Ryan Holiday: Finding stillness amidst chaos

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. Welcome back to another episode of The Drive. My guest this week is Ryan Holiday, a previous guest and a close friend.
In addition to the conversation we released on Tuesday with Sam Harris, I also wanted to bring back Ryan to talk about stoicism and how it can help us during these current times. We talk in this episode, in particular, about some of the measures of stoic philosophy and how moments like this are sort of tailor-made for examining those principles and more importantly, figuring out how to apply them to our lives. But worry not, this is not an episode that gets deep or philosophical in any way, shape or form. It is mostly about us talking about balancing the challenges, trying to think through other things that folks are experiencing that perhaps Ryan and I are not experienced. For example, Ryan and I happen to live in largely rural areas and therefore, at least we're not space-constrained during this period of time, but we're aware that many people are. And the question then is, okay, well, what would you do if you're stuck on the 17th floor of a 600-square-foot apartment in New York? How can you apply some of these principles? We revisit some of my absolute favorite stories from some of his books, including the one that I think about the most, which is that of Winston Churchill during the Second World War, and basically, we extract insights and lessons from a number of Ryan's book. Again, his most recent, Stillness is the Key, Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, et cetera. Let's just get right to this one. It's about 90 minutes long, and I think most of you will find at least something of value in here. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion today with Ryan Holiday.
Ryan, thank you so much for making time on pretty short notice.

**Ryan Holiday** (2:34)
Yeah, of course, any time. How are you doing?

**Peter Attia** (2:37)
I'm doing okay.
Overall, I think I'm doing pretty well. Feel pretty fortunate to be with my family during all this. I think sort of reflected on it the other day and thought, man, this would be a lot worse if all this were going on and I wasn't with my family. So despite the inconvenience of this, which I think is it's obviously inconvenient in different extent to different people, yeah, I don't know. I'm doing better than I was a week ago of seeing the potential upside of this. From the beginning, Ryan, I mean, I was in contact with you right away and you seemed to immediately find a way to be productive in this. And I think part of that is you're one of the people that has the luxury of being able to work from home. But aside from that, does this also kind of pose for you a new laboratory in which you can examine your own reactions to this sort of thing and then that of others?

**Ryan Holiday** (3:32)
Yeah, I mean, to me, that's the only potential positive of any sort of dramatic setback or adversity or obstacle or whatever it is, is that it is a chance to sort of see things differently or look at things differently.
Almost always this status quo is something we had some sort of part in setting up. So we kind of like things the way that they are.
So sort of given a choice, I'd probably have left them exactly as they were. But then when you sort of experience these sudden shocks, suddenly you're working from home or suddenly you're not doing this anymore. Or in my case, like a whole bunch of stuff that I was planning to do later this month. And then in all of April was suddenly canceled. And so obviously the economic hit of that is very large and very unpleasant, but at the same time, so I never would have canceled them sort of deliberately. But then when you find yourself feeling relief that they got canceled, you're like, Oh, maybe my feelings on this were a little bit more mixed than I understood. I mean, for me, I am very lucky. I work from home. Not only can I work from home, but I live on a fair amount of property outside of a major city. So, and I had some mutual friends and you being one of them that sort of gave me some heads up on stuff that was happening. So I was able to prepare. So I wasn't sort of caught off guard or as harmed by it as some people.