31: Ryan Holiday - Conspiracy, Manipulation & other Pastimes

Conspiracy, Manipulation & other Pastimes
Information
Guest	Ryan Holiday
Length	02:26:59
Release Date	23 April 2020
Apple Podcasts	Listen
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Portal Blog	Read
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Ryan Holiday is a master manipulator with a cool head, and keen eye for social observation and a big heart. Eric sits down with the Author of "Conspiracy" and tries to get a self-confessed former manipulator and one of the top emerging millennial social analysts to tell us how he unweaves society's artifices to see what is really driving our current moment across many areas.

Ryan is a unique voice who uses stoicism to remain intellectually detached but without seemingly succumbing to emotional or moral disinterest in the issues of our day. With a background in marketing and media. he has gone beyond mere vice signaling to try to help people see how open they are to having their own media and digital habits weaponized against them. In some ways, one could say that he has migrated from grey-hat mind hacker to a white hat analyst and conversationalist helping us to better understand ourselves using ancient wisdom in a modern moment.

This interview was recorded slightly before the quarantining and so is interesting to think of in light of what is about to happen.

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Transcript

00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: [intro jingle] Hello, this is Eric with a few initial thoughts before this week's episode. First, I want to briefly discuss a pair of mistakes and omissions on my part. To begin with, we released a Portal special episode recently about a speculative theory of physics called Geometric Unity, which was partially recorded on April first. We did this so as to make use of the opportunity to attempt to repurpose the tired and increasingly irritating April Fools tradition of which many of us have grown bored. I had intended to single out and call particular attention to a man who is very important to the Geometric Unity theory, as well as the Portal Project itself. This is a man I think of as my uncle and who means the world to my family, Michael W. Brown, former farmer and commercial fisherman who became the CFO of Microsoft and then the head of the Nasdaq. Years ago, during the financial crisis, Mike invited me and my family to take over his two small islands in the Puget Sound archipelago and lead a renegade research-oriented science camp. We did this every summer there for many years, and these islands, now under new ownership, are in fact the origin of the so-called double island rules that we discuss from time to time, and which allowed us to get past issues of ego and miscommunication between intellectual and domain-specific silos. In any event, we, that is I, rushed to get the episode out for April first, and in my haste, I forgot to include the segment of special thanks due to Mike for a level of generosity, wisdom, selflessness, risk-taking, leadership, and brilliance that honestly I'd previously only seen in movies. I will try to have Mike on the Portal at some point, but I wanted to say that his unwavering support of scientists attempting to work outside of and around traditional channels in physics, biology, economics, and other subjects has been nothing short of inspirational to me. So Mike, if you're listening out there, please come through the Portal. These are dark times indeed, and we still need great leaders like you to remind us all of how it's done. Additionally, as someone who probably does not listen to a broad enough smattering of podcasts, I think I inferred from listening to Sam Harris' episodes that it is typical to begin a podcast with a section entitled Housekeeping. I now realize that that may be an iconic aspect of Sam's podcast, just like Dave Rubin's direct message is iconic to the Rubin Report. If so, I apologize and will call this first segment something else. Color me chagrined for engaging in the sincerest form of flattery here without knowing any better. As for what is on my mind this week, it is this: the virus and its curious relationship to the future. For the last month, I've spent nearly all of my time at home with my family, and many of the better thoughts I've been exploring during this time are due to my collaborator and wife, Pia Malaney. Pia is the economist who currently runs CIGS, the Silicon Valley Center for Innovation, Growth, and Society, which she co-founded with INET, the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Very early on, I was fumbling to try to understand the most likely effects of the virus, and she said something clarifying, which I wish I had repeated to you all when it was fresh. She said, "I think in a way, the virus can be thought of as representing the future." I don't know. Maybe I'm dense, but I didn't catch it the first time, so I asked her to clarify. She was surprised that this wasn't obvious to me, so she spelled her position out. Think about it this way. Take all of the seemingly varied issues we discuss constantly over the dinner table and at conferences. "All of them?" I replied with a slightly teasing voice as I assumed she was speaking with hyperbole. "Why, yes, pretty much all of them," she said brightly and without an ounce of self-doubt in a voice that I have learned to fear over many years of collaboration. She continued, "Let's start with surveillance, monopolies, automation, telecommuting, next generation warfare, UBI, future of work, the retail apocalypse, online dating, anti-vaxxers, the student debt crisis, supply chain vulnerability, green tech and climate change, urban homelessness, college equivalency certificates, biohacking, the retreat from globalization, collapse of mainstream journalism, Chinese ascendance, social engineering, Saudi modernization, and the move away from fossil fuels in the kingdom, inclusive stakeholding, political realignment, and the problem of gerontocracy and the end of naive capitalism underpinned by U Chicago-style economics. In fact, pretty much all the things we've used the center to explore." "Okay," I said nervously. "Well," she continued, "you know that tired tech expression, 'The future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed'? Well, this virus is accelerating that unifying future that was already headed our way across the board." And recapitulating that moment where Agent Kujan drops the Kobayashi coffee mug in the Usual Suspects film, a forest spontaneously emerged for me from the confusion of the trees I had seen previously. All of these seemingly disparate phenomena were suddenly revealed as closely related. Americans were actually calling for their own surveillance, only they were calling it contact tracing. The retail apocalypse, which had been building slowly, suddenly became a matter of a government decree, creating an ever more imposing monopoly for the world's now richest human. He in turn owns and controls the only paper to take down a US president, consolidating control over our sense-making apparatus. Most supposedly essential face-to-face office work was revealed to be illusory as easily monitored and recorded telecommuting replaced the high carbon commute. The demand for fossil fuels in turn evaporated, pushing oil futures into radical states of contango. Social distancing solved the problem of unwanted Me Too toxic male touch as sexless Zoom dating put the hurt on Netflix and chilling. Indeed, nearly UBI-like payments were going out to newly unemployed former workers who were expected to sit at home on couches as universities effectively all but confessed that they could deliver the same value through distance learning by not rebating extortionary tuition. China, through an emasculated World Health Organization, seemingly began inducing our own US institutions like the CDC and Surgeon General's office to impart deadly magical thinking to Americans about the ineffectiveness of masks for healthy people. This all came as if some kind of twisted revenge for the Boxer Rebellion, where Chinese believed swords and martial arts made them invulnerable to Western high-tech warfare. Spontaneous protests broke out in cities across the country as masked protesters fought mysterious rules that communicated that one may not peaceably assemble in contradiction to the First Amendment. We were also not allowed to contradict public health authorities who were clearly covering for a level of baby boomer and silent generation incompetence to keep the manufacture and storage of essential goods and services within national boundaries and out of the hands of strategic rivals who think nothing of blatantly lying to us in matters of life, death, and statistics. I reasoned, however, that there were clearly too many different things happening in such a situation for the sudden arrival of the future to lack a single ideology. And so it occurred to me, and to Peter Thiel as well, who I called immediately, that the two older generations of Americans who were to duke it out in the race for the presidency shared a single purpose. Their common goal was to stop the future from arriving at essentially any cost to future generations so that they could live out their remaining days in as close to the style to which they'd become accustomed in childhood and young adulthood as was actually possible. And what did they use to accomplish this? Well, it was a combination of three ingredients. First of all, it required political control. Second of all, it also needed a seemingly inexplicable indifference to the world of trouble that they would finally leave to their descendants after their demise. Lastly, it partially hinged on a reliance on seventy-five years of astonishingly good luck, which can partially be explained as a rational universal fear of the future after two world wars, totalitarian atrocities, the nineteen eighteen pandemic, and the Great Depression. This is related to Francis Fukuyama's theory of the end of history. To this way of thinking, what was happening was simple. The magic trick of holding back nearly all aspects of our true future required all three elements to be in place simultaneously. Now, nothing had changed with respect to the first two. In fact, all that had occurred was that their luck had finally run out with the COVID virus. To my generation and the ones that followed, that past version of the post-war American dream was like a mesmerizing rumor and tale that the older generations had repeatedly and vividly wielded to cast a spell. This intimidated many of us from demanding answers and a say in our own future. If you can't get a second home in your thirties from a paper route, a low-cost education, or a life in public service, then perhaps you should wait your turn and let the elders who made it work lead for a little while longer until the younger generations can prove that they are ready to assume adult responsibilities. This was a magical spell indeed, which blinded those of us who were forced to repeat, "Okay, boomer," to explain our seeming relative inability to earn and lead in the presence of elders who could out-earn us in their prime. And this was even under the weight of multiple divorce settlements or three martini lunches and without the extensive training and apprenticeships that we seem to require. Well, that spell is now broken for me watching our supposed leaders contend with the true pandemic. The silent and boomer generations, lacking any kind of precedent, now look like incompetent dolts. I suppose it is theoretically possible that the rest of us former gritty latchkey kids and digital natives would not fare better, but we could scarcely do worse. In fact, our elders are revealed not as go-getters or can-do leaders, but as creatures of the system who simply held back confronting the inevitable future for decades because its shape and form are indeed terrifying. And it wasn't really the virus that was accelerating the terrifying future across the board. Any worldwide crisis of sufficient depth would have done it. The world has always been caught up in escalating plagues, wars, depressions, and conflicts, and the coronavirus was ushering in the future simply because it was the first piece of early twentieth century scale bad luck to fall into our new millennium, characterized as it is by fragility. After a few words from our sponsors, I'll be back to introduce today's guest, author Ryan Holiday. Returning sponsor Blinkist has solved a problem many book people know too well. There seem to be an ever-increasing number of important nonfiction titles, and yet with modern attention spans, we seem to be able to get to very few of them. So how do you figure out which ones to invest in? Well, Blinkist has a team of expert readers who digest these books into summaries that they call Blinks. They last about fifteen minutes and can be either read or listened to as audio. Right now, I'm eyeing India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha, and I think it's an excellent way to decide whether this is the book that I wish to invest in, but Blinkist does this for thousands of titles. So remember, with Blinkist, you get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books, all the books you want, and all for one low price. And right now, for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to blinkist.com/portal and you can try it free for seven days and you'll also save twenty-five percent off your new subscription. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, blinkist.com/portal to start your free seven-day trial. And you'll also save twenty-five percent off, but only when you sign up at blinkist.com/portal. Returning sponsor Four Sigmatic is that crazy and plucky Finnish company that smuggles the mushrooms with the greatest potential health benefits into the beverages that we all love. And this is the key point. It's true even for those of us who hate mushrooms. But just where could such a crazy idea come from? Well, Finland, obviously. You see, Finland was once invaded by the mighty Soviet army in late November of nineteen thirty-nine, and yet they prevailed as the tiny David against the Soviet Goliath. But just how could they do it? Well, some say it was because the Soviets forgot to wear white fatigues to blend in with the snow. Nice going, Vladimir. Others said it was because the extroverted Finns were able to use their dominance of slapstick stand-up comedy to keep their morale up. Hmm. But in fact, I believe it was the lion's mane mushrooms that the Finns put into their coffee which allowed them to clear their minds and outthink the shivering Russians when even they couldn't take the Finnish cold. So if like me, you feel about mornings the way Finns feel about unwanted invaders, go to foursigmatic.com/portal and you'll get fifteen percent off your order of coffee with a hundred percent organic Arabica beans mixed with lion's mane mushrooms. It doesn't taste like mushrooms. You'll find it delicious, and I think it'll clear your head. foursigmatic.com/portal. In this episode, I get to sit down with author and social analyst Ryan Holiday. I wouldn't say that I know Ryan enough to consider him a close friend, but I have enjoyed every conversation I have had with him for the unique metacognitive perspective that he brings to all things on which he thinks, speaks, or writes. There are two things in particular that Ryan does that make him one of the most incisive analysts and best conversationalists in the public eye working today. In many ways, the overarching lens that I feel is missing from today's hyper-partisan world is that of expecting conflicting truths to lie in superpositions. After all, why would anyone imagine that the simplified childlike positions of activists would be appropriate for those who eschew hyper-partisanship in favor of nuance? While I can't pretend to answer that question, I can say that Ryan's ability to fully consider the validity of two or more evident truths that are at least nominally in conflict is all too rare in today's world of public intellectuals. While that itself is reason enough for me to tune into Ryan's perspective, there's something deeper that draws me towards his voice and way of thinking. All too often in my experience, the minority of social analysts who in the internet era can still properly entertain a dialectic in public without bending to the activist mob tend to stop there prematurely at a point of detachment. They frequently appear to be disinterested in reframing natural tensions for others so as to facilitate progress through synthesis and reconciliation. Instead, they often prefer the entertainment value of a continuing battle to a satisfying conclusion without victor or vanquished. In particular, I have increasingly noticed a move towards studied indifference and the projection of personal apathy on the part of several metacognitive pundits in what seems to be a mechanism of self-protection. I find that Ryan, by contrast, is fairly open in sharing that he cares about the future deeply, but always in a thoughtful and measured way, informed in an interesting fashion by his relationship to stoicism. That combination of caring without sanctimony makes him one of my favorite conversationalists in private, and I am glad that we got a chance to try to translate this into a public forum. Two words on the setting of this conversation. To begin with, it took place in 2020 before the stay-at-home orders were in place, so it feels in some sense like a message in a bottle from another earlier world, and it oddly filled me with a sense of what feels like a genuine longing for our recent past upon listening to it. With so much rapid change, it feels like full-on early 2020 nostalgia is actually now a thing, even though it is only April. Secondly, we discuss Ryan's book on Gawker and Peter Thiel. This is one of the first places that I've ever shared my thoughts about the episode, and it may surprise people to hear my inner conflicts about Gawker, journalism, and Nick Denton. To this end, I will just point out that I was later to find out about this story from Peter than many may have imagined, and that Peter actually encouraged me always to act as an independent voice of moral concern, as you may discern from the conversation. I'll let the conversation speak for itself, however. I do hope you will enjoy our uninterrupted conversation with author Ryan Holiday when we return after some brief messages from our sponsors. [upbeat music] Okay, so tell me if this is familiar. You're hunkered down, you're trying to get some exercise, and in fact, you're feeling some stress and some aches and pains from this crazy situation. But maybe you have a regular massage therapist and you can't go visit that person. What are you gonna do? Well, that's where returning sponsor Theragun can really come in handy. They make an incredibly professionally made percussive therapy device whose rapidly vibrating but extremely soft head can be directed at any muscle group that you like. You can use it on yourself, you could use it on a partner, and it manages to get deep tissue relief to the sore and aching muscles that you may have either from working out or from sitting in one place, rather akin to what you would get from a high-quality massage therapist. So feel better naturally, treat your pain, and get back to your life. Try Theragun risk-free for 30 days or your money back by going to theragun.com/portal. For a limited time, our listeners to this podcast get up to $150 off of your device. That's theragun.com/portal, T-H-E-R-A-G-U-N.com/portal. [whooshing] Returning sponsor Personna is relatively new to the Portal podcast audience, but in fact, they've been flying under the radar making fine razors since 1875, which admittedly was a lot easier to do back then because, well, there was no radar. But I digress. All of their men's and women's razors are made in the United States with fine stainless steel and chrome technology, and they always offer a safe and smooth shave every time. In fact, when my old razor company started moralizing at me, I switched over completely to Personna's five-blade men's razor, which gives me a superior shave on the same handle. And by supporting our sponsor, you'll support the show and skip the corporate moralizing and virtue signaling and just focus on getting a superior shave every time. So to get these fantastic and affordable razors delivered straight to your door like I did, go to amazon.com/personna today and be sure to enter our code razors25 to get 25% off your first order. That's amazon.com/personna, spelled P-E-R-S-O-N-N-A, and use our discount code razors25, R-A-Z-O-R-S25, all one word. [upbeat music] Hello, you found the Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I am here today with Ryan Holiday, author of Conspiracy, uh, and other books, and, um, a great all-around thinker and voice analyzing what's going on in our society. Ryan, welcome.

00:17:36
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, thanks for having me.

00:17:38
Eric Weinstein: So, uh, very curious about your thoughts as to whether the time that we're in right now has any particular feel and why it's hard to associate, uh, what has been going on in terms of a zeitgeist with any kind of, uh, intellectual wrapping that hel- helps us better understand what the forces are that are most changing our lives at the moment.

00:18:04
Ryan Holiday: I- I've actually been thinking about that a little bit. Uh, you, you've probably... Oh, you live in LA, so maybe. You ever watch the show The Hills?

00:18:10
Eric Weinstein: No.

00:18:11
Ryan Holiday: Okay, so The Hills was this sort of fake reality show that w- came out and, uh, it was about... Originally, it started in Laguna Beach. It was a reality show, and then they, they all moved to LA. But it's this sort of, like, uh, mid-early aughts, like, reality show about young people moving to LA. And, uh, it, it created all these sort of big brands and, and, and ... sort of personalities that dominated the tabloids for a real long time. And then this year they came out with, like, the 10-year anniversary of... Like, the show had ended, they all went on. Some of them were successful, some of them were not successful. This was a show about them in their early 20s, and n- you know, now they're in their early 30s, and they, like, revisited it. And my wife and I were watching it, and, and I loved it. I, like, it, it wouldn't, you would not think I would like it, but I loved it. What I found over and over again, and this is what I think the sort of zeitgeist is, is these characters who basically are fake people but sometimes have real emotions, the, the word they kept talking about over and over again was, like, how anxious they were and how tired they were. Um, and, and these are obviously all sort of tail-end millennials, right? And, and it, it-

00:19:22
Eric Weinstein: Wouldn't, wouldn't that be peak millennial?

00:19:24
Ryan Holiday: Sorry, peak millennials, yes. Um, and, and, uh, it struck me that there was probably something illustrative there about the sort of millennial mind of th- for the millennials, the tw- their 20s was, uh, or from their teens to the, the end of their 20s was, like, the Warner Act, the financial crisis, an economic recovery that they didn't really benefit from, and then walking in now to becoming a parent, you know, becoming an adult.

00:19:53
Eric Weinstein: Maybe.

00:19:53
Ryan Holiday: May- maybe. But, but starting to get serious about life, but without the comfort or security that would soothe some of those anxieties. So I thought it was, I... To me, one of the feelings of the age is kind of a- an anxiety or an unease about things. Like-

00:20:09
Eric Weinstein: Together with exhaustion.

00:20:11
Ryan Holiday: With exhaustion, yes. Because we're, you know, we're on our phones all the time. We're consuming more information than ever. We have more information about what other people are do... And I think that the exhaustion is from social media in the sense of, like, it's keeping up with the Joneses times, like, a thousand, you know? Because-

00:20:28
Eric Weinstein: I don't even wanna call it, uh, we are, we are on our phones. We have merged-

00:20:34
Ryan Holiday: Yes

00:20:35
Eric Weinstein: ... with our phones. And so if I think about the phone as a portal, the idea is that I, I turn this slab towards me-

00:20:42
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:20:42
Eric Weinstein: ... and then I suddenly go into some in... Like, right now, I don't know whether you and I are being attacked on social media.

00:20:49
Ryan Holiday: Sure. We probably are. [laughs]

00:20:50
Eric Weinstein: We probably are.

00:20:50
Ryan Holiday: It's just a percent- what percentage of it is attack and what percentage of it is complimentary.

00:20:56
Eric Weinstein: R- Right.

00:20:56
Ryan Holiday: Yes.

00:20:56
Eric Weinstein: But, but the point that, is that there is this parallel world-

00:21:00
Ryan Holiday: Sure

00:21:00
Eric Weinstein: ... taking place at all times, and that we have now merged with it so that we, there isn't a we that is on our phones.

00:21:08
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, or, or the idea that it's a separate world is, like, right now there are people simultaneously watching thousands of hours of video or audio that both of us have produced. So we're having this conversation, which is obviously not live.

00:21:22
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:21:22
Ryan Holiday: But other people are watching a very different conversation with us at this moment.

00:21:28
Eric Weinstein: That's right.

