Be Your Own Hero: Take Risks, Face Your Fears and Choose Courage – Ryan Holiday with Dave Asprey : 868

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. On today's show, one of my most favorite authors is joining us. And there are different kinds of authors. No, this is not a Neal Stephenson writing a cyberpunk book. This is Ryan Holiday, who is seriously nails it with books and writes at a speed and just a prolificness that I don't understand. If you read Superhuman, you know that I was reading his Daily Stoic with my son in the sauna every morning and I quoted some of his translations of ancient Greek philosophy as part of my anti aging theory. And so that's how much I like Ryan's books. And just his thinking has been, I think, affecting many, many people in society. And he's got a book about something that I'm completely opposed to, and that is called Courage. Because right now if you would just set down your courage and allow yourself to be controlled by a central AI algorithm, wouldn't you be safer? Okay, there might be some sarcasm there. Ryan, my friend, welcome back on the show. You've written so many cool books and one of my favorites is about what it takes to create a great book or a great work of art. What was the exact title on that book?

Perennial Seller.

Perennial Seller. Thank you. I have a hard time remembering it because no one I know who writes books writes them to be sold. The perennial part sticks, but it's like perennial creatist, perennial something. So Perennial Seller, I will tell you whether you're in our live audience from Upgrade Collective and welcome guys, or whether you're just listening, if you want to write a book or create a podcast or a blog, you gotta read Perennial Seller. Because the amount of creative force that goes into a book, I've never read a book that explains what it takes to make something that is worthy like that book. So Perennial Seller is just one example of the many things that go into the way Ryan thinks about stuff. But now Courage is calling. It's like the perfect title, the perfect time when we actually need some real courage. I gotta ask you, when did you decide to write this book?

I would have been the fall of 2019. So this has happened to me twice now with my ego book as well, where I thought I was interested in something and then life sort of overwhelmingly made that subject like the focus of all of my attention. So it was not, I obviously no idea that a pandemic was coming. And I didn't start thinking about it because there was a pandemic. It just happened to be sort of accidentally right in line with the moment.

So it seems like you had the ability to read the future. And I keep talking about favorite authors. You're more than author kind of philosopher, but you're also an organic permaculture farmer, like I am. But I look at. At guys like William Gibson. He actually rewrites his books. In fact, he'll be about to release a science fiction, a cyberpunk book and go, oh, wait, I always base these on society. I have to go back and rewrite half my book because drones just got invented. And he's kind of famous for missing deadlines because he's. He's tweaking until the last possible second. Did you do that with courageous calling? Did you go in there and.

Yeah, a little bit. I don't know about you. You read the audiobooks on your books, right?

Yeah, I do read my own audiobooks.

So I have found that that is a blessing and a curse because it's kind of the last thing you do. But it's really like the first time that you've engaged with the book in that way. I don't know about you, but I don't sit in my office and just read my own writing aloud to myself. That would be really weird. So I am someone who is editing all the way up through the very end, making changes usually probably within a little window of 5 to 10%. It's nothing transformatively different, but I feel like you're really dialing it in as you go. But you have to be disciplined about it because, yeah, you can never, never finish and never ship. So it's this tension between, like, this could always be better and, like, at some point you have to, like, fling it away from you and be like, I just don't want to touch this ever again.

In a lot of spiritual traditions, you know, at the beginning there was the word, and it's om or amen or whatever else. I feel like there's some kind of spiritual power in reading your own words when they're complete and putting it out there. It's like it instantiates it, at least in my mind, maybe in reality, in a way that's different than if I have someone else read the book. It's one of the reasons I do it. Do you have that same sense?

Yeah. And Emerson talks about how he says. He's saying. Saying this specifically when, like, you have an idea and then you don't act on it, and then you see someone else do it. He says you. You feel sort of an alienated majesty like, that you. You're like, I had that idea. And then you're watching it made real. I think I have a weird experience when I read my own books. Because you've been involved in the process. You've been in the muck of it day to day for so long. And then you get like some, you know, you put it aside, and then a month later, two months later, they're like, okay, you have to do the audiobook or you have to edit galley proofs or whatever. You're reading it and you're sort of like. You can get lost in it. You can be like, this is good. You know, like, where did this come from? Right? And you realize that there's something in art about where you are accessing something either from beyond or from a deep part of your consciousness that you don't ordinarily have access to. And that's why when you read the finished product, there's sort of an alienation, surprise, substantiation, as you said, where you're just like, wow, this exists outside of me. And yet I know it came from me. And it's a very surreal, almost magical experience.

It is. There's something about it. And so it's helpful for me as a fellow author to know I'm not alone in both hating and appreciating the ability to read my own book. Because it just takes, you know, a whole week. And every word you speak has to be done with your stomach moving in and you put on your voice and it's work, right?

Oh, it's you. You're like a babbling idiot by the end of it. You realize that you are not as literate as you thought you were because you don't know how to pronounce any of these words. And, yeah, it's, It's. It's a grueling process, but it's also, I think, really important as far as the relationship with the audience, because, you know, every once in a while, I'll meet someone. Not every once in a while. This happened two hours ago. Someone is like, you know, I listened to all your books on audiobooks, and I was doing the math. I was like, okay, I have, you know, 10 books, let's say seven hours of. That's 70 hours that we have spent together, me talking directly into their brain. It's like reading. You read in your voice, right? But when someone's listening to an audiobook, think about. Even with their. Their headphones on, it's like you're speaking directly inside their skull. That's a Very powerful thing. It's why I think podcasts are such a cool medium as well. You just have a profound relationship with the creator that you don't have in any other medium.

You are correct. Even video isn't the same as just audio. There's a magic there. Well, let's get into the stuff you're teaching in Courage is Calling. There's basically fear. There's courage and there's heroism. And you look at those separately. Can you tell me what's the difference between those?

Yeah, I think so. Before there is courage, there is fear, right? Because if there's not fear, there's no courage, Right? The whole point is if it was guaranteed, if it was safe, if you weren't afraid of it, there would be no opportunity for courage, right? So one is. One requires the other. So the first part of the book is really about this battle that we all face in different ways, in different forms, at different levels. But fear is a constant of the human experience, right? We're afraid of what other people think. We're afraid of losing our lives. We're afraid of so many different things in whatever it is that we happen to be doing. So that's the. The sort of the first battle. And I tell the story of Florence Nightingale. You know, she gets this call. She has this sense that I think a lot of people have that, like, I'm meant to do something special, like I'm not going to have my parents life. She comes from these rich, sort of indolent, spoiled parents in, you know, the British countryside in the middle of the 1800s. Like, she was expected to do nothing. She was expected to go to dance parties, get married, keep a house. That's it. And she has this sense that she's meant for more, but she can't. She can't muster up the courage to pursue that. She's afraid. She's afraid of what people might think. She's afraid of what her parents might think. She's afraid of, you know, it not working. She. So she ignores this call. I think this is a thing we miss, right? If you look at the hero's journey, an early step in the hero's journey is the refusal of the call, right? We're like, I'm not ready. It's not for me, it's not going to work. So she refuses the call. Not like for a little while, but for 16 years she just sits on this until eventually she does get this sense that she's never going to be happy, she's never going to lead a good life. She's never actually going to please these people that have imprisoned her by doing what they want. And she has to strike out on her own. And she ends up inventing, essentially modern nursing in rebellion to this. But that fear is the first battle. And it's not until we get over that, until we express that first bit of courage, that we can begin to live a sort of courageous, exciting, adventurous life.

