The Stoic Advice Every Man Learns Too Late In Life | Ryan Holiday PT 1

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: The Stoic Advice Every Man Learns Too Late In Life | Ryan Holiday PT 1

Release Date: August 15, 2023
Guest: Ryan Holiday
Host: Tom Bilyeu

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Main Theme and Purpose

This episode dives deep into the resurgence of Stoicism as a guiding philosophy for modern life, especially for men navigating a landscape shaped by cultural confusion, shifting values, and overwhelming temptations. Tom Bilyeu and Ryan Holiday contrast ancient role models, especially Marcus Aurelius, with current ones like Andrew Tate, dissecting what it means to build an “inner code” for living well. The episode covers masculinity, agency, modern social ills (like OnlyFans and the “red pill” movement), and how Stoicism provides actionable advice for fulfillment, resilience, and meaning in a disruptive world.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Choosing Role Models: Andrew Tate vs. Marcus Aurelius

[02:11–11:59]

• Tom contrasts Andrew Tate, “the pinnacle of modern masculinity” for many, with Marcus Aurelius, “the last of the five good emperors” of Rome.
• Ryan explains the cultural vacuum that leads people to hypermasculine influencers:

  “I get why all that's attractive, but I find him to be repulsive.” — Ryan Holiday [03:23]

• The importance of how one achieves success, not just success itself.
• The Stoic ideal: Talented, masterful, powerful, and also fundamentally decent, generous, and kind.
• Marcus Aurelius as a Model:

  • Raised deliberately, not by inheritance, reflecting the value of character and preparation.

  • First act as emperor: Shares power, reflecting humility and community-mindedness.

    “The first thing he does with absolute power is give part of it away…unprecedented in the annals of history.” — Ryan Holiday [10:08]

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2. What Is an Inner Code and How Do We Build It?

[11:59–20:59]

• Tom outlines three phases of personal development:

  1. Building a frame of reference (values & beliefs)
  2. Deploying it in daily life
  3. Pushing it outward (impacting the world, resisting temptations)

• Ryan notes how Stoicism confronted him with life-changing questions when he first read “Meditations” at 19:

  “No one had ever talked to me this way before. My dad hadn't talked to me this way. I hadn't really heard that in church or in school or on TV…” — Ryan Holiday [15:04]

• Emphasizes the absurdity of expecting people to "just figure out" how to live — people need guidance and structure.

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3. Stoicism and the Four Cardinal Virtues

[20:59–23:31]

• Ryan traces Stoicism’s origin and pillars:
  • Courage
  • Self-Discipline
  • Justice
  • Wisdom

    “Every situation, good or bad in life, every moment, big or small, one or all of those virtues is appropriate, is demanded.” — Ryan Holiday [22:42]

• Comparison to religion: Similar underlying operating systems aimed at framing “the good life.”

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4. Fulfillment vs. Pleasure — Recipes for a Grounded Life

[23:31–28:06]

• Tom defines fulfillment as a neurochemical state more resilient than happiness/joy, especially “in the presence of grief.”
• Recipe for fulfillment:
  • Working hard to gain skills
  • Enjoying your work
  • Serving yourself and the group
• Both agree: Philosophy/religion should align with human flourishing, which requires resistance to modern temptations and distractions.

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5. The Ancient Debate: Greatness, Ambition, and Power

[28:06–33:49]

• Alexander the Great as ancient role model; contrasting ambition with self-mastery (Diogenes’ famous “stop blocking my sun” retort).

  “Diogenes says, I have conquered the need to conquer the world.” — Ryan Holiday [31:58]

• True power is command of oneself, not command over others or possessions.

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6. Modern Distractions, OnlyFans, and the Paradox of Connection

[33:05–43:09]

• The abundance of pleasure (porn, OnlyFans, drugs, food, travel) makes self-discipline harder than ever.
• Pleasure vs. regret:

  “When you do something for pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame remains.” — Ryan Holiday (quoting Musonius Rufus) [34:23]

• Why men spend money on OnlyFans: not just sexual gratification, but the illusion of connection and being seen.
• The pain of a hyper-efficient, competitive dating market, emotional skill demands, and the allure of no-responsibility illusions.

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7. Stoic Advice for Lost or “Incel” Men

[43:09–47:11]

• Stoicism’s focus on agency:

  “All the things that you don't like about the world, all the things you don't like about yourself, being mad at other people, about them, resenting them, lamenting them, it's not going to make it any better for you. So how do you focus on what you control here?” — Ryan Holiday [43:13]

• Joan Didion quote: “The decision to take responsibility for yourself and your own life is the source from which all self respect springs.” [44:18]
• For those who feel irreparably left out (black pill):

  • Find meaning and companionship in service, contribution (animal shelter as example).

  • Momentum is built from “the most immediate attainable, realistic next thing.” (e.g., “You could lose five pounds, you could go for a walk.”)

    “Well-being is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing.” — Zeno (quoted by Ryan Holiday) [50:30]

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8. Building Resilience: Small Steps, Habits, and Doing Hard Things

[51:12–56:48]

• Practical habits: Wake up early, eat well, do something hard every day.
• Building a “track record” of discipline and courage stacks into an identity.
• Biological wiring ensures a sense of “disease” if you don’t do hard things.

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9. Challenges, Cold Plunges, and Mindfulness

[56:48–62:22]

• Cold plunging as a metaphor for practicing discomfort, self-mastery, and present awareness.
• The value is not in the health benefits, but in cultivating the mental muscles of presence and resilience, applicable to all life’s challenges.

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10. Emotional Control: What Stoicism Is (and Isn’t)

[62:22–67:12]

• Common misunderstanding: Stoicism as emotionless.
• Real Stoicism: Not suppressing but processing emotions with healthy distrust and control.

  “If stoicism is the processing of the emotions, the questioning of the emotions, the talking through the emotions, the having the emotions for a brief period of time and then going, I'm done with that and I'm moving on, then I'm all for it.” — Ryan Holiday [67:12]

• Examples from Marcus Aurelius: Not emotionless; known to cry, but also to “wipe away the tears and get back to it.”

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11. Masculinity, Gender, and Biological Realities

[72:16–79:04]

• Gendered expectations: Is toughness required of men? Should men always be stoic?
• Tom's perspective:

  “When you talk about how the world ought to be, that falls in my list of ought to be. Like, I think guys should be tough. I think that that's a hundred percent their responsibility.” — Tom Bilyeu [74:21]

• Ryan: Stoicism is not about gender, but creating “well-rounded humans.” Sometimes men need courage to be emotionally vulnerable, sometimes women need discipline to manage emotions.

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12. Stoic Parenting and Teaching Resilience

[79:04–86:53]

• Dealing with childhood pain, setbacks, and parents’ responses (Tom and Ryan share personal childhood stories).
• Instead of defaulting to “walk it off” or over-coddling, parents should help children create nuanced frames for adversity and pain.
• Extrapolation (“if I tolerate this, my kid will be weak forever”) is the enemy; address each situation as it comes.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On choosing models:

  “A lot of people aspire to be great but don’t really care if they’re good in the process.” — Ryan Holiday [06:24]

• On discipline:

  “We treat the body rigorously so it’s not disobedient to the mind.” — Ryan Holiday [51:48]

• On pleasure vs. pain:

  “When you do something for pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame remains.” — Ryan Holiday (Musonius Rufus) [34:23]

• On agency and self-respect:

  “This isn’t my fault, but it’s my problem.” — Ryan Holiday [44:18]

• On incremental progress:

  “Well-being is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing.” — Zeno / Ryan Holiday [50:30]

• On being bad before being good:

  “You can’t get good at anything if you’re not willing to first be bad at that thing.” — Ryan Holiday [63:58]

• On processing emotion (not suppressing):

  “[Marcus Aurelius] breaks down, he cries…and then he wipes away the tears and he goes to work.” — Ryan Holiday [67:40]

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Timestamps for Key Sections

• Andrew Tate vs. Marcus Aurelius [02:11–11:59]
• Inner Code & Stoicism’s Relevance [11:59–20:59]
• Four Virtues & Foundations [20:59–23:31]
• Fulfillment and Modern Life [23:31–28:06]
• Ancient Ambition Debate [28:06–33:49]
• Modern Distractions and OnlyFans [33:05–43:09]
• Stoic Advice for the Lost [43:09–51:12]
• Small Steps & Doing Difficult Things [51:12–56:48]
• Cold Plunge Discomfort Practice [56:48–62:22]
• Emotional Control Explained [62:22–67:12]
• Masculinity & Stoicism [72:16–79:04]
• Parenting & Resilience [79:04–86:53]

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Summary Flow and Tone

This episode is candid, empathetic, and practical—Tom and Ryan combine intellectual rigor with real-life stories and a direct, conversational tone. The focus is always on what actually works for living meaningfully, grounded in both ancient wisdom and evidence from modern life.