00:21:28
Ryan Holiday: And that is strange if you think about it. And yeah, some of those people are hating that conversation. Some of them people are loving that conversation. It's, uh... One of the th- one of the weird things I get all the time, we were talking about Tim Ferriss a second ago, like, people go, "Oh, I just..." Uh, they're like, "I loved you on the Tim Ferriss podcast," or whatever. And it's like, I did that interview in 2014, but to them it's new. So, like, that, the portal, different people are entering the portal at different times. And whereas I think something is old, if you've never seen it before, it's brand new.

00:22:01
Eric Weinstein: I was, uh, I was trying to talk to my son, who's 14, about the old days. Like, what it-

00:22:06
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:22:07
Eric Weinstein: ... w- what was it like. And I had to explain to him how important the clock was when you didn't have cell phones in everyone's pocket, that you had to be very precise and careful where you were going to meet someone-

00:22:19
Ryan Holiday: Sure

00:22:20
Eric Weinstein: ... on, like, what street corner at exactly what time, and that these things th- that were broadcast live, um, like the news-

00:22:28
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:22:28
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, synchronized behavior. We were willing to be synced because we didn't have an a- ability to be independent, and that now we've gotten this ability to do everything on demand, uh, we're, we're surprised that no one carries our information set.

00:22:44
Ryan Holiday: I was actually just... Like, my, I have a three-year-old, so I was thinking, like, what's the, what's the... Like, when I was, you know, when I was a kid, like, what's the, what's the technology story that I will tell them that will, like, blow their mind? And I was thinking about this last night because I got in my friend's truck. It was an older truck. And we had an older version of that when I was growing up. But we had this Toyota pickup truck when I was a kid, and it didn't have a clock in it, um, 'cause it was a cheap, old truck. And I remember that whenever, like, on the way to school to see if we were late or, you know, what time it was-

00:23:16
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:23:16
Ryan Holiday: ... we would have to turn it to, like, KFBK. I grew up in Northern California. Turn it to KFBK, because every 15 minutes they said, "You're listening to KFBK. It's 9:45, and traffic..." Like, so we'd have to turn on the radio and hope we were close to, but would know that in, in a, in a minimum of, you know, 14 minutes and 32 seconds, we would be getting the time.

00:23:40
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:23:40
Ryan Holiday: And, and so it was, it was, it's weird because, yes, things were more synchronized, but also you could exist in a bubble detached from time. Also because not everyone was trying... You, you were un- you were genuinely unreachable.

00:23:56
Eric Weinstein: It was glorious.

00:23:56
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, it's strange.

00:23:57
Eric Weinstein: It was-

00:23:57
Ryan Holiday: And not that, not that long. I mean, this story I'm telling you is probably, like, 95 or 6.

00:24:04
Eric Weinstein: Well, so I'm interested in, in sort of these old stories.

00:24:08
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:24:08
Eric Weinstein: But I'm also just... Am I right that probably we will find that our brain structure was altered by our phone use?

00:24:17
Ryan Holiday: I mean, I, I would think so. Um, there's that Louis C.K. bit about you used to have to sit with awkwardness or unpleasantness, but now you can instantly relieve yourself of, like... Like, let's say I got here early, and there was no one here, and I was waiting.

00:24:33
Eric Weinstein: Because the host was late.

00:24:34
Ryan Holiday: [laughs] No, no. I'm just saying, let's say you get to something early.

00:24:37
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:24:38
Ryan Holiday: You would have had to wait with your own thoughts.

00:24:40
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:24:41
Ryan Holiday: And now you can go into the portal- And not have to have thoughts. And so that idea of reflection or downtime, it's like, uh, uh, um, one of the things I compare writing a book to is your... Sometimes if you have your laptop and you shut it and it should go into sleep mode, but you come back and something had happened, and it's been on for 11 hours, and it's like almost like hot to the touch. It doesn't happen anymore, but I remember that happening on my older MacBooks. To me, that's like what writing a book is, like your brain is not shutting off. And I think social media actually creates... Or the phone creates some version of that where the, you're never getting the downtime between moments.

00:25:23
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:25:23
Ryan Holiday: It's always, always the moment.

00:25:26
Eric Weinstein: In what ways am I diminished? What, what parts of my capacity have I forgotten?

00:25:31
Ryan Holiday: For that?

00:25:32
Eric Weinstein: Um, well, what I'm really trying to get at-

00:25:36
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:25:36
Eric Weinstein: ... ultimately is that a lot of transformations have taken place that have not been well documented that divorce us increasingly from what might be termed our super ancestors, people... Like there are no 400 hitters in baseball.

00:25:52
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:25:52
Eric Weinstein: We've accepted that that was a different era and-

00:25:54
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:25:54
Eric Weinstein: ... somehow that can't be.

00:25:56
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

00:25:56
Eric Weinstein: But it, it seems like we could accomplish all sorts of things [laughs] recently that we can't now.

00:26:02
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:26:02
Eric Weinstein: And it's very interesting the extent to which we've lost capacities, and we haven't documented what it was that took them from us.

00:26:11
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:26:11
Eric Weinstein: Like I can't figure out why I can't read a book.

00:26:13
Ryan Holiday: Well, so related to that, one, I think it was Daniel Boorstin, have you read him at all? He wrote this book, The Image, about sort of the invention of modern media. He's basically talking about what sort of television and radio does. Uh, uh, he's fascinating. I think he was like the Librarian of Congress or, or something. But he was, he was like the Lincoln de- the, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, it was like Lincoln talked for three hours, Douglas talked for three hours, then everyone took a break and went home and came back, and then they each argued for like another three hours. You're like, now at the Democratic debates are like an hour and 20 minutes, and there's eight candidates. You know, like human beings used to be able to consume incredibly long form comp- Like these were farmers, and blacksmiths, and, you know, people were sitting here watching one of the smartest people who ever lived, one of the most eloquent speakers of all time, talk for three hours without break, you know, unamplified.

00:27:11
Eric Weinstein: Have you seen certain losses of capability?

00:27:14
Ryan Holiday: I mean, I think the abil- I think the ability to consume very long form content, whether it's, you know, a Robert Caro book or it's a, you know, a thousand, you know, line poem, I think those are... One of the, one of the only bright spots for me is podcasts, like that people will listen to a three-hour Joe Rogan interview.

00:27:33
Eric Weinstein: L- long form podcasting and long form television.

00:27:36
Ryan Holiday: Yes. Yes. Although I find long form television to be very manipulative and not a sign of progress.

00:27:44
Eric Weinstein: Oh, say more. This is great.

00:27:45
Ryan Holiday: So I think, um... Okay, so it, it, like when I watch, I don't know, Bloodlines, what I got the sense of is that... Like let's say I watch the first three seasons, which I thought were good, and then I realized I just watched 22 hours of television and eight minutes of things have happened. What they did is they, like instead of having to create beats inside the show to get you to go from a commercial break to commercial break, they, they just know that if they, if they keep you going... If, if at the end you're vaguely interested, you will let it autoplay to the next thing. So it- it's, it's taking what, what could be a compressed, really interesting couple hours of television and, and it's like how the YouTube algorithm, uh, uh, rewards watch time.

00:28:43
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:28:43
Ryan Holiday: So people just make shit longer than it genuinely needs to be. Um, like as a writer, one of the favorite rules, uh, one of the favorite exercises I heard, um, Raymond Chandler would write on basically index cards in his typewriter, and his rule was like something has to happen on every index card. So if you read a Raymond Chandler thing, it's like beat, beat, beat, beat, beat. Now you read, you know, some novel that wins the National Book Award, and it's like weirdly it is 2,000 pages or 1,000 pages, but nothing happens. The characters learn nothing. You know, no lessons are taught. So like it's, it's... Even some of the long form stuff that we consume, it's mostly just a testament to our ability to veg out or consume it in the background as we're doing another thing, rather than be very engaged with a-

00:29:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, then maybe what I want to do is to break out. Is there some long form television that you think isn't empty calories?

00:29:48
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah. I m- I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure there is, but-

00:29:49
Eric Weinstein: I mean, like I found that The Sopranos was incredibly drawn out and in general didn't waste a lot.

00:29:58
Ryan Holiday: So you liked it?

00:29:59
Eric Weinstein: I did.

00:30:00
Ryan Holiday: And, and look, I would say that the HBO model is different than the Netflix model. The HBO model is like, this has to be so good, you will wait one week and hold onto the thread and come back to it.

00:30:11
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:30:12
Ryan Holiday: The Netflix model is, can I, can I steal Tuesday from you?

00:30:16
Eric Weinstein: I see.

00:30:16
Ryan Holiday: You know, like where you call in sick from work and watch eight episodes of Genghis Khan or Narcos or whatever.

00:30:22
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well then, what's going on with Joe Rogan? Like this is a singular phenom.

00:30:27
Ryan Holiday: Yes. It is fascinating. Um, someone was telling me that for, like there's a whole generation of people that don't even know you can listen to Joe Rogan, that you, like they just watch it on Y- Like I mean, I, it makes no sense to me that someone could watch a three-hour YouTube video. Like I just don't understand- Where you would be able to do that

00:30:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, in part they're, they're, they're lightly watching it often

00:30:49
Ryan Holiday: I think so. But, but, but I think it is a, it's a, it's a generational, also a lifestyle thing that is somewhat new. Um, but I was just listening to his Malcolm Gladwell interview, and it's like three and a half hours, and I was, like, literally entertained for every second of it. He's like a, he's a... I think he's a master of it, and I think what he's really good at is, is, is being the everyman in the sense of, like, he's asking the questions that a normal person would ask Malcolm Gla- Like, like what a, what a person who has the opportunity to talk to one of their favorite authors would talk about-

00:31:31
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:31:31
Ryan Holiday: ... as opposed to whatever the subtle political agenda or, you know, w- what, like, whatever somebody in the media would try to use the opportunity of talking to Malcolm Gladwell to accomplish.

00:31:48
Eric Weinstein: Right. Except that, I mean, the funny part is that he's so far away from being every man.

00:31:54
Ryan Holiday: Sure, of course.

00:31:55
Eric Weinstein: And, and... But the, the persona and the rapper exactly communicates every man. Like, his vibe is what you say.

00:32:01
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:32:01
Eric Weinstein: And then if you talk to him or hang out with him outside of his show, you're just aware of what an incredible storehouse of information this particularly singular human being is. He, he has an enormous body of knowledge so that you're always close to something that he, he wants to talk about.

00:32:18
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, that's true. One of the interesting things that I was noticing about that interview is there was, like, nothing that Malcolm Gladwell mentioned that Rogan wasn't vaguely familiar with.

00:32:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.

00:32:27
Ryan Holiday: There was no events in the news. There was no... You know, he's mentioning this video, like, this police shooting, and this, and, and he was like, he knew all of it. Um, I think, I think what defines Rogan to me, and good podcasts and why they've so exploded, is, like, actually an earnest interest-

00:32:46
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:32:46
Ryan Holiday: ... as opposed to a vague... Like, you've been profiled by media outlets, right? And-

00:32:52
Eric Weinstein: Very little

00:32:52
Ryan Holiday: ... but, but what happens is that-

00:32:54
Eric Weinstein: I mean, actually very, very little

00:32:55
Ryan Holiday: ... interesting. But, but you get the sense that this person is very nice to you and very friendly, but when you read the article, it is clear that their intention was to let the reader know that they were above, up here, um, rendering judgment on the quality of-

00:33:18
Eric Weinstein: Which is why sometimes they don't cooperate with these things.

00:33:21
Ryan Holiday: Yes.

00:33:21
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:33:21
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:33:22
Eric Weinstein: I mean, in fact, this, this sort of ties together two different-

00:33:25
Ryan Holiday: Okay

00:33:25
Eric Weinstein: ... threads. Is the success of Joe Rogan above all, all others, um, telling us more about what is going on with traditional and legacy media, in that he is offering somehow the best antidote to, um, this kind of seamless, endless, interoperable wall of institutional, corporate, and, and legacy sense-making?

00:33:57
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Like, so, so I think it's also just genuinely... Like, most people are fans of stuff, right? And Joe Rogan is a fan of stuff, and when you read a New Yorker profile or a New York Times profile or an Atlantic piece or a, even some of the, you know, like recaps of television shows by outlets that, you know, everyone does this now, there's this weird sense that everything sucks, people that make it suck, the world is falling apart, and that the job of the media is to tell us what's wrong with things.

00:34:33
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:34:33
Ryan Holiday: And, and, like, why would anyone consume that information? Like, what, what is the utility of you telling me that things suck? Like I, I've, I talk to, um... When I, when I talk to authors, it'll... Like, the old media model was, like, you could write a book about an idea. Like, just general, like, "Hey, this is complicated," and people are like, "I don't have time for this. Like, tell me if it's... Tell me, is it good?" You know? Or tell me that this is bad. But there's this weird sort of thing in the media where it's just like, it's just kind of this is a, this is... It, it's like a, there's an ambiguity to it and a, like, it's almost like a film on top of-

00:35:15
Eric Weinstein: There's this culture, I mean, you know, this word, the commentariat.

00:35:20
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:35:20
Eric Weinstein: Like, who the hell elected these people?

00:35:22
Ryan Holiday: Right.

00:35:22
Eric Weinstein: And why do they have a culture?

00:35:24
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:35:24
Eric Weinstein: And what is it about their jobs that produces this, uh, kind of incestuous, "Well, she said she did this think piece about this-

00:35:36
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:35:36
Eric Weinstein: ... and then I came back with that," and, and then so-and-so digested the two, and you're just thinking like, "Nobody cares."

00:35:43
Ryan Holiday: Well, and ostensibly, that should be the role of the editor. The editor should, like... I almost get that there's a commentariat of sort of young, uh, opinionated writers who are writing things, but there should be the editor on top who's saying, who's asking tough questions about the, the hot take or the opinion.

00:35:58
Eric Weinstein: No, I guess what I'm saying, is it the, the economic... Is it that the system of selective pressures that is choosing these people to sit in those chairs-

00:36:06
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:36:07
Eric Weinstein: ... is now imparting such a spin that the world is kind of tuning it out increasingly because it... You know, for example, there is a piece I've never heard described, like a general Platonic abstraction, um, which I call envy porn-

00:36:24
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:36:24
Eric Weinstein: ... where the piece talks about fabulously rich people leading shitty, decadent lives, and you are supposed to be exactly f- filled with one part envy and one part pity.

00:36:39
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Or, or some version of that piece is like, "I'm gonna write about this person whose life seems very glamorous, but I'm, I'm gonna subtly gonna show how they're actually a vapid idiot."

00:36:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.

00:36:50
Ryan Holiday: You know? And, and- I, I think what it is is like, okay, so econo- like, e- economically and opport- as far as opportunities go, it's literally never been easier to reach a mass audience, to, to monetize your work, to, to control your own destiny-

00:37:07
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:37:07
Ryan Holiday: ... as a creative person.

00:37:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay. [laughs]

00:37:08
Ryan Holiday: Right? So, like, imagine, imagine looking at the, like, the, the vast opportunity of podcasts out there, the opportunity to, to write books or to create YouTube videos or to do any of these things, and go, "My... I don't want to do that. What I would like to do is make $42,000 a year without health benefits and be f- have a full-time job at Business Insider."

00:37:34
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:37:34
Ryan Holiday: You know what I mean? Like, you are... Either you're insane or you're fundamentally [laughs] there's something to get... But, or, or you're fundamentally lacking the talent to cut it in the real world, eat what you kill, like, sell stuff directly to the audience model.

00:37:54
Eric Weinstein: So it's a variance reduction model that you know that you're gonna have a job if you do your job, but you don't actually have to test yourself based [laughs] on whether or not people are dying for your content.

00:38:03
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, it's like, okay, if you live in some small town, you might think, "Oh, this person is a certified financial advisor. They m- they're, they know more about money than me."

00:38:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:38:13
Ryan Holiday: Which might be true, but, like, they would not be... If they were f- really good at managing money, they would not be running a Charles Schwab office in, you know, Toledo or something.

00:38:25
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:38:25
Ryan Holiday: Right? And so it's like, you just, oh, the people who are writing for this outlet or that outlet are ins- it- un- unless, I mean, there's obviously exceptions. Like, you know, Malcolm Gladwell writes for The New Yorker, but has, is also an entrepreneurial creator in other ways. But, you know, you, you just realize, oh, you're... The, it's sort of like the survivorship bias. Like, all the good people have been, all the fundamentally talented people have been siphoned off and work for themselves.

00:38:50
Eric Weinstein: I don't know that I really, I don't know that I, I hold exactly that take on it.

00:38:55
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

00:38:55
Eric Weinstein: I understand that there's a selection bias. I think that there's an aspect of people merging with these venerable structures. There is power from an institutional-

00:39:05
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:39:05
Eric Weinstein: ... perspective that hasn't been completely lost and frittered.

00:39:09
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:39:09
Eric Weinstein: I, I'm not quite sure whether the millennials still pay attention, well, that came from Harper's, that came from The Atlantic, that came from The New Yorker. However, what I'm very curious about is at what point do the super vital people start going back into the institutional structures? Like, I will see things happen on The Joe Rogan program-

00:39:29
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:39:29
Eric Weinstein: ... and unless there's an angle to take somebody down, it doesn't filter back into what I've, this thing I, I call the gated institutional narrative, because it's mostly an idea that certain organs only talk to each other and themselves.

00:39:46
Ryan Holiday: Right.

00:39:46
Eric Weinstein: And the, and that, the power of that conversation to stay focused on, it could be completely irrelevant and wrong things or misleading things or, or terrible things, but it still has a measure of coherence that the Wild West lacks, and I'm questioning what happens when the interesting stuff is incoherent and the other stuff has a coherence even if it's meaningless.

00:40:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, George Trau wrote this book called Within the Context of No Context, and he's sort of talking about, he, he was a New Yorker writer, he wrote this, like, 30 years ago, but sort of talking about exactly what we're talking about, is that, like, sort of the job of these old institutions was to provide context, a, an imprimatur, a stamp of approval, but now there's these new media outlets, this new Wild West where that's gone. Um, yeah, it is interesting. It's like the Elon Musk episode of Rogan is newsworthy, but the other episodes which reach still millions more people than, you know, an episode of Lena Dunham's Girls, one is covered and the other isn't.

00:40:48
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:40:49
Ryan Holiday: Um, but these empty shells are, are really em- uh, he calls them empty shells, that, like, these outlets are empty shells, they, that there is this significance and meaning and equity in them that was built over hundreds of years in some cases. The Atlantic is, you know, dates before the Civil War, um, so even if the business model has changed and the credibility might have been reduced, still means something to people because it's been around for so long. Like, a great example of this is, like, Forbes is this economic- the business model is the exact same outlet as the Huffington Post, right? Like, it's run by contributors, most of whom are not paid, most of whom are not edited, and yet you see something written by For- or, like, you see an article from forbes.com, it feels like it's from the media brand Forbes, which dates to the early 1900s, right? Eh, but it's actually written by some random person who may be, you know, conflicted or not qualified or, or whatever. So these empty shells matter a great deal, and we, because so much advertising has been bu- built behind them, and exposure, one of the examples I like to use is, like, okay, you, you, you're driving through LA, you see a billboard for, you know, a new movie. It'll have the laurel leaves, you know-

00:42:04
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

00:42:04
Ryan Holiday: ... around the award that it's won. Well, you know, there used to be, like, a handful of film festivals, and now there's a million film festivals, and so you're driving and you see the laurel leaves and you go, "Oh, this is an award-winning movie," but that might have been, you know, uh, the Sacramento Film Festival or a non-existent film festival.

00:42:27
Eric Weinstein: You know you've already got the, uh, Charles Schwab office of Toledo, Ohio really angry-

00:42:32
Ryan Holiday: I know. I'm, I'm, I'm s-

00:42:32
Eric Weinstein: ... and now Sacramento-

00:42:33
Ryan Holiday: Going after, uh

00:42:33
Eric Weinstein: ... is never gonna give us-

00:42:34
Ryan Holiday: I'm, I'm from Sacramento, so I feel like-

00:42:36
Eric Weinstein: Okay. All right

00:42:36
Ryan Holiday: ... I feel like, uh, that's what you said. But-

00:42:37
Eric Weinstein: We're just plugging Sacramento.