Based on what you've learned about that part of courage, there's a lot of people who are kind of losing their minds right now. Maybe a little bit more on the fear side of things. What's your advice to reclaim courage if you're just feeling. You watch the news all the time and you're feeling like it's the end of the world.

Yeah. I mean, look, these are scary, weird times. I mean, it's sort of like you hear about the history that your grandparents lived through and it seems very interesting and fun, but it probably wasn't super fun at the time. Right.

Like World War II kind of sucked. Right?

Yeah. I mean, look, like my grandfather lived through the Depression. Right. He wasn't aware how that would end in the middle of the Depression. Right. You know, he's 15 years old in the depths of the Depression. He's not aware one that it's going to. First off, he's going to have to go land at D day before this thing is over. But he's also just not aware that, oh, this is a temporary thing. This is a thing that will actually put forth a century of American dominance. We don't know how the story is going to end. So when we study history, these events seem much more clean and clear cut than they were at the time. They could have gone in any direction. And so I think we should be empathetic to the fact that there's a lot of uncertainty and people are dealing with that. But I would also argue that people were afraid long before COVID They were anxious, they were worried. They overstated risks to things they were afraid of. Really not scary things. Right. Like people are afraid of public speaking.

I mean, it's the number one fear.

In the U.S. yeah, like public speaking is scary, but you're. There's. Even if the odds of COVID are somewhat overstated, you're definitely not going to die of public speaking. Right. Like you're a half a million. People don't die every year of, of, of speaking in front of crowds. That is the good, good news. So we've always had this sort of tendency to be really scared of things that pose Very little danger to us that if we could master, would allow us to get closer to whatever it is that we wanted to do in life.

Is getting over fear a rational thing? I mean, stoics typically are going to think their way. They'll take it from the realm of the emotion into the realm of the logical. But emotions happen before thoughts. So I already feel afraid. Now I'm telling myself stories about why my fear is real. How do I really get to the bottom of that? I mean, it's a tough thing.

Well, the stoics talk about this. They're like, look, no amount of philosophical training is going to make you not cold. If I throw cold water at you or if I jump out from around a corner, you're going to be like, whoa, that was a surprise. These are like hardwired biological reactions. But I think, you know, you talk about sort of cold water training yourself. It's like you can have that reaction, but then you also realize if you don't act on it, if you push through the, there's often something on the other side of it or you realize that the more you expose yourself to it, the less scary it is each time and the less perhaps even that you feel that thing. So I think part of what the stoics are talking about is training, but then also making a distinction. So there's a great Faulkner quote that I love. He says, be scared, you can't help that. Just don't be afraid. Right? And so I love that the distinction between being scared, which is that immediate emotional, instinctive reaction, and being afraid, which is a thing you carry forward, I think is, is an easy way to think about it. And for an analogy, like I've thought about this because I'm like, well, aren't they the same thing? Being angry and doing something out of anger are not the same thing, right? So if someone insults you, it's perfectly reasonable that that would hurt you. And I don't think a stoic just doesn't give a shit that someone just called out your greatest insecurity in front of other people. But how you choose to react to that, particularly in the cool light of the passage of time, is the big thing.

So, so well said. What happens, at least in my map of reality, there's this quarter second where the nervous system does stuff before you and you might get down to like 190, 190 milliseconds if you're a super well trained F1 driver and all that. And you have a little bit of a narrower window when you're young, but it actually extends as you get older. It takes you longer. So this is like the. The gap where you're going to feel scared. The way you described in that elegant quote from it was Emerson.

Was it Faulkner?

From Faulkner. Okay, cool. That sounds like Faulkner. So what happens there is. Okay, it did happen. And then if you allow your conscious brain to tell yourself that, that'. Right. You'll make up a whole story to justify it. And when in your book about courage and when in the Stoic philosophy, what happens in that little gap between the scare and the fear? When they're talking about fear, are they talking about scared plus the story about scared, or are they talking about just the activity after you feel the feeling? Because it's a very big distinction for those of us who want to own our own reactions to the world.

Yeah. Viktor Frankl talks about how between the stimulus and the response, we choose our condition. Right, There you go. And I think your point that there's a story is a really. Is a really good way of thinking about it, right? Because the Stoics say events are objective, then we tell ourselves a story about them. Right? And this story often determines what we're going to be able to do. So I talk about this instance with Pericles, the Athenian general in the book. So he's leading his men, and there's an eclipse. So imagine 2500 years ago, you don't understand what an eclipse is, and suddenly the entire world goes dark or the moon disappears or the sun disappears. That'd be fucking nuts. Right? Like, or more recently, like, we only understood what tornadoes were like 150 years ago. Just imagine you're just chilling. The weather changes, and then everything goes up in the air and falls back down. You're just like, what is that? Right.

And bored, definitely.

Yes. And I think a lot of these explanations make sense when you're like, oh, they just didn't know. But. So his men are sort of thrown into chaos by this eclipse. And Pericles, sort of thinking about it really quickly, he goes, okay, it's dark. This is scary. He's like. He walks up to one of his men and goes, okay, I flip your cloak over your head and suddenly it's dark, right? You can't see. Is that scary? And the guy goes, no, it's. No. And he goes, okay, well, that's what happened here, right? It's. It was light, now it's dark. Is the darkness itself scary? No. Right, so let's. Let's proceed the same thing with thunder. He goes, okay, Something's causing this noise in the sky. He's like, something's also causing the noise of these two rocks bouncing together. The noise isn't scary. And so I think if we can take a moment and sort of break down what we're afraid of, really think about it. You know, like, okay, you're afraid public speaking because people might heckle you. And then you're like, wait, what do I care that much about some random drunk guy who is such a jerk that he screams out in the middle of somebody else talking. You're like, oh, I don't care about that person. So what they do no longer has that kind of hold over me. So I do think there's an ability to. To take this thing and decide, am I going to tell myself a negative story about it or a positive story about it?

It's true. So you can choose the story you tell yourself. And the perennial example that I like to use, someone cuts you off in traffic. They did it because they don't respect me, or they did it because they're on the way to the hospital. You just don't know. Pick a story that just works better for you. Is that a stoic perspective, though? Do they tell you to pick the story?

Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, look, I think ideally you get to a place where you don't need to think anything about it at all, right? You're like, I was three cars. There were three cars ahead of me. Now there's four cars. Right? Or whatever it is, Right. Ideally, you get to a place where you're just objective and indifferent either way. But I think the idea of. I think it's Epictetus says, like, how do you know they acted wrongly if you don't know their reasons, right? And I think what you're doing there is coming up with a charitable reason instead of an uncharitable reason. And we begrudge the charitable reason less than the uncharitable reason. And I think one of the ways we can think about this also is like, look, when you cut people off, why do you do that? It's unintentional. You're in a hurry. You're having a bad day. You have all these reasons that you excuse. So is it fair for you not to extend that same courtesy to this person? And extending it or depriving it, what makes your day better, right? Like, you're punished. The thing I think what's so good about the car examples is I think about this, where you're like, you. You're cursing them or Whatever. They're in their car and you're in their car. The only person experiencing this negativity is you. They don't even know that you hate them. So, so what's the point?

Yeah, exactly. What's the point? And believing, you know, someone else's motive is usually part of a fear response, at least in, in my experience. And if you say, if you call someone a liar, okay, that means you know their motive and that they're intentionally being deceitful. You don't know that. All you know is that they're wrong. And if you say you're a purveyor of misinformation, that's fancy propaganda for liar. You don't know if it's misinformation. They might just disagree with you. And using these judgmental pejorative terms seems like it's in violation of the four virtues of the ancient world. Because it's not, it's not any of them. So I'm like, let's, let's get uncharged in our language. It's either true or it's not.

Yes, it's tr. It's tricky, I think when we get into like, should the person know better, you know, like, oh, they're not lying. They just believe their own bullshit right there is lying.

They're an idiot. That's different.

It's a little different, but yes. No, I think again, if you're the perfect sage, you can not get upset by these things day to day human being. It's difficult, right? Especially I think again to go to this idea of the immediate reaction versus the more well thought out action. So the person cuts you off in traffic as you're swerving your car to recover, to narrowly avoid the accident, you're probably going to think, what a jerk. Why did they do that? Now, if you're still holding on to this 30 minutes later, or if you're following the person to wherever they're going to confront them about this. Now we're talking about a whole other level of not just insanity, but sort of rage and being consumed with, you know, a thing that you should have let go. So I think again, it's like, look, if you fall off a horse, it's good to be probably a little bit wary about getting immediately back on a horse. But if because you had a singular bad experience, you never do that thing again, five years later, 10 years later, you're still on this thing. Now, now we're really talking about where fear, the negative story, has consumed you and your life.

Yeah, well said. I'M curious, in the Stoic teachings, there's courage, temperance, justice and wisdom. Kind of four big things. Are you planning, like the next book is temperance and then justice and then wisdom? Is that kind of how you're framing this out or like you went to courage first, but they're just kind of in this order. Right.

Yeah. I'm about halfway through, maybe a little bit further on the temperance book, which I'm rendering more as self discipline. Temperance is kind of a. It's a first of. It's, it's a weird word. It's not a particularly sexy word. And I think of, of what we need today, temp. Self discipline is probably needed more than temperance. So, yeah, I'm in the middle of a four series because I think this is really important. None of the virtues, first off, none of the virtues are possible without the others. But also none of them are worth very much without them. Right. So courage in pursuit of an unjust goal is not so great. And justice, like a sense of what's right without the courage to implement it, you know, is of course, you know, not much good for anyone. So the virtues are all related to each other. And I'm doing this. Yeah. What I'm calling the four Virtues series.

And this isn't just a stoic belief. If you look at Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, pretty much any halfway decent philosophy has some similar words, or maybe it's ahimsa or like that, whatever that. But if you boil it all down, you're going to come up with these basic ideas that, you know, you should have wisdom about stuff and you should be fair and you shouldn't be overreactive and you should have bravery for a good cause. And anyone who argues with those, I'm like, what is wrong with you? But do people argue against these? Do people ever go, those aren't the right things?

You know, I think one of the, one of the tricky but also brilliant parts about the Four Virtues is they're, they're kind of unfalsifiable. Right. Like, it's like, how can you. There's almost no philosophical school that has ever said, like, we're the school of cowardice, we're the school of immoderation, we're the school of injustice and the school of ignorance and stupidity. Right. Like the, the. Obviously we can, we can have a lot of disagreement about what those four virtues look like in practice. And I think what I'm portraying in the series is probably the, the Western ideals of those things. But at the core, I think almost all philosophical schools and religions, and then to say nothing of, like, just bedrocks. Try to find me a civilization that did not worship courage as a valuable thing. I mean, it's. It's evolutionarily valuable, right? So I think these things go to, like, the very core of who we are as people.

It does go to the core of who we are. And the list is, I think, almost unimpeachable. You could try and come at it, but you're not going to eventually win an argument about that. And to me, courage ought to come first, because you will not develop wisdom if you don't have the courage to try stuff and fail at it sometimes, because all that takes courage. So if I had to order these, I think you've got the right order. Is that a stoic order? Did they tell you it had to be in this order? Because they're all interrelated, as you said?

They definitely get moved around, depending on how the translator renders it or what philosophy you're looking at. But for the most part, this is the order that I've found them in. And this is typically how Marcus Aurelius tends to. To put them through sort of my sort of guide on a lot of these things. But I would say, yeah, people go, well, how do they all relate to each other? To me, to go to your point, like, it's not just courage and wisdom are related in the sense that you said, but also, like, what is scarier than truth or ideas, right? Like you need courage to pursue. When we say ignorance is bliss, that's because ignorance is everything you want it to be, right? Ignorance doesn't challenge you. Ignorance doesn't force you to change. Ignorance doesn't make you uncomfortable. But to pursue ideas, whether it's history or science, is inherently a scary pursuit because you're going to find things you don't like. Whether it's about human beings or about our biology.

We call that cognitive dissonance. And man, people get really uncomfortable when something that they were told by their parents or their church or their society or their social media, and all of a sudden, they face profound evidence that it's not true. You feel like you're going to die, right? And unfortunately, earlier in my life, one of my favorite hobbies was creating cognitive.

Dissonance in people, which is sort of ego death, right?

Totally.

It's like, but who I was was built around this fact, right? This is, I think, why, you know, we talk about cults, like, the reason nothing is scarier than a person having to come to. To terms with having been Very wrong about something. Right? So like if you bet your identity, if you bet your bank account, if you bet your career on a thing, it's why it's hard to admit that the invasion of Iraq was, was a mistake. This is why it's hard to have to tell an updated newer version of history. Because who we are was predicated on certain assumptions. And, and it feels like you're admitting that nothing is stable now.

I thought you were talking about Foushee for a minute there.

Well, look, I think all scientists have to cultivate the ability to admit they were wrong. And not all of them can do.

