Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host Shane Parrish, Curator Behind Furnham Street,

an online intellectual hub of interestingness that covers topics like human misjudgment,

decision making, strategy, and philosophy. The Knowledge Project allows me to interview

amazing people from around the world to deconstruct why they're good at what they do. It's

more conversation than prescription. On this episode I have Ryan Holiday. Since dropping out of

college at 19 to apprentice understratigers Robert Green, the author of the 48 Laws of Power,

Ryan has advised many New York Times bestselling authors and musicians. He's a master and someone

say, manipulator of the media. As his first book Trust Me I'm Lying Outlines, his latest book,

The Obstuble is the way to reach bestseller status. We explore how he reads, what it means to be a

stoic and his infamous no card system. The conversation is actually cut short. We originally had 90

minutes booked for this interview, but I forget to turn on the recorder so we had to re-record the

entire interview. Ryan got to practice some of that famous stoicism. With that said, I hope you

enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Before I get started, here's a quick word from our sponsor.

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productive. Visit slack.com slash fernam to create your team and get $100 in credits that you can use

if you decide to switch to a paid plan. Where do we want to start? Let's start with what is stoicism again.

We'll go quicker. We were just talking for about 20 minutes and just realized that the microphone

wasn't on. Wouldn't it be funny if I freaked out and knocked over all the mics and was just very

unstopic about it? Now, so stoicism is a practical philosophy. Most people think when they think

philosophy, they think college professor lecturing them, stoicism is it's favored by statesmen,

politicians, soldiers, artists, etc. Because it's really at its core, I think, a series of maximums

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