Ryan Holiday: Stillness, stoicism, and suffering less

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
I guess this week is Ryan Holiday. Ryan is the bestselling author of many books, including Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy. His first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, which basically predicted the rise of fake news, The Conspiracy, and a number of other books about marketing, culture, the human condition. His most recent book, Stillness is the Key, came out recently. And while we talk about it quite a bit, it's actually not even the focus of our discussion. Instead, I think we talk more broadly about Ryan's influence, his work, the influence that stoic philosophy has had in his thinking. And obviously as it permeates into this book, we talk about anger, we talk about just a number of things that I think factor into the way I try to think about longevity more broadly than just living longer, but also this idea of suffering less. And if there's anything I've learned from mine, and I've learned a lot from Ryan, because as I mentioned in the podcast, and I'll say it again, now, his daily newsletter, The Daily Stoic, is one of the most important things that I look for in my inbox every morning. Being able to kind of go into a little bit more detail on that for me was great. And I've been wanting to talk with Ryan for probably about a year, and maybe six months ago when we sort of realized, well, the book was going to be coming out, we decided this would be as good a time as any to do. So the book is fantastic. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Ryan Holiday.
Ryan, thanks so much for making time and for coming out here today.

**Ryan Holiday** (2:16)
Of course.

**Peter Attia** (2:16)
Like I was saying to you a minute ago, I'm kind of bummed I didn't get to come to the farm.

**Ryan Holiday** (2:19)
Yeah, so the problem with the farm is it's very wonderful, except we've got like a weird animal balance going right now. So it's like, what will happen is like a cow will come, and then the dogs will bark, and then that will make another bark, dog bark. And then it can be this whole cycle that takes many minutes to settle back down. So it's great for writing, it's great for living, it's not great for podcasts or interviews of any kind.
Also, the internet's no good. Well, I guess we're not doing this live to anything, but that's the other big problem.

**Peter Attia** (2:52)
Talk to me about the joy of having lousy internet.

**Ryan Holiday** (2:55)
Yeah, it's great.
Weirdly, the crappier it is, the more expensive it is. Like I have fiber at my place in town, and it's like 50 bucks a month for the fastest internet you can possibly imagine. And then in the country, it's like 150 or 200 bucks a month for like barely Netflix streamable speeds.
And it goes out, you know, if it rains or it goes out all the time. But it's nice because that's not what you're there for. And we have, I've said this before, but we have like T-Mobile and it works great in Austin for cell phones, but out there it sucks. And AT&T and Sprint both work pretty good, but we purposely haven't switched just because you get less phone calls. Like if I have it at the house, like because you pick it up off the wifi, but if you walk too far from the house, you basically lose cell service, which is good 99.9% of the time. I'm sure there will be some time when I cut off my leg with a chainsaw and I desperately need a call for help and I can't, but otherwise it creates a sort of an artificial silence, which is great.

**Peter Attia** (3:59)
Yeah, it's hard to believe that 20 years ago, maybe a bit longer, but directionally 20 years ago, the idea that we would have had cell phones with us 24-7 seemed kind of foreign, certainly 30 years ago, completely a foreign idea. So from a relative standpoint of our existence on this planet, this notion of being tethered to that type of device is basically unbeknownst to our DNA.