It, you know, and I said that mostly to be funny. We'll get into that stuff later. But for listeners, guys, I come from a family of scientists for many generations and man, once you're wedded to a theory and you studied it and you've done four experiments that have been published in papers that say that it's real, and then some young upstart jerk spreading misinformation comes up and says but. And has that one little thing, man, it is like an ego death. Prime example, I've had a guy on the show from the Resonance Academy who, he's a professional ski instructor who came up with a model that's 4% more predictive than the standard model. And the low level scientist said come and speak at cern. And the high level bureaucrat scientists like how dare thou, you're not one of. And they literally wouldn't let him speak even though his math is better. And so this is endemic in just hard science from universities. But then when you get it with industrial funding, that's also there where there's a financial motive. It takes stupid amounts of courage to stand up and say this is the reality that I see. How do we encourage scientists to have courage? Did you come up with a special recipe for that? Because we need more scientific courage right now.

Well, so just admitting that something that you have sort of professional or personal reasons to have an affinity for, that's tough enough. As Upton Sinclair said, it's very hard to get a person to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding. Right. So if, if you know, you're an expert, you know, you gave a Ted, a famous TED talk about X and then that that study is not replicated and now you have to disavow your millions of you TED Talk. That's a hard thing to do. But I think about something like, and I'm forgetting the guy's name, when they start to understand that illness is caused by germs and that doctors not washing their hands.

Was it Pasteur?

No, but some French guy, I'm sure.

The epidemiologist guy in Paris mapping. Yeah, I know the story. Okay. Yeah.

Okay, so imagine you have this new theory which itself is disruptive and provocative and already going to have trouble taking hold, but your theory is also inherently an indictment of a generation of doctors, right? So you're not saying, hey, guys, we thought the. The moon orbited or, sorry, the sun orbited the Earth. Actually, the earth orbits the sun. It's like sort of no skin off my back. Right. But you're saying, hey, every time you went into the operating room or you delivered a baby, you were personally infecting or making less safe the person you thought you identified with helping. Right? So that's even harder to do. So it's like if it's hard to get someone to understand something, imagine the courage to admit culpability or mistakes. Because not only is this challenging your identity, there's potentially legal liability, there's the issue of your conscience, etc. So I think when we think about getting people to change, we have to understand just the real process that is preventing them from doing that. It's not as simple as, well, here's evidence. Accept this evidence. You're forcing the ego death, but you're also forcing them to reckon with a lifetime of decisions made confidently around that information. And that's. Not everyone can do that. I mean, I try to think about all the things that I used to believe that were wrong. And I go, oh, okay, I was a real asshole about some of those things, right? So I do hope part of the outcome should just be some intellectual humility as well.

I guess humility is one of the future virtues here. I want to go deeper on courage with you. There are some other words that are part of the definition here or like the kind of a list of attributes. Can you describe courage and what it looks like, what it feels like, how you would write about it?

Well, I was trying to think because there's two. There's typically described as being two types of courage. Physical courage and moral courage. Right? One is the soldier, one is a scientist, one is running into a burning building. The other is putting out some transgressive piece of art or cultural commentary. But what do those things have in common? Why is, why is one also considered courage if it's not risking oneself? I basically, I think it's like at the core of courage is putting your ass on the line, right? So you're either putting your money on the line or you're putting your life on the line. You're putting your reputation on the line, you're putting your body on the line. Right. It's got to be something. Because if there's not, like, again, if there's no risk, if it's a certainty, it's not that. It's not important. We're just not talking about courage. But by definition, you have to be braving something that ordinarily people, or, you know, people in your position would not be expected to do. If I told you, hey, 100% guarantee bulletproof coffee is going to be successful, it's going to get this massive cultural adoption. You're going to. You'd be like, oh, of course I'll do it. I don't have to think twice about it. But the fact that, the fact that it was a risk that not only did you not know, but lots of people told you very confidently that it wouldn't. Yeah. You know, that's, that's where courage comes in. And then I, I say in the book, obviously there's a level beyond that. Right. There's a difference between courageously starting a new business and courageously leaving a successful business to, I don't know, you know, be a social worker in the inner city. Right. There, there's a level of heroism above courage where you're putting your ass on the line less for your own benefit, where you're really in no position to reap the rewards of that courage. I think that's an important distinction or higher transcendent level of courage that we often sort of forget.

So there's risking your meat, your life, and then there's risking your reputation are kind of two different aspects of courage.

Yeah, yeah. And it's not always as simple as that, but because it could be a combination of those two things. Right. So you think about a politician today speaking up against, I don't know, this bill or that bill or this trend or that trend, you know, they're risking being reelected or not. Right. Which is a scary thing to do.

That's why they always lie, no matter what party they're in.

Right, of course. So you go back, but you go back 2,000 years. The same senator in Rome is also worried about being executed by the emperor or something. Right.

So we should bring that back, shouldn't we?

Well, you know, people are mad about cancel culture. And I'm like, you know, this has existed for a long time.

Right.

They called it exile. And we've got a long, glorious Tradition of driving people away that upset us.

That we do indeed. What has required the most courage for you in the last few months?

I don't know. I don't know. I try to think about these books as I'm trying to write them. Obviously I use my own experiences and I think about my own life, but I try to think about them as a writer, as an artist. So I'm not sort of like, try not to be a character in the books so much. But I mean, just a real simple, easy one is I opened a bookstore here in the middle of the pandemic, which was a big swing for me. Certainly it was a big swing, not just financially, but like the upside was also not particularly high. Right. Like it was, it was doing it was a thing I thought would matter and both be fun, but also sort of a positive contribution to society that was, you know, small business, risky when I started thinking about it in December of 2019, and then became like a whole other level of risky and uncertain when, you know, a pandemic comes and as you know, has all these sort of massive implications for retail and supply chains and logistics and all of that. So that has been the, the, the, the battle of my last year or so.

We, we both have been through something like that. I, I opened here in Victoria, a farm to table upgrade cafe where I'm growing the meat and most of the vegetables and serving. I put a restaurant in the middle of the pandemic. And like, you don't make money at restaurants or bookstores, to be honest. But you love books and you love writing and I think it makes you happy, right?

It was something, and it was something that once I decided to do it, not doing it because it was scary or hard seemed like bad reasons. Do you know what I mean? It's like if you have the means, if you have the idea, if you think it could work, to not do it because other people are like, well, what about this, this and this? That seemed cowardly is too strong a word, but it just seemed like not the recipe for an interesting life.

At the end of the day, when you die, either you had an interesting life or you didn't. But whether you had a Ferrari or not probably was less important at least.

Yes, for sure you are.

Okay, talk to me about bravery versus sacrifice. I mean, there's so many aspects to courage as a big bucket and you go into those in the book. It's actually very fascinating to not just think about it but to say, well, here's what we've learned throughout the History for it. Which is why I like your work a lot, because you, you study it, you don't just think about it.

