#1001 - Ryan Holiday - Stoicism’s Lessons on Becoming Wise

How did the live shows go?

The last time we were talking,

we were discussing upcoming live shows.

Yeah, I think it was I was doing two in Australia and you gave me this advice.

You were like, well, you told me that you did done it with no notes.

And usually like when you do talks at events, like they don't want you to just go up and give a speech.

They want like a presentation.

But these were, this was different.

So yeah, I had to figure out how to do it with no

notes, which was

interesting.

Like it's good to pick arbitrary challenges and take something that you're good at, that you've done a lot of times, and just figure out a way to do it the hard way.

Yeah, what's new?

Yeah.

And so I had to sort of reinvent it from scratch.

It was challenging, but good.

It's actually funny.

In Mark's religious meditations, he talks about practicing holding the reins with your non-dominant hand.

And so, just like, what's the way that you're comfortable doing it?

What's the way you normally do it?

And then how do you force yourself to do it not the way that you like to do it?

And

to force yourself to do it in front of the way you're not comfortable doing it in front of 2,000 people

is a, is a, you know, it's a whole thing.

Difficulty plus.

Yeah.

I've always thought about doing a podcast episode with a guest that somebody had organized for me and sat down opposite me and I didn't know who it was.

Yes.

And I had to try and do an episode without breaking the fourth wall that I didn't know who they were and see if I could excavate what the fuck is going on here.

Who is this psychologist, athlete, coach, trainer?

Like, what the fuck are you?

And, uh, and do it without like destroying the episode.

I always thought that would be like a fun challenge.

Well, and the reason you challenge yourself artificially is that life doesn't really care about your plans.

Doesn't play by your rules.

So, I had a talk I was supposed to do in Kentucky like a couple of weeks ago.

And so, I was supposed to fly in

all day, and then I would do the talk at night.

And then, you know, I'd get to the airport at nine, and it's like 30 minutes delayed, 30 minutes delayed, 30 minutes.

It's starting to get crazy, And some incredibly complicated, very expensive travel adjustments later.

I land

and I'm in the car.

Like I'm already late.

So they've pushed it.

They've been stalling.

Everyone's there.

Everyone's there.

And I'm the last speaker.

And

I'm texting them.

And I go, okay, like I just landed.

I'm 12 minutes away.

I will be there.

I will run up and go on.

And they go, okay, that's awesome.

We're waiting for you.

Where are your slides?

And I go, what do you mean?

Like,

I know for a fact they came in yesterday.

So you should definitely have them.

But I'm like, here they are again.

I'm like texting.

Here's the link to the, there's the Dropbox links to the slides again.

And they're like, okay, awesome.

And then, so, you know, they get there.

Seven minutes to go.

Yeah, seven.

They, I open the door of the car and I'm, you know, running upstairs.

I'm carrying my suitcase up to the thing.

I'm getting there.

And then as they're micing me up, they go, and you don't have slides, right?

It's like, is no one talking to you guys?

Like, like, now I know for a fact that you've had the slides for at least seven minutes, you know?

So, so, uh, and, and there's like a band on stage performing

that's stalling.

Cause it's like a, so

yeah, look at the guy goes, okay, so, um,

uh, the band's going to play the first 20 seconds of two minutes to midnight by Iron Maiden, and then you're up.

And I go, okay, so we got that.

Like, we had a live band performing like a song that I like, but no slides.

And then the guy's like, I'll try to figure out the slides.

And I go, in the next 20 seconds, what are you talking about?

I was like, this is, you know, this is done, man.

I was like, I'll just, you know,

but I walk and so I start to talk.

And I'm, you know, now I've got, you know, 45 minutes of time to fill with no slides.

And you can't just do the talk you were going to give without slides because it's, you can't be like, normally normally there'd be a slide

every other minute yeah exactly and so i'm like what am i going to talk about for 45 minutes i'm starting and then the guy's like trying to talk to me via the screen you know he's like slides are comfort monitor he's like slides slides incoming should be about 10 minutes you know it's like this is too late man um but but uh you know i was able to just give some version of the talk that i've now given several times

but new maybe some new shit came out yeah of course but but but the interesting thing is, like, you think, to me, the lesson in these things is always like, you think you need it to go a certain way.

You think you want it to go a certain way.

And then when you were forced to do it the way that you

didn't want to do it, not only do you find something out about yourself,

but

you actually find that the thing you were preparing not to.

for it not to happen actually isn't that bad.

And it might be better in some ways.

So, you know, but like you,

technical difficulties are a part of any industry in life.

And so if you, if you,

if you,

if you need it to go a certain way, you're very vulnerable.

If you're good with it going effectively anyway,

then you'll be all right.

Yeah.

What happened with that

Naval Academy

speech?

That was slightly different technical difficulties.

So, you know, normally you send your

like, so for the last four years, I've been speaking every year to the incoming class of the Naval Academy.

It's called Plebe Summer.

So these are like the brightest kids in the country, future naval officers.

So they're going to run submarines and fly F-16s and command aircraft carriers.

I mean,

future presidents, future admirals, future heads of the CIA.

All the top gun ships.

These are the best, you know, most promising people in the world, actually, because the Naval Academy sometimes has students from other countries on these sort of guest programs.

So every season, every year for the last four years, years, I've been doing this series of lectures on the cardinal virtues of courage, discipline, justice, wisdom.

So, I've done courage, done discipline, I've done justice, and then I'm supposed to do wisdom this year.

And

so, you send your slides in before,

not for approval, but for technical reasons.

Like, you don't, you don't show up with your computer because they don't have the plug or whatever.

You send them in advance.

So, I sent them in, you know, the night before, as I had for every subsequent talk, and

have had previously received zero notes because that's not what we were doing.

And then I get a call, you know, I get up, I go for a run, I'm walking through the talk, and I get a call from someone at the Academy, and they go, Hey, so there's this thing in the talk that we would like you not to talk about.

And of course, I knew exactly what they were referring to because I had spent a lot of time thinking about what I was going to talk about.

And one of the things I felt sort of duty-bound to address was they had just removed several hundred titles from the Naval Academy Library.