00:42:37
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:42:37
Eric Weinstein: There's no such thing as bad press.

00:42:39
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, but, but you know what I mean? So, like, like, our mind is looking for these symbols-

00:42:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:42:43
Ryan Holiday: ... that tell us, like, this is the important narrative, this has been vetted, and in fact, most of that has fallen away. Um, and, and so we're, I think we have trouble integrating what's even real and not real.

00:42:57
Eric Weinstein: So if all of our minds are now really the product of random, not randomly, but, uh, eclectically chosen- ... inputs and we can't count on a cannon so that there i- is a-

00:43:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:43:10
Eric Weinstein: ... less shared context, uh, what would be the art that would be appropriate to this time that we could look back and say, "Hey, do you remember how we shared that?" I mean...

00:43:25
Ryan Holiday: Like what is the art we're creating now that matters or-

00:43:27
Eric Weinstein: But are we, are we unreachable by art effectively because we're too atomized? It-

00:43:33
Ryan Holiday: That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, yeah, is there a, is there a painting that could come out that would gen- that would genuinely pierce the cultural consciousness?

00:43:45
Eric Weinstein: Like remember when Gangnam Style came out?

00:43:47
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:43:47
Eric Weinstein: That was so weird.

00:43:49
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:43:49
Eric Weinstein: It was so unseen.

00:43:51
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:43:51
Eric Weinstein: That we-we-

00:43:51
Ryan Holiday: That everyone was dancing it at weddings and all the things

00:43:53
Eric Weinstein: ... but we also, like the first thing was just your jaw was dropping, "What am I watching?"

00:43:58
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:43:58
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't even make sense.

00:43:59
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

00:43:59
Eric Weinstein: It's like some sort of hypnagogic state.

00:44:01
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah.

00:44:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So that was able to g- it, it, it, it, it grabbed the mic and said, "Now hear this."

00:44:09
Ryan Holiday: Well, what's interesting was that was like the first video to do a billion views, right?

00:44:13
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:44:13
Ryan Holiday: And now there are videos that have done a billion views that you and I have never heard of, you know? Like, which is very strange to think about. I remember the other day, I, um, someone had recommended this book, it's a, uh, the, uh, the book is A Man Called Ove, which is this interesting little novel. Um, it was actually really good, but I, he's like, "Hey, you should check out this book," and it had, it had recently come out, and I pulled it up, and it had 18,000 reviews on Amazon, and I'd never heard of it.

00:44:41
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

00:44:41
Ryan Holiday: So not like I hadn't read it, but like I'd never heard of it, I'd never seen it written about anywhere, um, it had won no awards, it had not been made into a movie. Um, and, and so you realize, yeah, things can be flat-out cultural phenomenons but have no cultural impact-

00:45:04
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

00:45:04
Ryan Holiday: ... whatsoever because they are filtered out of whatever that dominant media narrative is.

00:45:11
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:45:12
Ryan Holiday: I, I, yeah, like I, I mean, I even see this with, with my, with my own books, right? Like, um, I've sold l- my books have sold millions of copies, have been reviewed like twice in newspapers.

00:45:27
Eric Weinstein: Really?

00:45:27
Ryan Holiday: And they were almost all from the Teal Book because that was a media-centric book. So my book that's got the most media, uh, connections, got the most attention, but actually sold the fewest amount of copies.

00:45:48
Eric Weinstein: And f- for the rest, for the, the rest of it, you don't really fully exist?

00:45:52
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, basic- basically, it exists to the people who surface it in the, who get it surfaced to them in the Amazon algorithm-

00:45:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:46:00
Ryan Holiday: ... and sell like crazy. But as far as, yeah, the, like... What's also weird is like, yeah, to sell millions of books and you, I could walk into, I could walk into a good chunk of indie bookstore. It, I think people, it, it's not just the, the, the media culture, but I could walk into a large number of indie bookstores and not that they wouldn't have my books, they would not have heard of my books-

00:46:24
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:46:25
Ryan Holiday: ... even though their business is literal- should be-

00:46:27
Eric Weinstein: Books

00:46:27
Ryan Holiday: ... finding books that are selling copies-

00:46:30
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:46:30
Ryan Holiday: ... and putting them in front of people. So there is this weird sort of, there's this weird... It, it's almost, The New York Times list, th- I, I'm fascinated with The New York Times bestseller list. So two, two things about it. So-

00:46:44
Eric Weinstein: Why?

00:46:45
Ryan Holiday: Um, because to the a- to the public, The New York Times list is a reflection of what books are selling best.

00:46:52
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:46:52
Ryan Holiday: And to anyone in the industry, you know this is emphatically not the case. It's heavily edited. The New York Times list, for instance, um, discounts Amazon and weighs independent retail as a, their algorithm says independent retail matters more than Amazon, even though Amazon is responsible for roughly 80% of all book sales. Um, only until like 2000... It, it was only in like 2012, 2013, that they started counting e-books.

00:47:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:47:22
Ryan Holiday: Audible was, uh, in some cases not included. If you look at the fine print on The New York Times bestseller list, it says explicitly not included are, uh, perennial sellers, which means that like The Great Gatsby should be on the bestseller list most weeks, but The New York Times says, "Oh, that's old. W- let's put How to Be Antiracist on the list," even though actually that book is selling a fraction of Seven Habits.

00:47:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is... Okay, so-

00:47:52
Ryan Holiday: You know?

00:47:53
Eric Weinstein: So th- th- this is this, uh, complex supporting our human malware, and our malware runs between our ears.

00:48:00
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

00:48:00
Eric Weinstein: So it's client side. So I, I have a program that says, "If I wanna know what's hot, I should check The New York Times bestseller list."

00:48:07
Ryan Holiday: Yes.

00:48:07
Eric Weinstein: And the idea is, why am I maintaining the malware client side to participate in this crazy drama? Is it only because other people are using the same list? And so it's a QWERTY phenomena where it's a terrible arrangement of keys on the keyboard that was originally there to get keys not to stick to slow down typists?

00:48:26
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:48:26
Eric Weinstein: Or I mean, how do I get rid of my legacy architecture?

00:48:30
Ryan Holiday: Well, uh, uh, it's probably a little bit that, right? It's the cultural inertia and legacy of like this thing is existing and so it's a shorthand. There's, uh, probably a Girardian argument that like we want what other people are wanting. Um, and there's also, uh-

00:48:46
Eric Weinstein: But you're telling me they're not even wanting that.

00:48:48
Ryan Holiday: R- right, but we think that's what people are wanting, so-

00:48:50
Eric Weinstein: I know, but if I wanna have a real, real Girardian moment-

00:48:53
Ryan Holiday: You would s-

00:48:53
Eric Weinstein: ... I wanna actually want what you're wanting, not what somebody else is telling me that you're wanting.

00:48:56
Ryan Holiday: That's true, yes. So it's, it's Girardian virtue signaling then. Uh-

00:49:01
Eric Weinstein: Oh, this is good

00:49:01
Ryan Holiday: ... uh, and then, and then I think a lot of it is the paradox of choice, right? There's so much choice that we need s- we gravitate towards anything, so we go to the most read list on the site of The New York Times. We go to the top of Amazon. Like we, we, we, we just, it's like, "Please reduce choice for me." I think that's what we're saying.

00:49:23
Eric Weinstein: What, uh, or- I mean, or-

00:49:25
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:49:25
Eric Weinstein: ... and, um, please allow me to, to plug into a large memetic complex so that my time isn't wasted with references. Like, for example, I drove here, and I have this, uh, Discord, uh, server of people who talk about the show-

00:49:44
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:49:44
Eric Weinstein: ... and, and the culture, and I wanted to announce myself as, as coming in, so I said, uh, you know this line from the HMS Pinafore, "My gallant crew, good morning," and I was hoping somebody would echo back, "Sir, good morning."

00:49:58
Ryan Holiday: Right. You want them to get the reference.

00:50:00
Eric Weinstein: I want them to get the reference, and nobody has the reference.

00:50:03
Ryan Holiday: Right.

00:50:03
Eric Weinstein: Because why is anyone maintaining HMS Pinafore from the 1800s in 2020 on a Discord server?

00:50:10
Ryan Holiday: Well, that is one, it's, uh, as I mostly write about ancient philosophy so I, I sort of, you know, reading these books. What I, what I love is when you're reading Montaigne or Seneca, they'll be qu- they'll quote lines from, uh, you know, The Odyssey or Virgil. They, they're quoting poetry and plays and things, and it never occurs to them to attribute the line.

00:50:32
Eric Weinstein: Every-

00:50:32
Ryan Holiday: It's always in the footnote from the translator, "This is a lost line from a Euripides play," or whatever, right?

00:50:38
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:50:39
Ryan Holiday: But in the ancient world, it was assumed-

00:50:42
Eric Weinstein: That you'd know this

00:50:42
Ryan Holiday: ... that you would, you would not only, yeah, you would not only, uh, have seen said play, but you would have seen said play so many times that you would recognize it. And, you know, it, I think, I think the problem is there was just so much less stuff, right? So-

00:50:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's, there's that, but there's also this, this, uh, weird discomfort we have of teaching a canon for the purpose of keeping interoperable referencing.

00:51:10
Ryan Holiday: Well, canon is racist, Eric. That's why we can't have a c-

00:51:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's why we promote it on the portal, uh-

00:51:15
Ryan Holiday: [laughs] No, of course. Wait, well, we stopped teaching the canon. Uh, we certainly, like, uh... Yeah, people used to, people used to learn Seneca when they were being taught Latin, but now they don't learn Latin, so they're definitely not gonna learn Seneca's epigrams. You know, like, so there, I think there, there's an element of that to it. Um, but also, I, it's like, look, there was only a handful of playwrights in Athens. Now, we have all those playwrights, and we have Shakespeare, and we have, you know, 100 years of movies, which-

00:51:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, but the movie canon is, is the one thing that I really see going in the opposite direction, is that we remember these scenes.

00:51:57
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:51:58
Eric Weinstein: Like, if I said to you-

00:51:59
Ryan Holiday: If you had said, "You can't handle the truth," everyone would know what you're talking about

00:52:02
Eric Weinstein: ... Right, but if I said to you, uh, "Put that coffee down," would that be resonant with you?

00:52:08
Ryan Holiday: Uh-

00:52:09
Eric Weinstein: Your name Levine?

00:52:09
Ryan Holiday: Glenn There, Glenn Ross?

00:52:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:52:11
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:52:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:52:11
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:52:11
Eric Weinstein: Like, so-

00:52:12
Ryan Holiday: Yes

00:52:13
Eric Weinstein: ... the fact that we-

00:52:13
Ryan Holiday: Right, coffee is for closers. Yeah, there's, those are the things we quote from

00:52:15
Eric Weinstein: ... the fact that we can do that-

00:52:16
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:52:16
Eric Weinstein: ... to some extent.

00:52:18
Ryan Holiday: Well, one of the... So what I do, 'cause I do this email, every morning I write an email called Daily Stoic, and it's one sort of stoic-inspired meditation every day. Instead of quoting plays, 'cause no one gets those, I use song lyrics a lot, and I find song lyrics are also something that people have a, have a, a lot of familiarity with.

00:52:39
Eric Weinstein: Really depends on what era.

00:52:41
Ryan Holiday: It, it does, but-

00:52:41
Eric Weinstein: When I found out that my millennial coworkers had never heard Bridge Over Troubled Waters by Simon & Garfunkel, I had a real moment.

00:52:49
Ryan Holiday: But I bet if you had, let's say you'd written an email and the title was, like, We Need a Bridge Over Troubled Water, there would be a vague cultural, like, not nostalgia, but connection to that. I'd, even if they don't get it, there's a vague familiarity, I bet.

00:53:07
Eric Weinstein: OMG, LOL, ROFL.

00:53:09
Ryan Holiday: [laughs]

00:53:10
Eric Weinstein: Really? I, I don't think it... I, I mean, I've been shocked how little, uh, transmission there is to a lot of my millen- And, and again, this isn't a knock on them. It's just things that were incredibly important and salient just drop by the wayside. And then there will be references. Like, a lot of them will know Led Zeppelin.

00:53:30
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:53:31
Eric Weinstein: And I'll say, "Wow, why is it that you all know this but you don't know that?"

00:53:34
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, it's like classic rock versus folk rock. I, I did hear this one thing to tie back to media. There were, uh, it's like if you look at like, you know, media headlines over the last 100 years, there's lots of, yeah, Shakespearean references and, like, literary references. Like, the headlines might be a pun on the... And they were like, and the person was saying like, "In the future, the headlines will be Simpsons references." Like, because that's-

00:54:01
Eric Weinstein: But the s-

00:54:01
Ryan Holiday: ... what's replaced the thing.

00:54:02
Eric Weinstein: But, uh, that was very sneaky of you.

00:54:04
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:54:04
Eric Weinstein: A friend of mine said that The Simpsons was the only, um, the only pleasure she got where she could actually use her very expensive BA in English literature.

00:54:17
Ryan Holiday: Well, 'cause the people writing it are so s- are all, like-

00:54:20
Eric Weinstein: Are in-

00:54:20
Ryan Holiday: ... are a Harvard-

00:54:21
Eric Weinstein: Exactly

00:54:22
Ryan Holiday: ... you know? Yeah.

00:54:22
Eric Weinstein: So the point is, is that they're sneaking-

00:54:24
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

00:54:25
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Um-

00:54:26
Ryan Holiday: But, but yeah, they're, they're... I, I would argue that one of the reasons, like, the Marvel movies are so big... Now, obviously there's a hero's journey sort of archetypes or whatever, but, but if you're gonna make a $200 million movie or a billion dollar movie, it's, you have to have a large cultural familiarity. Like, there has to be an, uh, the audience has to already be familiar with the characters. So the reason we get lots of sequels, we get remakes-

00:54:55
Eric Weinstein: Is because you've already invested in building up the-

00:54:58
Ryan Holiday: There's already a, a latent audience who are at least potentially interested in the idea, whereas, like, if you think about a movie like Interstellar or, um, Inception, what an incredible gamble that is from a studio standpoint to make a movie that's that expensive but that has no cultural headstart in that people already love.

00:55:23
Eric Weinstein: Although, let, let's just take one of those. So Interstellar has this character who never really got his chance, and he's, he's now a father. And so he's got this problem, which is that he's finally getting called up to the majors to do something real, and he has-

00:55:38
Ryan Holiday: And he's Matthew McConaughey, who people know.

00:55:41
Eric Weinstein: Yes. Okay, well, this character in some sense is playing off, um, not a specific archetype-

00:55:49
Ryan Holiday: Sure

00:55:50
Eric Weinstein: ... but something that is very, you know, the passed over, who has to choose between family a- and a dream.

00:55:59
Ryan Holiday: Sure. Yes. But, but just I, I think the, the point is it's if you're doing Spider-Man eight-

00:56:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, I-

00:56:07
Ryan Holiday: ... everyone knows who Spider-Man is.

00:56:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, I took your point.

00:56:09
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah.

00:56:09
Eric Weinstein: Another question I had about the Marvel Universe-

00:56:12
Ryan Holiday: Although how many people in Interstellar recognize the, uh, you know, "Don't go quietly into the dark night," uh, you know, like, there, that, that movie is built around poetry.

00:56:22
Eric Weinstein: Dylan-

00:56:22
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, Dylan Thomas

00:56:23
Eric Weinstein: ... Dylan Thomas. Yeah.

00:56:25
Ryan Holiday: Uh, did people get it? Did they not? I don't know. But, but that's also a weird exception in that sense.

00:56:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, and also, you know, all of the work of, like, you know, was it Kip Thorne who was consulting to this to get the physics right?

00:56:35
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:56:35
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, v- very often a film is over-engineered, um, which I think is a beautiful thing that Hollywood-

00:56:42
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:56:42
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, still chooses to do on occasion. With respect to the Marvel Universe, how much of that is really... It's an ensemble idea, but like, with The Avengers, how much of that is really based around one or two of these characters that are much more important than all of the others?

00:57:01
Ryan Holiday: I mean, I'm sure that's a big part. I've literally never seen a Avenger or Marvel movie, but I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm interest- I think, like, what are, in 10 years-

00:57:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:57:10
Ryan Holiday: ... or 15 years, um, what, what will be big enough to have have the cultural nostalgia-

00:57:19
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:57:20
Ryan Holiday: ... to be a sure bet for a blockbuster movie? What do we all share enough that... You know what I mean? Are they gonna be Kardashian movies? Like, what, what, what could you be making movies about that reached everyone to a degree that... I, I'm not sure what that answer is.

00:57:37
Eric Weinstein: So here's the thing. I, I, I... I'm always fascinated when I'm positive about something and I can't get it to land generally.

00:57:44
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

00:57:44
Eric Weinstein: You and I have never explored this.

00:57:45
Ryan Holiday: Yes.

00:57:45
Eric Weinstein: But, um, I'm convinced that we're in a revolution, and it's a weird revolution so that it doesn't immediately, uh, rhyme close enough with any revolution we've been through before.

00:57:57
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

00:57:58
Eric Weinstein: And you see this with unrest all over the world, and everybody's un- incapable of figuring out why things are going in unexpected directions. The last time we were in such a situation arguably would've been the late 1960s, and the music we had clearly made sense for the revolution that was going on.

00:58:15
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, sure.

00:58:16
Eric Weinstein: I'm positive that the music I'm listening to does not belong to this time. It's like, it's unwanted, even the best of it.

00:58:25
Ryan Holiday: You mean like the, like what? Like the, the Taylor Swift of the world, or...?

00:58:29
Eric Weinstein: Even the hip hop.

00:58:29
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

00:58:29
Eric Weinstein: Like, the hip hop is-

00:58:30
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:58:30
Eric Weinstein: ... everybody will point to the hip hop and say, "No, no, no, the hip hop is actually that. That's what's now. That's what's-"

00:58:35
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:58:35
Eric Weinstein: "... really, you're just not getting it." I listen to it. I'm still not convinced that that's the music of now.

00:58:40
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

00:58:41
Eric Weinstein: That somehow our inability to say where we are in common and to build up that kind of... People, you know-

00:58:48
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:58:48
Eric Weinstein: ... somebody will call it the intersubjective or what have you.

00:58:50
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:58:52
Eric Weinstein: Means that my music, even if it's great music, sucks because it's not the music of this time.

00:58:58
Ryan Holiday: Sure. It's not rooted in anything human.

00:59:02
Eric Weinstein: Well, that if I heard... Let's imagine that I, I, I wake up and I get in an Uber, and the guy's playing the radio or whatever.

00:59:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:59:10
Eric Weinstein: And a song comes on, and I just think like, "Oh, my God, that is the song of now."

00:59:15
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:59:15
Eric Weinstein: "This is a sound I haven't heard."

00:59:17
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

00:59:17
Eric Weinstein: Suddenly I'm grounded again, and then there's an explosion in, in this fantasy-

00:59:21
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:59:22
Eric Weinstein: ... where everybody's saying, "What is that?" And then people start talking about it and start building it up. So for example, the comedy we had was not the comedy of now up until I think very recently.

00:59:33
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

00:59:33
Eric Weinstein: I was talking to Joe Rogan about this at the, at the Comedy Store. The Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip now appears to be, and maybe the Comedy Cellar in New York, I don't know-

00:59:43
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

00:59:43
Eric Weinstein: ... a small number of places, the reincarnation of CBGB's for punk.

00:59:49
Ryan Holiday: These are the subversive voices, the politically incorrect voices that you're talking about?

00:59:52
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no.

00:59:53
Ryan Holiday: Uh-

00:59:53
Eric Weinstein: It's, it's a group of people who are talking to each other backstage, trading ideas and creating... Like, there is a school-

01:00:02
Ryan Holiday: Sure

01:00:02
Eric Weinstein: ... happening that I don't know if it's named.

01:00:05
Ryan Holiday: Interesting.

01:00:05
Eric Weinstein: Where they couldn't figure out how to tell the jokes a few years ago.

01:00:10
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

01:00:10
Eric Weinstein: And they've now cracked the code.

01:00:12
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:00:13
Eric Weinstein: And the jokes are now the jokes of our time, where the jokes didn't feel like they were the jokes of our time.