Well, so one example I have in the book is, and I'll say this as someone who is generally a huge Netflix and Reed Hastings fan, but you think about the middle days of Netflix, right? So starting a business is scary. Then you're successful. He starts this multi billion dollar business distributing DVDs by mail. It's very successful. But he gets this sense that the future is going to be digital. And Reed Hastings bets everything on transitioning from physical to digital. And he burns, essentially burns the boats behind him, walks away from one business to transcend, transform the business into another. That's courage now. And I think that needs to be lauded and celebrated as an example of capitalistic courage, let's say now, flash forward several years later. Netflix is international behemoth, one of the most powerful, successful companies in the world. And Netflix is distributing a show with Hasan Minhaj, who criticizes, rightfully, Saudi Arabia's murderous dismemberment of a dissident journalist. Right? And he talks about this in this episode. It's a great episode. Brave stand for him to take as an individual. But suddenly Netflix is under pressure from its allies and investors in the Middle east who are like, you got to pull this episode. This isn't what we signed up for. We don't like this. And Reed Hastings does pull it. And he says something like, we're in the entertainment business, not in the truth to power business. And I. So I contrast those kind of two, those two moments, right? They both call for courage. In one he does it, in the other, he doesn't. But the costs of that latter one are not so much financial as they are spiritual and ethical. And look, I'm sure he has his reasons, but I sort of, I think zooming out at the end of his life, is he going to go. I think he's going to think, why the hell did I become worth hundreds of billions of dollars, run one of the most powerful companies in the world to not be able to say or to stand behind someone who says, hey, chopping up journalists into little pieces is not cool with me. Right? And so it's often interesting how we can have lots of courage in one aspect of our lives or in one big moment, and then in another moment, that same courage can falter. So when we think about courage, it's not just like, hey, is this going to benefit me or not? But I also wanted people to think about, you know, like, do you have courage when it really counts, when there's principle on the line and when. When you're the only one in a position to do something.

How do you teach that? How do I get my kids to be able to be that person if they so choose?

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I mean, I think a big way to do it is by celebrating and making them feel a kinship to the people who did do that, right? And I don't think shame is powerful, but I think also talking about moments where people fell short, right? Like, like Winston Churchill is a flawed person who did many shameful things and we should talk about those shameful things and learn lessons from them. But we should also be like, look, when the world fell to pieces, one guy was like, no, I'm going to do something about this, right? One guy sort of put England on his back and said, we're going to fight on. I think we can do this. And those are our, yeah, those need to be our heroes and these need to be a diverse cast of heroes. And it's something I think about in my books. It's why I very deliberately was like, I want to make sure I open this book not with a man and not with some sort of military courage. Because I. And so the reason I opened the book with Florence Nightingale is because I want people. One, I want it to be identifiable to all different types of people. But two, I want people to understand that it doesn't matter who you are or what you do, there's an opportunity for you to be one of those.

Kinds of People, Yeah, there's always Rosa Parks. And that kind of courage is actually a lot more important. It seems like all the movies. I'm diverging a little bit here, but I'll get back to it. It seems like almost all the movies I can find on Netflix now, since we're talking about Netflix, it's just like a five foot tall woman wearing body armor with guns, shooting the crap out of everyone over and over and over. And it's just not entertaining, it's not interesting, and it's not courage at all. It's just like rote violence. I'd rather see a movie about a man or a woman, whoever it is, like doing something that matters other than, you know, just shooting.

I got an email from someone not long ago who'd read an. They'd read the book or they saw an article about the book and they were like, how could you put Rosa Parks in this book as an example of courage? She said, you know, she was a member of the end. The. The. She was a civil rights activist before. She was like, she wasn't just some random lady sitting on the bus who decided not to do it. It was planned. And I was like, how do you think that that makes it different?

Not at all.

I was like, you know, how do you think that. How do you, how. How easy do you think it was to be a civil rights activist in the 1950s and 60s in Alabama? And, and the fact that it was planned makes it more. I mean, she willingly did this, right? She. She said, somebody needs to do something about this and it's going to be me. So, you know, I think your point is a good one, which is that it's almost like we overstate physical courage and we understate the moral courage. Although again, I would argue Rosa Parks is such a great example of physical and moral courage. They could have beat her, they could have killed her. They could have killed people who are close to her. She said, I don't care if you throw me in jail. I'm taking a stand on this thing. And then I'm gonna fight the case until we bring about change. And that's what courage is.

They could have also taken away her job, told her she wasn't allowed to enter certain kinds of establishments unless she towed the party line. You know, they could have prevented her from traveling unless she did whatever they said. Of course, you know, they could have mandated almost anything. What's your take on mandates in. In terms of courage in mandates?

In what form? Like laws generally, or do it or we'll shoot you.

It doesn't matter what the it is. Really.

Yeah. I mean, look, obviously, civil society is inherently based on mandates. We sort of. The whole form of government that we have specifically is the idea that society collectively entrusts a government which is, you know, made up by us to enforce certain laws or norms that, that, that.

That are done, like segregation and stuff like that. Right?

Yeah, it's. Look, it's not always. It's not always done well. And that. That is the challenge. But look, it's. I think it's. I think it's tricky. I imagine what you're specifically getting at is the mandates that we're now looking at with COVID whether it's masks or vaccines.

I'm more worried about biological autonomy. It's not a specific mask or vaccines. It's one of those things, where do we have control over what we put into our own bodies? Because I am deeply concerned that the next one is, oh, you'll be taking prophylactic antibiotics, antidepressants, and it's a very slippery slope. Oh, and you can only eat 6 grams of red meat a day. That's coming from the UN like, no, I'm not signing any paperwork. And I will literally die on this battlefield over whether I have the right save goes in my body. And, you know, I might actually choose to get vaccinated. That's my choice. But, man, you tell me that you're going to shut my family and my life down. I think there's about 100 million Americans with guns who are not going to take that. And I think that's a fundamental human right. And to me, it's courage. And to all of those other people here, it's courageous because, yes, there's societal arguments on both sides, but the arguments might be wrong going back to the science thing. So I'm looking at that as courage, Right?

It's tricky, right, because so there's a couple things. So I want to make a courage point, but I think specifically about these. Right. It's both an existential and a practical question of where does one person's freedom begin to impede on another person's freedom, Right. So I think about a family friend who recently died of COVID who had been vaccinated but was currently undergoing chemotherapy. So very immunosuppressed. He dies of COVID And I won't say, but I happen to know who infected them. And it was an unvaccinated person. And I think about where that guy's freedom went. Right? And so it's a Tension between generally living and letting live, and where the consequences of those decisions begin to bleed over into other people's lives. So. And we should talk about that. But what I would say that is important as far as courage goes, because this is where the virtues interrelate with each other. Courage in the abstract is meaningless. There's a great Lord Byron quote that I have in the book where he says that, tis the cause makes all that hallows or degrades courage in its fall. So the person who stands alone, the person who says, I'm willing to die over this, the person who says, like, over my dead body, you know, whatever it is, this matters. Right? There's courage in that. The person who says, I don't care if you fire me. I'm not going to do what you say. Were there people who have done that over good causes all the time? Of course. And there's people who are doing it over bad causes. I think of. There was a really poignant example of this to me, to also bring another politically charged issue into this, but I remember during the George Floyd protests in Buffalo, New York, there was an old man. You can watch videos of it. It's really sickening. This old man walks up to these police officers to say something. I think he's trying to hand them something. And this police officer shoves the guy to the ground. And you could hear the thud of his head when he hits the ground.