As part of this order from the president, that was supposedly about addressing, you know, DEI and wokeness or whatever.

They had removed books that talked about those themes from the library.

So you could say you have a problem with the policies, right?

And the president is allowed to decide, you know, how the academy is going to be run, But you can't remove books from an elite university because you don't like what's in the books.

That's a very different thing.

Well, there's an interesting point there.

Was it Megan Phelps Roper that did The Witch Trials of J.K.

Rowling?

So this was the inverse of that situation that was

one book, one series of books, Harry Potter,

originally in the 90s and 2000s by right-wing fundamentalist Christians.

They campaigned to have them banned from schools because they were worried that it was witchcraft.

And then two decades later, the left-wing progressive people are trying to get it banned because they think that J.K.

Rowling is a transphobe.

And what you're talking about here is this is the other way around.

This is right-wing in the modern world trying to get rid of books that they don't like.

Well,

and this is why we don't ban books because it's stupid and

it's incredibly inconsistent, right?

Like the Bible is a very banned book.

So they're removing it

because these books have these objectionable themes.

But of course, Mein Kampf is still in the present, is still in the Academy Library.

And so here you are removing a book that's talking about minorities that died in the Holocaust or minorities that served in the troop.

Like

when you have Chat GPT pull up a list of books that it thinks might be objectionable and then you just rip them out of a library, you're in very dangerous territory.

And so I was going to speak about this in

because it pertains to something I've been writing and talking about there, which is that

Admiral James Stockdale is one of the most famous graduates of the academy, one of the most famous modern practitioners of Stoic philosophy.

After he graduates from the academy, the Navy sends him to Stanford, where he gets a post-grad degree.

And he studies quite a bit of philosophy there.

And his favorite course while he's at Stanford, this is in 62 or 63, is he takes a course on Marxist thought.

And they only read the primary Marxist texts.

So, not like commentary on Marx, not neo-Marxism, but like Marx himself and Lenin.

And they read and they spend an entire semester talking about what the

Marxists thought.

And you might go, well, what does a Navy fighter pilot need to learn about Marx?

Well, when he ends up in a Marxist prison camp in North Vietnam and is subjected to years of brainwashing and torture and propaganda, it actually comes in extremely handy.

And he would talk about how he was able to

go back and forth with his captors.

And then in many cases, he knew Marxism better than they did.

And that this was a defense mechanism, right?

And it's actually funny because the Stoics talk about this too, which, of course, I was going to talk about in the talk.

The Stoics, Seneca, talks about reading like a spy in the enemy's camp.

The idea is you...

I'm going to stop.

Oh, no, no, I heard this.

Oh, good.

Good.

So the idea is that you want to know what your opponents think.

And in this case, we're not even talking about opponents because we're talking about the memoirs of Maya Angelou that are getting removed from the library of, again, a university on par with Harvard or Yale or West Point.

So I was going to talk about why

this is why we can't be afraid of ideas.

And in fact, we have to engage with ideas that we disagree with and dislike.

Well, you can imagine the people that are removing, well, once the leadership of the Academy had put themselves in the position of not challenging the order and

sort of removing the books without protest, they're now in a tricky situation of like, can we allow criticism of this decision, right?

This is what happens when you, and of course, Stockdale talks about this too.

He talks about when you start to make compromises with extortionists, you have to make more and more compromises.

And then pretty soon, you're not just removing one or two books because it's controversial, but then you're revoking invitations to speak from people who are criticizing that idea.

And it escalates.

So

they asked me to remove it.

And it's like, I can't, I felt, and I don't know if I could have made this decision early on in my life, but

I'd talk to these kids who are going to, again, in the future be entrusted with nuclear weapons and immensely powerful bits of machinery and budgets of the billions and billions of dollars that I can't give them a lecture about courage.

I can't give them a lecture about discipline.

I can't give them a lecture about ethics and doing the right thing.

And then, when someone says, hey, if you want to keep talking here, we'd like you not to speak about the things that we're trying to sweep under the rug.

And so I said, you know, I can't do that.

And so, of course, the invitation was revoked, and then so was the subsequent invitation.

The interesting thing about it to me was, I said, you know, I think you think this will

avoid controversy, but it's only going to do the opposite.

Not only is it going to do the opposite because like this is a public event, like not this is a

publicized event that is now ended, you know, 10 minutes before it's supposed to go on, but you know,

part of the, like I was speaking, the,

I was speaking at,

I was brought there by this center on campus called the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership.

So the irony of like, let's remove books that we find to be objectionable and then let's not talk about it.

And then let's pressure a person from the center of ethical leadership.

You know, the ironies are stacking up here.

But like

there is this, there is this presumption that people in the military are just like big, tough, strong,

you know,

robots that you send in to do.

But that's what gets countries and.

the world into trouble.

The crown jewel of the American military and the Western militaries for centuries has been the ability of their leaders to think, to

challenge orders and to question, right?

This isn't to say that it's anarchy, but like you need independent thinkers or everyone's thinking the same thing and thus not thinking at all.

And so like you are going to want these young men and women at some point when they're entrusted with leadership and power to make difficult, unpopular decisions that are, you know, maybe not always in their

interests of their careers.

And what this leadership is showing them in this moment is,

we might say that, but we don't mean it.

Right.

Like, like, imagine you become a multi-star admiral.

of the Naval Academy, one of the, you know, crown, and then you're not just a party to removing books from the library, but then you are like, what, I guess, this, this is a theme that I've been writing about for these last couple years: is like, what is the point of power, influence, success, a platform if you don't use it?

And so it was a, it was a, it was a strange, surreal experience.

It's only sort of gotten worse.

Like the West Point just revoked an invitation and an award they were going to give to Tom to Tom Hanks this week

because of his political views.

So we are in the full sway of like the pendulum of cancel culture, snowflakeism has gone from like this way to this way.

And it's the same thing that's happening just in the opposite direction.

Yeah.

And it's equally stupid in both directions.

And it doesn't help anyone.

And then, you know, it was funny because people kept going, like,

well, what about this book?

