YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryan Holiday

lines on the record: 129
first: 2024-11-26
most recent: 2024-11-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's tough. My kids are still pretty young, and so I am. I am hesitant to give them my somewhat unhealthy adult levels of discipline. Part of me is just like letting them enjoy letting them just not be. My assumption is that they have whatever I have. And so allowing them to enjoy not having it is part of how I think about it. Because I watch as they get into things, they don't just like kind of get into things.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do a during sports and they help me as a writer. I couldn't do what I do as a writer without those physical components. Even like I have a cold plunge and there's something about I'm going to get in this thing that is uncomfortable and I'm going to decide how long I'm going to stay in it. Whether or not it has any health benefits whatsoever, and I'm pretty skeptical at this point of all of those claims because I've seen what nonsense these same communities will propagate. So to me, the benefit is purely.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So clearly at some level we understand that competition is healthy and motivating and yet too much competition is disorienting and ultimately self-defeating. And so that balance is tough.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes in swimming, you're only next to each other. Like the marathon or something the longer races, you might be two minutes. That's a closable gap, but you can't see what the other people are doing, even if it was an insurmountable lead for her to get first.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's that, although the other one that keeps me up, there was a mountain bike race in the Japan Olympics, I think. And the woman thought she was in first place, but she was actually in second place.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's even more hard to run your own race. Set it guys this word euthymia and he talks about being on the path that you're on this is not being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours? Especially the paths of those who are lost. And I think about that all the time. You don't know where someone's trying to end up. You don't know where they're going to end up. You also don't know what is propelling them. Addiction or psychological issue. What's propelling them is Millions of dollars of a fortune they inherited or you know some dark money you know donor it could be a bazillion things you don't know and so I think the more indifferent and probably ignorant you are of what your peers are doing the healthier you are in the your compass reading will be.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's somewhat productive and it's socially adaptive. Do a heroine or drinking all night tends not to have positive social reinforcement, but being really good at what you do and Thriving on that feeling of being validated for being good at what you do is nevertheless a pretty wicked feedback loop.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, go for it. Yeah, of course. I think it always has. And so what you oftentimes workholism or Insufficiency or it's sort of a way of soothing something that you feel, but unlike a lot of addictions or compulsion, It's a”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's not based on anything real. And most of the time, what you get is not even the reward for doing it. You get the relief for doing. having not done it. The feeling is not, I'm proud of myself. I did a great job. This made a huge difference. The reward is see, you're not a piece of shit, and that is Not a way to go through life.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's the thing about most compulsive tendencies is they're not based on anything. You have this belief that if you don't do it, things will fall apart.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I almost always have the opposite problem, which is that Telling myself that be it five minutes late on this is not as big a deal as it feels in the moment. I am tending to fight the compulsive side of it, and so the battle for me is going, let's just have a nice weekend as opposed to I'm behind I'm going to blow apart this nice weekend to check some arbitrary box in a race that I am preposterously ahead on, and by the way, don't even need to be doing.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's a great way of thinking. I try to write every day or try to do a little something every day. And that's better for me than, okay, I'm not doing it. And then next month I'm going to start doing it.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You told me something that I've been thinking about where you said that you go to the gym every day. As opposed to I work out three days a week Because there's a consistency to everydayness and”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Knowing one's limitations, setting reasonable bounds on things, I don't have a problem getting up and working, I have a problem getting up from and stopping working. I mean, I have other vices too, whether it's food or you know my screen or devices or whatever, but I think for the most part it's discipline for me is closer to balance and saying no than it is to insist El Yes for the”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the virtue self discipline is the discipline that you insist upon yourself, so it's what you do when no one's watching. It's what you do with the discretion that is given to you. And I think when we think of self-discipline, we shouldn't just be thinking of physical discipline. It's not just how does your uniform look and how far can you march and self-discipline is? Can you keep your head about you when things are falling apart? Can you be a calm reassuring presence? Can you keep your emotions in check? So self-discipline is sometimes rendered as the idea of temperance, which just doesn't have a good connotation in the initial language, but it is the Sox would say the greatest empire is command of oneself. And so whether you're the emperor or a slave, whether you're a soldier or a CEO, it's this idea of not like, what are you allowed to get away with? What is being asked of you?”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know not self discipline. So the discipline of an army sergeant Obviously, important, but I don't think that's a virtue because it's being imposed on you. Of course essential that an army is disciplined.