I remember that was shocking.

It was one of the worst things I've ever seen on video. And so the police officer was immediately suspended. But then all the members of this guy's unit resign in protest. Right. But the pivotal thing is, are they resigning in protest of what he did, or are they resigning in protest over his treatment of being held accountable for what he did? And in fact, it was the latter. So, you know, the. The courage to quit your job in protection of a comrade is courage. But if you are doing it to protect a comrade who should be held accountable, it's not. So where I come back to on the COVID stuff is I respect in the abstract the courage to say, my body, my choice. You're not going to make me do this. I'd rather die. But then I think also what the protest is potentially not in all people, but potentially is the freedom to be the vector of a deadly virus that's killed hundreds of thousands of people. And that is ultimately the tricky thing on this. I was going to say I'd love for there to be no mandates, but like, to me, the but is just Sort of rhetorical. I don't know what the solution is if people aren't doing the right thing. This is where to me the purpose of government is to solve collective action problems, right? And a pandemic, a public health thing, depression, a war. These are collective action problems that individually it's very hard to just get everyone voluntarily to do the right thing. And so we have to come up with solutions. Is this the right solution? I don't know.

It concerns me because at least where I live right now in Canada, there is no exemption. And as a biohacker, guys only written a few books about medical stuff. There are actually people, including one of my family members, who actually have very, very valid medical reasons for this. I have a family member who almost died of a series of vaccines for Doctors Without Borders and was actually out of work for a year. So any doctor would say and has said, you know, it's probably a good idea for you to be one of those people who doesn't get it right. However, the way they're setting up the mandates, it doesn't matter if the vaccine is much higher risk for you than average, you will be treated like one of our pieces of property. That's why mandates are evil. That's why there always must be, you know what, unless it's the wrong thing to do for you, at which point it becomes a strong recommendation and not a mandate. So, like, the government doesn't have this power over our bodies. And I won't hand that over any more than I'll hand over my right to free speech because I already handed that over to the algorithms that govern our life now. Right. Accidentally.

Well, I think, I think in the US at least so far with the mandates, they have been largely sort of either employment based or profession based or activity based, which I actually like in the sense of, you know, it's not the government saying, as they did they've done with many vaccines in the past, like, hey, by the way, we gave your kid a polio vaccine at school today. Hope it all works out. I love the, I prefer the idea of like, sure, if you don't want to get it, that's great, but then you can't participate in certain things that other people who have, you know, taken the sort of hit, so to speak, you know, now have the entitlement to go do.

It's interesting that people who have natural immunity, I've had Covid, So I have 13 times more immunity than a vaccinated person, according to some studies, or at least as much. That doesn't count. And that's another part of this that is disturbing to me. And so I know that you're an early and vocal advocate of getting vaccinated. And I'm totally okay with that. I support our ability to make that decision. And I can see the reasons for doing it. I also can see reasons that forcing it on people without any emergency break and without a control group might not serve society over the course of the next 10 or 20 or 100 years. And that's why I'm objecting to mandates, not objecting to your right, and even the. The viability of saying, okay, I'm going to get vaccinated for these reasons. But if you already got sick, like, okay, great, prove immunity or breathe in a thing and prove you don't have it. By the way, I'm an advisor becoming an advisor to a company that'll have a 15 second breath test for Covid. So you want to go to a concert, breathe in this tube, and everyone's happy and freedom is there. I think that's a good answer. But I'm a little worried when you go to courage, because there's courage to take this risk, whatever it is. We don't know what the risk of a vaccine is because the companies lie, and we know that. But it's probably not going to kill you because most people got vaccinated. Most people didn't die yet. 5G control and magnetized Bill Gates, whatever. I'm not none of that, right? So you took some courage and like, okay, and you took courage when you went on your platforms, you're like, guys, you're an idiot if you don't do it. And I've seen you call people something like that, and I respect you greatly for doing that. Like, you took a stand and you took a risk for your business, right? You might have alienated some stoics. Okay? So you have balls and you believe what you're doing. You stand for it and like, you go, brother, seriously. So we did that. But where do we end up from a stoic perspective where I have courage, the man on the other side of the battlefield also has courage. One of you is Athens, one of you is Sparta. Where does courage end up when you have two courageous people facing each other who don't agree?

There's a great line in Lincoln's second inaugural address where he basically goes, this has been a horrible civil war that we've just engaged in. And he was like, both sides of the battle, both on both sides of the battle. We evoked God to bless our cause and thought that our cause was just. And he said, now look, one side thought that it was their right to steal the labor from a whole race of people and exploit and kill and own them. And he says, but let us not judge lest we be judged. Which I think he is talking about the somewhat intractable situations that we find ourselves in where we have these sort of unreconcilable differences of opinion that are really tough. They're really tough. I think anyone that thinks the government has done a spectacular job responding to Covid is like out of their minds. And anyone that, that, that that trusts the government implicitly and explicitly, you know, has no understanding of history. So I get where you're coming from. I think, I think what, where I come down on is that like, this is an inelegant solution to a difficult, changing, real world problem. If I was in charge, would I do it slightly differently? Is there probably a way to tackle it where it's vaccines plus testing plus different kinds of medication and people were choosing them? Yes. But I think, I think the really tricky part about it is like, where I come down, this is what I was saying earlier. I would love for this not have to be mandated because I would love everyone to be on the same page, not even as far as like, what the best way to treat it is, but like we're not on the same page as far as reality goes with a significant chunk of society. Right? Like if you told me that the people who said, hey, I'm worried about the vaccine for the following reasons, were also perfectly overlapped with people who took Covid very seriously, I'd be like, okay, we're all adults, we can work out a solution, right? But I think that the tricky part about COVID is that the people who are the least resistant to vaccines, to masks and so and other mitigation measures, are also the people most in denial about whether it exists at all. And so we're in this tricky business where the vast majority of people are on the same page, are doing what they can, are not part of the problem, and then we're all at the mercy of the people who are the problem. So I just think about it, it's like, where's my kids freedom, right? Because they, they don't get to choose whether they're vaccinated or not. They have to either not do things that would be part of a normal childhood, or run the risks of COVID which are relatively low, but the long term consequences are unknown. You know, where's their freedom? So society Modern, the modern world is a trade off of these things.