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For Listeners: Key Takeaways

• Fulfillment, not fleeting pleasure, should be your North Star.
• Self-mastery, agency, and responsibility are timeless virtues—developed through small, repeated acts.
• Pain, adversity, and emotional turmoil are inevitable; how you process and respond makes all the difference.
• Stoicism is not about being emotionless, but about understanding, feeling, and properly channeling emotions.
• The world offers endless temptations—choose well, build your code, and have the courage to live it out, one small step at a time.

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Transcript

[Ryan Holiday]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Ryan Holiday]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

of the ten largest banks get it. They get that. VantageScore, the modern credit score is the leader in predictive power, improving mortgage default predictions and saving lenders billions. Better predictions, better for your business with VantageScore. Today's guest is Ryan Holiday, best selling author and the man most responsible for introducing the modern world to Stoic philosophy, arguably the most useful philosophy for anyone trying to gain control of their mind. If you want to win at the game of life, the most important thing you can realize is that the quality of your life won't be determined by what happens to you. It will be determined by how you respond, what happens to you. And that's what Stoic philosophy is all about. In part one of this two part episode, we answer the question of whose ideas are going to see you through the hardest times? Modern influencers like Andrew Tate or influencers of old like Marcus Aurelius, who's considered the last of the good emperors of Rome? We we also dove into the OnlyFans phenomenon, the optimal code for living your life and what to make of the rise of both the red and black pill movements. You guys will not want to miss this episode or any of our future episodes, so be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Tom Bilyeu and now I bring you Ryan Holiday. My heart absolutely aches for all the people out there that feel lost and inadequate. People try to look good on Instagram. They don't really worry about who they actually are. I want to compare and contrast two people, okay? One being Andrew Tate, for many people considered the pinnacle of modern masculinity, the other being Marcus Aurelius, known as the last of the five great emperors of Rome. Who should people be looking up to? And most important, why?

[Ryan Holiday]

I think it's hard to be a man in the world these days where as we have corrected, you know, mistakes of the past, some of the things that sort of would have been reassuring or purposeful or Even just mooring, like tie you to who you are and why you're here for men has gone away. Right. Less people go to church than ever before. Less people work at the same job their whole life than ever before. You know, all these things that would explain who you were, how you should be, why you mattered. Those have fallen away. And, and so I'm not surprised by the fact that from that sort of emptiness or vacuum, people would be attracted to someone who both tells them what they want to hear and sort of sets down kind of an aspirational model where, yeah, you're good with women, you're financially successful, you seemingly emanate power and confidence. I get why all that's attractive, but I find him to be repulsive.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why?

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, I mean, first off, he's a sex trafficker.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And what if he was proven innocent? Because I, I would love to set that aside because if he is that, and God knows, some of the things I've seen make it seem like it probably it's. It's dark no matter what, and it may be just unbearably heinous. But I, I want to address the part that made people like, go to him because I think that that will break the spell. If it true, I think he'll just disappear. But prior to that, there was the sense of strong, could fight, very articulate, tons of money seemed to be the kind of guy that people wanted to be around. So I'm using him as a standin for hyper masculinity or the modern model.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, And I think you're making a point. Let's say perhaps he's innocent. It still doesn't change the fact that the business model from which his wealth has been derived is about the sort of a modern form of prostitution or pimping. Right. Like this is. I don't think this is. The Stoics don't have any problem with making money. Right. Being financially successful. Seneca says, what does it matter if the philosopher is rich insofar as that his money is not stained by blood. Right. And so I think it's great to be successful, to make money. I think how you made that money is more important than how much you have or don't have. Right. So I find the enterprise to be repulsive. Let's, let's. I just want to stipulate that. But if we're sort of contrasting some of the sort of hyper masculinity, manosphere, red pill kind of maleness with some of the ideals in stoicism, I think that's a Fascinating contrast because there was actually a recent. Maybe it was the American Psychological Institute or there was some medical institution that was sort of laying out what they thought the primary attributes of toxic masculinity were. And one of them is stoicism. Like they're laying out stoicism as in non emotional, as in unemotional, invulnerable, sort of suppressive, which I think is obviously a fundamental misreading of stoicism. But. But I do think the contrast between those two things is interesting. There's like maybe what people would call lowercase stoicism and uppercase stoicism. I'm obviously interested in the sort of, the actual philosophy of stoicism, the Marcus Aurelius version of Stoicism. It's interesting you pointed him out as one of the five great emperors. Actually the historical term there is he's the last of the five good emperors. Interesting. Which I think is an important distinction because he is great. I mean, you don't become the most powerful man in the world without some form of greatness there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You don't stay the most powerful man. But he was just appointed so you definitely, you could. His son, for the love of God, was a tyrant, psychopath.

[Ryan Holiday]

But what's interesting about Marcus is how he gets there. Right? But pointing out that great and good are not the same thing and that a lot of people aspire to be great but don't really care if they're good in the process. And I think to me, what's truly impressive, what true greatness is, is both. It involves both being talented and masterful and powerful and successful, but also fundamentally decent and generous and honest and fair and kind. All these other attributes that can sometimes get lost in a cutthroat, ambitious, real world scenario. Right. But Marcus's story is so interesting because he's more than just appointed. Right. So what's so fascinating about the five good emperors is basically for five consecutive emperors, there is no male heir. I think we all agree hereditary monarchy is not a great system. It doesn't tend to create good leaders. So why do you have five in a row? It's because the emperor was not simply naming his eldest son his successor. So what happens is Hadrian, who is two emperors before Marcus, is without a son. He's probably gay, you know, sort of an eccentric, interesting guy. He's a pretty good emperor. He's flawed in a lot of ways, but he's a good emperor, Right? No one would say he's a great, a good man, but he was a, he was a Great emperor. And he's starting to look around who's going to succeed me. And he looks at this boy. Marcus Aurelius is pretty young. Then he doesn't come. They're not related anyway. But he is from a prestigious Roman family. And there's something about this kid that strikes Hadrian. He nicknames him Verismus, or the Truthful One. So he has some fundamental honesty or decency to him that makes Hadrian think like, this kid has potential. He's smart, he's philosophically inclined. Quite early, doesn't want to be emperor, right? Which is, I think, also a positive sign in a leader. Like the leader that wants the power the most is the one you have to be the most worried about. So Hadrian decides, hey, there's something in this kid. But he also knows that the worst thing you could possibly do is make a kid a king, you know. And so he has to set in motion some training program that would make this kid a great emperor. And so he realizes he needs, like a stopgap, he needs, like a placeholder before Marcus is ready. And Marcus not having a male relative who could do this, Hadrian settles on this guy named Antoninus, who's the most powerful politician in Rome at that time, who's sort of worked his way up through the ranks. Honest, decent, good. And Hadrian's considering maybe he's the successor. And he. The story is that he notices one day Antoninus helping his stepfather, his elderly stepfather, up a flight of stairs. No one's watching. And he just sees this moment of kindness or goodness in a person who is otherwise a very talented, ambitious, powerful politician. So what Hadrian does is he names Antoninus his successor. In exchange, Antoninus has to name Marcus Aurelius his successor. And so Hadrian probably thinks Marcus will reign for that. Antoninus will reign for three or four years or ten years. Right? Life expectancy there is not super long. And Antoninus ends up ruling for like two decades. And he and Marcus have this incredible relationship where he seems to actively be interested in teaching Marcus and modeling good behavior for Marcus. And Marcus, in turn, doesn't see this adopted stepfather as a rival in any way, as an impediment in any way, but as someone to learn from, someone to model himself on. And so for 20 odd years, Antoninus leads while preparing this kid to succeed him. And that's what ultimately ends up happening. And I think a testament to Antoninus's tutoring and to Marcus's learning and inherent decency, the first thing Marcus does when he becomes Emperor is he names his stepbrother Co Emperor. Right. So the first thing he does with absolute power is give part of it away, which is, you know, unprecedented in the annals of history. And so all of this is to say what makes Marcus great is not just that he's a great leader, he's a great military campaigner, that he's smart, that he's good at communicating, that he knows how to broker, you know, compromises. But that sort of fundamentally, there is a decency there, a goodness there, a sense of community, mindedness in it. In Meditations, he talks about the common good 40 or 50 times. Right. Like what. What. What's in Marcus that makes Marcus, I think, a worthy model for young men and for young women is that, you know, he's not corrupted by the power that he has. He doesn't feel the need to prove anything to anyone. He has this sense, this inner code that he's trying to live by. And he wants to be great, but he doesn't necessarily want to do it through the piling up of wealth or honors or accomplishments, but by making a positive difference in the world.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, What I want to talk about is that inner code. So what I find interesting about this whole setup is. All right, so I don't know a lot about Andrew Tate, but it does seem like he had quite a dysfunctional relationship with his father. Yes, fatherlessness is tied to a lot of bad outcomes. Part of the question, and that's for boys and girls, part of the question becomes why?