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tim Duncan took over, and the team was down by seven or eight points, and Tim Duncan coached the rest of the game, and they came very narrowly within winning, like it came down to like the last two seconds and they didn't win, but they almost did. And somebody told me after that Pop had looked at Duncan and said, I'm going to get myself thrown out. You're going to handle the rest of this game. And he was just, he saw that the team needed an energy shift and that that was a tool in his toolkit. I find that. Very interesting.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being angry and doing something out of anger. And then there's a third, which is the performative element of anger. You're a head basketball coach and you've gotten a series of bad calls. Losing her temper, screaming at the ref and getting ejected not only does it help your team, but it costs your team points because you get too technicals. But if you are so even keeled that you're just allowing the refs to run over you, or you're allowing a lackadaisical effort from your team to go unchastened, also probably not good. And so I am fascinated by the way that a great coach can. Turn up or down certain levers. I was at a Spurs game one time and I watched Greg Popovich get ejected and”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think he was chastened by the fact there's a story about Hadrian, his predecessor, who's Gets frustrated with his secretary, he grabs the secretary's pet and he stabs it in the man's eye. Like this is the thing that the king, the emperor could get away with, literally anything. And so I do think it's interesting the allowances we make, particularly with men for certain kinds of emotions and not other kinds of emotions. And I'm not saying, oh, hey, we should be all with one or all with the other. It's just The idea of the Stoic Suppressing their tears and sadness and love and affection, but then Being a vortex of temper and rage strikes me as a contradiction that doesn't make any sense. And the idea would be to be kind of an even keel across the board. That being said, there is a difference between”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had this idea that crying is not manly, right? Being overwhelmed with your emotions is somehow a weakness. But we make an exception culturally for anger. If you went through some problematic work thing and you cried in front of your whole team, you would reasonably expect that team would be like, what's wrong with shame? Right. I'm not saying that that's right. They just would. But if you got so angry that you punched a wall. Not only might not you be judged for that, that might be like part of the legend of Shane, which is interesting. And the Stoics would point out that, like, Those are both the same process of being overwhelmed by our emotions. And the other is not. And so it's kind of strange. So it's interesting. We have a couple of stories that Mark Surreal is crying, but we don't have any stories of him losing his temper.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Historically a very clear drop off. Like at some point you age out. At some point you Your trend or moment goes away. And maybe you survive long enough for it to come back, but like the idea that for me as our author, that my sales are only going to go like this. It's preposterously naive. Then it adds this layer to like, okay, so you're saying no because you're too busy right now”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The example it is the book, which I think is a good one. He's talking about like a med student who's living way below their means, saving up money. They know in the future they're going to make a lot of money. It's very clear how that profession works, right? And so they'd be more effective, maybe not racking up a ton of debt, but like not living as if they don't know for certain their financials. They're not actually making $30,000 a year. They're just temporarily making that. Anyways, that advice is very helpful in clarifying in more predictive linear professions. But that would be bad advice to give to a rookie in the NBA because they may only be able to do it for two years. I think it is tricky when you have a very clear element of unpredictability and a very”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Read that book Die With Zero? Great Book, but the idea is, you know, thinking about What do you try to do all this for? You try to accumulate a large amount of money that you don't get to take with you when you die? We are borrowing money from our poorer selves to loan to our future richer self.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So you have to. Sets of boundaries and then task other people with enforcing them. I think some people will go, oh, is it, you know, you don't want to pay these people commissions? You just do it yourself. And I think there's a danger in doing it yourself, which is that. It can go to your head and also kind of”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just eliminate. Three of the five that were not serious, or not even not serious, but were at a number that might be tempting, but it's better for you not to see.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you need a certain amount of self-confidence and security to be able to do that. And you can see why if you're like, if you have just an enormous void inside you, how vulnerable that makes you. Because You want to be wanted, you want the validation, you want the ching. That feels good.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Opportunity costs are sometimes clear but often not clear. If I could offered to do, I don't know, speaking gig, that's the opportunity cost of saying no or whatever they're offering, the opportunity cost of saying yes is whatever creative work I might have done had I stayed home and then also whatever Intangibles like the rhythm of our households, my personal happiness, how easy things are, and so the downside is in one sense is very quantifiable, and the upside in the other case is very hard to quantify. And in some cases, the consequences of it are quite lagging. And so You're faced with briefcase with cash in it and hey, isn't this a bit much we're all tired”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was thinking about how kind of like what seemed like a lot of money to you as a kid always remains a lot of money to you. Even as your income goes up. It's hard for you to pass on things because that seems like a lot, even though proportionally it no longer is. I'm trying to do work and get more clarity, get more objective about like, no, hey, actually, yes, to you ten years ago, to any person on the street, that is a lot. But given what your time is actually worth at its current valuation, that's actually something you should say no to. That's hard. Imagine if you're a billionaire, how hard that must get no one's throwing them a pity party, but like that must be very disorienting and destabilizing to not have a good way to value what to say yes or no to. The problem is financial upside is always clear.