And what about this book?

You know, this is a bad.

And I go, I don't know the names of basically any of the books.

Like, I don't give a shit what the names of the books are.

I'm actually sure most of the books are bad.

Like,

the library has hundreds of thousands of titles.

It would make sense that, in fact, a large percentage of them are bad.

I would agree that most books that are published are bad and stupid and wrong.

Like,

that's how it works.

But a free society

requires the

free transmission and publication of ideas, right?

And so it's a it's a weird, it's a weird moment in time to be sure.

You've been in the war zone, it seems.

Well, no, as I've been the it may be, maybe an intellectual war zone.

I think what's ironic about it is these are people who are going to at some day be sent into a real war zone.

And we're nervous that they're going to read Maya Angelou or even the most like offensive, stupid, wrong, you know, ass backwards book and just be like

immediately.

That's my worldview now.

Yeah, their mind melts.

Like, actually, this is when we would want to find that out, you know.

Ah, okay.

So, read these stupid books, see if your mind has changed.

And if so, out you go.

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You say wisdom is the most elusive of the virtues.

It's the hardest to define.

I think courage is something we know it when we see it, you know, disciplined, pretty straightforward.

I think the thing about wisdom is that

it's not just elusive in terms of its ineffability.

Like it's hard to define.

You know, it's experience, it's knowledge, it's intelligence, it's creativity, it's insight, it's perspective.

It's all these things, right?

But the interesting thing about wisdom is that

it's one of those ones that if you think you have it, you almost certainly don't.

And the second you think you have it,

you find that there is more.

left for you to learn.

So there's something elusive about it in the sense that the horizon is elusive, right?

Like you approach it and you feel like you're not making progress.

You look behind you and you clearly have made a lot of progress.

Look at all the things that you've read.

Look at all the things that you've learned.

Look at how much smarter you are than you were before.

And look how far away the people who were standing with you when you began are.

But there remains an infinite amount still to know.

And so there is something

inherently humbling about it.

The physicist John Wheeler said, you know, as the island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance.

I think that's that is the paradox of wisdom.

That

the more you learn, not just are you humbled, and that most

really smart people are actually quite humble,

but the more you learn, the more you learn about all the things that you still want to learn about.

What do most people get wrong when they think about wisdom, where it comes from?

Well,

you know, like there's some,

you know,

is it like book smarts or street smarts?

Like, is it school or is it life?

As if it's this binary thing.

And of course, it's a combination of all of the above.

It's like you want a base of knowledge.

Ideally, you want to learn from all of the experiences, all the

great ideas that humanity has come up with over thousands of years.

And then you have to go out and experience things.

And then what that does is it informs what you have learned.

And then the things that you continue to learn inform the experiences you're having.

So the subtitle of the book is like, learn, apply, repeat.

And that's the idea is that, is that it's this loop of always be learning, always be exposing yourself to things, and then always

be going out and applying and trying the ideas.

So, you know, if you're just sort of reading up in your your tower, so to speak,

you might be getting smarter, but I wouldn't say you're getting wiser.

And then there is something fundamentally stupid, though, about trying to learn all these lessons yourself, right?

Like

you go,

I think it was Otto von Bismarck, you know, he said, any fool can learn by experience.

I prefer to learn from the experiences of others.

So

why would you want to figure something out?

when someone has been in your exact position before and not just

learned from it, but like written about it.

And then other people have written about them.

And so you think about like this position you're trying,

this thing you're going for, this

thing you're attempting.

Like some of the smartest people who have ever lived have spent

years of their life thinking about just that thing.

And then

there is the ego in us that goes like, well, I'll wing it, you know, or, or I know better.

And

so the reason that humility is this key to wisdom is not just like you can't learn that which you think you already know, but

it keeps you hungry to learn more and more.

I have this idea about unteachable lessons.

Yeah.

And it's a unique category where no matter how many songs and movies and stories from your grandparents and warnings,

you cannot expedite the process of understanding this thing through somebody else's storytale.

You can only learn these things.

Money won't make you happy.

Fame won't fill your self-worth.

That girl's not lovable.

She's just hot and difficult to get.

You should see your parents more.

You should work less hard.

You know, these things that are cliché.

And the reason that they're cliché is that they seem to be

so reliably groundbreaking to everybody when they arrive there.

So it it almost becomes its own, it's like a self-defeating prophecy that

everybody says it, which means everybody thinks that they know it, which means everybody discounts it as like, oh, that's just like a wives' tale.

That's not like, you shouldn't put your hand on a hot stove.

That's these people, they've just accepted it as part of the source code of reality.

But I watch me dance through this minefield and I'll do pirouettes and I'll spin around.

The rules won't apply to me.

But the funny thing about that is, I think one of the reasons those lessons are so cliche, and then why

you talk about them so much is partly because,

okay, so you take something like money won't make you happy or fame is empty, or you're not going to fill that hole in your soul by achieving and doing.

That's a theme in literature and art and

of course social psychology also.

And

there's probably some evolutionary reasons why that's a hard lesson to learn, right?

This is what propels humanity forward.

But some of us learn that lesson sooner than others, right?

Some people have to go as far as Alexander, like literally to the end of the worlds to learn it.

And then other people experience it

during their college graduation.

What was Alexander's realization around that point?

Well, I'm just saying Alexander gets all the way to the end of the world and his men are like, how much longer are we going to do this?

And he says, You know, let it be said that you turned around here and didn't conquer the rest of the world with Alexander.

And then he subsequently dies.

And he dies this brutal, painful death where

some of the theories are like he was like sort of in this like conscious coma where he's like frozen.

But like he, it was, it was a, let's say it was an end where he might have had a few moments to contemplate whether it had all been worth it.

Right.

And so my point is, you can learn it at the very far end of the extremes or you can hear it at the first inkling of it.

Like I've said before, like I feel like life is always trying to tell us something

and eventually it will tell us in a way that we can hear it.

And so the whispers just get louder.

Yeah.

Do you want to hear it?

Do you want to hear it when life is whispering this to you?

Or do you want life to have to pin you down and scream it in your face?