01:00:21
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

01:00:22
Eric Weinstein: Right? Like, in other words, for example, you don't want to be politically incorrect for the sake of just being a dick.

01:00:29
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:00:29
Eric Weinstein: On the other hand, you don't wanna denature yourself to the point that your comedy is completely uninteresting.

01:00:35
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:00:36
Eric Weinstein: Before, nobody could figure out how to do an edgy bit that meant something, that still had some heart and left you-

01:00:41
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:00:42
Eric Weinstein: ... feeling uplifted that somebody had figured out how to say what you've been feeling.

01:00:46
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:00:47
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's some puzzle like that in music that hasn't been solved.

01:00:52
Ryan Holiday: So I had two things. So one, to go to our point about the dominant cultural medium or conversation and then, like, what people are liking. I've... Did you see that Jesse Singer piece about, like, the, the Chappelle ratio? Whereas, like, on, uh, Netflix or whatever, like, Chappelle's, uh, special had, like, a 98% rating, and then the Rotten Tomatoes rating was, like, 30%.

01:01:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:01:16
Ryan Holiday: And so it, like, the people who are supposed to be helping us surface these things and contextualizing them and popularizing them and reflecting-

01:01:24
Eric Weinstein: We-

01:01:24
Ryan Holiday: ... back to us what they mean have failed completely to get what people need and want.

01:01:28
Eric Weinstein: Or, or we have failed our betters in Brooklyn.

01:01:31
Ryan Holiday: Yes. Right. They... Actually, they know what's good, and we plebs-

01:01:34
Eric Weinstein: We, we, we plebs-

01:01:34
Ryan Holiday: ... our life is garbage

01:01:35
Eric Weinstein: ... just don't get it, right.

01:01:35
Ryan Holiday: That, that, right.

01:01:36
Eric Weinstein: We just don't get it.

01:01:36
Ryan Holiday: Right. That, that... [laughs] Sure, sure. But that, and that's certainly what they think, right? That they're-

01:01:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, they're-

01:01:42
Ryan Holiday: ... they are telling us why we're all-

01:01:42
Eric Weinstein: They're beginning to understand That they look ridiculous.

01:01:46
Ryan Holiday: I think they are, but there's also an argument that, like, we're the deplorables who are not getting how offensive, uh-

01:01:53
Eric Weinstein: Do you really-

01:01:53
Ryan Holiday: ... Chappelle's, uh-

01:01:53
Eric Weinstein: I don't, I don't believe that. Look, I, I, I didn't think Chappelle's thing was that great, to be hon- honest

01:01:58
Ryan Holiday: I didn't think it was amazing, but it

01:01:59
Eric Weinstein: And I did think it was offensive in sometimes uncompensated ways.

01:02:03
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:02:04
Eric Weinstein: But that wasn't what was so exciting about it. The exciting part was the breaking of... The joke that broke the fourth wall, where he s- said, "I'm gonna do two impressions."

01:02:13
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:02:13
Eric Weinstein: And the second impression is-

01:02:15
Ryan Holiday: You

01:02:15
Eric Weinstein: ... fuck the audience.

01:02:16
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah.

01:02:17
Eric Weinstein: The, the, "My audience sucks."

01:02:18
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:02:18
Eric Weinstein: "And you know you suck, and I am going to point out that you suck to get you to stop sucking quite as hard as you are."

01:02:25
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

01:02:25
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:02:25
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. No, I love that. Um, the other argument though is, like, okay, when we look back and we go, okay, the songs of the '60s and '70s, I wonder if you, if you... Okay, give me... If you're like, "Give me the 10 sort of Vietnam songs," you know, it's like All Along the Watchtower. It's, uh, uh, you know, whatever the songs are.

01:02:43
Eric Weinstein: Why was All Along the Watchtower a Vietnam song?

01:02:45
Ryan Holiday: I don't know. I'm just saying, like, what, what are the songs-

01:02:46
Eric Weinstein: Vietnam era?

01:02:47
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

01:02:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Okay.

01:02:48
Ryan Holiday: I... Yeah, that's what I meant. But I mean, like, it... Do we think what those songs are, it's because we've watched so many movies about them, they've been... You know, it's like what's the soundtrack from Forrest Gump? What's the soundtrack from-

01:02:59
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no

01:02:59
Ryan Holiday: ... Full Metal Jacket?

01:03:00
Eric Weinstein: Let's just take the one you, take, take the one you pulled up. Bob Dylan is quoting two separate parts of the Bible, one of which is Isaiah, right? And, you know, this whole concept of d- Christ on the mount being crucified between these two other figures, and this incredible conversation sketched in thumbnail, uh, between these two figures, uh, e- evoking the crucifixion. The other case, you know, you're talking about, uh, y- you know, the loss of a great city and, and waiting to, to hear the news that, well, I guess Babylon has fallen or something. You know, and then Hendrix comes out of nowhere combining rhythm guitar and lead guitar in an otherworldly piece that even Dylan has to realize, "Holy shit, I didn't get my-

01:03:45
Ryan Holiday: So much better. Yeah

01:03:45
Eric Weinstein: ... I didn't get my own song." There was so much drama in that, those three chords, you know, that-

01:03:51
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:03:51
Eric Weinstein: ... that... I know why that song worked for that time.

01:03:58
Ryan Holiday: But what I just mean, like, if you, if you ask someone today what are the songs and you, let's say you got 10 songs.

01:04:04
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:04:04
Ryan Holiday: And then you compare, then you look side by side with the charts of that era. Are they the same, or is it, is our sense of it a thing that happens slowly over time as we get more removed from it? So the argument that what we're listening to today is not the songs of our time actually is do those songs get created afterwards as we refl- like, as we reflect on it, as we filter the good from the bad slowly over time? So maybe you, maybe you didn't actually hear, maybe you wouldn't have heard All Along the Watchtower in a taxi-

01:04:38
Eric Weinstein: In the club

01:04:39
Ryan Holiday: ... in New York City in 19 whatever, just as you wouldn't hear it getting into an Uber downstairs today. You, you see what I'm saying?

01:04:48
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I d-

01:04:52
Ryan Holiday: The Great Gatsby is the book of the Jazz Age, but it was a failure in its own time.

01:04:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's lots of-

01:04:58
Ryan Holiday: And it do- You know, uh, but so it, so it, it co- It, it, it emerges i- after we sift through it over time, and then we get the reflection. It was being written in that time, it just wasn't... We just didn't appreciate it enough then.

01:05:12
Eric Weinstein: I, I love that. I think that's true for some amount of it. What I think it, what I'm talking about is an effect so large that we don't even really wanna contemplate. You know, I mean, there, there's an aspect which, to which, um, Ariana Grande or Billie Eilish is speaking to her audience-

01:05:29
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:05:31
Eric Weinstein: ... i- in the time and going through their problems and, and they are making a connection.

01:05:34
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:05:34
Eric Weinstein: I don't mean to say that. What I mean to say is that this moment for young, old is t- wildly incoherent. If you have a civil war, let's say in, in Beir- Beirut-

01:05:47
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:05:48
Eric Weinstein: ... everybody's going through the same civil war.

01:05:49
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

01:05:49
Eric Weinstein: It's not like, "Old man, your civil war is different from..." No. Those, those checkpoints are real.

01:05:54
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:05:55
Eric Weinstein: Whatever is blowing us apart in terms of whatever assumed interstitial intersubjective, uh, is breaking down everywhere, we're all going through it and nothing is reflecting it, and we're not even thinking about... Like, what I try to do-

01:06:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:06:10
Eric Weinstein: ... is to give you a concrete realization. I believe-

01:06:12
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:06:12
Eric Weinstein: ... that the comedy that's going on in the lab-

01:06:15
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:06:16
Eric Weinstein: ... is now the comedy of our time.

01:06:18
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:06:19
Eric Weinstein: I don't think that's yet true for music, and people have an automated answer, which is, "No, man, it's hip hop. Hip hop is what's now."

01:06:25
Ryan Holiday: Right. Sure.

01:06:25
Eric Weinstein: And even that's not right. Like, you will see something take over the planet when somebody actually hits the formula that says, "Oh my God, this is the ephemeral of this moment made archival."

01:06:38
Ryan Holiday: Have you watched the Taylor Swift documentary?

01:06:41
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:06:41
Ryan Holiday: You should watch it.

01:06:42
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:06:42
Ryan Holiday: It's, 'cause it's interesting, 'cause you're watching the most popular artist of our time essentially create a propaganda documentary about themselves.

01:06:50
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:06:50
Ryan Holiday: But there is this interesting moment in it where she's decided she wants to speak out about the, the Senate race in Tennessee that's going on at that time or what. This is, like, filmed in 2017 or something like that, and you watch her... So I think, two, two things. Uh, uh, the first one is there's a scene in the documentary where she has to go to her advisors and her parents, and she's, like, literally weeping, begging them to try to let her say what she thinks politically, right? Which you would never have... Bob Dylan did not have that conversation. Jimi Hendrix did not have that conversation. There was a... I think there was both a courage, but also the stakes were lower, and so-

01:07:36
Eric Weinstein: Didn't Bob Dylan have that conversation by singing Maggie's Farm, Gone Electric at Newport? I mean, wasn't that the import is like, "I'm tired of you guys telling me to... I, I'm breaking free. Screw you"?

01:07:52
Ryan Holiday: May- maybe, maybe. That's a good point. I, I don't know, but it w- it's a very... I, I thought it was a revealing cultural moment that, like, the person with all the power... It- I don't think Bob Dylan was then as big as Taylor Swift is now. Uh, he didn't have 100 million Instagram followers. Do you know what I mean?

01:08:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:08:10
Ryan Holiday: Uh, but you're wi- you're wi-

01:08:11
Eric Weinstein: It's a weird thought, isn't it?

01:08:12
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, it's crazy.

01:08:13
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:08:14
Ryan Holiday: Uh, but, but you think that, that there... I think it's a courage thing, but it's also a vu- Like, her brand is specifically about her being apolitical, not controversial, not saying what she actually thinks. It's about the mask, and here she's trying to break that mask or take that mask off and be genuine. And so I thought that was interesting. The other weird sense I got from the documentary is primarily... 'Cause it is propaganda. She makes this herself. It's not like some s- you know, 20/20 documentary about her-

01:08:47
Eric Weinstein: Sure

01:08:47
Ryan Holiday: ... or something. She, her pri- I felt the primary mood was that you, she wanted you to see her as kind of a victim, like, as weak and as struggling, and, um, uh, being buffeted by forces and adversity and difficulty. I can't imagine 30 years ago Madonna, at the peak of her career, wanting you to feel sorry for her. That would not be the brand. So there, there's a weird millennial moment in that for me.

01:09:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, but sometimes that's just bringing your context. Like, Madonna effectively was, was, uh, metabolizing shame, you know, in something like Like a Virgin-

01:09:31
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:09:31
Eric Weinstein: ... where the idea is, is that if I can assume that you understand the shame, then my cavorting in this particular way shows you that I'm rising above it. So maybe the idea is, is that a Taylor Swift, like... You have to be buffeted by forces and pushed down and victimized so that you can rise up and say, "No fucks left to give," and all of the-

01:09:52
Ryan Holiday: No, no, no. It's, it's, it's, it's actually closer to something that you've talked about, where, um, Madonna's narrative is fundamentally of empowerment and of, and of her agency, and the prevailing mood of this, and I think of our time, to go back to your original, original question, it was that she's a low agency person. Do you know what I mean? That, that, like, you think sh- you think she's X, but actually she's just like everyone else, which is that we are not in control of our destiny and that we are victims, and that l- this is hard, and we're helpless. You know what I m- Like, I think that is a weird force of our time, that, like, even though we actually have more opportunities, more resources, more freedom than literally ever before, everyone wants you to know how powerless they are and how much of a victim they are of systemic or-

01:10:43
Eric Weinstein: Certainly how Taylor Swift came to our, our consciousness is that, you know, sh- she was the, the good-hearted girl next door when you were focused on the, the hot chick-

01:10:52
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:10:52
Eric Weinstein: ... leading the cheerleader squad.

01:10:54
Ryan Holiday: And then right as she was winning her award, Kanye West came up and bullied her out of it, right? That's, like, the narrative of the film.

01:11:01
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:11:01
Ryan Holiday: It's really interesting.

01:11:04
Eric Weinstein: Um, what do you think the biggest distortions that we're wrestling with in our minds are where there is a resolution that immediately catapults us to a different metacognitive level of understanding of our environment? In other words, what is it that you see is most off in people's understanding where there is a fix and you can say, "What, now that I see that, I understand why I'm behaving this way, why, uh, I don't feel right about my family relations. I'm not comfortable with the media or our political process"?

01:11:39
Ryan Holiday: Uh, yeah, that's a good question. Um, I don't know. I, I, I get a sense from a lot of my peers that there's this kind of feeling of, of unrootedness and being untethered, and it's like they're, they're looking for it everywhere. They're looking for, they're looking for peace and meaning in psychedelics and polyamorous relationships and, you know, traveling and, you know, influence and-

01:12:09
Eric Weinstein: That's the exact same list that I would've come up with.

01:12:11
Ryan Holiday: Okay. Interesting. And, and to me, the solution of 90% of the problems-

01:12:16
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, don't tell me.

01:12:16
Ryan Holiday: Okay. Yeah.

01:12:17
Eric Weinstein: Let's both fix it in our minds.

01:12:19
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

01:12:22
Eric Weinstein: I won't change mine, you won't change yours.

01:12:23
Ryan Holiday: Okay, okay.

01:12:24
Eric Weinstein: Give me yours.

01:12:25
Ryan Holiday: I think for most pe- I think this would be the solution to the elite angst and, and, and, you know, anxiety, as well as the alt-right anger and fear. It's like, get married, have kids, live within your means, find work that's purposeful and fulfilling to you.

01:12:43
Eric Weinstein: So this just happened. Uh, I went to, uh, I think it was Joe Green was opening this, this, this tree house. It was one of these int- intentional communities. Everybody's talking about we have a loss of s- of, of, uh, spirituality.

01:12:57
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:12:58
Eric Weinstein: We have a need for community like never before. Our lives have to be meaningful.

01:13:02
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:13:02
Eric Weinstein: And th- and then all this stuff about nutrition, s- uh, you know. I always pick on Tulum because people are always going to Tulum.

01:13:09
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, they are. Yes.

01:13:10
Eric Weinstein: Um, uh, psychedelics, uh, all of these kind of, uh, i- intentional getaways with-

01:13:17
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:13:19
Eric Weinstein: And I raised my hand. I said, "How many of you have children?" And, like, one hand goes up in a very crowded room.

01:13:25
Ryan Holiday: Right.

01:13:26
Eric Weinstein: And I said, "Have you ever considered that what it is that you're looking for is family?"

01:13:32
Ryan Holiday: Yes.

01:13:33
Eric Weinstein: And maybe even belonging to your local mosque, ch- s- uh, church or synagogue, whether or not you believe.

01:13:40
Ryan Holiday: Right.

01:13:41
Eric Weinstein: And I don't think it even occurs to them that, that, that this is... They've got a family-sized hole in their souls.

01:13:51
Ryan Holiday: Mm-hmm. Yeah, they w I- that's a weird thing Silicon Valley, and I- it's Silicon Valley, but I mean more like the larger system of, of sort of media and questions and what. It's like we've kick- they've kicked out the legs of all the stools, uh, all the legs of the stool. Like family's kicked out, showing up in an office is kicked out. Even if you show up in an office, having your own space inside the office is kick- Like all the things that used to make us feel normer- normal and comfortable and safe and rooted-

01:14:24
Eric Weinstein: And that provided meaning

01:14:24
Ryan Holiday: ... it's not normal to go to WeWork and bring your stuff to a large community table every day.

01:14:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:14:30
Ryan Holiday: You should have a desk with pictures of your kids on it.

01:14:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, I don't want to say it normatively.

01:14:34
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:14:34
Eric Weinstein: But the thing that I'm just fascinated by is the idea isn't occurring to these people.

01:14:41
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:14:41
Eric Weinstein: Like the-

01:14:43
Ryan Holiday: Yes

01:14:43
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, o- once you have a kid in a school and you're worried about how the kid is doing and other parents have the same concerns about-

01:14:49
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:14:49
Eric Weinstein: ... the same teachers and you're having these conversations, you start to think, "Oh, well, this is what my body is programmed for, is to take this incredible interest in a tiny number of people." Now, I don't mean to say, and I'm, I'm positive that you won't mean to say, that every single person needs to go have a child.

01:15:07
Ryan Holiday: Right. It's just most people.

01:15:09
Eric Weinstein: Most people-

01:15:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:15:10
Eric Weinstein: ... on average.

01:15:11
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:15:12
Eric Weinstein: Even, a- and I'm not even talking about having a great family.

01:15:16
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:15:16
Eric Weinstein: Like have a challenged, difficult family-

01:15:18
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:15:18
Eric Weinstein: ... like everybody else.

01:15:19
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. It could be a gay family, it could be a transgender fa- it doesn't really matter. It-

01:15:22
Eric Weinstein: It could be a dysfunctional family.

01:15:24
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. [laughs]

01:15:24
Eric Weinstein: It could be a family with a lot of pain.

01:15:25
Ryan Holiday: Right. No, you need, you need that. I, I do think you need that. Also, I think it, it has all these weird unintended benefits, even just like, oh, it puts you on a schedule because the kids go to wake up at a certain time and go to bed at a certain time. They need a bath at a certain time, and like they go to a same place most days of the week. You know, like, it, it roots you in life in a way that when you have unlimited options and unlimited choice, you, you are paralyzed.

01:15:58
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I don't know whether you, you've found this. Your, your oldest is three?

01:16:01
Ryan Holiday: Three and a half, and then I have a seven-month-old.

01:16:03
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:16:03
Ryan Holiday: So I'm in, I'm in deep in the shit.

01:16:04
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:16:05
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:16:05
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is great.

01:16:05
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:16:06
Eric Weinstein: Um, by the way, three was definitely the... I heard about the terrible twos.

01:16:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:16:10
Eric Weinstein: We had terrible threes.

01:16:11
Ryan Holiday: They call it threenager.

01:16:12
Eric Weinstein: A threenager?

01:16:13
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:16:13
Eric Weinstein: That's very good. I hadn't heard that. [laughs] Uh, it was also the most delicious time.

01:16:17
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:16:17
Eric Weinstein: But anyway, um, the thing that I found was is that my feelings about death changed because this is the human program for immortality.

01:16:27
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:16:27
Eric Weinstein: So you can worry, like once your child starts to carry your memes and your thought processes and knows your references, there's a weird way in which you can accept your own death and say, "Okay, well, I'm continuing in some form."

01:16:41
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I had this weird feeling, I don't feel it a lot, but sometime after my son was born, um, because my career's been successful, I've done interesting things, and I had a kid and I was like, "Oh, I'm, I, I could be done." Like, like, like I'd done it all. Like, obviously you want to be around, you want to have more, you want to do more, but you're just like, "Oh," like I've... There, there was this weird evolutionary sense of having ticked all the, all the boxes. Did you ever feel that?

01:17:09
Eric Weinstein: I, I, so w- our, our oldest, um, skipped her last year of high school and went to college.

01:17:17
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

01:17:18
Eric Weinstein: And we had this sense of like, "Wait a minute, we succeeded?"

01:17:22
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. [laughs] Right.

01:17:23
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:17:23
Ryan Holiday: Right. Yeah.

01:17:24
Eric Weinstein: You know, and I, I'm not even positive-

01:17:26
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:17:26
Eric Weinstein: ... that I think college is a good idea.

01:17:27
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:17:27
Eric Weinstein: But it, but it was just the sense of like-

01:17:29
Ryan Holiday: You got them from beginning to y- the, the plane has, has l- the wheels have left the ground.

01:17:35
Eric Weinstein: The wheels have left the ground.

01:17:36
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:17:37
Eric Weinstein: And that was like, that was one of these feelings, uh, where you do have that sense that somehow you've contributed. One of the things I find very strange is that children are about the most interesting thing to have, but they, they're terrible for talking about them, particularly to people who don't have them.