[Ryan Holiday]

Why?

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's that dynamic? But what. What I find interesting in life, if. If it's all predetermined and you either are just born a good person and you're going to be fine, or you're born a sociopath and nothing that happens to you is going to make any difference legitimately. Close. My company quit. Because the whole point. What's the point? Yeah, yeah. For me, literally, it's called impact theory, because I really believe that there are a set of ideas that you can give to people, and if they deploy those ideas, it will make their life better. And so all I am trying to do is actually articulate these ideas now. They get extremely complicated. You and I were talking before we started rolling. For me, this has really gone in three phases, and this is kind of how I want to walk through this today. So phase number one for me was the inner code. So I needed to build a belief system. And that was the beginning of my show, was just that I was just trying to help people cobble together what I called mindset. If you get the right mindset, which I now probably refer to as frame of reference. So you build a frame of reference intentionally. Most people do it completely on accident.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But I would want them to take control of that process. So you're building a frame of reference from beliefs and values. What is, what do I choose to believe is. And then what ought to be.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Then once you have that, you go into phase two, which is deploying it in your immediate life. So I'm going to deploy it in my relationships, in my career, in my personal finances. I'm sure a lot of the things. Because honestly I came to stoicism not by reading stoicism, but, but by going, what works.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so you end up, and then you hear it for the first time, you're like, whoa. Like this is exactly the kind of thing that I've been steering myself towards. And then phase three becomes what I'll shorthand to the reality distortion field portion of your life. You get to the point where, okay, I've built the right lens through which to view the world and myself. I've deployed it in my immediate region. And now I want to see how much I can really push this out into the world. Now I, originally I would have thought of it as creating the world that you want. But as the modern world ratchets up and throws more temptations, more ease at people, I find that a lot of what I think about is knowing what to resist, what not to do, what to turn away from. So walk me through what, what is that inner code that somebody who's aiming at the, the, I'm gonna call the, the ease of Tate. Right. Get rich quick.

[Grainger Advertiser]

Sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Fast and flashy. Not necessarily about long term relationships. And then comparing to somebody like Marcus Aurelius, that's really about self denial, anchoring, not giving into power.

[Ryan Holiday]

I, I remember, I, I, I, I understand that position very well because I wasn't, it wasn't that long ago that I was there. I remember I was 19 years old. Someone had recommended that I read Marcus Aurelius Meditations. I was sitting in my college apartment, it arrived in the mail. I went and I got it and I sat down and I read it. And here you have the thoughts of the most powerful man in the world, sort of explaining like his code, how a person should be, what a person should do, what greatness was, what goodness was, what virtue was. And I remember being struck so much by the, this sense that like no one had ever talked to me this way before. My dad hadn't talked to me about this way. I hadn't really heard that in church or in school or on tv. You know, there. There is this sense, I think, that, like, kids will just figure it out. People will just figure it out. Or that, you know, it's obvious, and it's not obvious. People need guidance. They need structure, they need advice. Like, it's absurd that you would just expect them to figure this stuff out by trial and error, because you can end up going down these blind alleys. It could take you years to find out that, hey, this trait you picked up, this way of living, isn't actually the right one or isn't working for you. It's not as meaningful as you think it was. So what so struck me about the Stoics was that it answered this same question that I think people are feeling like the Andrew Tates or random YouTubers or TikTokers are answering, which is like, how should I be? What is the good life? What do I need to do in the world to get ahead? Or how do I prevent myself from being taken advantage of or being weak or failing? How do I deal with this hole that I have inside me? And I think it's a shame that we don't think of philosophy as a way to address those existential questions, because that's fundamentally what philosophy was from the very beginning. Today we think of philosophers as like, somebody who works in the philosophy department at Harvard, or we think of some unpronounceable German name. But, you know, Socrates is walking around trying to answer the questions about knowledge and wisdom and insight and goodness. Diogenes famously walks around with his lantern and he says, show me a good man. He's looking for that kind of person. The founding of Stoicism. Zeno is this successful young merchant. He inherits the family business, suffers a shipwreck. He washes up on shore in Athens, having lost everything. And he walks into this bookstore, and the bookseller is reading the works of Socrates, right? One of the dialogues of Socrates. And he says. He walks up to the bookseller and he goes, where can I find a man like that? And the bookseller points to this cynic philosopher named Crates. And that sets Zeno on this mission, right? He's lost everything. He doesn't know where to go. He doesn't know what to do. And philosophy is that light. It is that North Star.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I want to really put a point on that for a second, because as I was researching, searching for this episode, I took a whole bunch of sort of journal style Notes on the idea of philosophy.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I think that we all have a God shaped hole in us.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it has been. I'm not even sure how to categorize what's happened to religion because in some ways we're like becoming more religious, but in other ways it really does feel somewhat empty and it feels like there's a huge fragmentation and so there is no one galvanizing sense of who you ought to be and what you ought to become. Right.

[Ryan Holiday]

And religion is political now as opposed to a guide to living in the world, which is what it was supposed to be. You know, 2,000 years ago. You think of the Ten Commandments, right? It's like, do this, don't do this. Right. And philosophy and religion were intertwined. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Aren't they one and the same? It's just one is backed up by a deity and one is not.

[Ryan Holiday]

I mean, I mean this more literally. Like Paul is known as Paul of Tarsus. St. Paul was known before he becomes St. Paul as Paul of Tarsus. And Tarsus is the center of Stoic philosophy. It leaves Athens and it goes to Tarsus. And he studies Stoic philosophy. Right. And Christianity absorbs a bunch of the ideas from Stoic philosophy, which I think because I lost the thread a little bit. But like you said, what is the code? Right. What is the code for living that philosophy teaches us?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so we're back with Zeno. He's been on the shipwreck. The reason that I wanted to really drill that point home is so I started this by saying my heart bleeds for the people that feel lost and inadequate. And why does my heart bleed for them? Because I've been there. I know intimately what that's like for me. I found Taoism and then business forced me into something probably more like Stoicism. But you, when you begin to create a category of thought in your mind about how things ought to be, how you ought to be, and you start steering towards that, then you can create meaning and purpose in your life.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so now all of a sudden, and I mean, this is a straight quote from the Stoics. You can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you react.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so that's what's so fascinating about that moment is you've got this guy that had everything, loses it in a shipwreck. And whether it's apocryphal or not, like he's, I imagine, dream dripping wet as he walks into the bookstore, you know, and is like, how do I reconceptualize of my life now.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, it's the moment in Fight Club when his apartment gets blown up and he loses everything, and he's having to look at life with new eyes for the first time. And Zeno would. Would say later, he. He would joke, he says, you know, I lose everything. He says, I made a great fortune when I suffered a shipwreck. Because he lost everything financially, he lost everything as far as his identity goes, his work, his. His sort of family's legacy. And what he finds, his philosophy, he finds this code of living. And Zeno is the first of the Stoic philosophers to articulate the four virtues which Stoicism is built around. Courage, self discipline, justice, and wisdom, which also any Christian would recognize as the cardinal virtues. So Stoicism and Christianity share the same underlying operating system, if you will. One says that God gave it to us, and maybe the Stoics would say it's from the gods, or they would say it's from, you know, our ruling reason, our rational sense. I think it doesn't really matter. What matters is that those are four traits, four bedrock values that you can build a great and a good life around. Courage, self discipline, justice, and wisdom. Every situation, good or bad in life, every moment, big or small, one or all of those virtues is appropriate, is demanded. Right? Everything the Stoics would say is an opportunity to practice one of those virtues. So, you know, famously, when Marcus Aurelius is talking about how the obstacle is the way, he's not saying that, hey, this shipwreck is awesome, he's saying that this shipwreck is an opportunity to practice one or more of the Stoic virtues. This betrayal by your business partner is an opportunity to practice one or more of these four Stoic virtues. Right? This loss of a family member, this horrible warrior in the middle of. Right. Also this incredible success. You've just become the emperor of Rome. Courage, self discipline, justice, wisdom, all of that and more is demanded of you. And so, like Stoicism isn't a list of commandments, do this, don't do that, but it is these sort of four bedrock values which you're supposed to build your life and your decisions and your individual actions around and towards.