You know, like in sobriety circles, they talk about like, you know, hitting rock bottom while you still have two cars cars in the garage.

Like, do you have to hit rock bottom when you've blown up your entire life and lost everything and everyone?

Or can you take this DUI as a sign, right?

That's a really, a really great point that yes, these lessons are unteachable, but some people need to be taught more times than others.

Yes.

And that was, you know, the Romans talked about, you know, the fool is not someone who stubs their toe on a rock.

It's the person who stubs their toe on the same rock more than once.

And so it's how quick can you learn the lesson?

And so part of part of why you take in, especially early on, why these classic myths and ideas and the Western canon is so important is that they contain from the Bible to the Odyssey,

you know, to Marcus Aurelius and Aristotle and

all the great stories, is they contain kind of the sum total of human wisdom, right?

And some of them, though, you don't learn, you hear, but you don't understand until you have the experience that matches that lesson.

Oh, that's a thing.

Yes.

And so

you need to have the ideas to match with the experiences.

Neither

is sufficient on its own.

I love that blending of the two, especially because if you don't have a...

a good enough framework, sort of a robust scaffolding to hold your life's experiences on,

yeah, maybe you will take the right lesson, but maybe you'll take the wrong one.

Maybe you get gold medalist syndrome.

You think, ah,

two.

Yes.

Two.

That's the issue.

The issue is I need to prove that I wasn't lucky, that I was good.

Yes.

I don't just sell the one company for $100 million.

I've got to run it back again in a different industry.

And then the thing, as opposed to, no, this is habituation.

You have learned this before.

It's the exact same gremlin just coming at you from a slightly more conniving angle.

Yes.

And it's to be able to recognize, oh, this is what so-and-so was doing here.

This is so-and-so at this, you know, critical juncture point.

Like, and there was a time when we had enough shared story.

First off, there were just fewer stories.

So everyone could kind of recognize, oh, this is like, you know, Odysseus at the sirens, or this is Hamlet, or this, this is, this is, you know, George Washington at this moment.

You know, you have these stories that are designed to teach these moral lessons.

Like the greatest biographer of all time is Plutarch.

And Plutarch says, you know, there's a difference between biography and lives.

And he says, I write lives.

And lives are illustrated by a certain anecdote, a little story,

an utterance of a few words that help you unlock the lesson or the...

the fatal flaw or the the the brilliant genius of this person.

And so when you read about these historical figures who are often flawed and tragic figures, the idea is you take back from them little lessons that then, yeah, when you're winning a gold medal or you just sold a company or

you're about to gamble it all on this thing that you believe is

the key to unlocking your happiness or your legacy or whatever, you go, oh,

maybe I should ask myself, am I about to do?

what they did and how did it go for them and and so it's having this broad array of case studies and stories that were, you know, not always the most historically accurate, but they were illustrating something about the human experience that we need to remember.

I was spending time with an impressionist a couple of weeks ago.

Like a comedian?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or do you mean a painter?

No, sorry.

Yeah.

He does impressions, whatever that person's called.

Yeah.

Are they both called the same thing?

I think so.

Someone should change it.

Yeah.

Anyway, and I was explaining, I've got Matthew McConaughey coming back on the show.

Yeah.

And that wouldn't that be exciting.

And he's like, what was it like to sit down with him the first time?

And I said, all of the things.

He's very charismatic and all the rest of it.

And he does a great McConaughey.

And I said, he does this thing that you didn't do when you did it.

And he doesn't ever have, it seems to me like he doesn't have stuff in his mouth, but he goes like

he's sort of like as if there's a little bit of straw or something that he needs, and he does this with his hand.

And the dude was like, that's the unlock.

And he explained to me that in the art of doing impressions of people,

there is

an unlock.

And the unlock is this one thing:

the way that you speak, the pronunciation of the S, the moving of the fingers, the hands, the face, whatever.

And he says, that's the thing that people hook onto in the same way as what you're talking about here is that there are these portable stories, as Clay Habbot calls them, these individual, maybe even a tiny little three-word aphorism, whatever.

And you go, that's the thing.

And both me and you quote other people a good bit because

original thinking is pretty tough.

And also,

people way smarter than me and you have already figured stuff out.

And it's kind of our job to essentialize that and make it accessible.

If I could say it better, I would.

Yeah, true.

And I've tried.

And I think that, you know, in many ways, for me, the reason that I love it is that

using small quotes, aphorisms, mantras, stuff like that is kind kind of like a Winzip file that condenses down this big thing.

My memory's not that good, but it's not bad if I just have to remember this small sequence and I go, oh, yeah,

the universe has changed, and life is but what we deem it.

Oh, well, there's like this big thing that that means that I kind of remember a bit,

but I can recall this.

I can remember the chorus, and from that, I kind of the rest of the album comes along with it too.

Yeah, and

I think

too many people have confused

history and trivia.

Exactly what year this happened, exactly how the name is pronounced,

exactly, you know,

where the troops were aligned in this battle or that battle,

you know, is much less important as to the why or the characters or the kind of the fundamental moral lessons

that that thing has the opportunity to teach us.

And that's what the classics and the sort of ancient stories have always been.

Like Cincinnatus, do you know the story of Cincinnatus?

So Cincinnatus is this Roman general who's living in retirement.

This story will sound familiar to you in a second.

He's this famous Roman general living in retirement.

And the Roman army is in battle in some distant land, and basically the whole of the Roman army

is trapped.

And so Rome is basically undefended.

And so the Roman elders go to Cincinnatus, who is plowing on his farm in retirement, and say, we need you to save Rome, and we will make you dictator.

And so he's made dictator.

He leads a small

troop of

Roman auxiliaries

and frees the Roman army, saves Rome,

and is now dictator.

And he, after 17 days, resigns the dictatorship and returns to his farm.

This is the plot of Gladiator, of course.

And it's also the model for George Washington resigning his commission after the Revolutionary War.

You know, when King George hears that

Washington is going to return to his farm, he goes, if he does that, he'll be the greatest man in the world.

Both of them understand that this is an allusion to the example of Cincinnati when Washington resigns the presidency after two terms.