01:17:54
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, it's ineffable.

01:17:54
Eric Weinstein: So they-

01:17:55
Ryan Holiday: It's ineffable.

01:17:56
Eric Weinstein: There's an ineffable quality.

01:17:58
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:17:58
Eric Weinstein: And, um, what was I gonna try to get at? Some- something here.

01:18:03
Ryan Holiday: And it also gives you a, a weird relation to your own body and feelings in that, like if you could step back from it, you know it's hard and exhausting and difficult, and somehow your body and mind is telling yourself that it's worth it and amazing. Like you get a sense of like, oh, my body is... Like that my wife would like to have another kid. I'm like, "You saw what this did to you. Like it was horrible." You know? Like-

01:18:28
Eric Weinstein: I mean, let's, let's be honest.

01:18:29
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:18:29
Eric Weinstein: This was a life and death activity. Still is occasionally, but-

01:18:32
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and you're still not sleeping from the first two.

01:18:37
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:18:38
Ryan Holiday: You've not gotten any of the stuff you wanted to get back back yet, but your mind is able to... Th- it's where it's all, it's like, it, it's like the equivalent of like, so normally you're flying the plane and you're convinced you're the pilot, and then every once in a while autopilot kicks in and you realize that it's overriding you and you don't have nearly as much of a say in it as you think you have had. That I think kids sort of give you a weird glimpse into how biologically driven you are and your life is.

01:19:11
Eric Weinstein: So I'm very concerned about the idea that a lot of the people that I really love and take seriously don't have a particular concern about the world beyond their own lifespan, and that's very hard to convince them of why they should care. A lot of these people increasingly have an idea of, "I don't really need to have kids."

01:19:35
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:19:35
Eric Weinstein: "I enjoy my life." But it's very somatic. It's very much about the purpose of life is to be happy, and if there's one thing I'm reasonably convinced of, the purpose of life is not to be happy.

01:19:47
Ryan Holiday: We- I think we would be happier if that's what we were bred for or-

01:19:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:19:51
Ryan Holiday: ... made for. Yeah.

01:19:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, happiness is approximate to guide you to doing certain things that are actually about something related. I mean, it's not- It's not orthogonal to happiness, but some kind of fulfillment

01:20:02
Ryan Holiday: There's a Greek saying where it's like, uh, society is great when old men plant trees-

01:20:08
Eric Weinstein: Trees under whose-

01:20:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:20:10
Eric Weinstein: ... in whose shade they will never sit.

01:20:11
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And-

01:20:12
Eric Weinstein: I, I just was trying to make this point to people, and they, they act as if they've never heard it

01:20:19
Ryan Holiday: Well, what's... Not only is it weird people, most people have never heard it, if you look at, uh... It's the exact opposite of s- how demographics voting patterns seem to go. The older you get, the more conservative you are, the more selfish you tend to get. It's, it's strange that we are looking at a political system in which the young people are most concerned about... A- and look, there's obviously, these are nuanced issues, so I'm not meaning to... But it's young people who are most concerned with climate change. It's young people who are most concerned with the solvency of sort of various institutions or, you know, uh, things.

01:20:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, look, we've got a psychotic generation, and I don't know why, because you can't have everybody being a psychopath.

01:21:04
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:21:04
Eric Weinstein: But, but the Boomer generation, there is something bizarrely wrong-

01:21:10
Ryan Holiday: Yes

01:21:10
Eric Weinstein: ... with these people as an aggregate. Not as individuals, but as an aggregate, their concern for their own children is so diminished from what I would expect.

01:21:22
Ryan Holiday: Yes.

01:21:22
Eric Weinstein: And their concern f- with their lifestyle is so exaggerated. And a- again, everything has to be filtered through on average.

01:21:29
Ryan Holiday: Sure, sure.

01:21:29
Eric Weinstein: So-

01:21:30
Ryan Holiday: Right. Yeah

01:21:30
Eric Weinstein: ... please, before you attack, all the standard disclaimers. What the F?

01:21:35
Ryan Holiday: It's strange. It's very strange. That, what's the, the term for it now, is dream hoarding? Uh-

01:21:42
Eric Weinstein: Wait, I-

01:21:42
Ryan Holiday: Which I've-

01:21:42
Eric Weinstein: I haven't heard this.

01:21:43
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. So it's like, like, who are, who are the NIMBYs? Who are the people who, uh, are most in favor of legacy admissions to colleges? Prob- it, you go down the list, it's, it's wealthy people who are primarily concerned with themselves, and in some case, it, if, if we're lucky, their one to two children. It's not a sense of... Like when, when we say our kids, like the, the... I f- I forget who said it, but it was very brilliant. I think about it all the time. He said, you know, a generation or two ago, if you said like, "W- we're gonna build a park for our kids," or, "We're gonna put in a swimming pool for our kids," you meant a community swimming pool in your neighborhood. Now you mean we're putting in a swimming pool in the backyard.

01:22:30
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:22:30
Ryan Holiday: We're gonna put a large fence around so the neighborhood kids don't come in it.

01:22:34
Eric Weinstein: Well, my, my version of this is why am I more concerned about your children than you're concerned about your children?

01:22:40
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:22:41
Eric Weinstein: Like, I, I'm a Gen X-er. My audience is largely Millennials. I rag on the Millennials-

01:22:46
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:22:46
Eric Weinstein: ... to an extent.

01:22:47
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

01:22:47
Eric Weinstein: But honestly, it's this avuncular concern. Like, hey, how do I help you guys figure out why you're, why you're feeling blocked with work? Because let me tell you, I believe all standard career paths don't make sense-

01:22:59
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:22:59
Eric Weinstein: ... which is a terrible thing to be growing up with.

01:23:01
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:23:03
Eric Weinstein: Uh, not all of you need to have children, but a lot of you are pretending you don't need to have children-

01:23:07
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:23:07
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, so that you don't feel bad if it doesn't work out.

01:23:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:23:10
Eric Weinstein: How do I, how do I say something to help you couple and court and, and-

01:23:14
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:23:15
Eric Weinstein: ... and, and, and realize these dreams? And then when I l- listen to the Boomers, they have this attitude of like, "Yeah, I just figure everybody will find their bliss and, you know, make their own way. Uh, uh, uh, we, we know we did." And I just think, do you have any idea, for example, how crushing college is as an experience relative to when you went through it?

01:23:35
Ryan Holiday: Me?

01:23:36
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no.

01:23:36
Ryan Holiday: Oh, yes.

01:23:37
Eric Weinstein: You Bo-

01:23:37
Ryan Holiday: Totally

01:23:37
Eric Weinstein: ... you Boomers.

01:23:38
Ryan Holiday: Right, 'cause they remember paying $55 for tuition to go to UCLA, and it's now $55,000.

01:23:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, but why does nothing get through?

01:23:48
Ryan Holiday: It's, it's very strange. Well, one of... I remember one of the, a tweet I saw from you many years ago that I thought, I think about often is you looked at, like, the average age of professions as Boomers have gotten older, and it's precisely the age of what the Boomers are. So, like, a college president in 1970 was 30, 'cause that's how old Boomers were, and the a- now Boomers are 70, the average age of a college president is, like, 70. You know, like, they've hoarded all the stuff, and they won't, they won't retire-

01:24:22
Eric Weinstein: The average college president-

01:24:22
Ryan Holiday: ... and give it up

01:24:23
Eric Weinstein: ... was 51 during the '80s.

01:24:24
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:24:25
Eric Weinstein: ... and it's now climbed into the 60s.

01:24:27
Ryan Holiday: Right.

01:24:27
Eric Weinstein: But my... I mean, I just wanna take it away from them. I, I, I, I literally, a- and I think this is just important, I wanna say, "You're done. You, Timmy needs, Timmy needs the, the tricycle now, and you've been on it, and having a, a s- a 69-year-old person-

01:24:45
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:24:45
Eric Weinstein: ... on a tricycle is unseemly."

01:24:47
Ryan Holiday: Right.

01:24:47
Eric Weinstein: Get the hell off the trike.

01:24:49
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. It's time, it's time for... It's almost, it's like nepotism would be refreshing. Like, like, that you're g- that you're, y- you're retiring as CEO and putting your son in charge or your daughter in charge would be refreshing, better than you just never letting go.

01:25:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, the thing that, the re- the r- the one that really breaks my heart is how many weekend getaways do you people need? And I, I, I said this thing about you're gonna have hard drives filled with photos that nobody cares about-

01:25:20
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:25:20
Eric Weinstein: ... and you're never gonna hold a grandchild in your own arms. W- what, what is even going through your mind?

01:25:26
Ryan Holiday: Well, so-

01:25:27
Eric Weinstein: Like dowry-

01:25:28
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:25:28
Eric Weinstein: ... is a concept that we consigned-

01:25:30
Ryan Holiday: Well-

01:25:30
Eric Weinstein: ... to the developing world.

01:25:31
Ryan Holiday: Wealth dis- redistribution

01:25:33
Eric Weinstein: Just give your kids your m- money while their, while their ovaries are still fresh.

01:25:38
Ryan Holiday: No, it's funny, like, so my, my parents I think are sort of typical. My, my parents were slightly late, or, like, late, the last generation of Boomers, uh, the, or the last sort of tail end of Boomers. But, like, when my, we grew up in California, and then when my sister and I graduated from college or went to college, my parents moved to Hawaii. So they moved, so the opposite of, like- ... uh, let's be near the kids. My parents moved literally as far as you can move away and [laughs] stay in the United States. And then I can tell it makes them sad that they don't have as close a relationship with their grandchildren as some of their friends, and it's like, you know it's 'cause you live in an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, right? And-

01:26:17
Eric Weinstein: They can't put it together

01:26:18
Ryan Holiday: ... I'm not gonna... The, and they go, "Oh, come visit us. It's the beach." It's like, do you know how hard it is to put two toddlers on an eight-hour flight t- with-

01:26:26
Eric Weinstein: Well, if you have-

01:26:26
Ryan Holiday: ... a three-hour time difference? That's insane.

01:26:28
Eric Weinstein: Just get a paper route and-

01:26:31
Ryan Holiday: What? [laughs]

01:26:31
Eric Weinstein: Just get a paper route.

01:26:32
Ryan Holiday: Right, right. No, no, it's not the expense. It's just like-

01:26:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:26:34
Ryan Holiday: ... I'm just not gonna do that.

01:26:35
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no.

01:26:36
Ryan Holiday: It's like, right.

01:26:36
Eric Weinstein: I, I understand. It, it's a complete disconnect.

01:26:39
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:26:40
Eric Weinstein: Um, the story I've been telling recently was going to a, my father's 85th birthday party, and, uh, one of their friends, this is the silent generation who doesn't take enough shit, in my opinion-

01:26:51
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:26:52
Eric Weinstein: ... for this, because I think they really-

01:26:53
Ryan Holiday: This is, your father is the silent generation?

01:26:54
Eric Weinstein: My, my father's silent generation.

01:26:55
Ryan Holiday: That's born be- right before World War II or...?

01:26:58
Eric Weinstein: Uh, born before '46.

01:27:00
Ryan Holiday: Okay. Got it.

01:27:01
Eric Weinstein: So he, he's born in the mid-'30s.

01:27:04
Ryan Holiday: Got it, okay.

01:27:05
Eric Weinstein: You know? And he-

01:27:05
Ryan Holiday: This is, like, McCain and-

01:27:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, interestingly, no person born in the '30s ever becomes President of the United States.

01:27:12
Ryan Holiday: Right.

01:27:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:27:12
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, okay.

01:27:13
Eric Weinstein: So, um-

01:27:15
Ryan Holiday: This is Korea.

01:27:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:27:17
Ryan Holiday: Your dad fight in Korea?

01:27:18
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:27:18
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

01:27:19
Eric Weinstein: But-

01:27:20
Ryan Holiday: Right.

01:27:20
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:27:21
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

01:27:21
Eric Weinstein: Um, w- so one of his friends says to me, "You know, uh, everything's changed so much. There used to be 14 boys who all played in the street where we live, and we've been in that house, you know, for decades."

01:27:34
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:27:35
Eric Weinstein: And I said, "Well, how many boys play in the street now?" He says, "None." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, no families can afford this street."

01:27:42
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:27:43
Eric Weinstein: I said, "Does that strike you that you were able to afford this street when-

01:27:47
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:27:47
Eric Weinstein: ... you started, and now you have an idea, well, of course no families can afford..." I mean-

01:27:50
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:27:51
Eric Weinstein: ... is there any part of this that w- that lands? None of it.

01:27:54
Ryan Holiday: What's also, it's like you should move into a two-bedroom condo, [laughs] and, uh, then people... You should have moved to Florida, and then people could have your house. It's all, it's not only that it can't affor-

01:28:05
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:28:05
Ryan Holiday: ... can't afford it, it's that you're still in the house.

01:28:08
Eric Weinstein: No, it, uh, yes, but, uh, I, I-

01:28:11
Ryan Holiday: It, but, but-

01:28:11
Eric Weinstein: ... I wo- I would say it differently.

01:28:12
Ryan Holiday: But I just mean, in California, it's like, it's also 'cause boomers aren't selling their houses, 'cause they don't wanna-

01:28:18
Eric Weinstein: But, but, but-

01:28:18
Ryan Holiday: They don't wanna take the tax hit.

01:28:20
Eric Weinstein: Th- here's the disconnect for me. Do you understand that you caught a wave? Do, do you imagine that the rest of us just aren't as smart as you? Uh-

01:28:29
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:28:29
Eric Weinstein: ... and then we, nobody's hardworking? 'Cause that's one of the memes. It's like-

01:28:32
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:28:32
Eric Weinstein: ... well, and I believe that it's, it's exactly the reverse, that the millennials watch the X-ers... This is a f- a friend of mine says that. He said, "We, we watched you give everything to try to make these careers work and fail, and so we're not gonna fall for that-"

01:28:47
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:28:47
Eric Weinstein: "... so we're going to Tulum."

01:28:48
Ryan Holiday: Interesting. Sure. Yeah. Or, or it's like, if you know retirement's a lie and it's not gonna happen-

01:28:54
Eric Weinstein: If you... Right

01:28:55
Ryan Holiday: ... you should go to Tulum now.

01:28:56
Eric Weinstein: You should go to Tulum and front load your life because, quite frankly, we don't have a plan. There's no, there's no retirement plan.

01:29:02
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. No, no, I think, I think that's right. I think that's right. Yeah, it's, there's also, I think, let's say you're a millennial, it's like, I remem- my freshman year of high school, I watched 9/11 live on television. You know, then I watched the war in Iraq. Then I watched the financial crisis. You know, I, I was lucky in that I dropped out of college. I didn't take any debt. I, I ro- I, I caught some waves that other millennials didn't get to catch.

01:29:31
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:29:31
Ryan Holiday: But, like, I mean, that's a dark 10-year period right there, you know, like, of shit happening and being lied to, and w- you, we, you watched... I think th- the antagonism between millennials and boomers is not just the straight generational conflict, but it's, it's, it's almo- uh, like, the boomer conflict between their parents, it's like, sure, there are problems, but, like, there was a heroism to the greatest generation and a, and a sacrifice there. It's like you, we just watched, like, sort of rank moral hypocrisy and selfishness, uh, from the boomer generation without much in the way of redeeming qualities. Do you know what I mean?

01:30:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, see, I don't think it... L- l- let me just give my spin-

01:30:15
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:30:15
Eric Weinstein: ... on this. There's nothing magical about the generations.

01:30:18
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:30:18
Eric Weinstein: The key question is what was your developmental environment and your economic environment growing up?

01:30:23
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:30:24
Eric Weinstein: So I thought I just had a problem with authority. Turned out when I started working for somebody younger than myself as an X-er-

01:30:33
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:30:33
Eric Weinstein: ... somehow the X-ers don't figure-

01:30:35
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:30:35
Eric Weinstein: ... into the millennial story-

01:30:36
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Right

01:30:36
Eric Weinstein: ... which is very f-

01:30:37
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:30:37
Eric Weinstein: ... we X-ers think it's, it's hysterically funny. Um, I found that I was easily able to take, uh, direction from somebody like Peter Thiel, not because I had a hierarchy or authority issue, but because really the problem was silence and boomers have beliefs that I don't share.

01:30:57
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

01:30:57
Eric Weinstein: They just don't understand. I... What they do makes no sense to me, none. I cannot process it, and it's not like I haven't studied it or tried-

01:31:06
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:31:06
Eric Weinstein: ... to understand it.

01:31:06
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

01:31:07
Eric Weinstein: It's just n- certain things that are obvious realities to me, th- it's like speaking at a high frequency that their ears can't hear.

01:31:16
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:31:18
Eric Weinstein: The division to me is you had silence and boomers, and then there's a line, and then X-ers, millennial, Gen Z are all saying, "Well, we're not part of whatever story is going on above that line."

01:31:32
Ryan Holiday: And, and maybe to tie back to the art pro- the art discussion, I think one of the big problems is that we don't have any story whatsoever. There's no mediums, music, television, especially literature, which is-

01:31:47
Eric Weinstein: Mm

01:31:47
Ryan Holiday: ... you know, sort of my focus, that is telling any kind of redeeming, inspiring, meaningful-

01:31:54
Eric Weinstein: What's inspiring you?

01:31:55
Ryan Holiday: ... story.

01:31:55
Eric Weinstein: Come on. We... I don't even believe this. What, what is... You've taken tremendous inspiration, for example, from stoicism.

01:32:01
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:32:01
Eric Weinstein: Right?

01:32:01
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:32:02
Eric Weinstein: You, you've profiled, like, y- you know, this is an incredibly weird-

01:32:07
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:32:07
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, heroic story of Peter against Gawker, unless it's the reverse, in which case it's the, uh, you know, the, the rich baron-

01:32:16
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:32:16
Eric Weinstein: ... laying low the pr- the free press.

01:32:18
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:32:19
Eric Weinstein: Either way that you tell that story, it's an effing amazing story.

01:32:24
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, it's, it's, it's the story of good and evil, and I-

01:32:28
Eric Weinstein: Either way you assign it.

01:32:29
Ryan Holiday: Yes, right, and that's what I was fascinated with. Who is the good guy, bad guy? Both characters have... But if you were, if you were telling the story in television today or something, the only way you would tell that story is Peter is irredeemably the bad guy. And like, I, it, I think what, what is the cultural... y- what's, what's the primary theme of most of the culture that we're consuming today? I think it's nihilism. I think that everything is, uh, everything is meaningless, everything sucks, everyone's a moral hypocrite, there is no good or bad, shouldn't judge other people's lifestyles. Uh, you know, like, uh, so I think we don't lack, we lack any kind of stor- like, what we've, we've looked back at history-

01:33:13
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:33:13
Ryan Holiday: ... and gone, Abraham Lincoln's actually a racist, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson are total hypocrites, founding of America was based on fra- like, we've looked back at, we've, we've ig- we've emptied all these things of meaning and replaced them with nothing, and then we wonder why everyone is content to burn down the system.

01:33:33
Eric Weinstein: All right, but you, sir, are not afflicted with this.

01:33:36
Ryan Holiday: Right, but I'm, I'm-

01:33:37
Eric Weinstein: Why?

01:33:37
Ryan Holiday: I, I'm a throwback of some kind.

01:33:39
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no, no, no. You're, you're of this moment. You're part of the same... We, I was very curious when you said your colleagues are your peers. Who are they? What's your, what's your firmament? What's your cohort?

01:33:48
Ryan Holiday: I mean, I, I feel like I spend most of my time communicating with people that are dead. Like, like, uh-

01:33:54
Eric Weinstein: You talk to the dead, and so do I.

01:33:56
Ryan Holiday: Well, so, so Zeno is the founder of Stoicism. He goes to the Oracle of Delphi. He's a young man, he's this, uh, this, f- a merchant family's, incredibly wealthy s- he trades Tyrian purple, which is the purple dye that makes the emperor's cloak. Um, and he stops at the Oracle of Delt- Delphi and he says, "What should I do with my life?" Basically, this, the timeless question.

