on myself. In fact, I do it when I write all the time. I do a pian with the same rhythm. I'm a brilliant writer.

[Ryan Holiday]

Like a mantra.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yeah, it's like a mantra, only with a very specific read. I say, I'm a brilliant writer, everybody loves me, and you know, you're smiling. I did too. The stupider it makes a great experiment. The dumber the piano and the more you repeat it. It's not just the repetition, I swear, it's the rhythm. And you can see Madison Avenue has picked up on this bet. You can't eat just one is a peon.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Jay Heinrichs]

And a lot of you go back and you look at the slogans, which, by the way, peons became the word chant, started out as a prayer to peon and became a slogan where we're going to kill you right away. Whatever they were shouting.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Jay Heinrichs]

That became a kind of, of implanted belief through rhythm and memory that actually changes your ventromedia prefrontal cortex, which is what has to do with interpreting your reality. And so you begin to see yourself differently and the things around you differently. Now this is not so much discipline, this is pure manipulation.

[Ryan Holiday]

I think we agree. I mean, at some point you have to do the thing you do, the persuasion. But what are you persuading yourself to do? What is the persuasion towards? It's persuading yourself to do a thing and then you have to do it. And that's where the sort of willpower comes in. But I think what you're getting at, and maybe sometimes the stoics didn't do enough or people who people miss, is like, we only have so much willpower. And however you can reduce the amount of willpower required to do a thing, again, this is the sort of work beforehand or you know, it's like the Abraham Lincoln thing about you gotta chop down a tree. You should spend most of the time sharpening the axe.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Yes.

[Ryan Holiday]

But you go, hey, if this is just raw brute force, willpower, you know, you better hope you have a lot of it. I would say, like, as I've gotten older, I've had to get smarter about these things because, you know, it's like on my first book, before I had kids, before I was married, I could just, I sit in my chair and this is what I do all day. And as kids and life takes up more and more, you gotta be, no, I got one hour to be in the zone. And so what are the strategies that you use to get in that zone? It can't just be that kind of brute force.

[Jay Heinrichs]

That's true, I will say, and push back on this. I'm sure you will. One of the ways I define stoicism, modern stoicism, is looking at stoics and the people who are really into stoicism, who really understand it and seem to practice it. I get a sense they were pretty strong, self disciplined people to start with. Yeah, I think so. Like, they're awesome people. Sure. And so I like to write for someone like me, a weakling, you know, a nerd who maybe just loves words so much and would rather be doing that than any kind of painful exercise.

[Ryan Holiday]

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.

[Jay Heinrichs]

You hear that?

[Ryan Holiday]

That's not just a Toyota truck. That's the sound of no crowds, no.

[Jay Heinrichs]

Alerts, no distractions, and no telling what you'll find next. You know, like a detour. So why would you ever take a.

[Ryan Holiday]

Tour and you could take a detour?

[Jay Heinrichs]

Toyota Trucks My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner, and honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned around town. It's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded up with gear and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota Trucks are built for. Off road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer. From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks. They're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn [e-mail] trucks adventure detours that's toyota.com trucks adventure detours.