It's again Cincinnati that he's.

So this is a famous story.

But Cincinnatus almost certainly did not exist.

Like that is a story that goes back so far in Roman history that there is almost no factual basis for it that anyone can clearly point to one way or another.

But the story has existed for so long that the Romans certainly thought it was true, and Washington thought it was true, and King George thought it was true.

And, you know, when I tell it to my seven-year-old, it may as well be true.

And I think some people have taken the role of the historian to prove that it didn't happen, to be like, here, George Washington didn't chop down the cherry tree, or you know, Cincinnatus didn't really exist, or this didn't happen, or it was more complicated than that.

And look, if you're a grad student specializing in that thing, perhaps that is

important.

But for most people, most of the time,

the

significance of that is

the lesson of sort of restraint and selflessness that

actually power can be laid down and that the truly great and powerful people not only do do that, but that's the gift they are giving the future generations, this

continuing this tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.

And so the

history is supposed to be

the sort of sacred, hard-earned knowledge that we pass on from person to person.

And so a lot of this famous stories, you know, maybe they're true, maybe they're not.

If you're being literal about them, you're missing the point.

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Did you read Derek Sivers' book, Useful Not True?

No.

Okay, so I had this idea for, I swear to God, I came up with it independently, which was figuratively true, literally false.

Yes.

Literally true, figuratively false.

Yes.

And Derek came up with something that was not too dissimilar, which is usually a good idea.

It's like, hey, two people pointed at the same thing from different angles.

Like, there's might be something here.

Sure.

Literally true, figuratively false.

You,

Determinism might be a way to look at this.

That perhaps there is no free will, and the entire way that we move through the world is predetermined by the Big Bang and the dominoes just falling, falling, falling.

However, functionally, what would you do with that energy?

It's fucking useless.

It makes me nihilistic.

It makes me feel like I don't have any control over my future.

Something which is literally false, but functionally true.

In the Middle East, in sort of medieval times, pigs are morally dirty creatures.

They're no more or less moral than another creature.

But in a hot climate, their flesh contains more pathogens on average.

So not eating them, probably a pretty good idea.

Porcupines can throw their quills.

No, they can't.

They can't fucking throw their quills.

But if you treat it like it can, you stick just a little bit further clear and you're less likely to get stung.

So this idea that

holding modern stories to the

standards of objective rationality, where does it appear on the spreadsheet?

Please show me how this comes into land.

I think

for a lot, it was a good solvent that was supposed to kind of wash away a lot of bullshit that existed because there was stuff that was literally false, functionally false.

And that actually needed to fuck off.

You know, there's an expression that traditions are often solutions to problems that we've forgotten about.

And

this idea, there's kind of been this fetishization these days of like thinking from first principles, right?

And this is important.

I'm going to arrive at it myself.

Yeah, I think for myself.

I'm a first principles thinker.

Not one of the sheeple.

I'm autonomous.

Yeah, I don't care about your precedent.

And, you know, a lot of precedent is hard won.

Right.

And maybe even why it was hard won or how it was hard won, you are blowing past and you are ignoring why it was set up this way in the first place.

And so not only is it exhausting and unsustainable to truly think

from first principles and everything, but yes, sometimes

things are incidentally solving one problem and also solving another problem, or things are variables are hopelessly tied up with each other.

So,

you go, hey, we don't need this.

This is stupid.

And you don't understand because you don't have 20 years or 50 years or a thousand years of experience in this thing that actually this is a subpar solution or an inelegant solution to a very complicated or multifaceted thing.

And so the arrogance, I think that again, what wisdom is, is this humility of having done hard things before and solved hard problems before.

And you go, oh, okay,

it's probably not going to be solved like this.

And this thing that popped into my head that should magically resolve all of this, you know,

is

naive.

Like, do you know the story of the Gordian knot?

No.

So there's this knot that's tied, that is impossible to untie, and person after person goes to untie it.

And if you untie it, you know, you become the king of this land.

And I think it's Alexander comes and

he solves the Gordian knot by chopping it in half with his sword.

And yes, that's technically a solution, but it's also not a solution.

You haven't actually untied the knot.

And so there is this, again, this sort of fetishizing of like these

complete solutions to things that, hey, the people before were not idiots.

And in fact, they had a little more

humility than you did and understood that there probably was not a solution that pleased everyone or checked every box.

And so that's why this is where it is.

And why, by the way, things have remained relatively stable for a long time.

I think we're seeing this now in politics, but also life where, okay, if you're a Silicon Valley investor and you invest $50,000 in a company,

okay, the downside of you being wrong is that you lose $50,000, but the upside is you might make $5 billion.

So that's great in this very specific domain that you are in, where you get access to lots of early stage companies.

You have a large, broad base of capital, and you can throw, you can be wrong a lot to be right one time.

Well, most of life is not like that, right?

And politics and life, geopolitics, are not like that.

Don't get to be wrong that much before there's a catastrophic outcome.

Yes, yes.

And so a lot of the systems that we have set up and a lot of the procedures we have, this is not just in America, but all over the world.

I'm talking about the UN or the EU or all these different institutions, they are there not to create the easiest, most well-functioning, efficient machine in the world.

They're there to make sure World War III doesn't happen.

They're there to make sure that a nuclear weapon doesn't explode.

They're there to prevent an economic meltdown, right?

They're protecting against downside, which, unlike, say, investing, is not you lose the capital that you put in.

The downside is you lose everything for everyone forever.

And so understanding what environment you're in and the stakes, this is also, I think, something that some really smart people don't have.

And in fact, they've learned a lot of bad habits from being the master of one domain.

Like some domain expertise is transferable and a lot of it is not.

And the wisdom is knowing what domain expertise is transferable and what isn't.

You write fantastic songs.

Wonderful lyricist, great at melodies.

Yeah.

Don't care what you think about climate change.

Don't care what you think about the Ukraine.

Don't care.

Like your geo.

That is not an area that your expertise can go to.

Now you can outsource that to other people, or you can become an expert in your own right.

Yeah.

But just because you're great at this one thing.