01:34:16
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:34:16
Ryan Holiday: And they say, "Your li- you will i- you will become your best self when you begin having conversations with the dead." And he shortly thereafter suffers a shipwreck, washes up in Athens, loses everything, and he walks into a bookstore and the bookseller is reading, uh, uh, a dialogue of Socrates. And this, he realizes, oh, this is the conversation with the dead. You know, uh, Socrates is dead, you know, a few decades by the time this happens, and he realized, oh, I'm talking to Socrates, and this, this creates the school of philosophy that I now believe in. But I think, I think what we have lost i- we, we, this is the closing of the Ameri- of the Closing of the American Mind? The, the, is it Bloom?

01:35:06
Eric Weinstein: Bloom.

01:35:07
Ryan Holiday: We've lost, we've, we've destroyed the canon, replaced it with nothing. You know, we, we destroyed the myths of the founding of America, replaced it with nothing. We questioned patriotism, replaced it with nothing. You know, we, we tore down marriage, replaced it with nothing. You know, we tore down the office, the community, the small town square. All of the things, we tore them down and we've replaced them with nothing. I feel like I, I'm, I'm rooted in those, I'm rooted in that an- more ancient tradition. That's, to me, where I find meaning that gets me out of bed.

01:35:39
Eric Weinstein: But you're rebuilding it.

01:35:40
Ryan Holiday: I hope so.

01:35:41
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so when, when, when you bathe your three-year-old-

01:35:44
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:35:45
Eric Weinstein: ... how's your nihilism doing?

01:35:47
Ryan Holiday: Oh, it's not... That's, that's my point, and when I'm reading him Aesop's Fables or we go for a walk on our farm in the morning or, you know, I, I drop him off for town in this, uh, for school in this small town in Texas that we live in-

01:35:59
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:35:59
Ryan Holiday: ... and I walk down Main Street and my office is a 100-year-old building and I'm surrounded by ideas and, and I think even podcasts, the idea of dial- like, this, like, this is what most of Socrates' work is, is the recreation of dialogues between smart people. Do you know what I mean? Like, I, I feel like that is the-

01:36:20
Eric Weinstein: This is what I'm doing. I, I-

01:36:20
Ryan Holiday: That's our salvation

01:36:21
Eric Weinstein: ... I, I've gone back to, I think, 1609, um, to find a drinking song for my, uh, I don't wanna call them a cult, but, uh-

01:36:31
Ryan Holiday: Okay

01:36:31
Eric Weinstein: ... the people who are coalescing around this podcast.

01:36:34
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:36:34
Eric Weinstein: There are probably now 10 different performances of this song on a Google Drive.

01:36:39
Ryan Holiday: Oh.

01:36:39
Eric Weinstein: Uh, you know, one like an EDM, another was this, is a swing version. You know, somebody else has done, like, three-part, uh, religious harmony.

01:36:48
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:36:51
Eric Weinstein: People want meaning, and the whole point that we can't get at is these open communities where everybody can comment on YouTube and say, "You suck. You don't even get it. You're so far out," you know.

01:37:03
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:37:03
Eric Weinstein: "You got pwned."

01:37:04
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:37:05
Eric Weinstein: That thing just needs to shut the fuck up, and we need to exclude it because I think we've wildly overestimated diversity and inclusion. We need interoperability-

01:37:19
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:37:19
Eric Weinstein: ... to allow for the diversity-

01:37:20
Ryan Holiday: Sure

01:37:20
Eric Weinstein: ... and exclusion. There's certain voices that we now need to just turn the volume all the way to zero. They can have their free speech.

01:37:28
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

01:37:28
Eric Weinstein: But it's very important that those voices not enter-

01:37:31
Ryan Holiday: I'm a big fan of shadowbanning.

01:37:34
Eric Weinstein: I'm not a big fan of shadowbanning by corporate interests-

01:37:37
Ryan Holiday: Sure, sure

01:37:37
Eric Weinstein: ... who are doing it for the wrong reasons.

01:37:39
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:37:40
Eric Weinstein: I'm a big fan of excluding people and heads on pikes, uh, when you actually have the conviction of why that person needs to be excluded from the community.

01:37:50
Ryan Holiday: Yes. Like, for instance, I don't, I think, like, Twitter sh- i- instead of banning people, Twitter should tweak the algorithm to de-emphasize politics, let's say, and re-emphasize- ... photos of pizza or w- whatever. Like, I think, I think what we've allowed is toxic conversations or styles of conversations to dominate the town squares in a way that's made them, uh, almost un- un- un- unlistenable or, uh, you know, made them worthless. Uh-

01:38:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, we, to your early, uh, uh, to your earlier point about public parks.

01:38:29
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:38:29
Eric Weinstein: When a public park becomes a dangerous Hobbesian, uh, square-

01:38:36
Ryan Holiday: When you let homeless people turn it into a camp

01:38:38
Eric Weinstein: ... Well, uh, but I'm not even talking about necessarily homeless people. You know? If, if you have, like, a, a, a solid drug, uh-

01:38:44
Ryan Holiday: Sure

01:38:44
Eric Weinstein: ... taking community-

01:38:45
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:38:45
Eric Weinstein: ... where people who have perfectly-

01:38:47
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:38:47
Eric Weinstein: ... reasonable homes.

01:38:47
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, you let high school kids drink in it or what, you, yeah

01:38:50
Eric Weinstein: ... Whatever it is, you lose that original intent. So exclusion is trading at a discount at the moment because we have a fear that if anybody points out that inclusion, as writ large-

01:39:03
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:39:03
Eric Weinstein: ... is, you can't just stop at an idea that simple.

01:39:07
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. I lo- like, what I love on Twitter is the mute button. I don't block people.

01:39:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:39:12
Ryan Holiday: I just mute the people that I don't wanna hear from, and they don't know that they've been muted [laughs] as far as-

01:39:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's that, but the, but the part of the problem is, is that people who are using these attacks on, um, the lower brain. So for example, if you have followers and start, who start to say, "Wow, Ryan really is at an interesting point. I really like-

01:39:32
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:39:33
Eric Weinstein: ... what he's developing," like, then you start getting these, like, weird accounts that w- are, are remoras on your shark.

01:39:40
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:39:40
Eric Weinstein: And they're like, "You know, that blowhard has been mining the same passage from Seneca."

01:39:46
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:39:46
Eric Weinstein: "Dude, tell me something new. Did you read a new book today, Ryan?"

01:39:48
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:39:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so now you mute that.

01:39:50
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:39:50
Eric Weinstein: You don't realize that that person is changing the experience-

01:39:55
Ryan Holiday: They're ruin... Right

01:39:56
Eric Weinstein: ... for everyone else.

01:39:57
Ryan Holiday: Like, subreddits are a great example of this. Almo- there's almost, like, a law that, like, a subreddit is formed by people who are fans of a thing.

01:40:03
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:40:04
Ryan Holiday: And then it becomes dominated by people who actually hate that.

01:40:07
Eric Weinstein: This process, it's like, if you leave, uh, a dead body out, and then you put a time lapse photography-

01:40:14
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:40:15
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, ti- time lapse camera on it, you'll see this weird process by which the body is reclaimed.

01:40:22
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:40:23
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:40:23
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

01:40:24
Eric Weinstein: That seems to be a feature of our time that I wish we were talking about, that anything hopeful and decent and meaningful left out in this environment-

01:40:34
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:40:35
Eric Weinstein: ... will be eroded and memified and, and cheapened and degraded-

01:40:40
Ryan Holiday: Sure

01:40:40
Eric Weinstein: ... simply by virtue of the fact that it was out there.

01:40:44
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:40:44
Eric Weinstein: And there is an aspect of saying there's a reason that we don't leave the original Constitution in an open air park.

01:40:52
Ryan Holiday: It's protected under bulletproof glass and-

01:40:55
Eric Weinstein: Hell yes

01:40:56
Ryan Holiday: ... humidifier and yeah.

01:40:57
Eric Weinstein: And the key point is can you touch... Well, I understand.

01:41:00
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:41:00
Eric Weinstein: Why can't we touch it? We're the people. The people's, like... No, you can't touch it.

01:41:03
Ryan Holiday: Right.

01:41:03
Eric Weinstein: You just can't.

01:41:04
Ryan Holiday: Right. Yeah, it's a sort of protection to enforcing of boundaries and norms and-

01:41:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the thing. This is what has to start... I mean, I literally watched the moderators of one of these groups dedicated to this show, and they were, they were in pains. "Well, I don't wanna, I don't wanna exclude anybody. I don't wanna..." I just said-

01:41:24
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:41:24
Eric Weinstein: ... "Heads on pikes."

01:41:25
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:41:26
Eric Weinstein: Take the first real troll and make a public example of this person-

01:41:31
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:41:32
Eric Weinstein: ... and their shittiness.

01:41:33
Ryan Holiday: Right.

01:41:34
Eric Weinstein: And, and, and let that, you know, m- put that at the gates of the city wall so that everybody understands exactly how you'll be asked to leave the community.

01:41:42
Ryan Holiday: Right. No, that's a great point. That's a great point. Yeah, it's weird. Uh, I feel like, yeah, everyone, everyone should have experience moderating an internet forum. Like, I, I, 'cause I did that as a sort of internet ner- nerd growing up, and so I, I... You, yeah, you're like, look, you gotta, you gotta ban people, or you gotta get rid of people, or you have to insist on the rule. Like, if there are rules, and you don't insist on people following that rule-

01:42:09
Eric Weinstein: But you also-

01:42:09
Ryan Holiday: ... it descends into anarchy immediately.

01:42:11
Eric Weinstein: I also think you need an injustice budget. Like, in other words, you can't move through the world. You know like the Jains in India, they don't wanna do any harm?

01:42:19
Ryan Holiday: Okay. Yeah.

01:42:20
Eric Weinstein: Okay, well, no. You have to, you have to be allowed to do some injustice as you move through planet Earth.

01:42:25
Ryan Holiday: Got it. Sure.

01:42:25
Eric Weinstein: And so the fact that so many people have an idea that they have to only have type one error and never have type two error is paralytic.

01:42:34
Ryan Holiday: Well, so I, I wrote a piece a couple months ago about hunting, and, uh-

01:42:39
Eric Weinstein: Are you a hunter?

01:42:40
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Uh, like, I live on a little farm in Texas. Mostly, mostly boars, because they're s- an enormous invasive species.

01:42:47
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:42:47
Ryan Holiday: But what I lo- uh, two, two things a- about it I love. One, if I took a picture of my breakfast this morning, people would, "Oh, that's a delightful photo."

01:42:55
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:42:55
Ryan Holiday: If I took a picture of a boar I shot, I'm a murderer.

01:42:58
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:42:58
Ryan Holiday: Even though actually one is much less violent and, uh, cruel than the other, right? Bacon from a factory farm, you know, sausage from a-

01:43:09
Eric Weinstein: I encourage everyone-

01:43:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:43:10
Eric Weinstein: ... to read, uh, The Walrus and the Carpenter poem of Lewis Carroll.

01:43:14
Ryan Holiday: Oh, I haven't read this. I will.

01:43:16
Eric Weinstein: Y- y- you know, "The time has come of, uh, the walrus said, to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings." You ever heard this?

01:43:25
Ryan Holiday: No.

01:43:26
Eric Weinstein: It's a dialogue between these two characters who trick a bunch of oysters, uh, into being their lunch.

01:43:33
Ryan Holiday: Ah, okay.

01:43:34
Eric Weinstein: And one of them is very sad about the fact that they've done such a nasty thing.

01:43:40
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:43:40
Eric Weinstein: And the other one's like, "Oh, come on, we did it, whatever."

01:43:43
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:43:44
Eric Weinstein: And I really dete- uh, the question is who do you detest more?

01:43:48
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:43:48
Eric Weinstein: And I always detested the one with this sort of mock care and sanctimony-

01:43:54
Ryan Holiday: Right

01:43:54
Eric Weinstein: ... and pity.

01:43:55
Ryan Holiday: Yes.

01:43:55
Eric Weinstein: Whereas other people have the idea, well, at least that, that's a nub of something to begin an empathic conversation.

01:44:01
Ryan Holiday: Well, and that, that was my point in the article. It's not that everyone should hunt, it, but it's, I feel like everyone should do it once, because you realize, oh, this is a complicated thing. Which brings up complicated emotions. You learn that food comes from life and death, and you learn that there is violence in the world, and that someti- like, I, your point about unjust, like, it is in one respect unjust to kill this animal. On the other hand, this is where food comes from. On the other hand, somebody else killed all the mountain lions and the wolves, and so now there's not a predator to kill these wild boar, which shouldn't be here, and so there's an unlimited population of them, and they are destroying the environment that you say that you care about.

01:44:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's interesting also that people tend to think about the top and bottom of a food chain.

01:44:54
Ryan Holiday: Yes.

01:44:54
Eric Weinstein: And that the, um... When you kill something in the middle of a food chain, you're killing a killer.

01:45:04
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:45:05
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, in some sense you've preserved more life or-

01:45:08
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:45:08
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, then there are all these ways in which you can argue that a, a vegetarian diet takes life in ways that you didn't expect. So you have to make contact with the fact that there is no way out.

01:45:19
Ryan Holiday: That, that, that's, that's exactly right, and I think, I think for instance, this might seem like a stretch, but, 'cause so you, you, you go out, you hunt wild boar, you do it once, you get the experience that it's, there's a certain amount of injustice, but this injustice prevents a greater injustice, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. To me, like Austin is like San Francisco and like Los Angeles that's struggling with a housing crisis and homelessness. So Austin has had this, where I live, has had this long-standing belief that if we don't build infrastructure, people won't come here. If we prevent density, our place will not become dense, and we will preserve the bubble of our wonderful city. Well, me being outside the ci- I have a place in town and a place outside. So the, the, on the one hand, it's great for me that there's restrictive zoning laws, 'cause it means my house in town has steadily gone up in value faster than anything else. On the other hand, because they can't build a 30-story apartment complex in my neighborhood, what they are doing is razing large forests and beautiful tracts of land that were formerly farms right outside city limits and turning them into mobile home parks. So these people who think, "Well, it would be unjust to push these lower middle cla- lower income people out of their neighborhood so richer people could move into nicer apartments," they think by restricting zoning, by not passing laws, they are preventing an injustice. But actually, a greater environmental injustice and uh, a number of other injustices are happening just right on the other side of town, but because they don't see it, they don't have to feel it. And, a- and so the, the ho- like, people at the homeless crisis, and then they're, they cannot see... This is a boomer thing. They cannot see their insistence on protecting the single family home is directly responsible for that homeless crisis.

01:47:11
Eric Weinstein: Do you see your own hypocrisy clearly?

01:47:14
Ryan Holiday: What, like, gen, what, in what I just said or in my life?

01:47:17
Eric Weinstein: No, just you're talking about benefiting from things, things that are also having negative consequences. What is your relationship? I, I-

01:47:25
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:47:25
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm treating you as-

01:47:26
Ryan Holiday: I see what you're saying

01:47:26
Eric Weinstein: ... an advanced life form-

01:47:27
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah

01:47:27
Eric Weinstein: ... where some, some other person would say, "I'm not a hypocrite."

01:47:31
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:47:32
Eric Weinstein: I, of course, am a hypocrite. I would imagine that you would recognize that you are one as well.

01:47:35
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, no, in that example it's like, look, I, I, I'm benefiting from... It's like, look-

01:47:40
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:47:40
Ryan Holiday: ... I'm not a Trump supporter, but the Trump tax plan has been great for me, right? Like-

01:47:45
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:47:45
Ryan Holiday: ... and, and I think we have to be honest with ourselves about those things.

01:47:50
Eric Weinstein: To the extent that we can be.

01:47:51
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. A- and we should look for them and, and, and try to understand them, 'cause I, I'm really cons- One of my favorite quotes from Upton Sinclair is that it's really hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. And so when you don't understand where you benefit from things, what your incentives are, you can, you can drift towards a kind of a moral superiority which is actually based on in, kind of ignorance. But I'm sure I'm a hypocrite on a lot of things I don't know about.

01:48:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:48:20
Ryan Holiday: But I do try to be aware where I am good on both sides or whatever.

01:48:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, I mean, I, I guess when I have all, all the, these trade-offs in my life, I-

01:48:30
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:48:30
Eric Weinstein: ... I have to say that the idea of budgeting for badness, like this is my... We talked about an injustice budget. I have a hypocrisy budget.

01:48:40
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

01:48:41
Eric Weinstein: And I'm trying to live within my means. It doesn't mean that hypocrisy means nothing to me. It just means I've watched every other person make the arc, accusation to someone else of hypocrisy, and I always think, "I have so much metacognitive access. I'm watching my own hypocrisy constantly." And it, it's, it's legendary. I mean, it's really large.

01:49:02
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I think it's like let's try not to be a raging hypocrite rather than try to be utterly un-hypocritical.

01:49:09
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I think that that's the right, the right-

01:49:11
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:49:11
Eric Weinstein: ... posture, and I think that I don't... I- in an online world, signing yourself up for being f- for truth, for goodness, for consistency-

01:49:22
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:49:22
Eric Weinstein: ... you're just dooming yourself to fail. There's no possible way that you're gonna leave a trail that isn't gonna contradict itself many times over.

01:49:30
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And one of the stoic ideas is, is sort of be strict with yourself and tolerant of others. We have it the exact opposite in our sort of media culture especially. Like, I, I'm, I always laugh at the sky is falling alarm of media people about the collapse of norms in politics. And these are the same people who wake up every day and have been part of a generational collapsing of norms inside journalism, right? And so we can be, uh, norm enforcement is not something that you insist on other people do. It's something that you follow. I think religious people get this wrong too. The, the Ten Commandments are not y- for you to enforce on other people. The Ten Commandments are 10 rules to govern your behavior, because that's all-

01:50:22
Eric Weinstein: That's what you're, that's what's under your control.

01:50:24
Ryan Holiday: Yes.

01:50:24
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:50:25
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:50:26
Eric Weinstein: Where do you think we are with our press?

01:50:29
Ryan Holiday: Um-

01:50:31
Eric Weinstein: Like, if you just look at, for example, the Andrew Yang coverage in the last election, which everyone saw as being very clearly distorted.

01:50:39
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:50:40
Eric Weinstein: Or, or am I wrong?

01:50:40
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Sure.

01:50:41
Eric Weinstein: Or do, do you agree that it's distorted?

01:50:42
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, like I, I read that New York Times piece a couple days ago where it was like, "What was it like to work for Andrew Yang?" And-

01:50:49
Eric Weinstein: Enforced karaoke.

01:50:50
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Right, exactly. I, I-

01:50:51
Eric Weinstein: Like enforced monogamy of Dr. Jordan Peterson

01:50:54
Ryan Holiday: ... I, I, I just thought it wa- it, it was a great example of the kind of profiles we were talking earlier. That person, it's not, it's actually not an ideological bias. I think people get it wrong. That person was not trying to destroy Andrew Yang because of a political disagreement. That person's job is to take people down, right? That person's job is to find hypocrisy or contradiction.

01:51:20
Eric Weinstein: If everyone's happy with the story, we're not doing our job.

01:51:23
Ryan Holiday: Yes. And, and so, so that person was probably very friendly to Andrew Yang, probably every interview in the course of that story made them sound like an eminently reasonable person. And then the-

01:51:36
Eric Weinstein: Then the knife is stuck in and twisted.

01:51:39
Ryan Holiday: Yes. And something that I also took from you, I think that story is rife with his... What was it? The Russell con-

01:51:44
Eric Weinstein: Russell conjugation.

01:51:45
Ryan Holiday: That's exact- Like, so how you decide to spin those things is the difference between him looking like a ruthless businessman, a fool, or a-

01:51:59
Eric Weinstein: Savvy

01:51:59
Ryan Holiday: ... savvy. And-

01:52:00
Eric Weinstein: Savvy and ruthless might be Russell conjugates of each other.