It's, it is one of those, like you said, intractable situations there. And I've talked with medical ethics experts, people who taught medical ethics, and they're saying it's not ethical to require one person to take a treatment to protect another person. It flies in the face of everything we know about it. But to recommend it and say it's an act of kindness, it's an act of courage, it's an act of bravery, I can support that. I also know that there are probably some kids out there where their doctor's like, you know what? They have a weird gene, and the risk for them is five times higher than everyone else for this. Okay? To be like, you know what? People with this SNP might not handle aspirin very well, so they shouldn't take aspirin. And to build a world where we ignore that, I'm really concerned about. And so I, I want to create a place where, you know what, most people don't do it. And we, we create protection and maybe measure antibodies and all that. And there can be some good things that come out of it. And what I, what I'm hoping is that we have people who have that fear response and we're getting amplified fear from media, right? And then have the courage to say, you know what? I'm going to do everything I can to protect myself and others around me. I'm going to lose weight, I'm going to take my vitamin D, I'm going to get vaccinated. If I, and my doctor and my care providers believe that it isn't a higher risk for me than it is benefit, because it's different for different people. And if you're 80 and overweight and have five conditions, you should probably get like, triple vaccines just in case, because you're, I don't know, you're maybe not in a very, very good position there. So it's like, it has to be tuned and it's that, that treatment of the 7 billion people we have, like, we're all the same is hard for me.

I mentioned my grandfather earlier, so I think, I think about, you know, I think he landed it at D day plus three. So I think about, like, what, what must have been going through his mind, right? And, and so, you know, they were like, hey, you have to, you have to do this. You don't have a choice. You, you very likely could or will die. You may or may not be around to collect payment for the services rendered. You live in America. So it's very unlikely that the consequences of not doing this will be borne by you. And yet he not only went, but it was a sort of a pivotal moment of his life in world history. And very few people, I think looking back on it goes, you know, that draft was unethical. We shouldn't have done that. Right?

Yeah.

So I, I guess I would push back on the idea that we don't. It's, it's, it's not right to mandate that someone do something at their expense for the benefit of another. I mean, to me that at least as far as stoicism goes, but also my conception of what America is, to me that's actually that, that's the whole part of it to me that that's not just what courage is, but what heroism is. And I did this piece for the Economist recently where I was talking about this idea that Viktor Frankl had, who I mentioned earlier about a corresponding statue to the Statue of Liberty. So he said on the statue, on the east coast we have the Statue of Liberty and on the west coast he said we should have a Statue of Responsibility.

That was the best article then. I love that.

Thank you. So to me part of this comes down to responsibility. And again, like I said, I would love for there not to have to be. It undermines responsibility if you're forced to do it legally. But I would love to live in a world where responsible people did the responsible thing because they saw it as part of their values and to see an area where we agree. I would say also taking good care of yourself, being in shape, et cetera, these are also parts of contributing to the common good that I think as a society we've done a bad job talking about and creating a culture around because yeah, if you are not taking care of yourself, ultimately somebody else ends up carrying that weight.

It's true. And even in a draft, like if you had an injury in your leg or something was wrong with you, they would kick you out of the draft and say you, you don't get to go fight or they give you a desk job. Something would happen there. And so, I mean, you and I aren't going to solve this major intractable thing, but I appreciate the ability to have a curious, open minded discussion about it without all the rancor that's happening in society right now, all the judging and all because I really respect the way you think about things and it's cool to be able to hear what you think about this.

Well, the tragedy of COVID is that face to face is the Best way to talk about all these things. And that is the one thing we have been less able to do. Right. It's like if you were to take something like a pandemic, this goes more to the virtue of discipline. But take something as complex as a pandemic or the ethics of vaccinations or whatever, and you're like, what's the best medium for society to hash this out? I don't think anyone would say 240 characters on your phone.

That might be a little limiting. I'm with you there. Well, you're one of the few remaining long form journalists as well as authors. And there's actually a lot more books, but there's fewer really heavy books. Heavy is the wrong word, but just deeply researched and written books the way you do it. And like your piece and that was the Atlantic, right? The Economist or the Economist, Sorry, but like your piece there, there aren't a lot of 3,000 word pieces left, even though that's how we used to think and learn. So you're doing that. I want to know as we wrap this up, you've written Courage is Calling. What do you hope readers are going to take away most. What's the change in the world that's going to happen from this book?

I know for me writing it and sort of living with these characters over the last year and a half or so, it's really encouraged me as far as like stepping up, saying what I think, not holding back and sort of doing what I, what I know. But what that voice in your head is like, well, what about this, right? You know, I think, I think we would do better as a society if we. I had Alexander Vindamin on my podcast recently. It was the whistleblower in the second Trump impeachment. And again, people are probably already mad at hearing that. But he had this great line. He said what he learned as an expert on Russia, he's a 25 year expert on Soviet American relations. He said the key is do not self deter. So like the idea is like the Russians would do something aggressive and then the US would be like, well, we don't want to do anything because what about this, this or this or this or that, right? So we would, we would talk ourselves out of doing what we knew to be right because of this sort of boogeyman of the opponent. Right? Or the boogeyman of how it would be perceived in the media instead of just like this is obviously the moral, correct, courageous thing to do, let us do it. So this idea of self deterrence I think goes to the point in the book about fear. We often self deter because don't want to piss off followers, don't want to get, don't want the hassle, you know, don't want to lose money, etc.

Yep. We have both recently taken. Take some risks by just having a stand. And I don't think that. I think a few of your followers got really pissed off and probably left and you probably gained a bunch of others. Right?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely parts where I've pissed off. I've pissed some people off for sure. But I think, you know, you often, you're afraid of pissing people off and then what you fail to anticipate is, as you said, the people who send you really nice notes, you know, are like, hey, thank you so much for doing this. I haven't seen other people do it. So I sort of, I think it's a wash. At the end of the.

Day, it is a wash. And I've noticed the same thing, you know, I'm like, look, I stand for your right to work with your doctor and say I'm going to decide what goes into me, even though if there's a valid reason, I won't. But yeah, there's some people really said mean things about me and I lost a lot of sleep over the mean things they said about me. I did not lose sleep over that. Did you?

No, not really.

I didn't at all either. Look, that's what courage is like. I'm going to do what's right. Okay, sorry, I saw you nodding. I'm like, you did not really? You got me there. Now, I know that the Upgrade Collective has some questions here. What do you have to say? Bonnie?

Hi, Ryan. Thanks for being a part of. This is very lively. Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me. When you mentioned about the Cancel culture and this has been going on for a long time, what are those handful of things that have been around since humans have been around? Because to me it gives a comfort like we've been here before, kind of a take heart. Is there like five, four, three things like that? Yeah, I don't, I mean, I would say almost everything that we're experiencing today has some sort of historical antecedent. And the reason is that people are people. I was just in, just as an example, I was, I was driving across the country earlier this month and I was in Tombstone, Arizona, the site of the famous Battle of the OK Corral. And I, I took, I found it to be very funny that there were signs all over town for the different bars and saloons that still exist there that say no guns allowed inside these establishments. Because that was literally what the Battle of the OK Corral was about. It was whether you could openly carry guns in town. Right. So 150 odd years have passed and this tiny town in the middle of the desert in Arizona is still litigating this issue that you think would have been put to bed around the time of cowboys and Indians and so on. The one way to look at that is depressing, that like we never solve anything and we never make progress and we're stuck with these intractable issues. The other way to look at it is that history is the same thing happening over and over and over again. That people are people and we're just kind of along for the ride. I know that doesn't quite answer your question, but it is one example I was thinking about recently.