Yes.

And so

I agree.

But as with most things,

the devil is in the details.

Sure.

Here.

So, for instance,

there are people from outside of an industry

that get a new perspective because of the fact that they're alien to this thing, because they see something with a fresh set of eyes that nobody else would.

And the Wright brothers kind of strike me as a pretty canonical example of someone like this.

So I think balancing this

Chesterton's fence-pilled, okay, let's be careful with what we get rid of, you know, which is a much more sort of conservative, less innovative, less move, fast-break things position with,

well, you know, sometimes we need like a great man or great woman to come and kind of do a thing.

And balancing those two, the innovation desire with the iteration desire.

But what you find in the best of those people, the Wright brothers being a classic example of this, is

there wasn't

this sense that everyone else trying to tackle the flight problem.

And it was a problem other people,

people have been interested in it for thousands of years, but

all the armies of the world were also rushing to try to figure this out at the same time.

You know, there wasn't this sense that everyone else is a moron and we're geniuses.

What the Wright brothers had was this curiosity, this sort of openness to how it might work.

You know, they spent hours and hours just studying how birds, you know,

fly.

They had a scrappiness to them.

They were outsiders.

They were independent.

But you know, the first thing the Wright brothers do is write to the Smithsonian for like every book ever published on flight.

It wasn't a like burn it all down, everyone's a moron.

And in fact, they would have loved to collaborate with the powers that be and would have loved to be brought in as part of it.

So there's this tendency to celebrate the sort of brash, you know,

domineering

outsider who comes in and tears everything apart.

But I think you tend to find that

the most effective reformers have a profound understanding of why things are the way that they are.

So, so that is, that's actually, you know, the negative capability to go, like, here's what I know, and here's what I think is true, and here's what I understand as an outsider.

And then, here I've done a profound, deep dive as to why it is this way.

Like, one of the most

profound, I'll give you two sort of related reformers.

You have Abraham Lincoln, and then you have Thomas Clarkson, the two basically forerunners of of

the abolitionist movement.

Thomas Clarkson in the U.K.

leads to the eradication of the slave trade and then slavery in England.

And then

Abraham Lincoln ends it in the United States.

Both of them start their campaigns against slavery.

They had this,

as outsiders or as just human beings, this immediate impulse that slavery is wrong, that it doesn't matter that we've been doing it for thousands of years.

It doesn't matter that

billions of dollars are writing on it.

It doesn't matter that all the religious teachers say it's okay.

None of that matters.

They understood it was wrong.

That's your classic sort of outsider view, seeing the world from a new perspective.

But then what they both do is they go, I got to figure this out.

Like Abraham Lincoln goes to the State House Library in Illinois and then the Library of Congress when he's a congressman, and he goes and he actually reads like what the founders said about slavery.

And he realizes that the sort of dominant view at this time time that the founders were out to preserve and protect slavery actually wasn't true.

Thomas Clarkson, his genius is he realizes that slavery is actually just like bad as a business.

Like he studies the insurance claims that slave

traders are making on

the human cargo that they are transporting.

He's looking at the fact that like 20% of the sailors are dying on each voyage.

He's actually going and looking at what a slave ship looks like, and then he draws this famous diagram that like illustrates the vividness of what was an abstract problem before.

So the point is, it's not that you have to absorb the dominant view or the status quo, but you have to understand the logic of why it is that way.

This is where justice and wisdom are interrelated virtues.

Like it's not just, oh, I have this opinion, I'm morally correct, so therefore the world should agree.

You have to have this curiosity to go, well, well, these people probably aren't wrong on purpose.

So why do they think this?

What are the underlying conditions or incentives that are making them think this way?

You know, Lincoln, a lot of people have tried to go, well, you know, Lincoln is equivocating on slavery because, you know, he was so understanding of the South.

But no, that's what empathy is.

He says, you know, like, we are just what they would be.

We are just.

They are just what we would be in their in if we were in their condition.

Meaning he's like, if you were raised in the south and this is what you were taught from day one you would think about it this way and so what what you have to have the negative capability to understand and for people that don't know that's a

thing that keats talked about the ability to have mutually exclusive ideas in your head at the same time or contradictory ideas you have to be able to go here's what they think and here's why they think it That's not going to change what I know to be true, or that's not going to change the fact that that's still fundamentally incorrect.

But I have the ability to understand why it is that way.

And that is usually a prerequisite to doing anything about it, or doing anything about it effectively.

Like Elon Musk is right.

The federal government is very inefficient.

And he has a lot of domain expertise in his specific areas.

But most people predicted Doge would fail because it would run up into these sort of long-standing obstacles and difficulties that I think he thought he could overwhelm with sheer force.

Do you know Sam Corcos from Levels?

You know Levels, it's like a glucose monitor thing.

Oh, yeah, yeah, Levels.

So he was the founder of Levels.

He is now the CIO of the Treasury Department.

Yeah.

I'm interviewing him on Thursday.

We got an episode with him on Thursday.

It's the first long-form

conversation anybody from Doge has been permitted to have.

And it's been like, it's okay to happen.

And this is one of the kind of the fundamental questions which is how

tied up in bureaucratic red tape fuckery is the inside of the government when it comes to trying to make things more efficient and how much can you take the silicon valley mindset of notion templates and slack and and if this then that zapier fucking integrations how much can you zap your integrate your way through like vibe code how much can you vibe code yeah the government into efficiency yes and how much of it is this ossified, walnut-shelved, mahogany, leather fucking Chesterfield sofa bullshit that's getting in the way?

And I think that's going to be.

And then how much of it is there

because

that is the

best solution to an imperfect situation?

And do you have the humility and the openness

and the

empathy to understand that that's why it is that way?

Does that suggest that

along with wisdom comes a

humble comportment sort of gets brought in for the ride as well, that an amount of humility grows with the more that you are wise?

I think so.

I think so.

You know,

Epictetus said one of the signs that you're making progress in the path to wisdom is that you get in fewer arguments.

And I don't think that means that you

just roll over all the time

or that

you have no core values.

It's just you understand,

well, this is why they think what they think.