[Grainger Advertiser]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

The thing that I find so I don't believe in God, but I so relate to the idea of that, that sense of there is a hole in me and I need something to fill it. And for me, I think all of this, whether it's religion, whether it's philosophy, what is trying to get at is evolution has planted these drivers, algorithms in your mind and there's just no escaping them.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And the reason there's no escaping them is they are the things that you have to do in order to survive long enough to have kids. That have kids.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so the, the epitaph on my tombstone ought to read, you're having a biological experience. And what I want people to understand is death is a biological experience. 100%.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And whether God gave us evolution in the body, whether this is all a simulation, none of it matters. Sure. What, what it boils down to is the, the way that you interface with life, the way we interface with each other, the most importantly, the way we interface with ourselves is pre programmed. Like you. You are going to feel some kind of way, you are going to be prone to love, you are going to be prone to jealousy, you are going to be prone to envy, joy. All of it, like the human experience, as varied as it is, is so narrow when you compare us to other animals and what they go through. And once people realize that and you realize, okay, there, there is no way to escape certain pressures.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so now whatever philosophy that you have ought to align with the things that are going to make you, I would say, fulfilled.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I'll round it to human flourishing. Right. So to me, something you've said and the note that I took even before we started is you need a North Star. There needs to be something that you're aiming at. And so, you know, I hold up Andrew Tate and Marcus Aurelius as two potential north stars, as a bundle of ways of approaching the world, of deciding what to Value of deciding what to believe, but which one of those you choose, one is going to be more aligned with the. The algorithms that you already have running in your mind and thusly are going to lead you to a life of more fulfillment. It's probably worth me defining what I mean by fulfillment. So to me, fulfillment is the only neurochemical state that is pleasant and can survive something like grief, because joy or happiness does not survive grief. You cannot be joyful and grieving at the same time. But I think, curious to see if you agree with that. I think that you can be fulfilled and grieving at the same time. So I think fulfillment has a recipe. And that recipe is you must work really hard. Like that nature is going to ensure that you work really hard and that that is pleasurable and that you have a sense of disease if you don't, because otherwise you're going to die in an evolutionary context. So you must work really hard to gain a set of skills that you enjoy for whatever reason that allow you to serve not only yourself, but the group.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so that recipe to me is everything. The. Whether it's Stoic, whether it's Taoism, whether it's Christianity, Islam, whatever, it's the. The one that's going to win is going to be the one that most aligns you with the things that make you feel grounded, like you have meaning and purpose, you feel secure and worthwhile. All the things that I lament for people that feel lost and inadequate.

[Ryan Holiday]

What's interesting, how timeless this discussion we're having is. I mean, Marcus would have recognized it himself, Right? In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks quite a bit about the other emperors who come before him. Right. This is an elite club he's in. Some are more famous than others. But, you know, he talks a lot about Alexander the Great. Right. Who was sort of the historical model for manliness and greatness and success and ambition, is the greatest conqueror that ever lived. You know, one of the great military minds.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How far before Aurelius was he?

[Ryan Holiday]

Alexander the Great dies not long before Zeno makes his way to Athens. So it's a long time, and we're talking 500 years or so. It's interesting how we tend to think like the ancient world is so compressed. Marx, Aurelius quotes poets in meditations that were further away from his time than Shakespeare is from ours.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Whoa.

[Ryan Holiday]

So this goes back. This is a long tradition. And the debates about greatness and ambition and power, it's there, you know, the Xerxes, the Persian king who wanted to Conquer the world. Alexander the Great, who does conquer the world. You know, Alexander the Great, he is this great brilliant conqueror. And, you know, he makes it to the end of the earth. And his men finally rebel. We want to go home. We've been doing this for, you know, 20 years. And he says, what are you gonna. He's like, are you gonna go home and let it be said that you left Alexander the Great alone to finish conquering? And they were like, yeah. And there's some argument that his men killed him. But Marcus Aurelius tries to talk to himself and meditate. She goes, you can't compare yourself against this guy. He goes, he's like, it's important that you remember that Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and they were both buried in the same earth. Right. That death is this great equalizer that you don't get to take these accomplishments with you. And so to be insatiable in life is really a kind of an emptiness, kind of a torture that doesn't pay off the way that you think it does. Right. And so in the ancient world, they were constantly looking at these figures. And there's this famous exchange. I mentioned Diogenes earlier. Diogenes is this great philosopher, sort of a predecessor of the Stoics. And he meets Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great's a big fan. He's a student of philosophy himself. And he comes across Alexander comes across Diogenes, who's laying by the side of the road just sunning himself. And Alexander the Great sort of walks over him and he says, hi, I am Alexander the Great. What can I do for you? Thinking that he can bestow favors on this man and impress him. And Diogenes looks at him and he says, you can stop blocking my son. And the idea that the contrast, the reason the ancients would tell this story was to say that actually Diogenes is greater than Alexander the Great because Diogenes is self sufficient. Diogenes has reduced his needs to zero. Diogenes doesn't need to prove anything to anyone. And he had sort of taken a different path in life. And I think there's probably a middle ground between these two that we want to embody. But you know Steven Pressfield, right? Yeah. Steven Pressfield writes a great novel about Alexander the Great called the Virtues of War, I think. And there's a scene, a fictional scene between Alexander and Diogenes, and he sort of renders another one of their meetings. And I think it illustrates his tension. You know, Alexander the Great goes to Diogenes and says, I have conquered the world. What have you ever done? And Diogenes says, I have conquered the need to conquer the world. And so I think it's great to be driven to try to do things. But the Stoics would say, are those things driving you or are you driving them? What are you a slave to? Who's actually in control of your life? And so I think oftentimes the people that we hold up as heroes or that we admire, if you actually get up close with them and you see that they're not as free as you think they are, they're not as powerful as you think they are, they're a slave to something or someone, even if it's just like their over scheduled calendar. And so, you know what's beautiful about meditations is you have this immensely powerful man trying to get to the root of what it actually means to be powerful. And I think he settles on. The idea of being in command of yourself is actually a rarer thing than being in command of an army or an empire or a, you know, a great legacy or, you know, whatever, whatever one is after in life.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so this idea of being a slave to the things that you're into, that's one of the things that I worry about a lot with the modern world. So you have porn beginning to skew people. The idea that you could see more attractive naked women in a single session than most men would have seen in their entire lives sure is pretty crazy. Only fans, which is a whole thing. I don't even know how to conceptualize it. That, that's when I had my head down and I was just working for, you know, whatever, two decades, I. I look up and. Only fans is the thing that I don't necessarily. I haven't fully grappled with what that means. Drugs, just food. Like there are so many things.

[Ryan Holiday]

I mean, you can get on a plane for 200 and travel basically anywhere you want, right? At any time. Like the. It's wonderful how accessible and real, real like technology and capitalism has made things. But it also makes it hard to be self contained, to be self sufficient, to be in control of your life and not controlled by the endless urges and temptations and distractions and pleasures that are out there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are the pleasures bad?

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, the Stoics would say that pleasure isn't bad per se, but they would ask, how do you feel the morning after? Right. They would ask what regrets come from it. Right. What negative consequences come from it. Masonius Rufus is one of the great stoics. He's the teacher of Epictetus, he says, when you work hard on something, it's painful, but the pain passes quickly and the virtue or the accomplishment remains. But he says, when you do something for pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame remains. And so when I think about the things that people do, whether. Whether it's drugs or drinking or sexual stuff or just any of the pleasures that we chase, it's fun in the moment, it's rewarding in the moment, but the costs come later. And you can't separate those costs. You can't go, I had an awesome time drinking last night without integrating the morning hangover into that cost benefit analysis. But that's kind of the problem that we do. Right. It's like you're eating whatever you want, you're not exercising, because that's hard. Well, you don't see the consequences of that until you look in the mirror six months from now. Right. And vice versa, when you decide to work out and to eat clean and to push yourself and to be disciplined, you know, you don't see the benefits of that until later. And our inability to deal with that, I think, is a big part of why we're not the people we want to be or the people that we can be.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I have a thesis.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Many people need to be chased by a lion and, you know, obviously, as a metaphor, in order to have their life focused, take on meaning, because then it. You. You have a thing to deal with. You have a thing that provides that structure.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so when I look at the modern landscape, the thing that I really worry about is that there is no, like, you can. In a modern context, you can live in your parent basement until you're 35, and there's really no major consequence for that.

[Ryan Holiday]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And what do you think about that? So, like, what do you make of something like OnlyFans, where when, you know, I've been married for 21 years, I will often give relationship advice or have relationship guests on the show. And one of the comments you will see in the thread is one person will be like, oh, I think you should listen to Tom's advice. He's been married for 21 years. Then somebody else would be like, yeah, he got married 21 years ago. There was no social media, There was no swiping. Right. Like, one you'll see a lot is women. Women would settle back then. So I was like, thanks, guys.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, yeah, sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You know, and like, what do you think about that? What. What is the thing that has broken, that has left men spending inordinate amounts of money.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

On a woman they're never going to meet.

