Welcome to the weekend edition of the Bayley Stoweth Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoweth texts, audio books that we like here recommend here at Bayley Stoweth and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.
Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Bayley Stoweth Podcast. You probably heard about this incident at an evil academy where they asked me to remove some slides and I didn't, and probably wanted me to just quietly go away. And I didn't answer about this in your time to be spouting.
Then I filmed the talk and I put it up. And we read it as a podcast episode, so maybe you listen to it. And it's been nice and gratifying to be able to say, hey, it didn't work. You didn't get to shut this down.
I'm not going to obey in advance. I'm not going to quietly go into the night. I'm going to take a stand and I'm going to show, hey, my principles matter here more than access. And people I really admire, Admiral Stavrita, sent me a very nice notice and proud of you.
This is a former commander of NATO, someone who I admire, someone who I look up to, his books, we can't remember the book or that he's a great writer, one of my favorite business leadership writers, some politicians I admire. The response has been over one. I mean, some people just called the bookstore just to say, hey, I'm sure you're getting a lot of hate for this, but I just wanted to take a job. That was incredibly gratifying.
And people said some stuff about, this is you living what you talk. And I'm not listening all this to pat myself on the back. I hope that's quick, because I want to get into why I'm bringing this up. I felt like it was a little unfair how positive this stuff was, because I know myself, right?
I know that I haven't always done this. I know that there have been moments when I was afraid, even when they called and they said, hey, we want you to take this out. I thought about it, right? Like it wasn't black and white, it wasn't immediately clear.
I said, hey, is this a language thing? Like, are there some ground rules you want to lay? I don't know if I thought I could get myself off the hook or if there actually wasn't compromise. I don't think there was.
And I don't think I would have accepted it. But the point is, these things are hard. They're not clear. They're not obvious.
And even when I made the decision, even I said, hey, guys, I'm not taking this out. There was part of me that hoped there was still a way forward. There was a part of me that wasn't sure. I mean, I called my wife Samantha after, and I said, did I make the right decision?
And I asked because I wanted to be reassured, because I wasn't totally sure. And I'm saying this because doing the right thing is hard and it's scary. And these are the reasons we don't do it. We tell ourselves excuses, we make excuses.
And I know this from experience because I have been that person in the past. If you read Courageous Calling, you know this. If you know anything about my story, I had a complicated, in many ways, messed up stint in my 20s where I worked for some people. I shouldn't have.
I went along with some things that I shouldn't have. And it continues on past that. I mean, I look at conversations with people where they were talking about someone else. And I should have said, hey, don't do that.
That's not OK. Don't do that when I'm around. There are just all sorts of moments in my life where I have not had that moral courage. I think we all have.
And when I think about those moments, I think about how my excuses didn't age well. Now, I drew on that here and it made it slightly easier. That's the thing. It's kind of a habit.
You either develop a habit of doing it or you don't. And I felt like when I wrote Courageous Calling, I didn't want anyone to infer that I was saying I was like these people. Because if anything, I'm further from these people than I am like these people. And I open, let me grab it here.
I open the afterward of Courageous Calling with a personal story. One that was scary to write, I will say, because there's always some risk when you're being vulnerable and real that you are taking your life in your hands or your career in your hands, your reputation in your hands. And I talk about a real failing of courage. And that's what I wanted to bring to you today.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, they talk about doing a ceaseless moral inventory. It's not just about moments where you did the right thing and you want to say, look how great I am. But we have to look always in the mirror and go where did I fall short? Where could I have done better?
Where was I not the person, as Mark's really said, that philosophy wants me to be? And I'm telling you about how I fell short, because I think we learn more from these moments. And I want you to understand that if you have fallen short, will you still get to make the next decision? The call is coming again and again and again and again.
And what matters is not what we did then, but what we do now. And there were again big moments and small moments in my 20s when I was not that person. And that's what I'm going to bring you today. We're going to do this afterward from Courage is Calling.