Great. Thanks so much. Thanks, Ryan. Looks like Jim and Joanne probably. Joanne has a question for you.

Ryan, I'm wondering if David Hawkins is, is a philosopher you followed. I appreciate that Hawkins applauds warriors on opposing sides of a battle. It would seem to me in your four categories that would be because of both the courage and discipline that these brave warriors are following. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good, a good way to think about it. Obviously there is courage on, on both sides or, or, you know, it wouldn't be much of a battle, so to speak. I guess the, the question is like, you know, how sort of, how far do you take it? Right. There were lots of great brave generals on the side of the Confederacy or, you know, in Japan or Germany. So we have to. I think this is why I make this point that ultimately the cause does distinguish the conduct in some way. Like, like I do, I do take pains, for instance, when I see a member of a political party that perhaps I disagree with a lot when they take an unpopular stand within their own party. I always like that. I always think it's worth calling out because if you don't, it's less likely that it will continue to happen in the future. Right. But I, but I do think, you know, there, there is inevitably some judgment that has to be made about the righteousness of the cause. We have to do this with humility and the perspective of history. But I do think ultimately you're judged by the fruits.

Thanks for the question, Joanne. And that brings up something that. Ryan, I want to share a little story with you and get your stoic take on it. We talked about Cognitive dissonance earlier. And I was raised in a mostly, you know, fallen Catholic atheist kind of house. And I went to college and I found that I could take religious studies courses. And it was a lot easier to get an A in that than it was in computer science, which was my topic. So I was padding my GPA with religious science courses, and I took a course called Religion and Violence, and it was taught by rabbinical scholar. And we're studying Jim Jones, we're studying Hezbollah. Like all these, these religions turned very, very violent. And he said, what do all of these people have in common? And I said, they're all idiots because they can't think. Okay? And he laughed, right? And he said, actually, that's a common answer, but that's not true. What they all have is they have different assumptions about reality than you. And all of their behavior is logical. If you believe that you will go to heaven if you do this and that is your reality, then they aren't illogical. They're rational actors with different assumptions. And it was a big cognitive system. How much of courage is seeing reality versus taking action?

Well, this is the tricky thing about, say, like, an issue like abortion, which you don't have to wait into, but I think if you want to talk about respecting both sides, if, if you don't think, you know, life, if you don't think that of an unviable fetus, you know, is worth protecting, then, then you know, a woman shouldn't be forced to be pregnant against her will up until that point. If you do think that it is life, that it's sacred life, then what? That immediately raises the stakes to an incredible level. And you can see why some people are very adamant about it. But this is where also, I think, the courage to look at both what you believe, why you believe it, the intellectual history of that belief is also really important. Right? So you take something like abortion, you go, yes, the, the, the. The right in America takes abortion very, very seriously. And, and that they clearly, sincerely believe that. But how long have they believed that? What was the. What. What. When did that become a deeply held belief in that ideological group? Oh, it's actually much more recent than you think, actually. You know, it has this issue or, you know, it has this impetus or that impetus, which is suddenly not so noble. And then you go, oh, are you. So are you correct? Like, there's. I guess you talked about the difference between misinformation and lying earlier. Someone might be very sincere, sincere in what they believe and committed to that with the sincerity but if they don't have the courage to question themselves, to have the intellectual humility, to go, why do I believe this is correct, etc. There's also a certain amount of cowardice in that. And I think when we look at a lot of these issues, it tends to be that the belief wasn't sue generous. It wasn't, you know, sort of individually discovered. It was something they inherited from their parents, from talk radio, from political talking point. And you need to have the courage to be able to question that belief. And so I guess to make this really practical, wherever you happen to be politically, if you were in perfect lockstep with all of the beliefs of that group, chances are you don't actually agree with any of it. You've just assumed an identity versus someone who, like, I believe these things in the Republican Party, I believe these things in the Democratic Party, and then here in the middle, I have a bunch of beliefs that they both find abhorrent. You know, that's probably a sign of at least some intellectual courage or independence.

And we have one more question for you, Ryan from Ski, one of our Upgrade Collective members. By the way, guys, our upgrade collective.com you get to be in the live studio audience. Weekly calls with me and my team of coaches. Thousands of questions answered our upgradecollective.com Ski, what do you have to ask?

Thanks. Thanks for taking my question. In this day and age, I mean, your topic could be kind of seen as a bit erudite. It is leaning toward higher meanings and a bigger message. So you have a background in media, you understand public relations and how media works. So I guess in an era when we've got eight second attention spans and we're trying to break through amidst all this noise, how are you getting your message out there where it might be needed most? It's a great question. So I think a couple things. So one, always knowing who you're trying to reach, if you're trying to reach everyone, you're probably not going to be successful. So as an author of books, I have a. I understand that books are not for everyone, but that there is a specific market who reads books. And that's who I write for. And I try to make them as accessible to those people and practical to those people as possible. But I understand that, you know, a book is not the same as a YouTube video or an Instagram post or a TikTok. Now I'm also on all those other mediums. So I try to take the ideas that I spend a lot of time and length on as a writer, I also have a team that helps me break those things down into 30 second clips and 15 second clips and 10 minute videos and 20 minute videos and so on and so forth. So I think one of the things, it's like, what do you, what do you have to say? What's the best medium for that? And then once you've had traction there, how do you go out and reach people on all the other mediums that they spend time on to bring them into those ideas? And if you're not doing that, you're probably not reaching as many people as you can.

Thank you, Ski. That was a great question. And Ryan, I want to say thank you for being on the show and thank you for just writing a whole bunch of worthy books. There's more books than any of us could ever read in our lives. Just that if you read. I mean, you run a bookstore now.

Yes.

So you know you can't read everything in the store even if you want to. And you've written a series of books. I've never seen one of your books. That isn't worth the time it takes to read. And it's hard to read. It's very kind and that's true honest praise, no kissing ass there. So just thanks for putting the time and the dedication and the effort into it and your website. Ryanholliday.net courage is calling. And that's the name of your book. Your timing couldn't have been better. It was arranged that way for a reason. And I want to ask everyone listening here, read the book and apply courage. And the number one place I want you to apply your courage is apply your courage to be kind towards people who disagree with you. You might have noticed that Ryan and I don't see everything eye to eye.

Right.

I have great respect for the guy and it's okay that we disagree. And if we can do that, us big, powerful author people, then you can do that too.

All right, well said. And I needed that reminder myself, so I appreciate it.

You got it, my friend. Thank you again, truly, for your work and for everyone. Upgrade Collective. Everyone listening to this stuff. Seriously, kindness is something that happens when you're courageous and it's when you don't punch the guy back. Right? And we can all do that. And thank you for listening and thank you for reading Ryan's book. You need to do this. See you all later.

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