As I get older,

I certainly do have fewer opinions about shit that I don't think actually matters.

I have fewer opinions.

as I get older about other people's opinions, right?

Because

they're right.

They like that, You know, and I'm spending a lot of my energy trying to explain why they shouldn't like that, as if it changes or means anything.

And so

part that stoicism was this idea of getting to a smooth flow of life.

Right.

Now, you can get to a smooth flow of life by

removing yourself from most of the contentious and complicated parts of life, right?

You can have a smooth flow of life if you live on an island in the middle of the Pacific and you don't work, right?

Like if you never have to worry about money, you're not trying to do anything.

You're not trying to accomplish anything.

You don't care about anything.

It's pretty easy to live on vibes.

Can you get to a smooth flow of life in the arena, right?

As you're trying to accomplish and do and contribute that.

You can do your live talk with a fully scripted out comfort monitor in front of you and slides behind you.

Can you do it when there's no presentation and you've just got off a plane 12 minutes ago?

Well, you can have it

if it always goes that way, you'll be fine, but it's not always going to go that way.

It's a kind of fragility associated.

Yes, it does.

Yes.

And so resilience, adaptability, you know, being able to function and contribute and perform is the ability to work in less than ideal environments with less than ideal people.

And that's, I think, a skill you cultivate and develop over time.

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Given that we've got modern culture of shortcuts, life hacks, how do you convince people that

wisdom is worth a long, uncomfortable path?

The thing is, at some point in your life, you're going to need it, right?

You're going to come to some vexing decision, some challenging moment.

You're going to go through something.

You're going to be in the middle of something.

And in that moment,

you're going to want to have wisdom to draw on, right?

Wisdom that needed to be accumulated a long time ago.

It will be too late in that moment for you to do the crash course, to figure out all the things that you need to do, to develop the meta skills you need to solve this problem in front of you.

And so are you doing the work now?

To me, that's the question.

I think one of the things we can all agree

about wisdom is that it's not something you're born with.

There's certainly people who are wiser than others, but I don't think any of them came out of the womb that way.

Which is what distinguishes it from something like raw intelligence.

Yes.

Compute power.

Yeah.

Wisdom is something you accumulate over time.

And so if you're going to want to draw on it in the future, what are the deposits you're making now?

So that's the investment.

that you make in wisdom.

There's a story Seneca tells us, and I think it goes to this very idea of hacks and shortcuts and the fetishizing of

like gurus and teachers who can just tell you everything you need to know.

Watch this video and I'll tell you everything you need to know or come to this seminar.

He talks about this Roman who wanted to be seen as smart.

And so the Roman could have

gone to classes.

The Roman could have read hundreds of books.

The Roman could have experienced things.

And instead, this guy acquires a

number of wealthy slaves.

Or sorry, this wealthy Roman acquires a number of very literate slaves, each one like an expert on a different topic.

And at dinner parties, they would, you know, whisper in his ear the things that he needs to know.

And so everyone kind of thinks he's very smart.

And the guy thinks he's getting away with it.

He thinks he's figured out this shortcut until

one of the men comes up to him and says, you know, hey, this is a great party.

You're very, you know, love this reparte.

He says, have you ever thought of taking up wrestling, competing in a wrestling competition?

He goes, wrestling.

I'm like an old man.

Why would I do that?

And he says, but look at how young your slaves are.

The point is, like, they can't do that for you also.

And I think we are under the impression, for instance, that

artificial intelligence is this magical, transformative thing because it contains all this knowledge.

But you still have to know what questions to ask it.

You still have to be able to separate the good answers from the hallucinated, nonsensical answers, right?

It can tell you,

you know, oh yeah, that quote you're talking about, it's in this book.

But you have to know what that quote is, right?

You have to know some,

vaguely know what it is.

And you can really only do that from the work.

It can help you solve some problems, but if you can't recognize a good solution from a bad solution or bullshit from

a real insight, it's not going to do much for you.

And I think people think

that people are always looking for some magical thing that will exempt them from having to do this really hard thing.

And it almost never works.

Do you know that story about chauffeur knowledge?

Is this Richard Feynman, maybe, or somebody else's famous physicist in the 1900s?

And he was going around giving the same lecture and over and over again.

And his chauffeur was there at every single lecture that he gave.

And after a while, the chauffeur basically knew the lecture by heart.

And he said, Hey, wouldn't it be funny if one day we swapped and you went up and I'll dress as the chauffeur and you'll come in.

And this guy goes up and he gives the lecture and it's perfect the exact same way that the guy that was supposed to do it.

And somebody at the end asks a question and says, Excuse me, I just need to ask you about this.

He says, That is a question that's far too difficult for me.

You're going to have to ask my chauffeur.

And turns to the chauffeur that's the real guy.

Yeah, to know by heart is not to know.

Well, Naval came on the show at the start of the year, and just this lovely idea, which is there is a big difference between appearing wise and being wise and the temptation to rote memorize things that give the allure, the illusion of wisdom.

Like this looks like being wise because it is an insight that someone far smarter than me came up with.

The difference between being able to put that out, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

It's like, right, okay.

I understand and have retained the concept.

That's a very good first start because without understanding it and retaining it, right down, right down, right down,

you don't know it at all.

So great first step.

But what does it mean to be able to explain it three different ways?

What does it mean to be able to apply it in your life?

What does it mean to

see that insight when you're gripped by emotion?

Yes.

Yeah.

To even recognize that there was a kernel of insight or truth in the idea is no, is not nothing.

But then, yeah, to really know it is the next thing.

And this is where the interplay between reading study and exposing yourself to ideas and then having experiences is so important.

And it's also why it's a loop, because

there are some things, you know, maybe narrative non-fiction or whatever,

travel book or something.

You read it once and you're like, I get the argument.

I get what I'm supposed to take from this.

And then many of the great texts, literature, philosophy,

plays, stories, poems, et cetera, you have to read, have experiences, read again, have experiences, because

every vantage point that you look at it from,

particularly with the passage of time, allows you to unlock something new in it.