Let me just seamlessly get into it. By the way, you can grab the audio book on Amazon or I can sign a copy of Courage or Justice or Discipline at store.dailystowick.com. And then the Wisdom book, which is one of the books I was going to talk about at the Nemo Academy, I believe you can grab that at dailystowick.com slash pre-order because we're just putting it up for pre-order now. So she knows me talking about that exact struggle and how I myself have fallen short of it many times.
Afterward, I was maybe 23 years old when Dove Charnie, the CEO of American Apparel, asked me to leak naked photos of a woman who was suing him. I told him I would not. He believed that these pictures and the accompanying texts would exonerate him to a certain extent. He was right.
They also constituted what we now call revenge porn. I said, I wanted no part in it. At the time I felt a certain satisfaction with myself for this moment of moral courage. As I've gotten older and having written the pages you've just listened to, the choice holds up but it also seems shamefully insufficient.
On the one hand defying Dove Charnie is not something people did at American Apparel. Not if they wanted to keep their job, let alone stay on the boss's good side. On the other hand, why didn't I turn around, walk out the door and never look back? Why didn't I quit on the spot?
Why didn't everyone? Why did I still want to keep the job? I remember walking into his office a few weeks later and witnessing a video call between him and reporters for major media outlets where they viewed the photos. I had stopped only my participation in the scheme.
I had done nothing to actually prevent it from happening. Within minutes they would be splashed across the internet and the press. Why did my courage fail me? It's a question I have asked myself many times since because it was not the only moral quandary that I found myself in in American Apparel.
I told myself that I stayed over the years because I wanted to protect the people who worked for me. I stayed because I thought I could make more of a difference by staying because I believed in the mission of the company and it was doing good in the world because I wasn't like the others or like him. And to a certain extent this was all true but we can always find reasons not to do the hard but right thing. At that age walking away from money from the most important job I'd ever had, disrupting the plans I had for my life, that all weighed very heavily upon me.
The irony in retrospect was at that very moment I was already making plans to do something much scarier, to transition away from the corporate world and become a writer. I believe I was afraid of what severing my lifeline would mean. I hesitated over being without a salary. I was deterred by the uncertainty, by the leap in the dark but in hesitating I put myself in my safety above what was right, above other people.
For three more years I remained with the company as an advisor and a strategist which mostly consisted of running interference for the employees whom I could help in preventing the car from crashing into a ditch. I prevented bad decisions from being made. I steered decisions in a more ethical direction. I tried to rein Dove in.
I kept the theme going in my own small way, helping thousands of garment workers to keep making a living wage. I also continued to get paid and as a result I can't fully escape complicity for the bad that did happen. A profile in courage, I was not. In 2014 after I had established myself as a writer of three books events took a sudden turn.
Dove whose grasp on reality had been intermittent before spiraled. He was living on a caught in a warehouse. He struck an employee. He would rant like a lunatic.
He had driven the stock price to the lowest it had ever been. The lawsuits continued because he could not stop himself. During Dove's descent into madness I frequently had discussions with some of American Apparel's board members about the state of affairs inside the company. As the reports grew worse the board eventually decided to move on their CEO.
I had begun to argue that Dove needed help in the way that Nero had needed help. That removing him was the only way to do it. It had taken me too long to get there but once I made the decision there wasn't any doubt. It was the right path.
On the day I ended my book tour for the obstacle is the way I got a call from Dove and then from his number two the board had finally fired him. Could I have made a difference if I had advocated for this earlier or would I have been fired? If I had quit in protest in 2011, would it have sent a message or gone without notice? If I hadn't held my fire, I wouldn't have been around for the pivotal moment when it did come or that's what I told myself.
Dove unaware of my efforts tried to purchase my loyalty in those desperate moments. I will buy you a publishing imprint he told me. Could you have delivered on that promise? Probably not.
It didn't matter because I was not interested. I had crossed my Rubicon. I flew to Los Angeles and began a new role trying to rebuild the company and save it from Dove who instead of walking away with millions decided that if he couldn't be in charge, he'd rather attack what he'd spent his life building. It was a race to stop him from burning the whole place down.
There was a hostile takeover from Wall Street, then a poison pill from the board. It was hardly time in a war zone but it was chaos on a level that I'd never seen. I had to brave criticism and intrigue and all sorts of other nonsense. I would sit and be interviewed for a number of investigations.
I showed them where bodies had been buried and money had been wasted. I convinced other people to share their stories and protected them from retaliation. I cleaned up longstanding messes and canceled policies that never should have been there in the first place. I comforted people.
I tried to make things right. I worked long hours far from home while my wife waited patiently alone as we attempted to salvage the ruins of the company. It was exhausting. But not every battle is able to be won.
The new corporate leadership hesitated at a critical moment. There were employees who needed to be fired who had been corrupted over the years. When they were kept on out of a fear of upsetting anyone, Dove was able to sabotage the company through them. Then the hedge fund that bought the company relented under his pressure and brought Dove partly back into the fold.
I had warned against this repeatedly so I quit on the spot, giving up the rest of my contract. He had been fired for reasons that had been denied and excused for too long. The idea of then reversing course was unconscionable to me, but the turnaround experts were certain they knew better. The company would end up filing for bankruptcy twice.
More than 10,000 people lost their jobs. I tell a longer version of the story. This was an experience that informed my book, Ego, is the enemy. I've received death threats from my writing before, but none of them rattled me the way that Dove's clownish goons did over the phone that summer.
You go from working for and admiring someone thinking you believe in the same things to realize that you had blinded yourself. You realize that you debased yourself. You realize that most of it was a lie. And suddenly you're worried about your safety, going about your business as if your car and your office are bugged.
There was sadness and fear, but there was also a surprising amount of certainty. It felt so much better to leave, much better to do the hard thing than the morally conflicted years as interesting and fun as the times had been. It's far more rewarding too. Maybe you've been hearing the buzz about live shopping lately.
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No credit card or payment needed. Just head over to pipe drive.com slash doe.com slash doe. Do it to be up and running in minutes. As American apparel imploded, I read a lot of Seneca.
He's a fascinating figure because for all his beautiful writings about stoicism, courage, and justice, especially, he also worked for Nero. Had I been a minor 21st century equivalent, a writer who didn't live by their words, in a sense, yes. Indisputably I had fallen short. I had compromised.
Should've known better. I could've been braver. I think a big part of it had been the slow boil of it. You start with a set of assumptions made based on the facts as you understand them, or even on compromises you're willing to make.
Nero was a teenager when he met Seneca. I met Dove when I was a teenager. Things change. You learn more.
Events happen. But if you're not willing to make decisions, hard decisions, as you grow and things change, then you're a coward. A lack of agency is contagious. We used to talk in American apparel about how we were all watching the Dove show.
No one even talked about doing anything about it. It was like we were all passive observers of our own surreal lives. Right down to the hours and hours we were forced to sit and watch him rant and rave. Sometimes he was brilliant.
Sometimes he was appallingly malevolent. It's as if it never occurred to anyone that we could do something about this. Maybe we expected that somebody else would, that the adults would save us. And as we got older, as Seneca grew powerful in his own right, it conveniently escaped us.
We were the ones who needed to come to the rescue. Confidentiality agreements, severance as car leases, friendships, compartmentalization, our own data issues. He was the boss and his signature was on our checks. You have a personal connection and it blinds you.
Nobody we knew called us out and if they had, would we have listened? Or would it have just driven us deeper into the cognitive dissonance? Fear in its many forms was a persuasive deterrent. It won out over courage.
At least I can say that in my own case. Seneca would talk about how virtue is two parts, the study of truth followed by conduct. If there's a third part, he said it would be admonishment and reminders, the process of reviewing and reflecting and creating rules based on our experiences. Of course, if all the parts conduct is the most important, my own story is evidence of that.
But it is also by failing and looking in the mirror afterward that we were able to grow and learn and hopefully be better next time. That's how it went for Seneca. Eventually he did break with Nero. He went out like a hero.
By the time 2016 rolled around, I too had learned from my experiences. I had a column in the New York Observer, which was owned by Jared Kushner, then known simply as a real estate developer in the son-in-law of a reality show personality. That summer, I wrote a piece that made a strong case against Donald Trump's fitness for office. There had been no need for editorial approval of my writing up until that point.
But suddenly the paper blocked the publication of my piece. A few years earlier, I would have been afraid to rock the boat or lose the money that might come from the gig. Now it didn't even occur to me not to publish something I thought was important. I also knew I wasn't wrong, which meant it was right to say it.
I posted my piece elsewhere and immediately it went viral. I knew it meant my days writing at the Observer would be numbered. Shortly afterward, I wrote another critical piece that also focused on the extreme right-wing website, right-part. Again, it was not published, so I put it out on my own.
Shortly thereafter, I was informed that someone associated with the campaign had called to make serious allegations that one of my books had been plagiarized. The accusation was preposterous, but that wasn't the point. It was supposed to be a warning. They wanted me to know that they would try to ruin me if I didn't shut up.
It didn't work. If I had lost my column because of the Trump piece, if I had been forced to fight false allegations, if someone had come after me, I'd have handled it the same way I handled losing that salary that the tools have always had, as Marx really said, to give into fear is to deny the talents and skills that got you where you are in the first place. It's to deprive yourself of the agency you were given at birth. In a sense, I'm grateful for the experiences at American Apparel because they taught me, belatedly, about the importance of listening to the voice inside yourself.
In the midst of chaos and corruption, it can be hard to hear the call to courage. Sometimes you can only understand the perils of hesitation, of not speaking truth to power, after witnessing what happens to you and others when that doesn't happen. You'll find the outright intimidation I was talking about is rare. Far more effective are the ordinary incentives of life.
Tell people what they wanna hear and you'll have a bigger audience. Don't get political, refrain from challenging anyone's identity. Any modern writer can look at their unsubscribe and unfollow rates and learn very quickly that to present the harsh truth is often to harm your wallet. You only have to read your fan mail when you wade into controversial topics.
Why did you say that? I'm never reading you again. I'm not perfect. I haven't always been as courageous as I wish I was clearly, but as I've gotten older as a writer, one thing has become increasingly clear to me.
Our obligation is to the truth, whether people like it or not. Like how videos, they might punish you for it. They might cancel you or literally even kill you for it. But as I often tell angry readers, I didn't build my platform to not use it, to say what I believe.
I save this story for the close of the book precisely because it's complicated and ordinary. 12,000 people worked at American Apparel over the years. Who was the most guilty? No one can say.
If you read the stories about those leaked pictures, you'll see how murky the situation actually was. Maybe you'll read my Trump column and think I was totally wrong and it shouldn't have been published. My point in those stories was to show that courage is something we all have to work toward in our own way, in our own lives, most of which are quite pedestrian. Samuel Johnson joked that every man thinks mainly of himself for not having been a soldier.
I get that. I wrestled with that even as I wrote this book, and I qualified, am I allowed to write about courage, having never saved anyone's life outside of some 911 calls and giving somebody CPR on the pavement outside of a bar? I haven't always been courageous. I'm not always courageous.
I hesitated even to write this chapter and some people told me not to include it. But then I remembered that hesitation ought to steal your resolve. I can say earnestly that I am getting better at the timeless challenge of applying courage to real life. I care less of what people think today than I did yesterday.
I stepped forward more often than I slink back. Writing and publishing this book was an example of that, but I'd like my private life and my private actions to speak louder than words. We have to stop thinking of courage only as what happens on the battlefield or on a bus during the Freedom Rides. It's also just not being afraid of your boss or the truth.
It's the decision to follow your own creative path. It's drawing an ethical line. It's being a weirdo if that's who you are. It's voting your conscience, not what the crowd wants or what your parents want.
It's not only doing these things when destiny calls you onto the world stage, it's also as we talked about making courage a habit, something you do in matters big and small, day in and day out, so that it feels natural in every moment, no matter who is watching, no matter the stakes. Courage calls to each of us. Will we answer? Or maybe that's too much.
Can we get better at answering? Can we step up more times than we step back? Let's start there. Thanks so much for listening.
If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.