01:52:02
Ryan Holiday: Yes. But, but fool is the preferred way of destroying people in our culture. And I actually think what Tru- like it... Maybe I, I have this theory that, like, the media just wants... If, if, if there's this sort of bent towards nihilism or absurdity, it's like how do we just undermine the credibility of everyone?

01:52:19
Eric Weinstein: Every-

01:52:19
Ryan Holiday: Everyone and everything-

01:52:19
Eric Weinstein: Constantly

01:52:20
Ryan Holiday: ... by, by sort of pointing out weird flaws, contradictions, showing, portraying their worst moments, blowing up, you know, bad comments. That, that's, that's the equival- the analogy is that's, uh, "Oh, you don't feel good? Here's some antibiotics. Oh, you don't feel good? Here's some antibiotics." And then Trump and some other figures, I, I think it doesn't just have to be political, are the superbugs-

01:52:44
Eric Weinstein: Superbugs

01:52:44
Ryan Holiday: ... that are antibiotic or anti or, right, resistant to antibiotics.

01:52:49
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:52:49
Ryan Holiday: And then we don't have another play, like we don't have anything we can do.

01:52:55
Eric Weinstein: Are you fascinated by the Trump phenomenon?

01:52:58
Ryan Holiday: Was originally, uh, very horrified, and I've come back down to more of a bemused fascination.

01:53:06
Eric Weinstein: That's so dangerous. I mean, I, I've always found him fascinating.

01:53:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:53:11
Eric Weinstein: And I think a lot of what he does is just trolling, but he's trolling as the commander-in-chief. He, he, he has the mo- world's most dangerous machine at his fingertips.

01:53:25
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Right.

01:53:25
Eric Weinstein: And he's like the Cat in the Hat having a field day.

01:53:29
Ryan Holiday: Yes.

01:53:30
Eric Weinstein: And I feel like the fish. And the other thing that I, I can't stand is, is the way in which the left insists on being played by him at every-

01:53:41
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:53:41
Eric Weinstein: ... possible opportunity.

01:53:42
Ryan Holiday: No, that... I, I think, I think, uh-

01:53:45
Eric Weinstein: Like, no learning seems to take place.

01:53:47
Ryan Holiday: Well, so it's impossible to get someone to understand what's in their financial interest to not understand. Ideologically, they could not dislike Trump more. Commercially, he could not be better. So the idea that they would learn this and kill the golden goose is just not gonna happen. Like when that stat that, oh, we gave Trump, you know, the media gave Trump $2 billion in free publicity, the media business turns around and sells that free publicity at a multiple. You know? Like, so-

01:54:25
Eric Weinstein: You really think... I mean, it's not that I don't understand the economic proposition-

01:54:29
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:54:29
Eric Weinstein: ... that you put.

01:54:29
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:54:30
Eric Weinstein: You really think... I mean, I don't even think that that media war against Trump is working that well anymore.

01:54:38
Ryan Holiday: No, no, I don't think it's working. I, I think, I think they are, they are on the same team.

01:54:45
Eric Weinstein: To, to your point... Okay.

01:54:46
Ryan Holiday: Like, like-

01:54:46
Eric Weinstein: Like, this is the professional wrestling show-

01:54:48
Ryan Holiday: Yes

01:54:49
Eric Weinstein: ... and people tune in for as much professional wrestling as they can stand.

01:54:52
Ryan Holiday: Yes. Uh-

01:54:53
Eric Weinstein: So that means we have no press because of what we... W- there is no... Like, if you take UFC versus WWE-

01:55:00
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:55:00
Eric Weinstein: ... you're talking about a world where, what, there's no UFC, or UFC is just the rebels who live on farms and do long form podcasts?

01:55:09
Ryan Holiday: I, I think it's, it's like Trump every day wakes up and gives, does their job for them in that he gives them polarizing, divisive, controversial-

01:55:23
Eric Weinstein: So they want him to win-

01:55:24
Ryan Holiday: ... outrageous things

01:55:25
Eric Weinstein: ... they're gonna be voting for Trump f- to keep their pay-

01:55:27
Ryan Holiday: They're not gonna be voting, 'cause they don't like him ideologically.

01:55:29
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but then that gives the lie to what you're saying. In other words, if, if what you were telling me is that he's the best thing that ever happened to them.

01:55:36
Ryan Holiday: Well, there's a Le- there's a Les-

01:55:37
Eric Weinstein: And I understand that there's a way-

01:55:37
Ryan Holiday: There's a Les Moonves quote, who's also a shitty person, right? A serial sexual harasser. But he said, um, you know, "Trump is bad for America, but very good for CBS, so let's hope it keeps going." So I think at the very top there's some sense of that. But I think it's like if you're, if you're a social justice warrior reporter, it's never been a better time to be that, because there is an unlimited amount of material.

01:56:02
Eric Weinstein: But I, I'll be honest, I don't fully believe you.

01:56:04
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

01:56:04
Eric Weinstein: In other words, if that were true, then you would vote for Trump, and you won't.

01:56:10
Ryan Holiday: Me? Oh, you mean that reporter.

01:56:11
Eric Weinstein: That reporter. That SJW reporter. If that per- I don't think these people... I, I think they are benefiting from it.

01:56:21
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:56:21
Eric Weinstein: And implicitly and subconsciously they're doing things to further this-

01:56:25
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:56:25
Eric Weinstein: ... ridiculous conflict. I'm not arguing.

01:56:26
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah.

01:56:28
Eric Weinstein: I don't think they really want Trump to continue in office.

01:56:32
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, right. I, but, so I, I think there, there is the... But that's that Upton Sinclair thing, is that you don't- You don't understand why you're not understanding it because your-

01:56:43
Eric Weinstein: You think it's that the-

01:56:43
Ryan Holiday: ... biases are blinding you to, to what's happening.

01:56:46
Eric Weinstein: You know, I saw this before. I always, I, I try to use the same examples so people learn them.

01:56:51
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:56:51
Eric Weinstein: The word nuclear was not understood by the educated because they would always correct it to nuclear, and then they would always lose because they would say, "Okay, you win the idiotic point, and you lose the fact that you just look like a jerk."

01:57:07
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

01:57:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay? So it was like an easy way to always win an argument with-

01:57:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:57:10
Eric Weinstein: ... somebody with a college education.

01:57:12
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:57:13
Eric Weinstein: Um, you could always win a- against the educated. They didn't ever get it. They didn't understand that the person saying "nuclear" understood it was nuclear.

01:57:26
Ryan Holiday: And they were doing it to bother them?

01:57:29
Eric Weinstein: Y- y-

01:57:29
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:57:29
Eric Weinstein: ... yeah, it's, it's just a win.

01:57:30
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah.

01:57:31
Eric Weinstein: You know, or if I-

01:57:32
Ryan Holiday: Sure

01:57:33
Eric Weinstein: ... if I say Democrat Party, and I emphasize rat at the end, rather than Democratic Party, you know, it's, it's like I get the hack.

01:57:41
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:57:42
Eric Weinstein: But the other side somehow is-

01:57:45
Ryan Holiday: Right

01:57:45
Eric Weinstein: ... is weirdly confused.

01:57:49
Ryan Holiday: Well-

01:57:49
Eric Weinstein: You know how, how when you see somebody being trolled, like have you, have you ever been trolled b- and not realized that you were being trolled?

01:57:54
Ryan Holiday: Sometimes, yeah.

01:57:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, so it's happened to me.

01:57:56
Ryan Holiday: Right, yeah.

01:57:56
Eric Weinstein: Most of us. Um, it shows that you're not in on your joke, or like somebody slips a reference in that you didn't get.

01:58:04
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:58:05
Eric Weinstein: I think that that kind of thing is constantly happening to the left, where they just don't grasp. They're so convinced that they're on top of the game that they don't realize they're losing.

01:58:16
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, that's right. Um, but I remember you talked about this on your episode with Tyler, where it's obvious what a terrorist is doing, it's obviously what a school shooter is doing, it's obviously what a mass murderer is doing. It's to get the attention.

01:58:32
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:58:33
Ryan Holiday: But the media's not able to, to break out of the pattern that the bad actor is maliciously exploiting. And my, my Media Manipulation book was sort of all about this. It's like, look, if you ha- if you create a website, Jezebel, which is designed to express feminist outrage-

01:58:52
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:58:52
Ryan Holiday: ... it becomes very easy for a marketer or a troll or a person who wants to get attention to go, "Okay, the market here is for things that will outrage feminists, so I will do X, and I will get Y."

01:59:08
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:59:08
Ryan Holiday: And I think Trump, as a intuitive understander of the attention economy, realizes what they want, like realizes what the media wants, and he gives it to them, and they don't always realize that they're playing into it exactly. Um, but it's why they're getting raises and why they're gaining Twitter followers.

01:59:34
Eric Weinstein: Why don't we do something more hopeful? Why don't we start a movement inside the Democratic Party called Under New Management, where we kick the Clintons, the DNC, and all the people who presided over the economy from 1992-

01:59:47
Ryan Holiday: Sure

01:59:47
Eric Weinstein: ... into the present the hell out of this party-

01:59:49
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

01:59:50
Eric Weinstein: ... and say, "Okay, giant mistake, cosmic screw-up. They're gone."

01:59:54
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:59:55
Eric Weinstein: Why do I, why am I dealing with these people year after year?

01:59:58
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

01:59:58
Eric Weinstein: Why are they still in the story?

02:00:00
Ryan Holiday: Right.

02:00:00
Eric Weinstein: Does anyone... I mean, so many things have a- happened in, in human history that have not involved Hillary Clinton.

02:00:06
Ryan Holiday: Right.

02:00:07
Eric Weinstein: Why am I still dealing with Hill- Hillary Clinton?

02:00:09
Ryan Holiday: Right.

02:00:10
Eric Weinstein: Nobody really wants her.

02:00:12
Ryan Holiday: No. Nobody really likes Nancy Pelosi either, or any of these people.

02:00:15
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, but-

02:00:15
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:00:15
Eric Weinstein: ... Nancy Pelosi, when she, uh, in her role as starker, they may not like Nancy Pelosi, but they know that she's a starker. She's a tough piece of-

02:00:25
Ryan Holiday: Sure

02:00:25
Eric Weinstein: ... muscle.

02:00:26
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

02:00:26
Eric Weinstein: And if, if she's your starker, then okay, she's your bad guy to go up against their bad guy. I don't think that we have exactly the same feeling about Pelosi at the moment.

02:00:36
Ryan Holiday: Sure. Yeah, it i- it is weird. You're sort of hostage to people who have, who have gotten, uh-

02:00:45
Eric Weinstein: I mean, the ver-

02:00:45
Ryan Holiday: ... it's been a very one-sided arrangement

02:00:47
Eric Weinstein: ... the verdict is in.

02:00:48
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:00:50
Eric Weinstein: W- you know, it's, it's not a, it's not about her being a woman. It's not about-

02:00:54
Ryan Holiday: They just don't like her in specific [laughs]

02:00:55
Eric Weinstein: ... they just don't like her in specific.

02:00:57
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, sure.

02:00:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:00:58
Ryan Holiday: Sure. Yeah, I don't know. Uh-

02:01:00
Eric Weinstein: But like why aren't we even trying to take over this party?

02:01:03
Ryan Holiday: I think it's, I think what's interesting is that, like there's the argument that Republicans control the levers of power, Democrats control the levers of culture, right? Storytelling, like Hollywood's overwhelmingly liberal, you know, like, uh-

02:01:16
Eric Weinstein: Is it?

02:01:17
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. I mean, mo- if you-

02:01:18
Eric Weinstein: But in these terrible definition, I don't even know what liberal means if Holly-

02:01:22
Ryan Holiday: What, what I'm just-

02:01:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:01:23
Ryan Holiday: ... I'm just saying is like m- many of the greatest storytellers of our time-

02:01:26
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:01:26
Ryan Holiday: ... would identify as liberal and vote Democratic, and yet why are the liberals so bad at storytelling, narrative, branding? I mean, like why is Trump actually the one that is dominating the news cycle, that knows, like wh- when you watch the Democratic candidates speak or when you l- watch Hillary's campaign, are they actually so abysmal at saying anything compelling, having any kind of political vision?

02:01:58
Eric Weinstein: Because we're lying.

02:02:00
Ryan Holiday: In what sense?

02:02:02
Eric Weinstein: Let's imagine I wanted to tell a heartwarming, heartwarming story about immigration.

02:02:06
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:02:07
Eric Weinstein: If I just have a story about a guy who comes with a dream and founds a company and puts all sorts of people to work and becomes an American hero, that's not a great story at the moment.

02:02:17
Ryan Holiday: Mm-hmm.

02:02:17
Eric Weinstein: If I were instead to tell the story about a guy who comes over on an H-1B visa who's being cynically exploited by, um, importers of labor who are trying to destroy the American worker-

02:02:33
Ryan Holiday: Sure

02:02:33
Eric Weinstein: ... and then he realizes what's going on, and then he founds a business despite the fact that he's been used as a pawn in this terrible game, and y- You know, he starts speaking out on behalf of, you know, "Do you think that they hate immigrants? They don't hate immigrants. What they really hate is your exploitation, you Ameri-..." Like, oh my God, what a story that would be.

02:02:55
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:02:55
Eric Weinstein: Because then I would say, "Wow, you've just resolved these two things. One, I- I've always loved immigrants, and two, I can't stand immigration, and the reason is because it's being exploited." That's a story with an emotional core which would allow people to say, "I've never heard anyone sing my song before. I work in a, in a, in an environment where I love the immigrants, and I can't stand my American bosses because of what they're using the immigrants-

02:03:20
Ryan Holiday: Sure

02:03:20
Eric Weinstein: ... to do against me." We can't tell that story. Like, the weird thing is, is that the left is not in, in any way, shape, or form the left. It's not liberal. It's not pro-worker.

02:03:31
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

02:03:31
Eric Weinstein: It's metastasized into some unrecognizable thing-

02:03:35
Ryan Holiday: Thing

02:03:35
Eric Weinstein: ... that has no authenticity, and calling it the left. Like, when you had protest songs that were witty, that were smart, that, you know, that nailed people where they lived-

02:03:47
Ryan Holiday: Sure

02:03:47
Eric Weinstein: ... that worked.

02:03:49
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

02:03:50
Eric Weinstein: You know, this thing with Greta, uh, when Trump went after Greta, and he didn't go after Greta directly. He went after the, the exploitation of Greta.

02:03:59
Ryan Holiday: Sure, which is corrupt.

02:04:00
Eric Weinstein: He knew that there was a layer.

02:04:01
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:04:01
Eric Weinstein: Which is disgusting, and there, but then y- I start to feel negative things about Greta. Why should I feel any negative thing about Greta the person?

02:04:09
Ryan Holiday: Right.

02:04:09
Eric Weinstein: I have to maintain layers and layers, and it's the layers of manipulation and malware that are making all of us deranged. Is that, am I wrong?

02:04:17
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I went to this thing in LA. These, a bunch of big screenwriters have sort of created a consultancy for Democratic candidates. They're like, "We're getting beaten in storytelling, so why don't we take the sort of best storytellers, and we'll consult for sort of ascendant Democratic candidates of all kinds of political offices to help them tell a compare, compelling narrative."

02:04:37
Eric Weinstein: It's like, Greg?

02:04:39
Ryan Holiday: What?

02:04:40
Eric Weinstein: I, I'm wondering if I know the same group.

02:04:41
Ryan Holiday: Uh, I'm forgetting who it was. Uh, Billy Ray is one of them.

02:04:45
Eric Weinstein: Yep.

02:04:45
Ryan Holiday: Uh, but it was, it's... I love the idea. I w- I sort of wanted to be a part of it, and I went, and I won't say who the politician was, 'cause I'm actually forgetting the name. But the point was the, one of the Democratic candidates who came was, was so smug and, and, and sanctimonious and so cloying in the things he was talking... This is a person who's accomplished, like, nothing legislatively, [laughs] you know? But was w- It, it was, it was very illustrative for me of the fundamental problem, I think, which goes to your point, which is that instead of being honest and real, and thus relatable, the stories that the Democrats are talking about are, just don't work. And I think the story you're talking about has, has, w- is complicated, and there's some nuance, and there's good and bad, and you know what I mean? Like, it's, it's just-

02:05:39
Eric Weinstein: That's a textured story.

02:05:41
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Right.

02:05:41
Eric Weinstein: And my point is, is that-

02:05:42
Ryan Holiday: Which is an important part of it

02:05:43
Eric Weinstein: ... okay, well, the left, when they were able to tell... Like, if you have cartoon evil, like you had, you know, with the, with lynchings in the South-

02:05:52
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:05:52
Eric Weinstein: ... you can tell a simple story of courage.

02:05:54
Ryan Holiday: Sure. Right.

02:05:55
Eric Weinstein: The idea that you're going to not be able to tell the stories of our time is, is, I mean, it's exactly-

02:06:00
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:06:01
Eric Weinstein: ... the same point again. All of the great left of center stories in the modern era begin with, "We screwed up."

02:06:10
Ryan Holiday: Yes, or, "We suck. You suck. You're the worst."

02:06:14
Eric Weinstein: No, we ma- we screwed up on trade.

02:06:16
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:06:18
Eric Weinstein: We screwed up on immigration, and we screwed up on terror. We told you that if somebody says, "Allahu Akbar," after a mass killing, that that means absolutely nothing.

02:06:27
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:06:28
Eric Weinstein: And that made you feel crazy because if you have any Muslim friends-

02:06:32
Ryan Holiday: Oh, I see what you're saying. Sure

02:06:33
Eric Weinstein: ... they're telling you, "Hey, we have a problem in Islam. You guys aren't taking it seriously."

02:06:38
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:06:38
Eric Weinstein: And every time I hear somebody say that terror and Islam have nothing to do with each other, I always tell them, "You've just told me that you have no close Muslim friends because if you had them, they would be telling you, 'We have a problem in Islam with terror.'"

02:06:49
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:06:50
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:06:50
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

02:06:50
Eric Weinstein: So when you do that thing, you make people... Like, I can't s- You know, I, I talk about this as a Hercule Poi- uh, Poirot Agatha Christie mystery called The Allahu Akbar Murders. Nobody can figure out why anybody's uttering this phrase after all of these mass killings, and Hercule, [laughs] Hercule Poirot is the only one who can solve the case. That's crazy making.

02:07:10
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

02:07:10
Eric Weinstein: This trade thing, go back to Brad Delong recently, who was one of the architects of NAFTA, and he said, w- he, he, he pulls off, he rips off the mask, and he says, "You know, this improves your lot based on the cube of your wealth. It's a social Darwinist welfare function."

02:07:27
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

02:07:28
Eric Weinstein: Okay, you pushed a social Darwinist welfare function. It's like, I don't understand. We made some people poorer in the Midwest, but people got much ri- richer in the Mexican countryside.

02:07:38
Ryan Holiday: Right.

02:07:38
Eric Weinstein: It's like, what did you just say?

02:07:42
Ryan Holiday: What was your job? Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Right.

02:07:43
Eric Weinstein: Right? Okay, and then the last one is immigration. We are an immigrant-loving country. We love our immigrants. We come from immigrant stock. And as a result, what did you do? You used the fact that we love immigrants and that we're open to the world to figure out a way to redistribute wealth and s- put a vacuum into most of our pockets that, uh, exhausts into yours. So you used immigrants to transfer wealth, and then you said, oh, you wouldn't h- you know, you wouldn't hurt a puppy dog. You wouldn't hit a girl with glasses. You wouldn't say anything against an immigrant.

02:08:13
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

02:08:14
Eric Weinstein: All of those things are invidious. They're embittering. And the idea that America is taking its middle finger and sticking it into the eye of the Democratic Party-

02:08:26
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:08:27
Eric Weinstein: ... is warranted unless it, un- unless and until it makes contact with, yes, we had a group of people associated with Davos who played those games on you and created massive amounts of income and asset inequality. They're gone now.

02:08:44
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:08:45
Eric Weinstein: We can't do that. They're still there. They still wanna play the same games. They won't let us tell our stories. I mean, like, you know, the whole Me Too thing that happened in Hollywood, there was a lot of texture in that movement-

02:08:58
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:08:58
Eric Weinstein: ... that could have revealed all of the different ways in which, you know, there's type one error, there's type two error-

02:09:04
Ryan Holiday: Sure

02:09:04
Eric Weinstein: ... there's ambiguity.