[Ryan Holiday]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Who almost certainly is. You're not actually talking to them. You're talking to like, probably a guy that's running their account all while. And here's where my brain broke.

[Ryan Holiday]

All while.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You could go get free porn.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So this isn't just about masturbating like that. There's free stuff that you could do. You don't have to pay for. What the. Like, what's happening.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. I mean, I don't think one thing broke. I think a lot of things broke. Right. And so what are those things? Well, I mean, first off. Yeah. An unlimited amount of high definition pornography is an incredible temptation to any lonely person. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I get porn far more than I get onlyfans.

[Ryan Holiday]

I mean, at a certain point, watching pornography is lonely and unrewarding because human beings desire and need connection in relationships. But if you have been left behind, like we talk about people who've been left behind, like workers. Right. You're a factory worker and now that job can be done cheaper in China or it requires way more education than you have. You're left behind. But I think a lot of people are left behind when all of a sudden the dating market is so much more efficient. Right. Where the competition is so much more severe. Right. Where people don't have to settle, like you're saying, because they have access to unlimited fish in the sea. And so this means if you don't have your life together, if you're not taking care of yourself, if you don't have the emotional wherewithal and skills. But it's always been hard to be a person and to find your people. Right. By that I mean friends, and I mean potential spouse or life partner. It's always been hard. But then what we ask of people today is so much greater. We demand emotional awareness. Like I have young kids. The emotional awareness and the load that I'm supposed to carry and the level of involvement I'm supposed to have in their lives is enormously bigger than my father had and incomprehensibly bigger one to two generations back. Right. And then you think about the technological prowess that a person has to have. You think about how expensive things, like, it's just hard to be a person. And so people are left behind. And so if suddenly you can fool yourself into thinking that this beautiful adult actress or sex worker is into you, that illusion is going to be more comfortable than facing the hard reality. Have you ever watched the MTV show Catfish?

[Tom Bilyeu]

No.

[Ryan Holiday]

You know what catfishing is, right? Yeah, I'm very familiar with the concept. It's actually a really revealing show about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are they intentionally catfishing people?

[Ryan Holiday]

No, no. The show is people who think they're being catfished and then they come and help them investigate to see whether they are or not. And I think it's actually a really revealing look into what it, it's like to be one of these kinds of people in the world because these kind of incels.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What are we talking about?

[Ryan Holiday]

Incel is a strong word, but somebody who is struggling, like struggling to find real people in real life, right? And invariably the person has fallen for someone that is not just out of their league but, but obviously out of their league to everyone but them, right? It's like. And so cognitive dissonance is a powerful force. And so when this male or female model randomly slides into your DMs on social media and falls for you, an unemployed person working in your parents, you know, living in your parents basement and they're really successful, but they don't have a phone that works. So that's why you can't FaceTime. Like they're not seeing what's obviously there. Because to see what is there would mean despair, right? To see that they have been wasting their life or that the world is unfair or unjust or, you know, much, you know, more difficult than they would like it to be. That's a hard, that's a hard truth to face. And I think it's easier to turn to illusions like falling in love with some random person who's tricking you and ultimately going to take money from you. And a lot of what's happening on adult websites or OnlyFans is just a slightly more ruthless version of that same thing. They're creating a parasocial relationship with someone where you feel like it's a two way street and it's fundamentally a one way street. And you would rather live in those delusions than go to the gym, go back to school, go to therapy, deal with the unfair or awful hand that life dealt you. But it, even if it is unfair, even if it is unjust, it doesn't change the fact that that's what you were dealt and you got to figure out what you're going to do with that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What would the stoics say to an incel?

[Ryan Holiday]

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, It's hard to think about what that is because I think it's such a complicated. It's psychological and it's economic and it's the sort of radicalization of the Internet. But I think the stoics would say, like, look, all the things that you don't like about the world, all the things you don't like about yourself, being mad at other people, about them, resenting them, lamenting them, it's not going to make it any better for you. And so how do you focus on what you control here, on what you can do here? And I do think, you know, at the core of stoicism, although it has this reputation for being sort of resigned, the core of stoicism is this strong sense of agency that you don't control a lot of what's happened before or in the future, but you control who you are right now, what you do in this moment. And the decision to, to be a responsible adult. Joan Didion famously said, you know, the decision to take responsibility for yourself and your own life is the source from which all self respect springs. Facts and facts, totally. And the decision to go, this isn't my fault, but it's my problem. This sucks, but I don't want to live a sucky, shitty life, so I'm going to do something about it. I'm not going to blame other people for the fact that I am undesired, that I am unhappy, that I am unsuccessful. I'm going to do, to do something about that. That is the first choice. That is the number one thing that is up to you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let's say you're Quasimodo. Yeah, I don't know the Hunchback. I actually don't know the story, so I don't know what the punchline in the movie is. But because the, the black pill community, I've, I've not engaged with much, I know very little about it. But when I think about these things, if I'm Quasimodo and like, it really is out of the cards for me, like I, I am broken in a way that nobody is ever going to find attractive. I feel like, look, that's really brutal and I would never want that to be true. But at some point you either say, okay, that part of my life is dead and I'm gonna have to go find something somewhere else, or it's going to drive you mad. Like, I couldn't let that become the core of my identity. There's no doubt that that would be a part of it. You can't get away from that. You don't want to pretend that it isn't what it is. But at the same time, like, I, when I think about, again, this all Comes back to frame of reference for me. What do you believe is true about the world and how ought the world be? And I would say the. Okay, what is. In that moment, I'm not going to find a traditional relationship where physical attraction is the. The first thing that's going to lead me down that path. But the world ought to be such that people fill that need for love and being loved with something with some kind of contribution. Like, you need to go do. Go work at an animal shelter. It's not romance, but it. It is being loved and it is companionship. Like, I. That's where my mind goes. Like, you have to find an outlet for that, otherwise you end up in despair, man.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And, you know, when I think about people getting to the point where they believe they can never be happy again and suicide is the only option, it's like. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, I'm not here to say that there aren't major problems, but I am here to say, knowing what I know about how the mind works, you still can point your mind at something that will give you that sense of fulfillment that. That recipe that I was talking about you. You can get to that point, but it does require you to force that North Star upon yourself.

[Ryan Holiday]

I mean, first off, I would say you're not Quasimodo. Like, you're almost certainly not. Right. Like, so much of what I think people are down about themselves. When you look at people who are in true despair, they've written themselves up. There's ironically, a kind of ego in it, right? It's this sense. Like imposter syndrome. Right? Imposter syndrome. At the root of it is incorrect in the sense that it presumes anyone is thinking about you at all. Right? Nobody is thinking about you. But there's this sense, I think, when you are down, when things are not working, when you're unhappy, that no one has ever felt the way that you've ever felt. No one has ever had it as hard as you have it, and that your situation is unique and it's not. There's a great James Baldwin quote. He says, you think your suffering and your pain is so special and unique. And then you read, and then you realize you are opened up to a world in which people have had it so much worse than you have been dealt incredible hands of adversity and suffering and disfigurement and loss and pain. And those people got out of bed every morning and tried and worked on themselves. And even the people that you are jealous of that you think have it so Good are often dealing with secret pain and baggage and loss. And so the decision to go, hey, I'm going to stop making this so much about me, I'm going to stop making this so much on what has happened or what I am worried is going to continue happening. And I'm just going to focus on what I can do here. And I love your idea. You go work in an animal shelter, you get a job, you meet friends, you stop trying to get this one thing so bad and you just focus on things that are much more attainable and easy. And you find in life that momentum is an incredible thing and that oftentimes we despair of some destination, some far off change or transformation because we don't see how we're going to get there, when really we should be focused on what the most immediate attainable, realistic next thing is. You know, if you're 200 pounds overweight, imagining yourself, you know, ripped and yoked is probably inconceivable. But like, you could lose five pounds, you could lose ten pounds, you could get up and go for a walk. You know, you, you, you haven't been touched by a member of the opposite sex in however long. Well, you can still say hi to someone in line, you know what I mean? Like, you have to start so much smaller than you think. And the stoics talk about this. They talk about how like no one can stop you from doing that. They can stop you from some far off outcome, but they can't stop you from doing that immediate next right thing. And it accumulates. Zeno, who we can imagine Zeno, he loses everything, right? It seems utterly hopeless. The idea that he would become this world changing, world famous philosopher in his own life. He's sought after by kings and, you know, rebuilds his life and his fortune and his relationships. That was inconceivable to him at that moment when he's penniless and broke. But he says later, he says, well, being is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing. And if we can understand these small steps, these little things that everyone talks about that are very well established, just basic best practices of life, they add up in a big way and they create something that is big and transformative.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What are the small steps of well being?