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It'd be easy to say, like, oh, when you're disciplined while you're successful, don't take on too much. Say no to a lot of things, but In sports or entertainment or art, or even, you know, whatever it is that you do, you don't do it forever. Do you have a narrow window? And there's going to be at some point where it dries up. And so are you going to look back and go, there was almost a bit of ego in my selection process because I was assuming that.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marx reasons in meditation, you can imagine the immense pressure and inbound that's coming at the emperor of fifty million people. He says, in everything you do and say and think, you have to ask yourself, is this essential? And he says, because most of what we do and say and think is non-essential. And he says, when you eliminate the in essential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. Knowing that what you're saying, the S2 means saying no to other things, and conversely saying no to things means saying yes to things is like the very tricky never gets easy balance that I was struggling with like even this morning my wife and I were like okay I got offered to do this and I got offered to do that what do we want to say yes to what do we want to say no to and just the you would think at some point not needing it would make it easier to say no but opportunity costs”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other person is like has a, they have a break and they have their own steering wheel and they have their own accelerator. The pressure to scale is Obviously, a first world problem because most people and not that long ago for me, the problem was breaking through or breaking out. Once you do that, because that is so rare, there's an immense amount of structural pressure, economic pressure, cultural pressure to, you know, take a winner and turn it into a big winner, as opposed to just being like, this is nice. Even with the bookstore, every couple weeks I'll get an email being like, hey, we've thought about opening another one. And it's like, I already hit the lottery by it not failing. Do I need to? Start a shade of bookstores. I don't think that I do. And I don't think that would improve. My life quality at all.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The pressure to scale like I know a lot of people in this kind of information media space that have taken on like private equity investments, like there's like the Chernim group, and so they'll buy like half of the business or all of the business. And then the idea is like, well, how do we scale this into a much larger company? I've expressed no interest in doing that because To me, part of the whole joy of doing it is not having a boss and not needing to get at us to a certain level or do a certain amount of things which you Are foregoing when you bring on somebody else.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I had my marketing company, one of the reasons I never wanted to hire employees was that I was skeptical that there were enough projects that I would be interested in working on to pay for The people, which meant if I hired someone, they would represent a certain number of projects per year just to get back to even. I go back and forth between whether that was a constraining kind of limiting belief or if that was actually like a pure and Admirable”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you also do your interviews or longer, right? So. You might be the same if somebody's doing two a week and they're an hour, that's the same as you doing it.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the thing that for me is that's the part that I like doing And it's probably the least hard on me. It'd be the other stuff that I think would.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes to be there has there been any boxer in history that's walked away Too early, probably not. It clearly takes more discipline. To go for the sixth ring or the three P or whatever. Those things are extraordinarily hard, but clearly if less people do this other feat, it must be because it's even harder.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we don't hear about him anymore. So he's not out there fighting for his legacy, arguing about his accomplishments. He's not on TV. So he just sort of recedes from memory. But he also made like $100 million playing football. As far as we know, escaped without any serious long-term brain injuries, I don't know what he does all day, but the idea is.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not make himself and the Washington name a hereditary monarchy. And King George says, if he can do that, he will be the greatest man on earth. And there is something about relinquishing power or walking away that takes an incredible amount of discipline and strength. And that we don't usually appreciate in the moment. And in fact, we tend to ridicule and mock it like, you know, Andrew Luck, the quarterback? Yeah. He walked away”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“resigns as dictator after like seventeen days, and that he returns to his farm. It just goes back to his regular civilian life, and it's this example that is told for generations and generations and generations, so much so that George Washington hears it as a young boy. And he resigns his commission repeatedly. I was just in Annapolis a couple weeks ago, and you can stand in the courthouse where he resigns his military commission. And then when he resigns after two terms as president, but King George, when he hears after the revolution, what is to become of George Washington, he's told that, you know, I think he intends to return to his farm.