02:09:05
Ryan Holiday: Right

02:09:05
Eric Weinstein: But instead it was done incredibly starkly, very simple story.

02:09:08
Ryan Holiday: I believe victims.

02:09:10
Eric Weinstein: I believe, uh, believe all women.

02:09:12
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Right

02:09:13
Eric Weinstein: You know? And it's just, that's not workable.

02:09:15
Ryan Holiday: Well, and it's, but... And I think, uh, it's a betrayal of what are supposed to be the sort of core virtues that we supposedly all care about in terms of, uh, the, the, I, it, it, I think what's interesting is, is there is no, what, what, what, what is, what is the actual belief of the, like what is the belief of the Democratic Party? What do they actually stand for? A- and what are they, what are their actual sort of clear policy, uh, objectives? Like when I think back to the-

02:09:50
Eric Weinstein: Wealth, wealth transfer

02:09:51
Ryan Holiday: ... Well, when I think back to the 2016 campaign is, in retrospect, and I, I feel like I missed it, which is embarrassing as someone who writes about media, is like it's very obvious what Trump was campaigning on. He was gonna build a wall. He was gonna kill terrorists. You know, he was gonna do away with political correctness. He was gonna sock it to the media. You know what? He, he said what he was gonna do. And what was Hillary gonna do? Hillary campaigned on, "I'm Hillary Clinton." [laughs] And people hate Hillary Clinton. And so I think even now you're watching these five or six n- you know, the, as the pool winnows, they're primarily campaigning on who they are, and they're all fundamentally-

02:10:30
Eric Weinstein: No, but-

02:10:30
Ryan Holiday: ... uncharismatic people rather than as advocates for charismatic, seductive ideas.

02:10:37
Eric Weinstein: The big issue is Gini negative policy.

02:10:40
Ryan Holiday: Okay

02:10:40
Eric Weinstein: What can you... W- if the Gini coefficient measures the extent to which income and asset inequality is increased-

02:10:47
Ryan Holiday: Okay

02:10:48
Eric Weinstein: ... what are you going to do to decrease the Gini coefficient and create a more equal society? So my claim is-

02:10:54
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:10:54
Eric Weinstein: ... is that on the far left you have things like w- wealth caps, you know, no more billionaires-

02:11:00
Ryan Holiday: Sure

02:11:00
Eric Weinstein: ... or wealth taxes, asset taxes. Then you have sort of neutralist things like UBI, which, where Andrew's just-

02:11:07
Ryan Holiday: Student loan debt. Right

02:11:08
Eric Weinstein: Right. And then on the right you have things like renegotiation of trade and immigration.

02:11:13
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Sure.

02:11:14
Eric Weinstein: And so all of these are, are intended to be Gini negative programs.

02:11:19
Ryan Holiday: Okay

02:11:20
Eric Weinstein: And so that's a common consensus that we should do some Gini negative thing.

02:11:24
Ryan Holiday: Okay.

02:11:27
Eric Weinstein: The problem with th- the l- the institutional left as opposed to the imagined left or the historical left is that it is Gini positive.

02:11:39
Ryan Holiday: Okay

02:11:40
Eric Weinstein: Like, these, the Davos crowd figured out how to increase Gini coefficients-

02:11:46
Ryan Holiday: Right

02:11:46
Eric Weinstein: ... while all the time saying-

02:11:47
Ryan Holiday: That they wanna do the opposite

02:11:49
Eric Weinstein: ... Well, no, that, that, that they're in love with the world and the planet, and we have-

02:11:52
Ryan Holiday: Got it

02:11:52
Eric Weinstein: ... to move beyond. And so the idea is that while they're playing their anthem they're picking your pocket.

02:11:57
Ryan Holiday: Got it.

02:11:59
Eric Weinstein: That situation is something where the, the, the easy play to take the, the, you know, everything you just said about Trump.

02:12:06
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:12:07
Eric Weinstein: Trump makes it sound like maybe the foreigners are bad.

02:12:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:12:10
Eric Weinstein: Like, you know, foreigners aren't the problem. It's the importers of foreigners, the Americans, who are horrible.

02:12:17
Ryan Holiday: Right

02:12:17
Eric Weinstein: Right?

02:12:17
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

02:12:18
Eric Weinstein: On immigra- on, on, on, uh, trade, what did we do? We came up with trade policies to enrich an elite. And, and not an intellectual elite or a contributing-

02:12:30
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:12:30
Eric Weinstein: ... like a rent-seeking elite.

02:12:31
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Sure.

02:12:31
Eric Weinstein: And Trump is gonna say, "Hey, we have bad trade policies, and the reason y- you're out of work, in part, is automation, and part of it is due to the fact that somebody negotiated your job away-

02:12:40
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:12:40
Eric Weinstein: ... and screwed you." Right?

02:12:42
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

02:12:42
Eric Weinstein: And then the political correctness, what is the left's major tool? Every time you try to do something that breaks out of the, the left-of-center narrative, you get hit with this wall of insult and invective.

02:12:54
Ryan Holiday: Sure

02:12:54
Eric Weinstein: Like grifter.

02:12:55
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:12:56
Eric Weinstein: You try to earn a living a- as a member of the commentary-

02:12:58
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:12:58
Eric Weinstein: ... you're not part of the club, everyone's a grifter.

02:13:00
Ryan Holiday: Right. Sure.

02:13:00
Eric Weinstein: It's just hysterically funny.

02:13:01
Ryan Holiday: Sure.

02:13:02
Eric Weinstein: Now, all of those sorts of things, the left has to recognize, hey, we just screwed-

02:13:10
Ryan Holiday: Sure

02:13:10
Eric Weinstein: ... two to three generations of people out of the American dream, to your point about dream hoarding.

02:13:14
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:13:15
Eric Weinstein: The other thing would be universities. Like, just the way, you know, we have a warm feeling about immigrants, we have a warm feeling about education and-

02:13:22
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:13:22
Eric Weinstein: ... and, and training, and, and-

02:13:24
Ryan Holiday: That doesn't mean the current institutions we have are good.

02:13:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, it allowed them-

02:13:29
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:13:29
Eric Weinstein: ... to become parasitic-

02:13:30
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:13:30
Eric Weinstein: ... because we weren't thinking. We were so emotionally wrapped up in singing our, our alma mater songs.

02:13:35
Ryan Holiday: Sure. Right. No, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, so, and, and there's a, an honest, a, there's a, even if it's not true, there's a perceived honesty in that we've, we screwed up, we're different now. It's a compelling narrative, and it's different than, it, it's different than saying this time it will be different.

02:13:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. No.

02:13:53
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:13:53
Eric Weinstein: It, it, it, it's making the claim that under new management.

02:13:57
Ryan Holiday: Right

02:13:57
Eric Weinstein: You, you used, you used to find rats and cockroaches-

02:14:00
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:14:00
Eric Weinstein: ... in your soup when you ordered here.

02:14:01
Ryan Holiday: Right, right

02:14:02
Eric Weinstein: ... that those days are over.

02:14:03
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:14:03
Eric Weinstein: Those people don't live here anymore.

02:14:05
Ryan Holiday: Right.

02:14:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:14:06
Ryan Holiday: Right. Right.

02:14:07
Eric Weinstein: Let me ask you one final one-

02:14:08
Ryan Holiday: Okay

02:14:09
Eric Weinstein: ... about, uh, about Gawker and Tia-

02:14:11
Ryan Holiday: Okay

02:14:11
Eric Weinstein: ... and the whole thing.

02:14:12
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah.

02:14:14
Eric Weinstein: If I'm honest-

02:14:15
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:14:15
Eric Weinstein: ... Gawker was doing both good things and bad things.

02:14:19
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:14:19
Eric Weinstein: So for example, on the Epstein stuff, I think that, you know, I don't know whether it's a broken clock being right twice a day, but they were-

02:14:25
Ryan Holiday: Sure

02:14:25
Eric Weinstein: ... they were reporting on it when others were not.

02:14:28
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Yeah. And a number of things. Louis C.K. they talked about, Bill Cosby they talked about, Harvey Weinstein they talked about. Yeah.

02:14:35
Eric Weinstein: Right. On the other hand, they were doing stuff that was, like, really personal and invasive that wasn't, in my opinion, warranted, that was coming out of-

02:14:43
Ryan Holiday: Sure

02:14:43
Eric Weinstein: ... kind of a gossipy bitterness that was truly frightening.

02:14:48
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:14:49
Eric Weinstein: And so if, if we accept that Gawker was a superposition of both good and bad, I think a lot of the claim about whe- whether, um, it was justified to take D- Gawker down-

02:15:00
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:15:01
Eric Weinstein: ... relies on another set of questions. Do you view this as a legitimate use of the courts, or do you use, view this as an, uh, unadvertised hacking opportunity-

02:15:10
Ryan Holiday: Right

02:15:10
Eric Weinstein: ... to use the courts?

02:15:12
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:15:12
Eric Weinstein: Now, th- that's enough in play, at least two major ambiguities-

02:15:16
Ryan Holiday: Yes

02:15:17
Eric Weinstein: ... as to whether or not, if there was both good and bad, and there was both a legitimate and a potentially novel hacking aspect to the use of the courts. That gives plenty of room for everyone to come down wherever they want to from moment to moment.

02:15:30
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:15:31
Eric Weinstein: Do you think it's a resolvable question about what happened during the Gawker story? I mean, I should say, I was-

02:15:37
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:15:37
Eric Weinstein: ... close to Peter, and I didn't know about it for most of its existence.

02:15:42
Ryan Holiday: What I love about this story is it's like a Shakespeare play. You... Each of the characters is saying or doing something brilliant. Each has exaggerated flaws and weaknesses, and at the end, it's resolved, but fundamentally unresolved. You know? That, I, I, I love it in that sense. Um, like, I know Bad Blood and my book Conspiracy came out at the same time. Bad Blood has sold extremely well. My book has sold well, and I, I think it'll make a great movie when it gets turned into a movie, but not, not Bad Blood. Because Ba- in Bad Blood, Elizabeth Holmes is the irredeemable villain, Theranos is a complete fraud, and the story is black and white and clear. And I don't think this story has that.

02:16:31
Eric Weinstein: Are we... Oh, I thought we were complicit as a, as a next character. That because of our desire to see-

02:16:39
Ryan Holiday: In Theranos?

02:16:40
Eric Weinstein: Yes, that the-

02:16:40
Ryan Holiday: Yeah, sure

02:16:41
Eric Weinstein: ... the, the-

02:16:41
Ryan Holiday: But that's not the plot of the book.

02:16:42
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:16:42
Ryan Holiday: Uh, uh, the plot of the book is, like, this woman perpetrated a massive-

02:16:46
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:16:46
Ryan Holiday: ... fraud, and let's look at her rise and fall. Um, yeah, I think there's infinitely complex questions in the thing, because it's like, oh, okay, um, Gawker's argument was not, "We're right." Ga- Gawker's argument legally was, "You'll, we'll never get to a verdict, so it doesn't matter." You know? And that was actually Gawker's, I think, position for much of its history, was, like, it wasn't doing, running these stolen photos, let's say. It's not a question of whether it was legal or... They, they were, uh, they almost would probably have admitted doing X was not legal.

02:17:27
Eric Weinstein: But the, the-

02:17:27
Ryan Holiday: But the-

02:17:27
Eric Weinstein: ... the enforcement was impo- was impossible.

02:17:29
Ryan Holiday: Yes. And that you, as the person who's humiliated or embarrassed, whether you're very famous or you're a ordinary person, do not have the means, nor does it make strategic sense for you to try to fight us about it. Because you will only humiliate yourself further by fighting it, right? And so, um-

02:17:54
Eric Weinstein: Do you think it had a kind of, uh, uh, ideological justification, or it was just...

02:18:00
Ryan Holiday: I think it, I think in a way it was kind of a trolling and a nihilism. It was a, "What can we get away with? This is fun." It's, it was like a video g- it was like a shoot 'em up video game to them. Sometimes they shot actual bad guys, and sometimes they just went on crime rampages.

02:18:18
Eric Weinstein: Do you think that Nick Denton has a kind of hidden moral core that... I, I detect-

02:18:24
Ryan Holiday: Nick does

02:18:25
Eric Weinstein: ... I detect that he does.

02:18:26
Ryan Holiday: Nick absolutely does. And in that s-

02:18:28
Eric Weinstein: I've never met him, by the way

02:18:29
Ryan Holiday: ... in that sense, he and Peter are much more similar than people would think and that they would, they would think.

02:18:34
Eric Weinstein: So the, the, is there a Girardian aspect?

02:18:36
Ryan Holiday: Cer- certainly.

02:18:37
Eric Weinstein: Certainly. Okay.

02:18:38
Ryan Holiday: Certainly. Uh, probably more so Denton towards Peter than Peter towards Nick, although I think they both w- I think the cultural cachet and the influence was probably attractive to Peter, and the wealth and the dominance and the power, and the brilliance was attractive to Nick, in each other, right? Um...

02:18:59
Eric Weinstein: I didn't have the sense that Peter was very focused on Nick personally.

02:19:03
Ryan Holiday: No, but I don't think he was that concerned about him being collateral damage in it. But I think what Gawker represented was Nick.

02:19:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I see.

02:19:12
Ryan Holiday: Um, but, but, uh, it, e- even Nick would talk to me later about how he, there was an inmates running the asylum kind of a thing.

02:19:24
Eric Weinstein: That's what I wondered.

02:19:25
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:19:25
Eric Weinstein: Because, you know, the, I also saw, uh, I also believe, for example, that Jack Dorsey isn't necessarily in control of Twitter.

02:19:32
Ryan Holiday: No.

02:19:32
Eric Weinstein: That Mark Zu- uh, Zuckerberg is not really in control of Facebook. All of these things, uh, have an emergent structure, so that, like, just like the AGI we keep worrying about, nobody's actually in control of any of these things.

02:19:45
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Peter compared it to that, uh, Melville story. Was it Benito? The one where it's a slave ship and con- that the slaves take over, but then another slave ship comes up next to it, and so they can't reveal that they've taken it over. So the slaves are patrol- are walking the, the, you know, decks of the ship, conspicuously sharpening knives and, you know, like, like, it, it's like, it's, it, Nick looked like he was the head of the machine but was not, no longer the head of the machine. The toxic culture he'd created was running the show. I mean, even, like-

02:20:24
Eric Weinstein: So there's a tragic aspect for Nick-

02:20:27
Ryan Holiday: Yes

02:20:27
Eric Weinstein: ... in that he did have some kind of a moral core that he couldn't fully express through the machine?

02:20:33
Ryan Holiday: Yes, especially as he got older. And he got the dream that his... Like, he became rich, fell in love, was happy.

02:20:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:20:42
Ryan Holiday: Was thinking about having kids, you know, was fascinated with big ideas.

02:20:47
Eric Weinstein: Wow. Oh, wow, wow.

02:20:47
Ryan Holiday: Was not, which is not the same for AJ Daulerio. Right? Um, AJ Daulerio had a negative worth of, like, $50,000 at the time of the verdict, you know? Denton had a net worth of millions of dollars. So the, like, it, it's one was, one owned it, but the other was taking the risks that destroyed the company.

02:21:09
Eric Weinstein: Wow.

02:21:10
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:21:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:21:10
Ryan Holiday: So I, I, I thought it was v- I thought it was very interesting and complex. And, and, and I think it's also what happens when you create culture and systems, and then you just see what happens. Um, but I, yeah, I'm fascinated with the idea that Peter got... Peter did not manipulate justice in any way, I don't think. It was just, it was, if the fight is between Hulk Hogan and Gawker, Gawker wins. If Hulk Hogan has an unlimited bank account, or if Hulk Hogan can spend the same amount of money as Gawker, Hogan wins. And so is it an un- is it actually unfair for a billionaire to support that person?

02:21:53
Eric Weinstein: Well-

02:21:53
Ryan Holiday: Or is it fundamentally fair? Is it actually quite fair?

02:21:57
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I think Peter would view it as a, a fight against nihilism.

02:22:01
Ryan Holiday: I think so.

02:22:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I mean, I think that the forces, in particular, once the press is emboldened by an un-revisited New York Times v. Sullivan. Like, if you think about, I, I often compare it to the '66 or '67 Memoirs versus Massachusetts coming out of the Warren Court.

02:22:19
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:22:19
Eric Weinstein: You, these two incredibly idealistic decisions that are very simple and stark, and very, you know, morally easy to understand.

02:22:27
Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

02:22:28
Eric Weinstein: Um, one of them gets revisited because it's too insane to actually implement, and the other one sort of stays with us, and that now that the press seems often to be against the public interest as often as it is for the public interest, like, having its own weird independent agenda-

02:22:45
Ryan Holiday: Yeah

02:22:45
Eric Weinstein: ... it's terrifying to see that much protection.

02:22:48
Ryan Holiday: Well, I think it's like if you're gonna get the protections, 'cause in, in a way, journalists almost have, uh, where the c- court decisions have come in, journalists have extra First Amendment rights that the ordinary person doesn't have.

02:23:02
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:23:02
Ryan Holiday: I can't walk down the street and defame and slander people.

02:23:07
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:23:07
Ryan Holiday: But a journalist going-

02:23:08
Eric Weinstein: Provided there's no malice-

02:23:10
Ryan Holiday: Yes, right

02:23:10
Eric Weinstein: ... that can be proven.

02:23:11
Ryan Holiday: Right, right. Um, and, uh, um, what was I gonna say? Uh, so if you're gonna have special privileges-

02:23:20
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:23:21
Ryan Holiday: ... like, if you're, the intelligence community has separate, special rights, there has to be a culture of responsibility and-

02:23:27
Eric Weinstein: That goes with it

02:23:28
Ryan Holiday: ... and, and without... Like, you can't be disbar- Like, Hulk-

02:23:30
Eric Weinstein: Have you ever read the Journalist Code of Ethics?

02:23:32
Ryan Holiday: Uh, where is it?

02:23:34
Eric Weinstein: Uh-oh.

02:23:34
Ryan Holiday: Right? No, it doesn't, it, I mean, really there, there is not one, is what I would argue.

02:23:38
Eric Weinstein: There i- there is.

02:23:39
Ryan Holiday: I mean, there's different ones, but there's not one that, it's not like, uh, the Hippocratic Oath, or it's not like passing the bar.

02:23:45
Eric Weinstein: There is one that is more universal than all the others, and when you put journalists in contact with it-

02:23:53
Ryan Holiday: Well, it's in the case, yeah

02:23:54
Eric Weinstein: ... they freak out.

02:23:54
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. But, but, but, but they're not in any... Like, you can be disbarred from being a lawyer.

02:23:59
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:23:59
Ryan Holiday: Your medical license can be revoked. Those are, that's the, that's not really a legal thing. That's like a separate body that we've created to in, to make sure that the people given special rights-

02:24:11
Eric Weinstein: It's an as if body of law.

02:24:12
Ryan Holiday: Yeah. There is not one for journalists, and, and I think s- cases like this ultimately become necessary to, as a check, if you're not gonna have that extra self-enforcing culture on, on top of it.

02:24:27
Eric Weinstein: Ryan, one of the great things about hanging out with you is I feel like, just with Tyler, I could go on in-

02:24:32
Ryan Holiday: Oh

02:24:32
Eric Weinstein: ... any direction-

02:24:32
Ryan Holiday: Thank you

02:24:33
Eric Weinstein: ... infinitely, come back any time.

02:24:35
Ryan Holiday: I would love that.

02:24:36
Eric Weinstein: All right, fantastic.

02:24:37
Ryan Holiday: Thank you.

02:24:37
Eric Weinstein: Thank you. All right, you've been through the portal with Ryan Holiday on a variety of topics. Uh, please subscribe wherever you're listening to podcasts, and remember to go over to YouTube, subscribe to the channel, and click the bell to be notified when our next video episode drops. Be well, everybody. [outro music]

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