[Ryan Holiday]

I just mean some of them are cliches, but it's like wake up early, go to bed early, eat well. I try to do something hard every day, like physically hard every day. Why? Because I like the challenge of it. And more importantly, I like being a person who has a track Record of doing hard things that I don't want to do. The stoics talk about, they say we treat the body rigorously, so it's not disobedient to the mind. I want to cultivate the practice of I'm a person who pushes through hard stuff. I'm a person who decides what I'm going to do and do it right. And I wasn't always that way. No one is actually born that way. It's a culmination of doing it, of building the habit, building the practice, which becomes a ritual, which becomes an identity, which becomes a fact. Right. Those basic practices, like you could get it off any random Instagram account, any diet book, any self improvement. This is not rocket science, but it is hard work and it's the work of a lifetime. Waking up early three days in a row, that's not going to magically make you who you are, who you want to be. But the decision to wake up early, focus on what you eat, to challenge yourself, to put yourself out there, to do the thing you're afraid to do. These are habits that compound and they shape you as you are shaping them.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Ryan Holiday]

That's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Ryan Holiday]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this is why I want people to understand they're having a biological experience. So I want to remove all the sort of hoity toity of why one ought to do that. That the reality is there is in your brain that is messing with you and you are going to feel a profound sense of disease if you don't do hard things.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like the reason you should do hard things is not because it makes you a better person. It is because there is a. A subroutine running in your brain that is saying you're a piece of because you don't do hard things. Now, I wish that that thing wasn't there. Your life would be much easier if you weren't being chased by a line that you could still be all right, but the fact is that it will just niggle at you because that is what evolution has had to program into us to make sure that back when you were going to get potentially eaten by a saber toothed tiger that you still went out and braved it time and time again to move forward, to make a better life. Dis.

[Ryan Holiday]

Ease is a great word that you're using there. Ennui would be another one. There is this sense it's not just that you dislike yourself because you're not doing hard things, but you also have an anxiety or an insecurity because you know things could get worse. You know, things could happen to you at any moment. And because you haven't tested yourself, because you're not actually sure if you're strong, you're worried, right? You're worried about what tomorrow could bring. Seneca famously would practice poverty. He was very wealthy, born to a wealthy family, was successful, was powerful, and yet he would try to spend like one day a month. He would like wear his worst clothes. He would, he would walk the streets, he would survive on bread and water. And his point, he said the purpose of this practice was to be able to look at abject poverty and go, this is what you feared. He could go through life taking risks because he wasn't concerned about his ability to handle a reversal of fortune. And so when you do hard things, whether it's running or, you know, getting up on stage or, you know, lifting heavy rocks, like whatever it is, what you're cultivating is the, the kind of resilience and a kind of confidence. Like I have a cold plunge, right. And there's supposedly a bunch of health benefits to having this thing, right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What temperature do you set yours at?

[Ryan Holiday]

39.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, that's cold.

[Ryan Holiday]

It is cold. It is cold.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It bump ours down to like 50, 52. And that hurts.

[Ryan Holiday]

It's awful.

[Tom Bilyeu]

At 52, it hurts. 39 is like a whole nother level of suffering.

[Ryan Holiday]

An unpleasant experience. Right. But there's also makes me feel like

[Tom Bilyeu]

a wuss over here.

[Ryan Holiday]

There's all sorts of research that, you know, it helps your circulation and it helps your immune system and it helps your whatever, right? And you will feel different and, and I trust you know that the research is legitimate, but I actually don't give a right. Like, yeah, it's not the reason to do. It could all be disproven tomorrow and I would still do it. Facts. Because the, the, the benefit is the sliding in and the unpl. Pleasantness for the first minute or two minutes when you're like, this was a terrible mistake. This is deeply unpleasant. This is not natural. I shouldn't be doing this. And I go, no, I decide. I decided before I got in that I was going to do it and how long I was going to do it for, and that's what I'm cultivating.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you do? Does your mind scramble when you hit the cold water?

[Ryan Holiday]

It does. I feel like a flurry. And then one of the exercises that I'm practicing is I want. If I'm going to do it for three minutes, it's not three minutes of gritting my teeth and just enduring something unpleasant, but I also want three minutes of presence.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, like, define that for me.

[Ryan Holiday]

Like, I have my. You know, it's got a little arm.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are you. I'm hyper aware that I'm sitting in the cold, or are you trying to be like, cold is just the thing. I don't need to sort of be captured by it.

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, one of the core things I'm trying to do in that moment is not look at my phone, which is telling me how long I have been in it. Right, right. Like, I want to sit and just be for as long as I can, trying not to distract myself, trying not to count and to just actually be. So I try to. I try to combine the cold or the plunge experience with a couple minutes of sort of present mindfulness, of just.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I want to know more about what present mindfulness is for you. So I'll. I'll give you a description of what I'm doing in the cold. Tell me if there's anything like what you do. So I hit the water and my brain, it. It. It is screaming, danger. It's actually telling me, you're being injured. Get out right now. And so there's a. Almost a sense of electric confusion where I can't even tell what part of my body hurts anymore. It's. It's just weird. Like, I couldn't. It's almost like I'm blinded for a second because it's so confusing and it's so cold, and it's just like, oh, I just want to get out. And so my thing is, how rapidly can I get to the point where I feel at ease?

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I'm not tense. I'm completely relaxed. I'm not trying to get out of the water. In fact, this is. What's that guy's name? Something's Paradox. Who's Paradox?

[Ryan Holiday]

Stockdale. Paradox.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Stockdo.

[Ryan Holiday]

Stockdale.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Stockdale, yeah. Stockdale's Paradox. He said the people. Vietnam Concentration camp. No, what do they call him? War camp? Prison camp?

[Ryan Holiday]

Prisoner of war.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Prisoner of war. So he's a prisoner of war in Vietnam. And somebody asked him, like, who struggles the Most in a prisoner of war camp. And he said, oh, that's easy. The optimistic people, right, because they think I'm going to be home by Christmas, I'm going to be out in a month, and then they're not. And when he was drifting down in his parachute, he's like, okay, I'm going to be here for years. Like, at least seven years. This is going to suck. I'm almost certainly going to be tortured. This is going to be very painful. And in that, like, okay, I just completely accept what's happening. And you sort of relax into it. Like, admittedly, cold water is not a POW camp, but it's that same thing of, like, this is where I am and I'm going to force myself to be completely calm in the face of my lizard brain screaming at me to get out.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes. It's. It's a minor attainable way of practicing or flexing the muscle that people have had to flex in real adversity and real difficulty. Right. And so the sense, for instance, you know, when you get in the cold that it's going to be unpleasant and you're going to want it to be over quickly, but your mind is going to tell you that time is going faster than it is. Right. So if I'm sitting there and then I glance over and I'm expecting to be 27 seconds. Yeah. Two and a half minutes through, and it's actually been 23 seconds, you know, I'm going to be disappointed, I'm going to be crushed. It's going to be harder. So it's just the ability to sort of. You get in and like you said, your brain scrambles, and then you want to reassert control, reinsert sort of presence. And then for me, the next step is not letting my mind wander or drift into something like work or a grudge I'm nursing or an anxiety I feel about some other thing, or the sense that. That I need to finish this and then get in the shower, and then I need to get home to beat traffic, to do X, Y or Z. Right. And to just be. This is all I have to do for the next few minutes. It's going to be hard, it's going to be unpleasant, but I'm not going to die. I've done it before. I know I'm going to come out of the other side refreshed, so I'm going to just do what I have to do. And where do you put your locus

[Tom Bilyeu]

of attention while you're doing that? Is it on? Like, for me, I Do it on the breath and am I relaxed?

[Ryan Holiday]

It can be breath. And sometimes I'll cheat and I'll count, but not to record time or just the counting of the in and outs of the breath. Right. And the reason I like this again, health benefits, ancillary secondary. It's his bonus. But the metaphor of this is also the process of starting page one of a book. Book that I'm writing or learning a new skill or moving to a new place or anything that you have to do in life. The practice of it's going to be hard, it's going to be unpleasant. I'm going to doubt myself, I'm going to have dark nights of the soul. But I'm a person who pushes myself to do hard things. I don't give up. I don't cut corners. I don't make excuses for myself. I push through and I'm proud of who I am on the other side of it. That's the meta skill. That's the metaphor that you're trying to build in your life and in your mind because it's the most transferable and beneficial thing there is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I like the. In fact, I looked this up. The definition of stoic. The actual word. Did I put it down? It's the definition of stoic itself.