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I tell this story to my son all the time. Cincinnatis is maybe not real, maybe real, but his example was certainly very real to the Greeks, or I guess to the Romans, not to the Greeks. But yeah, Rome is sends out its army in this big battle and they're defeated and the army's trapped. And so Rome had this sort of emergency, you know, smash in case of emergency button that said, you know, you could make someone dictator to save the republic. And so they go to Cincinnatus, who had been a general, and they make him dictator. And he rounds up every, you know, straggling man and boy in Rome at this time, and he marches out and he defeats, he rescues the army, he defeats the enemy, and then he returns. To”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They did it as good as it can really be done, but they didn't have to turn themselves into a monster to do it. I would argue a much rarer corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely. So I think makes Marx really such a fascinating example is here you have one of the few humans to hold absolute power as we would really define it Doesn't seem to have become deranged or grotesque isn't an overwhelmingly cautionary tale. That to me is a rarer feat than if you told me he had won the Single greatest military and victory of all time. Like the greatest victory the Stokes would say would be the victory over those very impulses.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, what I really admire, and I've gotten to meet a handful of them over the years, and I'm always reluctant to be like, well, this one is a good example of this because you don't really know what's happening in anyone's personal life. But I think it's really something special when you meet someone who has inarguably attained the heights of their profession or, you know, in some sort of all-time greats, you know, achieve the great prizes of their thing, whether it's politics, sports, business, art, and they seem reasonably well adjusted. They haven't left a trail of bodies behind them literal or otherwise. Their family wasn't utterly neglected. Their health wasn't utterly neglected, their moral priorities weren't so weren't grotesquely out of alignment. So when you meet someone, you're like, oh.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think about this all the time. I would like to be both a And I think you do realize there are trade offs. There is something inherently unbalanced about. Excellence in a singular domain because You are focusing all of your energy on one thing. There's something dysmorphic about like the athlete's physique. And that's probably just the physical manifestation of also. If you could look at their mind. and their priorities probably equally. Out of whack. But if they want to.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Excellence And yet it's also not unmitigated because we expect our athletes to exhibit sportsmanship and grace and coolness under pressure. You know, like all these traits that go into being a full, well rounded person are At play in sports, this is, I think, why the Olympics are this sort of enduring thing. We still observe some of the same exact sports almost that, you know, the Stokes would have been very familiar with.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so. I mean, that's what sports are a metaphor for any kind of pursuit of excellence. It's just the Visible, you know, it's a very visible because it's a game with rules at a beginning and an end, the most observable form of excellence. An entertaining form of excellence. And look, in the ancient world, they're using sports metaphors then too, because it's the same process. One of the stokes is talking about how he thinks that a philosopher has to be like an athlete. He's just like a ball player. You catch the ball and throw it back, catch the ball and throw it back. And whether it's a good throw or a bad throw, you still have to catch it. He considers Socrates like the greatest athlete of all time because he does, he deals with the things that life throws at him, including this death sentence. There's weightlifting metaphors and racing metaphors. And some of the Stoics were also athletes. So I think we just, there's something about sports that is the sort of unmitigated pursuit of.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No Zeno is the founder of Stoicism. Zeno studies under this cynic philosopher named Crates. By the way, Crates is an equal partner with his philosophical wife in Athens. There's always been a female influence from the beginning, but Zeno is credited as the founder of socism. He sets it up on Stoa Pochile, this porch in the Athenian agora. That's where Stoicism comes from. Then there's Cleanthes and then Chrysippus. But it doesn't really become a real school philosophia till later with sort of codified. But Zito is considering the Faleros.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just on a historical basis, that's not true. And so this idea, if Stoicism is like for dudes in the army and it's about suppressing your emotions, I get why it's not going to be attractive. But that's not what it is. Just like if you think Epicureanism is orgies and parties and retreating from the world, you're going to be like, what is this? But that's not what Epipyrus was talking about either.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the Stoics would have had wives and daughters. There's a fascinating essay from Moussodes Rufus, who's not just Epictetus' philosophy teacher, so he's teaching a slave, but he writes his essay about why women should be taught philosophy. So we know he has female students. We just don't know any of their names. And there's been a backlash about Stoicism. It's like, oh, this is philosophy for bros in Silicon Valley, or this is for meatheads, or this is for soldiers. Yeah, there is, I think, a connection to certain masculine worlds in Stoicism, but I mean, a huge percent of my audience is not male. But I also”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have Epictetus, who's a slave, you have Marcus Aurelius, who's the emperor, Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. Some people were convinced he is black. He's described interestingly in some of the few descriptions we have of his physical form. But in any case, he's like a Mediterranean merchant. And so just the idea that it was like all people of the same social class, just because Rome was a caste society doesn't mean that all the philosophers perfectly conformed to that caste just because we hear mostly of the men doesn't mean there weren't Stoic women. Cato's daughter, Porsche, is involved in the assassination of Julius Caesar.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that it's all old rich white dudes with a lot of merit and a desire to point out the biases and sort of structural patterns of not just the ancient world but all forms of history just to focus on what was obscured or what's not included, we forget just how enormous the Roman Empire was. I mean, the Roman Empire makes contact with the Han dynasty during Marcus Aurelius' reign and it stretches as far as England and Africa and the Middle East.”
2024-11-26 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT