How to Win the War with Yourself | Ryan Holiday

0:00:05 You’ve said before that life is always whispering at you and if you’re not paying attention it’ll
0:00:11 eventually scream at you. In sobriety circles they talk about like two cars in the garage addicts.
0:00:17 What rock bottom is for you is a choice that you kind of get to make. So do you realize
0:00:22 that you’re heading down a bad path after you’ve had to sell your house and your cars and you’ve
0:00:29 lost literally everything or is it that embarrassing evening at the company Christmas party that
0:00:35 serves to send the message? How are you hearing what the world is trying to tell you
0:00:41 or are you very much not hearing it and at some point is it going to have to hold you down and
0:00:57 scream it into your ear? Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I’m your host, Shane Parrish,
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0:01:13 are not subscribers? Go ahead and hit that follow button right now. Thank you. My guest today is
0:01:18 the modern day philosopher king Ryan Holiday. His books on helping people live better and more
0:01:23 meaningful lives have sold millions of copies. Building a meaningful life isn’t just about
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0:03:26 How do we separate this signal from the noise? Like in a world of social media,
0:03:31 you’re getting feedback all the time. How do you distinguish what’s valid and sort of helpful
0:03:36 feedback and a whisper versus this is noise and it offers no value? Yeah, this is really hard.
0:03:44 You can see that often to be successful as an entrepreneur, you get there by not listening.
0:03:50 You get there by not listening to the odds, not listening to the doubts, not listening to the
0:03:57 critics and then you succeed. So then you get this very wicked learning environment where
0:04:03 you succeeded precisely because you did not listen to the message that the world was trying to send
0:04:08 you. But if what you generalized from that is never listen to people, you’re going to be a
0:04:13 really tough spot. So take Elon Musk. When Elon Musk was planning what became SpaceX,
0:04:20 his friends held a literal AA style intervention that said you cannot start a rocket company.
0:04:24 This is the worst idea. You will lose all your money. Obviously, he was correct and there were
0:04:30 moments when he probably, the conventional wisdom or the data or the advice from the investors
0:04:37 overwhelmingly was to sell Tesla or to do X, Y, and C. So what happens when it’s sort of a passing
0:04:44 fancy or an impulse consideration to buy Twitter? Some people told them it was a good idea. Some
0:04:47 people told them it was a really, really bad idea. Some people told them most totally outside of his
0:04:52 domain of expertise and all these things. How do you know whether to listen or not? This is like
0:05:00 the essential question. The quote is something like a reasonable person adapts to the world.
0:05:05 And an unreasonable man adapts the world to themselves. And so therefore,
0:05:12 all progress depends on the unreasonable man. So often this thing that makes one a groundbreaking
0:05:22 artist, a discoverer, an inventor, an entrepreneur, an artist, whatever it is. The thing that makes
0:05:29 you great is this ability to not listen to feedback. At some point, invariably, you come
0:05:36 across feedback that you should listen to. You go past the point that you aimed for. You go
0:05:43 past a convention that is there for a good reason. And we only see the survivors. We never see the
0:05:49 people who didn’t listen and failed because they just sort of become noise, if you will, in the
0:05:54 process. Whereas Elon gets held up as like, “Oh, I’ve done all of these things and people have
0:05:58 told me I couldn’t do them. I shouldn’t do them. They can’t be done and yet I’ve done them.”
0:06:03 Yeah. And what we take from that is not, he was right in these specific instances for these
0:06:08 reasons. What we tend to take from that is the shorthand of don’t listen to other people or
0:06:13 conventional wisdom is always wrong. But of course, many, many people had failed. There was a graveyard
0:06:18 of millionaires and billionaires who’d lost their fortunes starting private space companies.
0:06:24 I think a good part is like not taking these sort of like business book, headline,
0:06:35 cover story narratives from people’s trajectories or from history, but actually really drilling
0:06:41 down and getting to the actual reason as to why something worked or didn’t work. Elon Musk sees
0:06:48 himself as this groundbreaking, precedent-shattering entrepreneur. And another version to look at
0:06:54 is this guy who took massive government subsidies at critical points that allowed him to do those
0:06:59 things. A story you tell yourself about your own experiences is really interesting. And then the
0:07:05 story that society says about your experiences is also really interesting too. Can you give me
0:07:10 an example of where you’ve missed a whisper and it’s gotten louder and louder and then you’re like,
0:07:14 “Oh, shit.” Well, I think we all have these in our personal lives, right? Like you sensed you were
0:07:23 coming across some sort of personal limitation or you sensed that you were straining a relationship.
0:07:30 Working with someone that you didn’t quite think was right, but you ignore that and then it
0:07:36 becomes very clear why you should have listened to that kind of gut level instincts. I just take
0:07:42 on too much and then I’m like, “Oh, okay.” Like earlier this year, I had rolled my ankle really
0:07:48 bad. I had to go to the yard and they were like, “You got to take like six weeks off.” And I took
0:07:54 like a week and a half off. I heard it again so badly. I thought when I looked down, I would
0:08:00 see the bone sticking out of my leg. It wasn’t. Thankfully, I’d been given a very clear message,
0:08:04 not just from my own body, but from a medical professional. I said, “You got to slow down
0:08:10 and take a break.” And I didn’t listen. And the irony whenever I do this, and I’ve done this many
0:08:19 times, you end up losing more time than you would if you’d just taken the prescription when it was
0:08:25 there. It’s when we rush the comeback or we rush the recovery. What I say is a lack of patience
0:08:31 changes the outcome. And if you think about money, that’s a great area where people just try to get
0:08:38 rich quick, whereas the path or formula to get rich over time is pretty clear. And it’s available
0:08:43 to almost anybody, but you get into trouble when you start trying to rush the timeline.
0:08:49 Yeah, there’s a Latin expression called “festina lente,” which means to make haste slowly. We often
0:08:57 look for shortcuts and it takes longer than if we just sort of done it slow instead. It is amazing
0:09:05 at some level how it all can be reduced down to something in Aesop’s fables or a cliche or a
0:09:11 little proverb. I’ve been amazed lately at the idea that somebody said that for the first time.
0:09:15 Someone will invent a new word to express a concept or someone will invent a new way of
0:09:19 thinking about things and say, “Oh, that’s great.” But a lot of these things that we take for granted,
0:09:26 it’s not like they’re hardwired into our DNA. And so somebody who’s now lost
0:09:33 came up with that idea, the timelessness of the truth of that I just love. And then it’s been
0:09:39 true for 2,300 years or whatever. And it’ll be true for 2,300 more years. Yeah, almost certainly.
0:09:45 I was listening to our old episode and one thing I never asked you was, “How would you define stoicism?”
0:09:49 I’ve come to define it as this idea that we don’t control what happens, but we control how we
0:09:54 respond to what happens. And then when people go, “What does that mean? I usually follow this idea.”
0:10:01 And then stoic is predicated on this idea that you can respond with virtue or irritate annoying
0:10:09 people, a natural disaster, extreme success, death sentence. You don’t control that that happened.
0:10:13 Maybe you controlled whether it was or wasn’t going to happen, but now it is happening.
0:10:17 And to me, stoicism is the framework for which you orient your response.
0:10:23 Is it harder if we caused it versus something we didn’t cause? Is it harder to handle a situation
0:10:27 where we messed up versus we get a cancer diagnosis?
0:10:32 I think so, yeah, because we have guilt and shame and frustration, but it doesn’t change
0:10:37 the fact that it’s now there. And I think that’s part of what stoicism is, is the ability to go,
0:10:44 “Okay, how I got here is separate and independent from the fact that I currently am here.”
0:10:53 I might need to at some point examine those causes so I can learn from it, but my impulse to dissect
0:11:01 and blame and question what has happened is actually just a really convenient distraction
0:11:06 from the choice in front of me right now, which is what am I going to do about it?
0:11:10 There’s a passage in Meditations where Marx realizes, sort of criticizing the people who are
0:11:15 always trying to delve into what lies beneath. Like they’re always like, “Well, what does this mean?”
0:11:19 or “What does that word mean?” or “Why is it this way?” or “Who’s fault? What are the root causes?”
0:11:24 And again, that all matters, but usually not in the moment. In the moment it’s, “Well, what are you
0:11:33 going to do?” When should we look back and reflect on that situation so that we can actually learn from
0:11:40 it? What is our contribution to it? For me, it’s always once the strong emotions about it have
0:11:47 dissipated. How do you reflect? Do you write or do you think? To me, stoicism is journaling and
0:11:53 journaling is stoicism. Journaling is to stoicism as meditation is to Buddhism. It is the practice of
0:11:59 having a conversation with yourself about your thoughts and beliefs and values and actions.
0:12:04 And that, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marx realizes, his sole philosophical work was
0:12:10 entitled Meditations, which the Greek title was just to himself. Almost certainly he did not give
0:12:17 it a title. And what makes it such a remarkable work is that he didn’t intend it as a work.
0:12:23 It is a work in progress, that dialogue with the self. And so, yeah, I’m usually doing it there.
0:12:29 And then obviously the benefit of being a writer, and you know this, is like you have this sort of
0:12:37 forced self-reflection that if I was just a regular person, I think I would do a lot more
0:12:41 journaling than I do, given that I have to wake up and think about all these things and write
0:12:45 about them and talk about them. And I get asked questions about them. So there’s sort of a,
0:12:51 there’s something, there’s a benefit to the profession certainly also. You just kind of
0:12:56 ping it around in your head. I don’t think you’re going to be doing it. It’s because the thoughts
0:13:00 in our heads sort of make sense in our head. But when we put them on paper, they don’t.
0:13:07 Yeah, it’s like also what I’m hearing right now as I’m talking is an understanding of my
0:13:11 voice that when I listen to a recording of this, you see very clearly do not match up.
0:13:17 And that’s to me a metaphor for so much of the human experience, which is that it feels one
0:13:22 way to us as we’re feeling it, or as it’s coming out. And then with distance or from a different
0:13:29 lens or a, you know, a different medium, it suddenly sounds and feels and looks very different.
0:13:33 And I think it’s because it’s like, I’m hearing it through my own head right now,
0:13:39 like my, the way the sound waves are literally going through the bones in my own head are different
0:13:44 than when I’m have headphones on and it’s been recorded afterwards. Yeah, you grow up thinking
0:13:48 your voice sounds like one thing. And then you hear it recording like, Oh, I’m, I’m actually a very
0:13:55 different voice. You have these thoughts about things that feel like they make sense until you
0:14:03 interrogate them or ask, is that true? Thoughts aside, like I never thought about my voice until
0:14:08 I heard myself. Yeah. And apparently I have a very distinct voice that a lot of people don’t like.
0:14:14 It’s a feedback on the audio book is like Shane should not read books.
0:14:18 Interesting. And then I get this thing where I’m like, I was in a hot tub in Hawaii and this guy’s
0:14:22 like, I know your voice from somewhere. And I was like, no, all Canadians sound like this.
0:14:26 He’s like, no, it’s such a distinct voice. You just can’t pinpoint where it’s from.
0:14:30 But when I listened to myself talk, I don’t, I don’t hear any of that.
0:14:35 You realize in that moment, just how different objective reality and perception are how
0:14:41 sometimes it’s good to get external feedback. And sometimes it’s good to be in a bubble because
0:14:47 can you do anything about your voice? No. My therapist uses this phrase that I think about a lot.
0:14:52 And she catches herself doing it and so on. I catch myself doing it. But she’ll, you know,
0:14:56 somebody does something and then you’re like, well, what that means or what you’re saying.
0:15:03 And she always says you should preface it with this phrase. What I make up about that is what
0:15:08 they’re saying, what they’re doing, it means something to them. And then you’re having an
0:15:16 interpretation of it. It is a remark. And then you are saying it’s rude or it’s manipulative or
0:15:24 it’s provocative or offensive or loving or not loving. You’re interpreting what it is. And
0:15:28 this is a very core idea in Stoicism that Epictetus said that, you know, it’s not
0:15:33 things that upset us. It’s our opinion about things. It’s the way the voice sounds to us.
0:15:38 That is the problem, not the, not the voice. And when you realize that doesn’t magically give you
0:15:44 the ability to not have the opinion, but it does help you realize, I’m bringing a lot to this.
0:15:49 I’m making something up about that. That’s what an assumption is. I am assuming something. And
0:15:56 usually those things are making stuff harder, not easier.
0:16:00 There’s an interesting quirk to when you’re talking with people, if you say something like
0:16:06 the story I’m telling myself is, and it’s wrong, people have a tendency to correct you.
0:16:11 Yes. And so they’ll actually inform you. It’s like, no, that’s not what’s happening,
0:16:14 but you have to be brave enough to sort of put it out there.
0:16:17 Yeah. And when thinking about how much less threatening it is to say the story I’m telling
0:16:22 myself about that is this, as opposed to, I don’t like that what you’re doing is this.
0:16:30 Because one implies judgment and then the other implies not just a certain interpretation about
0:16:37 that, but an interpretation plus a loosely heldness, right? By you saying what I, what I make up about
0:16:43 that is, or the story I tell myself about that is, or the way that sounds to me is, you are not
0:16:50 expressing your interpretation of reality as reality. And therefore you are offering the person
0:16:55 the opportunity to correct or update or contextualize that thing.
0:17:03 A lot of people think stoicism is simply suppressing your emotion. How would you respond to that?
0:17:10 The Stoics got married. The Stoics had children. The Stoics went to the theater. The Stoics wrote
0:17:16 moving works that were performed in the theater. The Stoics fought in battle. The Stoics participated
0:17:22 in politics and, you know, the great causes of their time. The idea that these people had no
0:17:29 emotions is, to me, totally belied by their actual day-to-day existences that we have a lot of
0:17:35 evidence for. And when you look at Marx’s views as meditations, you’re not seeing
0:17:39 a person who is devoid of emotion. You are trying to see a person who’s
0:17:49 attempting to be less emotional in high-stakes situations or in stressful situations. But,
0:17:55 to me, that’s very different than denying or disregarding the emotions altogether.
0:17:59 It’s almost like you have a narrower band, so you don’t have these big oscillations.
0:18:04 Yeah. I mean, I make a distinction between being angry and doing something out of anger.
0:18:13 I think that’s like a pretty basic being, you know, being sad and then being in despair,
0:18:21 again, very different. And so I think, to me, Stoicism is a set of exercises and insights
0:18:28 and practices to help you understand those emotions, process those emotions, and not be
0:18:35 ruled by those emotions. But I don’t think there’s ever this place where you’re able
0:18:39 to fully transcend them. And I’m not sure you would want to. The Stoics weren’t saying, like,
0:18:43 you should never laugh. You should never have fun. You should never experience pleasure.
0:18:47 I think they were saying, hey, you know, this thing that feels pleasurable in the moment,
0:18:53 how do you feel after? And so let’s try to have a fuller picture of that thing. And they’re saying,
0:19:02 you know, if you’re wrecked every time you lose someone, life’s going to be very hard because
0:19:10 losing people is a part of life. So I think they’re trying to balance both a healthy set of
0:19:20 emotions and an unpredictable, often painful existence. And this sort of lower case Stoicism
0:19:26 that we have is about as far from the mark as lower case Epicureanism is from the philosophy
0:19:33 of Epicurus, who didn’t eat at fine restaurants or engage in orgies or, you know, truly give his
0:19:42 life over to pleasure as we understand that to me now. Can we experience like pure joy and really
0:19:49 high highs without really low lows? Or do we need the lows to actually give us the variation?
0:19:56 Yeah, I’m not sure one has to make room for the low lows in the sense that life will
0:20:02 force that upon you. I think when the Stoics talk about joy, they are trying to remind you
0:20:12 that if joy for you is only possible when things are going amazing, your joy or your happiness
0:20:19 is therefore out of your hands. Like one of the sort of philosophical questions that we get from
0:20:25 a lot of the ancients is like, could a person be happy like on the rack? Like could you experience
0:20:30 happiness as you’re being tortured to death? And I don’t think they necessarily thought you could,
0:20:35 but it is an interesting thought experiment. The idea like if joy and happiness are dependent
0:20:44 on external circumstances, how good is it? And therefore how fragile it is. And so the idea
0:20:53 to be able to experience joy and happiness in any and all situations is, I think, provocative and
0:20:56 interesting. There’s this woman, she wrote this book called Bomb Shelter. I think about it all the
0:21:02 time. She had what she thought was a normal childhood. Her name is Mary Philpott, I think.
0:21:07 She had what she thought was a normal childhood. And then she only found out later that her father,
0:21:14 they lived outside Washington DC, that her father’s job was to basically set up the government
0:21:19 facilities. He was a doctor, so he would have gone to in there if it happened, but to set up
0:21:27 basically the government in exile underground in the case of a nuclear strike on Washington.
0:21:34 And so she’s kind of thinking about what it must have been like for her father to go to his kids’
0:21:42 soccer games or punish them for not doing their homework or do anything at home with
0:21:49 like a literal sort of domicile over him at all moments. His job was to prepare for a,
0:21:59 was to assume that it was likely that they would all be evaporated in that nuclear strike.
0:22:09 And if that was to happen, part of his job was to flee and survive. It’s not like
0:22:14 the doctor got to take their family with him. So she was just talking about like compartmentalization
0:22:19 that that would require. And I think that’s interesting because one, that is actually,
0:22:24 I think, more relatable to every parent than you think it would be. You’re always thinking about
0:22:30 stuff. Yeah, you’re always thinking about stuff. And yet you also have to listen to this ridiculous
0:22:35 story about a video game character or something. You have to be present even though you’re waiting
0:22:41 for an email telling you that your job has been made redundant and you’re about to be laid off,
0:22:48 or you have to have fun with your kids at an amusement park as somebody you know is dying
0:22:54 in a hospital or whatever. And I think when the Stoics thought about joy and happiness,
0:23:02 they were thinking about a more resilient form of that emotion, not fun, smiling, cheerfulness,
0:23:08 happiness, but like a happiness of a person who is surviving the blows of
0:23:15 fate and flourishing as a human being in good situations and bad ones. There’s a story about
0:23:26 this one Stoic named Agrippinus. And he’s he’s exiled for running a fowl of Nero. And he’s told
0:23:34 that he’s been convicted. And you know, he has like, there’s like an hour before the verdict
0:23:39 comes down. And I think he exercises or something. He just like does whatever he just goes about his
0:23:45 day. And then they’re told, okay, you’re being you’re being exiled and you can take some of your
0:23:50 property with you. Was it going to be a penniless exile or not? He finds out he can take some of
0:23:54 his property that he says to his friend, okay, we’ll have our lunch on the road then. Or I forget
0:23:59 what it’s Attica or something. He’s like, we shall have our lunch in Attica. You know, he’s
0:24:04 like basically like, what is going on the road? And to me, there’s that is close to the Stoic idea
0:24:13 of joy and happiness of you just just got told everything was stolen from you. You just got
0:24:21 told you have cancer. You just got told, you know, insert horrendous event. Does it break you? Or do
0:24:27 you just go, okay, what’s next? So it’s not arguing with the reality or the situation as as it’s been
0:24:32 given to you or the hand that you’ve been dealt. It’s just how do I play this hand to the best of
0:24:37 my ability? Yeah, there’s no complaint about the unfairness, the preciousness, the surprise. Just
0:24:43 what are we having for lunch? Can you train yourself to think that way? Or is it something you
0:24:49 think is more there’s people disposed to that? I know I’m not born that way. I wouldn’t say that
0:24:57 I am now that way. But I think I am further along in becoming that way than I was at the beginning.
0:25:04 I think it’s probably true for a lot of the decision making and cognitive stuff that you
0:25:09 talk about, which is like, are there people who are naturally gifted and have this sort of a
0:25:16 computer, you know, mind? Yes. And then there are those of us that are not that way. But in the
0:25:23 process of studying and thinking about them, can we slow that process down? Can we be more conscious
0:25:31 of the things less of a slave to the things? I would say yes. I find it easier for me to like
0:25:37 in these moments where something is happening, we’re stuck in traffic. I love it when the kids
0:25:41 are in the car. Because when the kids are in the car, I can be like, oh, this is a good teaching
0:25:44 moment, right? Like, there’s not much we can do about it. Might as well make the best of it. Let’s
0:25:48 put some music on. Let’s have a conversation. Let’s do XYZ. But if they’re not in the car,
0:25:53 my immediate temptation is sort of like, oh, traffic, you know, we’re really good at giving
0:25:58 advice to other people and then not so good at applying it ourselves. Because we have that
0:26:05 cognitive distance, you know, we’re able to, it’s our identity is less at stake or our emotions are
0:26:17 less tied up in it. With your kids, you’re able to see the impotence and the unfundness of the
0:26:26 frustration. And you also feel obligated to help them with the meta skill of that. Because of the
0:26:32 specific instances with a kid, you’re like, well, what, how is this going to matter for their life?
0:26:39 But we’re not as good as that for us. We’re like, I’m mad that someone said XYZ, not, hey,
0:26:44 how can I get better in my life at not responding when people say XYZ.
0:26:51 So yeah, you learn as you teach the stoics. What other misconceptions do you run into about
0:27:01 stoicism? Well, that it’s all old rich white dudes with a lot of merit and a desire to
0:27:08 point out the biases and sort of structural patterns of not just the ancient world, but all
0:27:16 forms of history, just to focus on what was obscured or what’s not included. We forget just how
0:27:23 enormous the Roman Empire was. I mean, the Roman Empire makes contact with the Han dynasty during
0:27:30 Marcus Aurelius’s reign, and it stretches as far as England and Africa and the Middle East. And
0:27:40 you have Epictetus, who’s a slave. You have Marcus Aurelius, who’s the emperor, Zeno, the founder
0:27:49 of stoicism. Some people were convinced he is black. He’s described interestingly in some of the
0:27:55 few descriptions we have of his physical form. But in the case, he’s like a Mediterranean merchant.
0:28:02 And so just the idea that that it was like all people of the same social class, just because
0:28:08 Rome was a caste society, doesn’t mean that all the philosophers perfectly conformed to
0:28:14 that caste. Just because we hear mostly of the men doesn’t mean there weren’t stoic women.
0:28:19 Cato’s daughter, Portia, is involved in the assassination of Julius Caesar.
0:28:27 All the stoics would have had wives and daughters. There’s a fascinating essay from Mussodes Rufus,
0:28:34 who’s not just Epictetus’ philosophy teacher, so he’s teaching a slave, but he writes this essay
0:28:38 about why women should be taught philosophy. So we know he has female students. We just don’t know
0:28:43 any of their names. And there’s been a backlash about stoicism. It’s like, oh, this is a bro of
0:28:50 philosophy for bros in Silicon Valley, or this is for meatheads, or this is for soldiers.
0:28:55 Yeah, there is, I think, a connection to certain masculine worlds in stoicism. But I mean,
0:29:04 a huge percent of my audience is not male. But I also, just on a historical basis, that’s not true.
0:29:12 And so this idea, if stoicism is like for dudes of the army, and it’s about suppressing their
0:29:18 emotions, I get why it’s not going to be attractive. But that’s not what it is. Just like if you think
0:29:23 Epicureanism is orgies and parties and retreating from the world, you’re going to be like, what is
0:29:30 this? But that’s not what Epicurus was talking about either. I thought it was, not Zeno, I thought
0:29:36 it was Sisyphus, who, maybe I’m getting really confused here, who created like the first sort of
0:29:43 stoic? Chrysippus? Yes, that was the one. Created what? Sorry. Stoicism. No, Zeno was the founder
0:29:50 of stoicism. Zeno studies under this cynic philosopher named Cretis. By the way, Cretis is
0:29:56 an equal partner with his philosophical wife in Athens. There’s always been a female influence
0:30:02 from the beginning. But Zeno is credited as the founder of stoicism. He sets it up on the stoa
0:30:09 pochile, this porch in the Athenian Agora. That’s where stoicism comes from. Then there’s Cleanthes
0:30:14 and then Chrysippus. But it doesn’t really become a real school philosophy until later with sort of
0:30:21 codified. But Zeno is considered the founder of stoicism. Is the connection with really, instead
0:30:27 of sports and military, if we sort of generalize that, is the connection just with anybody who’s
0:30:33 doing hard things and yet we tend to hold up these professions? I think so. I mean, that’s what
0:30:40 sports are, is a metaphor for any kind of pursuit of excellence. It’s just the most
0:30:49 visible. Because it’s a game with rules at the beginning and an end, the most observable form
0:30:58 of excellence. An entertaining form of excellence. And look, in the ancient world, they’re using
0:31:04 sports metaphors then too because it’s the same process. One of the stoics is talking about how
0:31:11 he thinks that a philosopher has to be like an athlete. He’s just like a ball player. You
0:31:16 catch the ball and throw it back, catch the ball and throw it back. And whether it’s a good throw
0:31:20 or a bad throw, you still have to catch it. He considers Socrates like the greatest athlete of
0:31:26 all time because he deals with the things that life throws. And I’m including this as death
0:31:31 sentence. There’s weightlifting metaphors and racing metaphors and some of the stoics were also
0:31:37 athletes. So I think there’s something about sports that is the sort of unmitigated pursuit of
0:31:44 excellence. And yet it’s also not unmitigated because we expect our athletes to exhibit sportsmanship
0:31:52 and grace and coolness and repression. All these traits that go into being a full well-rounded
0:32:02 person are at play in sports. This is I think why the Olympics are this sort of enduring thing.
0:32:07 We still observe some of the same exact sports almost that the stoics would have been very
0:32:13 familiar with. Do you think anybody can be at the far right of the curve in whatever domain
0:32:20 they’re an expert or a sports or skill and be a normal sort of person? I think about this all
0:32:30 the time. I would like to be both. And I think you do realize there are trade-offs part. There is
0:32:41 something inherently unbalanced about excellence in a singular domain because you are focusing
0:32:48 all of your energy on one thing. There’s something dysmorphic about like the athlete’s physique.
0:32:55 And that’s probably just the physical manifestation of also if you could look at their mind
0:33:03 and their priorities probably equally out of whack. But if they weren’t out of whack then they
0:33:09 wouldn’t be on the right end. Yeah. I mean what I really admire and I’ve gotten to meet a handful
0:33:13 of them over the years and I’m always reluctant to be like well this one is a good example of this
0:33:17 because you don’t really know what’s happening in anyone’s personal life. But I think it’s really
0:33:23 something special when you meet someone who has inarguably attained the
0:33:32 heights of their profession or in some sort of all-time greats achieve the great prizes of their
0:33:40 thing whether it’s politics, sports, business, art and they seem reasonably well adjusted.
0:33:49 They haven’t left a trail of bodies behind them, literal or otherwise. Their family wasn’t
0:33:55 utterly neglected. Their health wasn’t utterly neglected. Their moral priorities weren’t so
0:34:00 weren’t grotesquely out of alignment. So when you meet someone you’re like oh
0:34:07 they did it as good as it can really be done but they didn’t have to turn themselves into
0:34:14 a monster to do it that’s that’s all I would argue a much rarer feat. Power corrupts, absolute
0:34:19 power corrupts absolutely. So what I think makes Marx really such a fascinating example is here you
0:34:26 have one of the few humans to hold absolute power as we would really define it and
0:34:39 doesn’t seem to have become deranged or grotesque is into an overwhelmingly cautionary tale. That
0:34:49 to me is a rarer feat than if you told me he had won the single greatest you know military victory
0:34:54 of all time. Like the greatest victory of the Stokes would say would be the victory over those
0:35:01 very impulses. There’s another Roman I think it was like a Cincinnati you know your history
0:35:06 way better than I do. Cincinnati’s who like gave up power. Yeah I tell this story to my son all the
0:35:14 time Cincinnati’s is maybe not real maybe real but his example was certainly very real to the
0:35:21 Greeks and the oh I guess to the Romans not to the Greeks but yeah Rome is sends out its army
0:35:30 in this big battle and they’re defeated and the army’s trapped and so Rome had this sort of emergency
0:35:39 you know smash in case of emergency button that said you know you could make someone dictator
0:35:46 to save the Republic and so they go to Cincinnati who had been in general and they make him dictator
0:35:54 and he rounds up every you know straggling man and boy in Rome at this time and he marches out and he
0:36:00 defeats he rescues the army he defeats the enemy and then he returns to Rome
0:36:08 resigns as dictator after like 17 days and then he returns to his farm. He just goes back
0:36:16 to his regular civilian life and it’s this example that is told for generations and generations and
0:36:23 generations so much so that George Washington hears it as a young boy and he resigns his
0:36:29 commission repeatedly. I was just in Annapolis a couple weeks ago and you can stand in the
0:36:34 courthouse where he resigns his military commission and then when he resigns after two terms as
0:36:40 president but King George when he hears after the revolution he’s you know what it’s to become
0:36:48 of George Washington he’s told that you know I think he intends to return to his farm to not
0:36:56 make himself and the Washington name you know a hereditary monarchy and King George says you
0:37:03 know if he can do that he will be the greatest man on earth and there is something about relinquishing
0:37:10 power or walking away that takes an incredible amount of discipline and strength and then we
0:37:15 don’t usually appreciate in the moment and in fact we tend to ridicule and mock it like
0:37:22 you know Andrew Luck the quarterback he walked away and we don’t hear about him anymore so he’s
0:37:28 not out there like fighting for his legacy arguing about his accomplishments he’s not on tv so he
0:37:33 just sort of recedes from memory but he also made like a hundred million dollars playing football
0:37:41 he as far as we know escaped without any serious long-term you know brain injuries I don’t know
0:37:51 what he does all day but you know the idea is any walk away at the top yes yes to be out there has
0:37:59 there been any boxer in history that’s walked away too early probably not it clearly takes more
0:38:10 discipline to walk away early or on top than it does to go for the sixth ring or the three
0:38:17 feet or whatever those things are extraordinarily hard but clearly if less people do this other
0:38:23 feet it must be because it’s even harder do you ever think of of walking away from writing
0:38:29 yeah why did you think it’s time for me to retire oh that’s the one I was saying at all
0:38:34 you’re you’re sort of like you’re in the middle of it right like yeah you’re like what 12 13 14
0:38:39 books so many like the thing that for me is that’s the part that I like doing you like and it’s
0:38:46 probably the least hard on me right it’d be the other stuff that I think would would be like the
0:38:52 bookstore or youtube no yeah like youtube or podcasts or speaking or to just be like now I’m
0:38:58 just just going to do this one part I don’t know how people do podcasts once a week or more like
0:39:03 I found once every two weeks hard how often do you do it 26 times a year is that a deliberate choice
0:39:10 yeah I don’t think I could remain intellectually like I don’t think it would be genuine if I was
0:39:15 doing it weekly I’d be finding people that I could talk to you not people that I wanted to
0:39:21 talk to you know what I mean like I’d be filling a slot versus I really want to talk to this person
0:39:25 well you also do your interviews are longer right so
0:39:30 you might be able to say if somebody’s doing
0:39:37 two a week and they’re an hour that’s the same as you doing but I find all the work that goes
0:39:43 into it sure it’s not like I show up I got this one page thing but this is like nine ten hours
0:39:49 when I had my marketing company one of the reasons I never wanted to hire employees
0:39:59 was that I was skeptical that there were enough projects that I would be interested in working
0:40:10 on to pay for and the people which meant if I hired someone they would represent a certain
0:40:16 number of projects per year just to get back to even I go back and forth between whether that was
0:40:26 a constraining kind of limiting belief or if that was actually like a pure and like admirable
0:40:30 stance and you kind of distance yourself from the work too right like so if I hired somebody to do
0:40:35 the research for the podcast I could show up there’d be a list of questions but part of what I enjoy
0:40:42 about it is actually doing all the research in the work the pressure to scale like I know a lot
0:40:51 of people in the this kind of information media space that have taken on like private equity
0:40:57 investments like there’s like the churnham group and so they’ll buy like half of the business or
0:41:02 all the business and then the idea is like well how do we scale this into a much larger company
0:41:09 I’ve expressed no interest in doing that because like to me part of the whole joy of doing it
0:41:16 is not having a boss and not needing to get at us to a certain level or do a certain amount of
0:41:26 things which you are forgoing with you bring on somebody else I was starting to John Mackey
0:41:32 about this the Whole Foods guy and he sort of said I love this analogy he’s like when you bring
0:41:38 people on they’re usually hitchhikers so they’ll be in the car with you and as long as you’re going
0:41:43 in the right direction at the right speed they’ll pay for the gas but the minute you you’re like
0:41:48 oh I’m really curious what’s over here they’re going to be like no what do you do you can’t do
0:41:52 that and then all of a sudden you have a boss and you have all this pressure and you know they own
0:41:58 half of your yeah it’s more like you went from being the driver to being the passenger kind of yeah
0:42:01 the other person is like has a they have a break and they have their own steering wheel
0:42:08 and they have their own accelerator the pressure to scale is obviously a first world problem because
0:42:15 you’re most people and not that long ago for me that the problem was breaking through or breaking
0:42:23 out yeah once you do that because that is so rare there’s an immense amount of structural pressure
0:42:31 economic pressure cultural pressure to you know take a winner and turn it into a big winner
0:42:37 as opposed to just being like this is nice even with the bookstore every couple weeks I’ll get
0:42:41 an email being like hey if you thought about opening another one and it’s like I already
0:42:51 hit the lottery by not failing do I need to start a chain of bookstores I don’t think that I do
0:42:59 and I don’t think that would improve my life quality at all but we it’s easy to be disciplined
0:43:04 in some areas and not in other areas so when you’re successful one of the tendencies is to
0:43:08 start saying yes to all these other projects start hiring a team and then your distance from the work
0:43:12 and you can be like you go do this and then all of a sudden you start taking on projects just to do
0:43:20 them yes how can we use stoicism as a means to sort of focus our energy and remove distractions
0:43:26 Marx just writes in meditation you can imagine the immense pressure and inbound that’s coming at
0:43:31 the emperor of 50 million people he says in everything that you do and say in the thing you
0:43:36 have to ask yourself is this essential and he says because most of what we do and say and think is
0:43:41 non-essential and he says when you eliminate the inessential you get the double benefit of doing
0:43:47 the essential things better knowing that what you’re saying yes to means saying no to other things
0:43:55 and conversely saying no to things means saying yes to things is like the very tricky never gets
0:44:00 easy balance that I was struggling with like even this morning my wife and I were like okay I got
0:44:04 offered to do this and I got offered to do that what do we want to say yes to what do we want to
0:44:12 say no to and then just the you would think at some point not needing it would make it easier
0:44:18 to say no but opportunity costs you get more opportunities yes and success tends to sow the
0:44:24 seeds of its own destruction it’d be easy to say like oh when you’re you know be disciplined
0:44:33 while you’re successful you know don’t don’t take on too much you say no to a lot of things but
0:44:44 in sports or entertainment or art or even you know whatever it is that you do you don’t do it
0:44:49 forever do you have a narrow window and there’s going to be at some point where it dries up and so
0:44:58 are you going to look back and go there was almost a bit of ego in my in my selection process because
0:45:04 I was assuming that I would get to do it forever I continue to wrestle with that constantly how do
0:45:09 you think about opportunity cost is it always increasing for you or is it based sort of like on
0:45:14 the workload right in front of you or I was thinking about how kind of like what seems like a lot of
0:45:20 money to you as a kid always remains a lot of money to you even as your income goes up
0:45:28 it’s hard for you it’s hard for me to pass on things because that seems like a lot even though
0:45:34 proportionally it no longer is I’m trying to do work and get more clear get more objective about
0:45:41 like no hey actually yes that to and to you 10 years ago to any person on the street
0:45:50 that is a lot but given what your time is actually worth at its current valuation that’s actually
0:45:56 something you should say no to that’s hard imagine if you’re a billionaire how hard that must
0:46:03 get no one’s throwing them a pity party but like that must be very disorienting and destabilizing
0:46:12 to not have a good way to value what to say yes or no to the problem is financial upside is always clear
0:46:21 opportunity opportunity costs are sometimes clear but often not clear if I get offered to
0:46:29 do I don’t know speaking gig that’s the opportunity cost of saying no or whatever they’re offering
0:46:37 the opportunity cost of saying yes is whatever creative work I might have done had I stayed home
0:46:46 and then also intangibles like the rhythm of our households my personal happiness how easy things
0:46:54 are and so one is the the the downside is in one sense is very quantifiable and the upside in the
0:47:02 other case is very hard to quantify and in in some cases the consequences of it are are quite lagging
0:47:13 and so you’re faced with briefcase with cash in it and hey isn’t this a bit much we’re all tired
0:47:17 how do you balance that my uncle taught me this thing when I was a teenager about how he used to
0:47:23 price his business so he was a he ran a plumbing company what he did was basically the first 75
0:47:30 percent of hours were priced at 100 percent so the regular rate but 75 to 80 he would increase the
0:47:36 rate 80 to 100 you’d increase and over 100 percent of like a normal work week then it increased it
0:47:41 even more and it was super transparent with people about this like I’m really busy right now I hate to
0:47:46 give you this quote but to do the job properly here’s what we’d have to price it at and he’s
0:47:51 pricing it at like 150 because he wants them to say no he doesn’t want to be the one to say no he’s
0:47:55 like I’ll figure out how to do it for this price and he’s like was so surprised by the number of
0:48:01 people who said yes in part because of his honesty right but I use this this is sort of like one of
0:48:06 the simple principles that I use which is like if I’m super busy I’m going to price it more because
0:48:10 I actually kind of want you to say no right but if you’re going to say yes then I’ll make it work
0:48:16 but it’s at a certain price and so the pricing that we use is dynamic in some ways and there’s
0:48:22 like a baseline which is like here’s the minimum and you need a certain amount of self-confidence
0:48:29 and security to be able to do that and you can see why if you’re like if you ever just said
0:48:37 endorphins void inside you how vulnerable that makes you yeah because you want to be wanted you
0:48:45 want the validation you want the cha-ching yeah that feels good but like you like I get I get
0:48:50 five speaking requests a week yeah and there’s no way you can say yes to everything so you have to
0:48:56 have a system to sort of well if I think the first step is you have to have someone between you and
0:49:02 the thing oh totally just eliminate three of the five that were not serious or not even not serious
0:49:07 but we’re at a number that might be tempting but it’s better for you not to see because you’re
0:49:11 more likely to say yeah what could happen as you become successful is you can become jaded and
0:49:16 entitled yeah and you want to be like you want to keep yourself as the good guy the nice guy that
0:49:24 the person who is saying yes yes so you have to set some boundaries and then task other people
0:49:29 with enforcing them yeah I think some people go oh is it you know you want to pay these people
0:49:34 commissions you just do it yourself and I think there’s a danger in doing yourself which is that
0:49:41 totally it almost it can go to your head and also kind of and then when it goes away what yes this I
0:49:45 worry about this all the time right it’s like well five and I’m like saying no you’re at that book die
0:49:52 was zero yeah it’s a great book but the idea is you know thinking about what are you what are you
0:49:56 trying to do all this for you try to accumulate a large amount of money that you don’t get to take
0:50:01 with you when you die we are borrowing money from our poorer selves to loan to our future richer
0:50:05 self the example that is the book which I think is a good one he’s talking about like a medsoon
0:50:10 who’s like living way below their means saving up money they know in the future they’re going to
0:50:16 make a lot of money it’s very clear how that profession works right and so they’d be more
0:50:23 effective maybe not racking up a ton of debt but like not living as if they don’t know for certain
0:50:29 their financials they’re they’re not actually you know making thirty thousand dollars a year
0:50:38 they’re just temporarily making that anyways that advice is very helpful in clarifying in more
0:50:44 predictive linear professions but that would be bad advice to give to a rookie in the NBA
0:50:50 because they may only be able to do it for two years I think it is tricky when you have
0:51:00 a very clear element of unpredictability and a very historically a very clear drop off
0:51:10 like at some point you age out at some point yeah your trend or moment goes away and maybe
0:51:15 it comes you survive long enough for it to come back but like the idea that for me as their author
0:51:20 that my sales are only going to go like this it’s preposterously naive that it adds this layer to
0:51:27 like okay so you’re saying no because you’re too busy right now yeah but in six years you’ll you’ll
0:51:33 feel like an idiot you wish for this request to come back yeah is it ever okay to lose your cool
0:51:38 like is there strategic points where it actually makes sense to sort of not be stoic and to to
0:51:44 I wouldn’t say completely lose control but to have more variation we had this idea
0:51:54 that like crying is is not manly right like being overwhelmed with your emotions is somehow a weakness
0:52:01 but we make an exception culturally for anger if you went through some problematic work thing
0:52:07 and you cried in front of your whole team you would reasonably expect that team would be like
0:52:12 what’s wrong with Shane right I’m not saying that that’s right they just would but if you
0:52:18 got so angry that you punched a wall not only might not you be judged for that that might be
0:52:22 like part of the legend of Shane right which is interesting and the stoics would point out that
0:52:31 like those are both the same process of being overwhelmed by our emotions and one is actively
0:52:39 harmful to you and your world and the other is not and so it’s kind of strange so it’s it’s
0:52:42 interesting we have a couple of stories and Mark’s realist crying but we don’t have any stories of
0:52:48 him losing his temper and I think he was chastened by the fact there’s a story about Hadrian his
0:52:54 predecessor who’s gets frustrated with his secretarity he grabs the secretary’s pet and he
0:52:58 stabs it in the man’s eye like this is the thing that the king could the emperor could get away
0:53:08 with literally anything and so I I do think it’s interesting the allowances we make particularly
0:53:13 with men for certain kinds of emotions and not other kinds of emotions and I’m I’m not saying oh
0:53:19 hey we should be all with one or all with the other it’s just the idea of the the stoic
0:53:29 suppressing their tears and sadness and love and affection but then you know being a vortex of
0:53:34 temper and rage strikes me as a contradiction that doesn’t make any sense and the idea would
0:53:41 be to be kind of an even keel across the board that being said there is a difference between
0:53:47 being angry and doing something out of anger and then there’s a third which is
0:53:54 the performative element of anger your head basketball coach and you’ve gotten a series of bad
0:54:02 calls losing your temper screaming at the ref and getting ejected not only doesn’t help your team
0:54:08 but it costs your team points because you get two technicals but if you are so even healed
0:54:14 that you’re just allowing the refs to run over you or you’re allowing a lackadaisical effort from
0:54:23 your team to go unchastened also probably not good and so I am fascinated by the way that a great
0:54:36 coach can turn up or down certain levers I was at a spurs game one time and I watched Greg Popovich
0:54:46 get ejected and Tim Duncan took over and the team was down my seven or eight points and Tim Duncan
0:54:55 coached the rest of the game and they came very narrowly within winning like it came down to like
0:54:59 the last two seconds and they didn’t win but they almost did and somebody told me after that Pop had
0:55:03 looked at Duncan and said I’m going to get myself thrown out you’re going to you’re going to handle
0:55:08 the rest of this game and he was just he he saw that the team needed an energy shift and that
0:55:15 that was a tool in his toolkit I find that very interesting I want to move on and talk about
0:55:19 discipline okay for a second when we think of discipline I mean the image that comes to mind
0:55:25 for me and probably a lot of other people is like the army drill sergeant what is discipline I’m
0:55:34 talking about self-discipline so the the discipline of an army sergeant is obviously important but I
0:55:40 don’t think that’s a virtue because it’s being imposed on you of course essential that an army
0:55:46 is disciplined how would you define self-discipline but the virtue of self-discipline is the discipline
0:55:51 that you insist upon yourself so it’s what you do when no one’s watching it’s what you do with the
0:55:57 discretion that is given to you and I think when we think of self-discipline we shouldn’t just be
0:56:01 thinking of physical discipline it’s not just how does your uniform look and how far can you march
0:56:08 and self-discipline is can you keep your head about you when things are falling apart can you
0:56:18 be a calm you know reassuring presence can you keep your emotions in check so so self-discipline
0:56:21 is sometimes rendered as the idea of temperance which just doesn’t have a good connotation in
0:56:27 the initial language but it it is the soaks would say the greatest empire is command of oneself
0:56:33 and so whether you’re the emperor or a slave whether you’re a soldier or a ceo it’s this idea
0:56:39 of not like what are you allowed to get away with what is being asked of you and it’s more like what
0:56:45 are you asking of and insisting of yourself to me that’s what self-discipline is or do you struggle
0:56:52 the most with it knowing one’s limitations setting reasonable bounds on things i don’t have a problem
0:56:58 getting up and working i have a problem getting up from and stopping working i mean i have other
0:57:04 vices too whether it’s food or you know my screen or devices or whatever but i think for the most
0:57:13 part it’s discipline for me is closer to balance and saying no than it is to insisting on yes for a
0:57:18 lot of people it’s sort of uh the discipline to eat healthy the discipline to go to the gym the
0:57:23 discipline and then if we miss one we think it’s like it’s over like we’ve how do we get back on
0:57:27 track you told me something though that i’ve been thinking about where you said that you’re you go to
0:57:34 the gym every day yeah as opposed to i work out three days a week yeah because there’s a consistency
0:57:42 to every dayness and it’s not a choice then yes it takes away the lie you can tell yourself which
0:57:47 is i’m doing it tomorrow yeah you can do it you can change like duration or scope but like work
0:57:53 out sweat every day it’s like it’s so life changing for me and yeah other people who’ve tried it after
0:57:57 listening to me it’s been life changing for them too no it’s a great way to think about i try to
0:58:03 write every day um we’re trying to do a little something every day and that’s better for me than
0:58:09 okay i’m not doing it and then next month i’m going to start doing it this you use the word
0:58:15 try like i try to write every day so like how do you get back on track if you you went two or three
0:58:19 days you’re traveling you’re talking you’re just busy with all the stuff that goes on you get home
0:58:25 the family needs you and then all of a sudden it’s three four days i always always have the opposite
0:58:35 problem which is telling myself that being five minutes late on this is not as big a deal as it
0:58:40 feels in the moment i am tending to fight the compulsive side of it and so the battle for me
0:58:47 is going let’s just have a nice weekend as opposed to i’m behind right i’m going to
0:58:57 blow apart this nice weekend to check some arbitrary box in a race that i am preposterously
0:59:02 ahead on and by the way don’t even need to be doing but if you don’t push yourself like what’s
0:59:08 the flip side of that what do you worry about are you scared you’ll just stop and be lazy or i
0:59:13 mean that’s the thing about most compulsive tendencies is they’re not based on anything
0:59:18 you have this belief that if you don’t do it things will fall apart i’m the same way like
0:59:24 i work every day yeah it’s not based on anything real and most of the time what you get is not even
0:59:34 the reward for doing it you get the relief for having not not done it the feeling is not i’m
0:59:40 proud of myself i did a great job this made a huge difference the reward is see you’re not a piece of
0:59:49 shit and that is not not a way to go through life does your work haul is a sort of an amazing
0:59:54 that no no go for it but does that cause issues in your relationship yeah of course uh i think it
1:00:01 always has um and so what you you oftentimes workaholism or any kind of sort of compulsive
1:00:10 tendency to do is adapting from some sort of either childhood wound or insufficiency or it’s
1:00:17 it’s sort of a way of soothing something that you feel but unlike a lot of addictions or compulsions
1:00:24 it’s uh somewhat productive it’s somewhat productive and it’s socially adaptive
1:00:34 doing heroin or you know uh drinking all night tends not to have positive social reinforcement
1:00:42 but being really good at what you do and thriving on that feeling of being validated
1:00:48 for being good at what you do is a is nevertheless a pretty wicked feedback loop
1:00:53 are you sort of like motivated i think about this all the time and it like sometimes it motivates me
1:00:58 and sometimes i’m like oh it’s hopeless you know there’s like this gap between where i think i could
1:01:05 be and where i am and no matter where that is on a relative like y axis it’s like that gap is what
1:01:11 i’ve focused on which is like how do i shrink this gap and then you know like where i think i could
1:01:16 be is probably growing slightly faster than where i am and so the gap is widening yeah and then it’s
1:01:21 like i need to there’s so many things i want to do there and i have so much excitement and energy
1:01:28 around it what did you throw on top of that like what you hear other people are doing yes it’s even
1:01:34 more hard to run your own race instead of guys this word euthymia and he talks about being on the
1:01:41 path that you’re on this is not being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours says especially
1:01:46 the paths of those who are lost and i think about that all the time you don’t know where someone’s
1:01:50 trying to end up you don’t know where they’re going to end up you also don’t know what is propelling
1:01:57 them addiction or psychological issue what’s propelling them is millions of dollars of a fortune
1:02:04 they inherited or you know some dark money you know donor it could be a bazillion things you
1:02:12 don’t know and so i think the more indifferent and probably ignorant you are of what your peers are
1:02:21 doing the healthier you are and the the cleaner your compass reading will be i think of it is
1:02:27 like swimming in your own lands and there was this video i think it was from the olympics post 20 i
1:02:33 forget what year it was but this guy is swimming and he looks over at his competitor and it ends
1:02:38 up distracting him just enough that he loses the race yeah because he’s like one he’s not worried
1:02:44 about him and his land and his goals and his stroke and yes he looks over just enough to distract
1:02:48 and he lost by like milliseconds yeah there’s that although the other one that keeps me up there
1:02:56 was a there was like a mountain bike race and the japan olympics i think and the woman thought she
1:03:02 was in first place but she was actually in second place oh so she let up because like it’s sometimes
1:03:06 you know like in swimming you’re only next to each other like the marathon or something longer
1:03:11 races you might be might be two minutes that’s a closeable gap but you can’t see what the other
1:03:20 people are doing even if it was an insurmountable lead for her to get first her second place time
1:03:26 was not the best that it could be right so clearly at some level we understand that competition is
1:03:34 healthy and motivating and yet too much competition is disorienting and ultimately is self-defeating
1:03:39 and so that balance is tough what can we do to cultivate more discipline
1:03:48 oh i mean look i think having a physical practice is a way to cultivate more mental
1:03:54 and cognitive discipline like going to the gym or running running swimming biking like i do at
1:03:59 during sports and they help me as a rider like i couldn’t do what i do as a rider without those
1:04:05 physical components uh even like i have a cold plunge and there’s something about like i’m going
1:04:10 to get in this thing that is uncomfortable and i’m going to decide how long i’m going to stay in it
1:04:16 whether or not it has any health benefits whatsoever and i’m pretty skeptical at this point
1:04:21 of like all of those claims because i’ve seen what nonsense like these same communities will
1:04:29 propagate so to me the benefit is is purely that it’s hard that it’s hard and then i am doing the
1:04:34 hard thing and how do you sort of teach your kids or instill discipline and then it’s tough my kids
1:04:43 are still pretty young and so i am i am hesitant to give them my somewhat unhealthy adult levels
1:04:49 of discipline part of me is just like letting them enjoying letting them just not be my assumption
1:04:57 is that they have whatever i have and so allowing them to enjoy not having it is part of how i think
1:05:04 about it because i watch as they get into things they don’t just like kind of get into things they
1:05:09 go all in they need they’re like i need all of this i read a story about tom brady watching his
1:05:15 son playing video games and his son getting so upset and he like throws the camera throws the
1:05:22 controller the tv or whatever and is just like he was like dude i have that and it it doesn’t always
1:05:29 take you where you want it to take you and so i i suspect that that part’s there so it can help you
1:05:36 but it can also get in your way yeah and would you wish it on someone especially someone who right
1:05:43 now is young and pure and has no none of these adult notions a lot of people with dyslexia talk
1:05:51 about how that dyslexia is shaped and informed the success they have then if you ask them would
1:05:56 you want your kids to have it they’re like are you fucking out of your mind we know like hard
1:06:04 things and struggle and adversity we know it’s good for us and yet we don’t want them for our kids
1:06:09 we don’t want it for our kids and and we also know though like if we hadn’t had that we probably
1:06:13 just would have had something else yeah like i’ve never met someone who had zero adversity in there
1:06:20 like sometimes people ask me hey should i create adversity in my kids’ lives or do i need to seek
1:06:25 out obstacles and i’m of two butts i think like having a physical practice is obviously a way
1:06:31 of creating adversity at the same time you know was it dosto eski would like gamble all this buddy
1:06:38 away so that he would write better i don’t know if you need to how would you define character
1:06:44 ooh i just heard something someone said like character like your reputation is what other
1:06:50 people think of you and characters like what you do and people don’t see there’s like an element of
1:06:55 right and wrong embedded in this but who who sort of defines what’s right and wrong that’s the hard
1:07:00 part i so i just i’ve been doing this series of the cardinal virtues so i’d encourage and discipline
1:07:05 and justice and on one level yeah i would go how do we know what’s right and wrong is it the 10
1:07:12 commandments is there some you know scientific basis or utilitarian argument for what’s okay about
1:07:22 and then it is remarkable how much societies and cultures all agree on some fundamental level
1:07:27 as to what yeah there’s disagreement some people some countries burn their dead some bury their
1:07:34 dead some you know do this or that pretty much every culture religious tradition and philosophical
1:07:41 school has formulated some conception of the golden rule and all the philosophers that you know come
1:07:45 to some level of like well what would happen if everyone did that one of the things i don’t like
1:07:53 about philosophy is the way that it looks at these moral questions and it makes them so complicated
1:07:59 as to make them almost worthless like how do you know what’s right and wrong what about this what
1:08:05 like we it’s like we almost focus on the edge cases as a way of there’s such a middle ground that
1:08:12 we can all agree on yeah that’s like 95 percent you know we’re like should you know a nazi’s begging
1:08:18 on your door they want to know if you have a jew in your basement should you lie to them or
1:08:24 should you tell the truth because you know like this is a cons categorical imperative you know a
1:08:30 trolley is racing down a track and it’s going to kill five people but if you pull this lever it’ll
1:08:37 go here and kill one person what would you do it’s a way of abstracting away from the fact that we
1:08:45 have morally charged decisions in front of us all the time and we don’t think about it and don’t
1:08:50 do anything about it and that that middle ground if everyone just did a little bit better on this
1:08:56 middle ground the whole world would be immensely better we’ve all sort of had moments where we
1:09:01 didn’t act to the person we didn’t choose the action to the person that we’re capable of being
1:09:07 totally how do you live up to the best version of yourself we think of virtue as this thing that you
1:09:14 have or don’t have think of it as a noun when it’d be far better to think of virtue as a verb
1:09:20 Aristotle says like how do you get better at playing the flute it’s by playing the flute
1:09:26 how do you become a more generous person it’s by doing more generous actions he sort of compares
1:09:34 virtue to any other craft that you know a carpenter builds stuff and that’s how they
1:09:41 become a carpenter so a good person does good things not the way we sometimes think about it
1:09:47 which is like go through your regular life and then perhaps you will find yourself in some
1:09:54 decision of enormous moral consequence upon which the fate of the world will depend and then let’s
1:10:01 hope that you draw from this ethical framework that you read about in a book and will make everyone
1:10:08 proud but in fact it’s like a series of small daily decisions just like any other discipline
1:10:11 and that’s why these virtues are so related like there’s a discipline to justice
1:10:17 I keep my word I help people I
1:10:27 think about the consequences of my actions on other people I don’t do insert x y or z thing
1:10:33 that might be legal but not right and so if you think about it as a practice
1:10:38 you can get yourself not only can you get yourself to a place where you’re capable of
1:10:43 doing it but by nature of doing the practice it’s never going to happen we’re just going to pick
1:10:48 some random ass person and put the fate of the world on their shoulders you have to be
1:10:56 involved in the thick of things making decisions of consequence to ever find yourself in a position
1:11:04 of decisions of consequence we live in a world where your slip up in character which we all make
1:11:09 yes can now become viral on the internet it’s like you yelled at somebody you weren’t generous
1:11:13 when you could have been generous you did something stupid somebody had their phone out
1:11:19 and now you can’t recover from this you know the profumo scandal in uh London in the 60s there was
1:11:25 this uh cabinet officer in the British government who has this affair so he’s cheating on his wife
1:11:33 he’s cheating on his wife with a prostitute that turns out to be a russian spy and he lies about it
1:11:39 and it ends up bringing about the fall of i forget which government but it brings about the
1:11:49 prime minister vouches for him and then uh has to apologize and ends up resigning as a result
1:11:54 and i tell the story of profumo because i think he’s so interesting so he destroys his political
1:12:00 career and you know today we would say he was cancelled and what would happen today is that
1:12:09 this person would be basically shunned by one half of society and then perversely like embraced by
1:12:17 another darker side of society that doesn’t like those people right and you would see him get radicalized
1:12:22 and fight against cancel culture you know you would you we almost know exactly how that scandal
1:12:27 would go he would like get rid of all of his political beliefs from before embrace a different
1:12:31 set of political beliefs and kind of become almost like they become almost like these
1:12:37 joker like figures and instead he just quietly shows up one day at this charity i’m forgetting
1:12:47 the name of it um it was like a like a salvation army style charity house and he shows up one day
1:12:52 and asks if they need any help and they put him to work in the kitchen like he’s washing dishes
1:12:57 and he volunteers there every day for like the next 40 years and he becomes it’s like chief
1:13:05 fundraiser and it’s main leader and he just quietly goes about his life doing good work
1:13:11 and eventually there is an arc of redemption to it that you can’t do good every day for decades
1:13:17 without it inevitably being noticed did he get his political career back no did everyone forgive him
1:13:25 no is his name still inextricably linked with a certain scandal sure but on net most people look
1:13:35 back and go probably overreacted we certainly made judgments about this person based on a singular
1:13:43 set of decisions that his subsequent actions revealed to be more complicated an aberration
1:13:51 yeah sort of care exactly and and i think uh to me that’s the danger in today’s world it’s not
1:13:55 so much that you’ll make a mistake and people will judge and criticize you for it because i think
1:14:00 that’s always been true it you’re you’re right the internet makes the internet is not a place where
1:14:07 grace is commonplace and where things can be wretched out of context and all of that and yet
1:14:14 actual danger is that in all of that scandal and attention and negativity
1:14:21 does it change who you are like i am fascinated by people who are
1:14:28 fascinated by and impressed by the people who have messed up had scandals and the subjects of
1:14:38 cancel culture or moms or whatever and then they emerged from it not caricatures of themselves
1:14:44 that it it actually wasn’t this life-defining formative change like the stoics talk about like
1:14:51 look people can come and take all your stuff from you and you can be treated profoundly unjustly
1:14:58 but like no one can affect your character that is the thing you have but oftentimes that’s the
1:15:06 first thing to go because we’re angry or we feel mistreated or because our willpower collapses
1:15:11 or whatever so so like can you not turn into a radicalized asshole is to me the interesting
1:15:17 question there’s another sort of subset to this that we sort of sometimes will behave better than
1:15:22 we want to because we know we’re being recorded we know we’re being watched and then it’s it’s not
1:15:26 character anymore because if character is sort of like what you do when nobody’s watching and
1:15:32 yeah look philosophers can debate that question too like is it good if you’re doing good because
1:15:38 you want a reward or because you’re following it should just be enough to do good because you’re
1:15:42 doing good yeah but if i had to choose you know like people are today are like oh it’s all this
1:15:49 virtue signaling you know it’s like certainly better than the alternative you know totally i’m
1:15:58 not sure this sort of input like this the cruelty is the point vice signaling is preferable even if
1:16:05 it’s more honest i would like people to be signaling work the as they say what um uh hypocrisy is the
1:16:13 is the credit that vice plays to virtue never like like you’re at least saying that you think it’s
1:16:19 important even if you can’t live up to it you know i would rather have virtue signaling than
1:16:27 than not than the nihilism of like lol nothing matters where in life do you have the highest
1:16:33 standards the easy answer would be professionally because it’s easiest and it’s the most measurable
1:16:42 and you get the most feedback is there something a little shameful and sad about that probably i
1:16:48 don’t know anyone that’s like i suck at work but i’m great at home so we we we naturally
1:16:58 are unbalanced like i don’t work as hard at being a parent as i do at being a great writer
1:17:04 but at the end which is which am i gonna think is more meaningful but when so much more measurable
1:17:09 more people care about the other one because it affects more people at least in the
1:17:13 short term without you what do you feel like you have the highest standards
1:17:20 oh i hope myself to these like unrealistic expectations in every domain i want to be
1:17:29 the best father i also want to be super successful at what i do at work and trying to pursue those
1:17:35 two things i want to be a great son to my parents i want to be right you know i want to be the best
1:17:41 of whatever it is that i’m doing and i go through these oscillations where i think of it as harmony
1:17:47 not balance because i can’t balance being great at work and being a great father and so sometimes
1:17:52 like it’s going to be busy for the next couple months i’m traveling a lot and we’re going to you
1:17:56 know my kids are teenagers now so it’s a little easier but like we’re going to figure this out
1:18:01 together right and then it’ll come back and it’ll restore and they’ll sort of be a different balance
1:18:05 but i also like it’s caused me to do these crazy things where it’s like i am home every day when
1:18:11 the kids get home from school my work day when i have the kids is basically like nine to three
1:18:16 and in that period i got to work out and so my work day is really short and then when i don’t
1:18:20 have them i’m like okay i gotta make up for this lost time because yeah it’s not coming at the
1:18:26 expense of being a great father or a great parent or a present parent and then when i fail at these
1:18:31 things like the parenting thing man like i’ve gone to bed crying you know just being like
1:18:37 man i lost my cool in the kids you know i wasn’t a good dad today and then you kind of beat yourself
1:18:42 up but you’re holding yourself to this expectation it is interesting how this is like basically every
1:18:48 woman’s experience up until very recently and almost no men were thinking about these things
1:18:57 were dealing with a set of expectations and a set of responsibilities for which there is not
1:19:06 centuries of cultural experience and lessons and examples to draw on yeah you know what i mean
1:19:12 like your dad wasn’t ever doing that and your grandfather certainly wasn’t ever doing that
1:19:16 and then you go back a couple generations and they’re like you probably even know all their
1:19:23 kids names it has changed way for the better but yeah i think about that too you go okay
1:19:30 i try to i i’m i’m either dropping my kids off or picking them up or sometimes both every day
1:19:36 that i’m in town i’m not always in town but when i’m home i’m doing that and so yeah very quickly
1:19:44 your day is super circumscribed and then there is this challenge or tension of like can you be great
1:19:52 at what you do working not even bankers hours but like stay at home mom hours or something you know
1:19:57 well it pushes me they go to bed so i’ll be like i gotta log in and i gotta do work you know we used
1:20:02 to travel in the summers and go away for kind of like a month and we just pick a random place and
1:20:08 we’d live there and i would be present with them all day and then as soon as they went to bed i’m
1:20:12 like oh god i gotta work right and now it’s easier because they sleep in so i get a full work day and
1:20:18 before they get out of bed yeah uh tony morrison talked about how she wanted to do all her writing
1:20:22 before she heard the work mom and so she would have to get up at like four in the morning she’d
1:20:28 ride until six or something i’m not quite on that schedule but i do yeah i try to like my day is
1:20:36 circumscribed by their day and i also go how the fuck are other people doing it this is crazy
1:20:42 i could pick my own schedule i could stop working if i wanted to but like how can you expect society
1:20:48 to function and you’re in canada so you have some social safety net but like how could you expect
1:20:55 your average american parent to drop their kid off at school sometime between nine or seven and nine
1:21:01 and then pick them up between two and four if you’ve got and then also let’s say you’re two
1:21:07 different kids at two different schools or more yeah it’s insane no one no society can’t function
1:21:12 this way we’re expecting rightfully so for parents spend a lot of time with their children
1:21:20 but the world is not conducive to that in all unless you’ve retired or you’re not working
1:21:25 i think about this all the time right like i have a eight minute commute to work in the morning and
1:21:29 i’m like i don’t know how people would do 30 minutes you know like that’s an extra almost
1:21:35 an hour a day you’re gonna lose just on commuting and then i think about family and the role of like
1:21:42 i’m so blessed to have my parents close by some active part of my life and my kids life and there’s
1:21:49 a lot of people who don’t have any family support in the city that they live in and i i wonder like
1:21:54 how they do it all the time crazy then i get texts from people going like oh god i just had the kids
1:21:58 alone for a weekend i don’t know how you do this all the time and i’m like okay maybe i’m not that
1:22:04 bad but also just think about the fact that like for basically up until let’s say 20 years ago
1:22:07 and that might be generous and and we’re not on different scales but like
1:22:14 only one parent was thinking about these things really at all and so the just the immense cognitive
1:22:26 load and only one of the genders is aware of it in any way yeah is insane in retrospect sad unfair
1:22:34 and then still doesn’t change the fact that it’s now different and not a lot has gone into helping
1:22:40 people manage that i have a lot of respect for the parents out there yeah whether single parents
1:22:45 are together it’s it’s a lot going on you’ve said that writing helps clarify your thinking
1:22:49 can you double click on that a little bit i actually have a chat about this in the book that i’m
1:22:56 doing now um you know amazon has this culture where they uh you’re not allowed to call a meeting
1:23:00 unless you’ve written a memo about what’s going to be discussed at the meeting and
1:23:05 multiple people have to edit that memo before you could sit down and do it and why is that it’s not
1:23:11 because memos are fun or anyone likes reading memos it’s that the act of having to put your thoughts
1:23:16 and the agenda and the purpose of the meeting on paper is essential there’s this story about
1:23:22 eisenhower at the outbreak of the second world war marshal his chief staff the us army
1:23:28 and he’s he’s bet eisenhower before he sees uh some promise in the sound officer
1:23:36 and he calls him in and he says uh you know it looks like world war two is about to break out
1:23:43 japan’s on the march what do you do and it’s a job interview and the eisenhower could have just
1:23:49 you know pulled an answerer off the top of his head and rift and he says can i have a desk in two hours
1:23:54 and marshal says um sure and he goes he gets a typewriter he sits down and he basically types
1:24:00 out a memo everything he has studied and learned and thought about this exact problem his whole
1:24:06 military career he’s been in the philippines he’s been in south america he’s been uh you know he’s
1:24:13 done a lot but he gets it on paper and i think there’s something about getting it on paper instead of
1:24:20 spouting it off whenever my aunt like the answer i just gave you is not as good as the answer
1:24:25 or the analysis of that problem that i wrote in the book that i’m doing right now that’s
1:24:28 how my mind works and i think that’s how most minds work they’re the process of really
1:24:36 stopping to think and clarifying and going over joe diddy and said that writing is a hostile act
1:24:42 because you’re having to convince someone to see things the way that you see them or think the way
1:24:48 that you think and that’s like it takes an immense amount of skill to do that very few people can do
1:24:53 that off the top of their head kind of have to meet people where they are and then take them
1:24:58 where you want them to go yeah you zoom out you zoom in yeah you know thomas merton the catholic
1:25:05 monk he becomes this monk and he’s a trappist monk which they didn’t technically take a vow of silence
1:25:10 but they are supposed to spend their lives in contemplation but he becomes this prolific writer
1:25:14 and a lot of people are upset because it’s somehow a violation of the vow and he was
1:25:20 saying no like writing is contemplation i’m thinking about what i think
1:25:25 and for people who are not writers maybe that doesn’t make sense to me writing my impulse to
1:25:34 write comes from my inability or the insufficiency of what i can come up with off the top of my head
1:25:41 my belief in my ability if i sit down have an uninterrupted bit of focus and concentration
1:25:48 but i can get it i can i can do that hostile act of changing your thinking as a writer
1:26:00 how do you see the impact of ai i haven’t seen it do anything that even a pretty good writer
1:26:09 can do but it can do things a lot better than people who are bad at writing we clearly have
1:26:18 problems in our society with people who are extremely credulous and susceptible to misinformation
1:26:22 and disinformation and conspiracy theories and nonsense i don’t know about you but
1:26:28 when you interact with ai about something you really know about you realize it’s not very good
1:26:35 and it’s very very prone to telling you what it thinks you want it to hear and so one of the
1:26:43 things i’m nervous about is people’s inability to handle that like one of the things you learn
1:26:49 as a project manager like if you’re working with someone who has technical expertise is you have
1:26:54 to know enough and they have to know that you know enough that they can’t bullshit you like they
1:27:00 can’t say no that’s not possible right or that’s going to take six months or that’s going to cost
1:27:05 this amount of money you have to have enough technical domain expertise that you can push back
1:27:12 and get to the truth of things and when i’ve worked with ai and i’m i’m needing it to track
1:27:16 something down that maybe i’m doing i’m like hey didn’t so-and-so say something about this and they
1:27:23 go oh yeah they said this and then i go wait or was it actually so-and-so and they go yeah yeah it was
1:27:30 that and and what it’s doing is it’s telling me what i wanted to hear in the same way that people
1:27:35 google stuff or see stuff on social media and they go that feels true that’s it if what human beings
1:27:40 are good at is using tools and using and cooperating with other people what we’re gonna have to have in
1:27:55 this age of ai is a strong sense for bullshit and an ability to know when to push back and to examine
1:28:02 and when to verify because a lot of what it’s going to spit out is not true or is only partially true
1:28:10 and if you’re just defaulting to it you’re gonna be embarrassed do you use it for any writing or
1:28:17 any purpose i mean i use it when i do presentations i have it do like uh i want a picture of insert
1:28:23 a thing that’s never been painted by a renaissance painter before so right you know like i when i’m
1:28:29 trying to visualize things i use it and sometimes we’ll use it in videos i’m gonna like you know
1:28:34 show marcus realius like in a suit of armor show marcus real is like so i use it for things like
1:28:42 that like track stuff down but then i i verify i have to i have to get a second opinion i have to
1:28:49 have it verified in some way because i’m that skepticism keeps me up because it the the costs
1:28:53 the reputational costs are bored it’s like trusting wikipedia you know it’s good if it’s right
1:29:00 the reputational hit is felt by you alone totally do you use it yeah we use it all the time at home
1:29:05 the kids like will write their essay the way that i i encourage it at home is like you’re
1:29:10 growing up in this well like you need to use it but here’s the appropriate use the appropriate use
1:29:17 isn’t like i need for an essay on the civil war that’s 2,500 words go the appropriate use is you
1:29:23 write something reasonably good yes and i want to see your full history so yeah like i always
1:29:27 keep the kids full history but you submit it and you’re like you’re a grade nine teacher what would
1:29:32 you say are the weak points of my argument so it’s like almost like a personal tutor yeah and then
1:29:37 i’ll submit like here’s a draft chapter like what did i miss what what do you think and sometimes
1:29:42 it’s pretty insightful i’ve used it with my kids will have fun like they’ll be like draw this or
1:29:50 make that they get increasingly excited about making it do more absurd things and the idea of
1:29:55 seeing it as a as a tool as opposed to a replacement for something i think is really important i want
1:30:01 them to be familiarized with the inherent limitations of it yeah right so it’s like you say
1:30:07 draw you know it i had to do i was doing a slide and i was like how to draw this the socrates doing
1:30:13 x y z and then one of the characters in the back had glasses on and i was like this doesn’t make
1:30:19 any sense they didn’t have glasses so like get rid of the glasses and then it’s like they redid it
1:30:26 and then now more people have glasses you know like yeah and it’s also its inability to to iterate
1:30:34 like it’s not very good at this i want this but five percent different it starts from scratch
1:30:40 you know and so again yeah i think the more you learn the limitations of it and the logic of it
1:30:47 and if you can get good at prompting like prompting as a skill um i want my kids to have that so here’s
1:30:52 a like interest i actually get it to write its own prompts i am going to prompt ai i want a
1:30:59 a summary of this podcast and then it’ll give me like a five sentence thing that i could basically
1:31:04 just submit back to itself and tweak a few things here and there but it gives me a much better
1:31:10 prompt than i would give it this is the worst it’s ever probably going to be yeah right much
1:31:16 much better and so it’s going to get exponentially better over the next decade or 20 years and it’d
1:31:20 be interesting to see how we use it and i find it interesting because the schools are like don’t
1:31:25 use it and i’m like you can use it i need the chat history because i want to go in if i have to
1:31:30 argue with your teacher i want to say here’s what you submit it here’s your first draft and now that
1:31:35 they’ve done this thing where they make them write a draft in the school and they take a picture of it
1:31:42 and so your final submission can’t differ too much from the original submission well so i do this
1:31:48 thing so when i read a book i often type up the passages that i liked in the book yeah and sometimes
1:31:52 because i’m just sending it to myself to print back the office or whatever i’ll do it in gmail
1:31:57 and gmail has always had this kind of predictive ai in it where it’s guessing the end of what you’re
1:32:03 saying and i always found it really interesting as a writer so i’m typing some sentence from Hemingway
1:32:09 so this is a sentence that has been written before unlike you know my average yeah i’m making it up
1:32:15 this is a sentence that exists so something there’s a right answer but there is an answer
1:32:22 and we’re largely in agreement that Hemingway did a good job right um he’s considered one of the
1:32:29 great writers so it’s like it’s like you’re you’re doing a simulation of a path that someone actually
1:32:36 flew never is the ai able to predict the next couple words in that sentence i’ve always found
1:32:42 that very interesting and it’s a reminder to me that still the the act of creative genius of of
1:32:49 doing not any sentence but like the right sentence the right way with the right words like Twain said
1:32:53 that you know that’s the difference between lightning and lightning bug you do get a sense of the
1:33:01 limitations of ai when you can see how insufficient it is compared to really great stuff Tyler Cowan
1:33:07 wrote this book like 10 years ago called averages over and i think that kind of defines my philosophy
1:33:14 of life which is that a lot these technologies aren’t eliminating they’re going to be eliminating
1:33:18 large chunks of the people who are able to do that thing but the people who could do that thing
1:33:25 at an elite or an excellent level yeah will probably it’s leverage will be better at it and
1:33:31 be more highly compensated and the importance of it will be higher and so you you have to figure out
1:33:35 what is the thing that you’re going to be excellent at and then you have to be as we’re saying somewhat
1:33:42 disunbalanced in the pursuit of that excellence but it’s like the cost of being mediocre get higher
1:33:48 and higher one thing i have noticed is like the length of emails and the grammatical perfection
1:33:54 in emails has increased quite a bit and i’m like i know you there’s no way you wrote 16 sentences
1:33:58 without making your grammatical error spelling error people are just putting you know their
1:34:03 point form and being like generate a nonviolent race you know email to send to this person put
1:34:07 this in nonviolent communication then you get it and you’re like this is half a page it should be
1:34:12 like two sentences we’re just like social media’s bots talking to bots like a lot of our life is
1:34:17 going to be like ai talking to ai like if i open an email and i don’t know the person it’s more
1:34:21 than like five sentences now i’m just delete right i don’t know yeah well you’re gonna have to get
1:34:25 better just like you have to get good at spotting most of it you’re gonna have to be good at spotting
1:34:31 ai versus non ai yeah because the cost to generate an ai email is zero at least before you had to
1:34:37 type something in or copy paste email like you’ve gotten those emails it’s like dear joe and you’re
1:34:44 like wait my name’s ryan like uh what are you reading right now that’s challenging your thinking
1:34:49 i just i’ve read these three huge books on linkedin so i’ve been doing a huge deep dive into
1:34:55 linkedin for the book that i’m writing now um and i think that’s like you know maybe earlier in my
1:35:00 writing career i would have read one book and called it and now i’m like i’m gonna read another
1:35:06 and another and another and so i’m just going deeper and deeper and stuff um i’m reading this
1:35:10 book now about the founding of australia the i’m finding really interesting called the fatal shore
1:35:16 about like why why did they start a penal colony on the other side of the earth was it was well the
1:35:26 argument was that uh london had an extremely strict legal system uh an abysmal for-profit prison
1:35:34 system and a belief that like there was essentially a race of people that were criminals as opposed to
1:35:43 crimes being an act of opportunity or desperation and that reform was possible then america rebelled
1:35:50 and the ability to send colonists or the undesirables across the atlantic to america
1:35:57 evaporated and they had to find some new place to do it that’s crazy it’s fascinating do you
1:36:01 read many business books like what are the best business biographies you’ve read best business
1:36:07 biographies i don’t read that many business biographies uh i like my dream book is like
1:36:15 a 900 page biography of someone i know nothing about or someone that i know a lot about
1:36:24 because you want the detail and then yeah i’m looking for illustrative stories or insights into
1:36:29 how that person operated or solved problems so like you know i read a book about lincoln
1:36:34 specifically as a politician i read a book you know specifically about lincoln’s cabinet i read a
1:36:41 book specifically about you know lincoln and literary inclination you know like yeah i want
1:36:48 to go really deep in a specific thing and and then i’m finding stuff that didn’t appear in one but
1:36:53 appears in the other and that’s how i’m building out the chapter that i’m writing and do you do that
1:36:58 without having the story in mind you’re like oh this story is representative of xyz tag it sometimes
1:37:02 i’m just reading generally about something and like i’m not writing anything about australia i’m
1:37:07 just was there and now i’m interested in it and i have some basis of knowledge i’m building on
1:37:14 and then it’ll help me understand the 1700s the 1800s and often it’s i’m i’m chasing something
1:37:22 down that i think i know is down this hallway how do you define success today and how has it changed
1:37:26 do you remember what i said the other times no i still think my definition of success is autonomy
1:37:32 like i’ve been saying recently like success is how much you see your kids and power is how much
1:37:38 control you have over your schedule my son school called and he was sick and i was like all right
1:37:44 i’ll be right there you know i like that to me that’s that’s both success and power i didn’t
1:37:52 have to ask anyone’s permission i didn’t need to worry about the cost of yeah missing a day’s work
1:37:56 or whatever i just could handle it turns out it wasn’t actually sick you know he’s just had a
1:38:01 cough or something and so we just hung out all day and then i had to talk that afternoon and
1:38:06 he came with me how has that changed from like a decade ago when you would define success when
1:38:13 you were younger i think success was often more predicated on like either very specific things
1:38:22 or relative to other people and their accomplishments and i think i’ve gotten closer and closer to
1:38:28 just not really caring and part of that is living where i live how my life is set up just
1:38:32 valuing different things the relative thing is fascinating because if you compare yourself to
1:38:38 people who are relatively you know not pursuing the same goals not maybe not as successful as you are
1:38:43 you sort of feel good about yourself like maybe you’re not reaching your potential because you
1:38:48 can sort of coast a little bit and if you compare yourself to people who are better or more successful
1:38:54 then you’re perpetually sort of like not where you want to be and it can sort of like destroy your
1:38:59 your satisfaction i try to remind myself that i write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy
1:39:04 that there’s a floor and a ceiling to that look if we compare ourselves to james clear we’re all
1:39:11 failure yeah and for our book sales but if you compare yourself to the millions of people who
1:39:16 would kill to even have a meeting with an editor it’s a huge success sometimes it can be helpful
1:39:22 to really think about how modest you would have previously defined success oh total and then there’s
1:39:27 there’s also like a relative or sort of like a relative success and absolute success which is
1:39:32 you know if you sell i think i don’t know what the actual number i heard it was like 50 000 books
1:39:38 yeah you’re in the top one percent of books ever published in the history of humanity yeah so like
1:39:42 there’s always a different way to change your perspective on where you’re at and sort of and
1:39:47 what a friend of mine used to say this like if we threw everybody’s shoes in a big pile
1:39:50 and you picked out the shoes and you got all the problems with it you probably pick your own shoes
1:39:55 like the whole world basically you know you could pick anybody’s problem a year most of the time
1:39:59 you’re gonna pick yours there’s a lot of people who would try to pick our problems when i feel
1:40:05 jealousy i try to remind myself that you can’t pick and choose like if you want what someone has
1:40:10 you have to trade your whole life and in that case you almost would never take it
1:40:15 or maybe not even your whole life but let’s just say like oh why did they get this opportunity
1:40:20 i should have got this but it’s no you have to swap your whole career for theirs would you do it
1:40:25 and it becomes more complicated it’s it’s it’s we want you know we want to be a little from here a
1:40:30 little from here a little from here but that’s not a possible combination because every decision
1:40:40 every goal inherently is making things not goals there’s trade-offs yeah and yeah you can’t be like
1:40:47 i want to be classical musician and then compare yourself to Taylor Swift they’re just they’re
1:40:53 different genres of music that have different floors and ceilings so like you know it might be
1:40:57 easier to break out as a classical musician i’m not saying it’s easy but like you know there’s a
1:41:05 there’s a set audience and there’s also a ceiling you’re never going to be the number one album in
1:41:13 the country but by going for the number one album in the country you might get nothing and just
1:41:22 understanding that you made certain choices and that you can’t strategy is by definition
1:41:30 choosing certain objectives and not choosing other objectives and if you try to straddle to
1:41:43 strategies you’ll destroy yourself thanks for listening and learning with us for a complete
1:41:52 list of episodes show notes transcripts and more go to fs.blog/podcast or just google the knowledge
1:41:57 project recently i’ve started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview
1:42:03 after the interview i sit down highlight the key moments that stood out for me and i also talk about
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1:42:30 the front of street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book clear thinking
1:42:36 turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results it’s a transformative guide that hands you the
1:42:43 tools to master your fate sharpen your decision making and set yourself up for unparalleled success
1:42:54 learn more at fs.blog/clear until next time
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