[Ryan Holiday]

Is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is the thing you were saying earlier that people weren't going to like. I'm convinced I have it here. Did you look it up? There it is. Yeah. So sorry. Read that again.

[Ryan Holiday]

A person who can endure pain or hardship without showing their feelings or complaining.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So I love that. I like the idea of being in control of my emotions. I don't want to. And people that only know me online, they don't know whether what I'm about to say is true or not. But it is true. I don't stuff my emotions down. I process them. I think it's very important to process pain and insecurity, hurt, all of it.

[Ryan Holiday]

Grief.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Grief for sure. You have to process it. When my dog died, as silly as that is, I was ruined for days. But at the same time, I want my emotions to have their place.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it is very important to me that I have a healthy distrust of my emotions. I don't just assume when I get in cold water that I need to leap back out. I don't assume when I'm starting something new and I feel like an idiot that I need to stop and give up. I don't assume when I started this YouTube channel and we had to go around to the seven people in the company and say, hey, could you please subscribe? Because we only have four, there's seven of us and we only have four subscribers.

[Ryan Holiday]

The awkwardness of being bad or not visibly successful at a thing is a very underrated skill. People want to be a famous YouTuber or be a best selling author. Like I'll hear people, they want to hire me to consult on some book project and I go, so show me some stuff that you have published. And they're like, well, they've never put a single thing out, right? And so they want that, the outcome. But they're totally paralyzed and intimidated by the process of being a nobody at that thing for a long period of time. Which is what it takes, right? And that ability to be like, I'm going to start this channel, even though some people think it's weird, even though some people I went to high school with are going to be talking about it amongst each other and making fun of me. And to think not only to do it because you think it will be successful in the future and you're just willing to put up with it that is outcome dependent. I like it that you're doing it because you are interested in doing it. You want to get good at it and you think it's important, right? And that's a very important skill because you can't get good at anything if you're not willing to first be bad at that thing. Thing, right? And people aren't willing to be bad at that thing. And so they would rather be on their couch, a lonely incel than to go strike out trying to meet people, right? They would rather continue to be the thing that's making them miserable than to experience some new form of discomfort or misery that is trying, that is failing, that is getting rejected. And you have to be willing to do that. You have to have the courage and the discipline, both of those things in concert with each other to be able to get better.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What say you though, to people that don't want men to be stoic? Like that's, you know, we started with that, that, that's really become part of the definition of toxic masculinity. Whereas I would say man or woman, if you are the slave to your emotions, yeah, that's just as bad as being a slave to social media or pornography or whatever.

[Ryan Holiday]

It's, it's just the idea that the stoic is emotionless is to totally miss what the philosophy is. And I think there's a big difference between being emotionless and being less emotional. Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Would you say is, is it Less emotional. Because I will say it's about being in control of your emotions. Meaning if you have. If you spark rage, which let me just tell you, running a company, there are times where someone will do something and anger wells up inside of me. Now, now, just because I'm feeling angry doesn't mean I'm going to act angry. And I don't think people have enough distrust of their emotions, like literal distrust, that I shouldn't be angry right now. I shouldn't be hurt, I shouldn't be upset, I shouldn't be wanting to cry if I really want to get under somebody's skin. So, yeah, I think that you should be like, yeah, maybe this isn't a time to be weeping.

[Ryan Holiday]

If we can make the distinction between stuffing the emotion down and then processing it, I think we're in a great place, right? I think people, if you think stoicism is. You don't feel it, you pretend it doesn't exist, you think it's weak to have it, then, yeah, I would agree that's wrong. But if stoicism is the processing of the emotions, the questioning of the emotions, the talking through the emotions, the having the emotions for a brief period of time and then going, I'm done with that and I'm moving on, then I'm all for it, right? Like there. We don't have a lot of stories about Marcus Aurelius, right? Like, not a lot of stories about who he was as a person, but we have three that involve him crying. Three. So we've got to imagine that this is not an utterly emotionless person. There's a moment early in his life where he loses his favorite teacher. His teacher dies, and one of his stoic teachers goes to him and says, you gotta stop crying. Like, this isn't what men do. And Antoninus, his stepfather, says, let the boy be human. He says, philosophy and Empire don't take away personal feelings, right? So he's letting the kid have this emotion. We know of Marcus crying while he mourns the victims of the Antonine Plague. Millions of people die in this heinous tragedy. And then the other one in between these two, which I think is also really revealing. He supposedly cries when he learns he is going to become emperor. Sad tears. He's overwhelmed by the enormity of the responsibility that's about to be thrust upon him. And he doesn't know if he can do it. He was said to be crying at the thought of all the bad kings that had gone before him, which I think is important. If you're like, I obviously have this, I'm the best. I excel at everything. To me, that's a person who is almost certainly going to fail because they're not taking it seriously. They're not intimidated by what should be an intimidating thing. Responsibility is difficult. Being responsible for people is a scary thing. But, you know, so he breaks down, he cries about it and then that night he has this dream. He has this dream. He says later that his shoulders were made of ivory. To me, what that means is, and what he said it meant is that he was stronger than he thought he was. He was stronger than he knew. So he has this moment and then he works through it and then he wipes away the tears and he goes to work. Do you know what I mean? So to me, that's the essence of what the philosophy is. He didn't cry and run away. He didn't cry and try to wiggle out of the job, right? He didn't suppress the tears and then go get mad at someone or indulge in pleasures or distractions. He was overwhelmed. He understood, he was overwhelmed. He dealt with it and then he got back to it. And so this idea that the stoic would never cry, I think that's an important one that we talk about because it's funny, we say men shouldn't be emotional, but we are very indulgent of men's tempers, right? Like if you get so angry that you punch a wall, you have been overly, you've been utterly overwhelmed by your emotions, right? We don't tend to categorize that as weak or as the same weakness as crying because your dog died. And I would argue I just put my dog down on my 16 year old dog and I wept like a baby. Like the, that not just because of the grief, but the emotion that, the responsibility of having to make this decision for this helpless thing that was now lying there and was not going to be alive anymore. It was an emotionally overwhelming experience. I didn't run from that experience, you know, I did what I, what I had to do and there was regrets and you know, mistakes, you know, caught up in it. Like there was a lot of emotions, right? And so I felt those emotions and then I moved on. I know I don't need to, I don't need to have fewer of those experiences in my life, but I've never lost my temper and then been proud afterwards. Do you know what I mean? So it's, it's funny that we tend to criticize, it's very gendered which emotions we Sort of criticize as emotional and then other emotions, jealousy, rage, lust, etc. We don't lump in the same negative category. But if I had to choose, I'd much rather someone feel sad than someone be. Be an because they're not in control of their temper.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This, this is a very complex topic. So I. One, I agree with you wholeheartedly that I am just completely unafraid to cry if that is what the moment deserves. Now, I'm not a big crier, so it's very rare. Unless it's a movie. I will be honest. Like, movies can really get me. But, but it, it's very rare in my real life that I cry. But when something is traumatic like that, then of course, and, and when I say I don't even have a mild compunction about crying, like, I'm not weird about that does not bother me in the slightest. But at the same time, I get why this has become gendered and I don't want this to get lost. And this is where someone like Andrew Tate becomes complex again. I, I want to take him as an abstraction prior to the, the trafficking stuff, but when he first came on my radar, I was like, here you. 10% of what he's saying is bang on. And nobody is talking about the need to be tough, the need to strengthen yourself. To be ambitious is okay, to be aggressive is okay. And 90% of what he said, I'm like, he's just going out of his way to say it in the worst conceivable way humanly possible. And it could just be that he's dark tetrad all day and he really is just a sociopath. But even if he's not, even if he's just playing a character, it's still dumb. And I don't want people to get lost in that. But I also don't. Like, I was really pushing back on what I'll call the hyper feminization of men. And I think that that's also problematic. And so when I look at, okay, well, how did we end up here with these gendered notions? I think there's an. Again, you're having a biological experience. So there's an evolutionary reason why, like, I don't know if this is the same in your house, but if somebody like the number of times that our alarm has gone off in the middle of the night, my wife has actually fallen back asleep as I'm creeping around the house to see if somebody's really broken in or if it's a false alarm. And I like Lock the door behind me. And I'm like, you stay in here, I'm gonna go do my thing.

[Ryan Holiday]

Sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that to me, like, when you talk about how the world ought to be, that falls in my list of ought to be. Like, I think guys should be tough. I think that, that a hundred percent is their responsibility. And part of that is meaning and purpose. Part of that is there. There is. I need a North Star. I need to know. I mean, let's go back to the four virtues. Courage, self discipline, justice, wisdom. Right? So I think regardless of sex, all four are bang on. But when it comes to physical danger or even just discomfort in my life, if, if my wife and I, if there was going to be hardship around food for one of us, for whatever reason, one of you had to suffer and not the other, 100 out of 100 times, I would want to be the one that suffers and not my wife. And it would really bother me if she stepped into the role to suffer on my behalf.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, you know, I. So I have a six year old, he's a boy, and I, I feel like, think a lot of the traditional masculine stuff. It's just there, it's in the air, right? In the sense that I work hard. He sees me working out, he sees that I'm ambitious. He trains in combat sports, he does Brazilian jiu jitsu, the sort of stereotypes of what a man should or shouldn't be. But we were going through. He just switched schools, right? And I said, you know, hey, how are you feeling? Are you sad about not getting to see your old friends and your teacher anymore? And he was like, I'm fine, you know, like, I'm fine. And like, he may have been fine, but I wanted to make sure he knew it was okay to not be fine. Right. Do you know what I mean? It's not like I'm trying to make him sad about something, but I was concerned that his impulse, maybe from me or from something else or some random stereotype or thing he saw on TV or YouTube video that he had internalized somewhere, that it wasn't okay for him to be sad or to miss these people or to not like what happened, right? So I felt like, I mean, I watched it happen. The impulse that it was, he was fine. Like he shouldn't have the emotion that was there, but there needed to be the extra conversation about, it's okay. Like, if you feel sad, it's okay. And sometimes, you know, you watch this too. Like, the kid will fall and they'll hurt themselves and there's Already at a very early age, some sense that, like boys don't cry or cover it up or don't tell anyone. And I don't think that's a particularly healthy thing either. So I just like the idea, I just like the idea that you're trying to create a well rounded person that has the full toolkit, the full human experience. And you know, it is funny like one of the early stoics talked about how, yes, of course there's some things that men and women are different at, but he said, you know, like, you don't care. He says you don't care what sex your hunting dog is or the gender of your horse. You just care if it can catch the rabbit or run fast in the race. And I think overall, when I think of stoicism as a philosophy, I do think about it as something that's not masculine or feminine, but that it's something human. And I think there are, you know, there are men who need the courage to be, be more vulnerable about their emotions as opposed to cultivating more martial courage on the battlefield. Maybe they already have that. What they're struggling with is the pain they feel or the grief they feel or the inadequacy they feel, and they're afraid to tell someone about it. Just as conversely, there might be a woman who needs the self discipline or the self command to deal with an overabundance of emotions. Right. And what we're trying to get to is the sort of moderate or the moderation or the middle ground, the golden mean of the best of both worlds. To me, that's what stoicism is about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very interesting. So let me ask you. I was playing soccer one day when I was a kid and the ball hit my thumb just right and broke it.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Cracked it right down the middle. And how should my father have responded? My dad was the coach of the team. I'll tell you in a minute what he actually did. But what in that moment, I come crying to the sidelines. I got hit, my thumb hurts.

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, I remember I fell off a skateboard when I was in fourth grade and I hit my wrist. I landed on my left wrist really hard and I probably cried. I know I was in a lot of pain. And I told my parents that it really hurt. And what my parents did in that moment was chastise me for going on a skateboard and then sort of not believe me that it hurt as much as it did. And they, you know, they like to save going to a doctor. They asked their doctor friend if it look Broken. And he said no. And you know, a week later I'm like, guys like, this really hurts. Like, I need to go. And of course it was broken, right. And, and one of the things I took from that was not, hey, you should be tough, you know, hey, what I took from that is like, my parents don't believe me, right. My parents say they care a lot about me, they want nothing bad to happen to me. And then here I was in physical pain and they were thinking one of saving money or two of, you know, doubts. Right. So I don't know what your dad should have done in exactly in that situation, but I think it's really easy as a parent, as a person to get to, to not just focus on the individual instance in front of you, which is like this kid says their thumb hurts, let's just figure it out. And to think, well, if I make too big a deal out of it, they're going to turn into a X, Y or Z. Right. Like, there's a lot of extrapolation that I think is harmful for parents. One of the things I think about with my kids is I try to think about most things as individual instances. Right. Like my toddler is throwing a temper tantrum. They're probably throwing a temper tantrum not because they suck, not because they're bad, not because I'm bad as a parent, but because like we forgot to eat earlier or they're coming down with something. Right. And I'm just going to deal with this instance in front of me instead of going, well, if I reward this bad behavior, then they're going to turn into a kid who does bad things and thinks they can get away. Right. The extrapolation, I think, is so often the enemy of what is usually a pretty common sense, low stakes situation. So I'm guessing because I think it's been the historical norm that you're your, your dad probably did not take it very seriously.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So it was walk it off.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like, go back in, keep playing. And the problem is that in that instance, what I walked away from it with was, I told you so and I told you it hurt and I told you that you should take me out of the game. But as I got older and got into business and realized, oh, I give up too early. As soon as something hurts, as. As something is difficult, my temptation is to turn and run. And so my journey of success has been one of getting tough. And so when I look back, I wish what my dad had done was take a more holistic approach to me as a Kid and help me create a frame of reference around pain and suffering so that when my thumb is broken, I know, hey, this isn't normal. Yeah, you need to take me out. But because I whined and cried about everything. Thing they couldn't know, like, because I used to whine and cry just the same when the ball would hit my cold leg, which I grew up in Tacoma, where it's like, in the winter, it's actually cold. And so when that ball hits your leg and it leaves the imprint of the soccer ball, like, that really does sting, but not remove me from the game. Sting. And so what I didn't understand as a kid and feel like, you know, when we think about stoicism, when we think about how ought one be, how, what should you be aiming at? It's like, like, you need to understand that things are going to get hard. You are going to suffer. If you want to do something great, you're going to have to push through this. And by all means, by the way, if you don't want to, if at any time you don't want to play, don't. But just be honest about why you don't want to play it. It hurts too much, you're not interested, whatever. Instead of like, oh, this is some unusual amount of pain, and you should always move in the opposite direction of pain.

[Ryan Holiday]

That's something my wife and I talk a lot about. It's like, hey, hey, that is an important lesson that has to be taught. Is this actually the most appropriate or the most suitable lesson or opportunity to teach that lesson? Right? Like when your kid wants to quit something, right? They're playing the piano and then they come home one day and they go, I hate playing the piano. I want to quit. And you go, well, I got to teach them that you can't be a quitter in life. But we have to zoom out and go, wait, did I force them to play the piano? Was the piano ever one of their interests? Or is this something that I forced upon them? And now they are asserting themselves to want to get out of something they don't want to do, to put energy towards something they do want to do? Right? And so is this actually an important opportunity or an appropriate setting to talk about whatever this sort of meta lesson or virtue or value that you're so concerned about? And again, I think about this with tantrums. It's like, yeah, of course, you can't just throw a fit anytime you don't like something. But is that what's actually happening here? Are they Actually thinking that the world revolves around them and if they lie on the floor and scream, they'll get what they want. Or Is this a 4 year old who is been overwhelmed by hunger or sickness or some other thing that they don't understand and they can't separate because they don't know what they're feeling from like wanting this toy and the fact that their body feels like it's falling apart. Do you know what I mean? And, and realizing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you actually do though?

[Ryan Holiday]

I try to just deal with the individual situation.

[Tom Bilyeu]

In what way? Just like you let them freak out. Like let's say you're in a restaurant and they start melting down.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, yeah. Why do we need to be in this restaurant? Do you know what I mean? Like, we don't need to be here, we don't need to do this. We can go outside, we can talk about this. And if we go outside and talk about this, you're not gonna be as overwhelmed or embarrassed about what's happening. I'm not gonna be feeling the pressure of. I don't wanna be the kind of parent that has a kid that does this. Like, I think so often what really hurts parents, parents is not what the kid is doing or not the reality of the situation, but their perception of how other people are thinking about them or their, their sense of what, whether they're a good parent or not. And that's totally unfair. That's all baggage that you're bringing to the situation, right? Like one of the, you know, nobody likes to be on a flight with a crying baby, right? But one of the things you realize as a parent is like, like this isn't a reflection of me, you know what I mean? This is the fact that I have a baby and the baby is crying. I'm not doing anything. It's not a credit or a discredit to me. If they're not crying because they slept the whole flight, that's not a sign that I'm a superior parent. That's just the luck of that situation. Right? And so when you stop caring so

[Tom Bilyeu]

much about what other people think anything

[Ryan Holiday]

to do with that, I mean, sometimes you do, I mean, you obviously chose to be on the plane or not, but like, like sometimes the baby's upset, sometimes they're not.