McConaughey says when he's reading a script, that he reads it when he's tired, when he's happy, when he's hungover.

And each time that he reads it, because you don't have the luxury of taking five or 25 years to go back to fucking crime and punishment or whatever.

You need short period, okay, so how can I change my state so that that different perspective that I'm coming in from, that different vantage point, I get access to.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

There are books that you,

there are books, you know, people go, oh, I read that.

And there are books that are designed for you to be reading.

It's not a thing you have done.

It is a thing you are doing.

And

this was easier to do in the ancient world because there were just fewer fewer texts.

You know, there was fewer, you know, you might read the Odyssey 500 times in the course of your life or hear it exposed because there's not any other, you know, major works to draw on.

We have this,

you know,

we have all of human history.

We have thousands of years of extra history and knowledge and art and stories that some of the ancients didn't have.

That's our blessing and our curse.

Well, I think that's

a really interesting challenge that we're facing.

A lot of the time, people may have thought they knew who they were, and in the modern world, have sort of lost themselves.

I had geographically triangulated who I am and why I'm here at this point.

And then they go through a period of protracted challenge.

They lose a thing, a person, a belief in themselves.

And now, this sort of paradox of choice, lots of options open in front of me, plus this unmooring from who they thought they were before,

arrives them at a port that they have no idea where the ships sail to.

So what do you think a wise stoic would say about somebody who's lost themselves in life?

Yeah,

when you lose everything, there's something...

very freeing about that when all your assumptions have been challenged or turned over and there's something profoundly destabilizing about it because you don't you don't have anything so it i think you go

maybe one of the things you do is you go back to those things that were formative to you at one point

and i i've been thinking a lot now about like what i'm rereading what i'm re-watching what i'm re-examining Because now that I am different, now that I am in different places,

what strikes me about them is so different.

But there is something

nostalgic and beautiful about going back to something where you're like, well, I knew who I was when I read A Great Gatsby for the first time because I was 17 and I know exactly what class I was in and what I thought was important.

And I can look here and see

what I marked.

Like Joan Didion has this famous essay about journaling.

And she says, you know, why did I record a thought that I had at a train station in Pennsylvania?

Why did I write down this thing that I overheard someone say in a restaurant?

Why did I write down this or that?

Why did I tell this story?

And she'd been journaling since she was five years old.

Her mother gave her, she told her,

she told her mother she was bored one day.

And Joan Didian's mother said, Well, here's a notebook.

Why don't you write a story?

And then you can have something to read.

And so she'd been taking notes for her whole life.

And in this famous essay on notebooks, she says, well, why did I, why, why do I do this?

Is it a professional like Rolodex?

Is this like

someday I'll find a story to put this quote in?

And then she said, no, that's, that's, it's got to be more than that.

She says, um, the purpose of journaling is to keep on nodding terms with who I used to be.

She's like, that's what it is.

It's to remember to who it's, it's to remember who I used to be.

And there's something very powerful about journaling.

Like I have this journal that I do every day where it has five lines on it.

And, you know, so every five years I do a new one, but you write like where you were on that day, what you're doing, what you were thinking about five years ago, or that day.

And then you do it the next year, and the next year, and the next year.

And the first year, it's kind of cool.

And the second year, it's kind of cool.

But by three, four, and five, it's very powerful because you're like, oh, you know, in September of 2022, this is what I was thinking about.

And that feels very urgent and important, or that feels like silly and weird.

And

so her point was that what journaling allows us to do is not just write down and record something, but it's almost like

it's like taking a picture on your phone and both cameras are working.

Like it's taking the picture of what you're looking at and it's taking the picture of you as you're looking at it.

And it depends on which of those is actually the more important image to capture, right?

And I think journaling as a practice is very helpful to prevent.

some of those dark nights of the soul.

I don't know who I am.

I don't know what any of this means.

I don't know what happened.

Because you do know what happened.

You've been

monitoring it and tracking it incrementally as you go.

I wonder whether the meta lesson as well is

nothing is as important as you think it is,

apart from when you're thinking about it.

Yes.

Like that moment when you are caught up in the rumination cycle, the worry, the despair, the depression, the anxiety, the concern.

And although people unfortunately don't tend to journal when this is happening, happening, the elation, the bravado, the overconfidence.

Yeah, the ephemerality of all of it.

Like

this is from Buddha,

but the story is, you know, the wisest philosopher in the world was asked to find a phrase that's true in any and every situation and always has been and always will be true.

And what...

The answer that comes back is, and this too shall pass.

And,

you know, that can be

true of grief.

That can be true of, you know, an incredible triumph.

It can be true of despair.

It can be true of happiness, torture.

All of it lasts

longer, less long than you think it does.

And eventually it all does end.

Like it ends one way or another, the Stoics say.

Like, like you're the Stoics say, like, when you're feeling like profound pain or like sickness or whatever, you can say confidently to yourself,

this is going to end, either because it's going to kill you or it's going to go away, right?

And

sometimes it's only zooming out and getting a little perspective on your own life that you realize this is true, and then zooming out and looking at things historically that you realize, oh, this has always been true for every person who has ever lived.

I was reading Unbroken

about Zampurini and I'd never read that.

So my favorite stories are kind of solo or group People Against the Odds.

Endurance by Alfred Lansing,

Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urkhan.

Yeah, yeah.

You want to.

And Unbroken, Laura Hillebrand

about Louis Zampurini.

And I said this to you last time.

No one's done a good Stockdale book yet, have they?

I'm in the works.

No way.

Let's fucking go, dude.

I'm maybe three chapters in.

I've been.

That's going to be the next one.

That's.

Once the wisdom is this, and then that's the next one.

i so perfect his story is fucking incredible like so much better than you would think it is like i think people think

we know about stockdale yeah yeah yeah so for people who don't know stocktale shot down over north vietnam he spends basically seven years in what's called the hanaway hilton where he's tortured spends the vast majority of that time in solitary confinement,

horrendously tortured.

Okay, so the key to understand, like, it's not, it's, it's actually a much more powerful story than even Unbroken, because

Zamparini, I think I'm saying that right, is your ordinary prisoner of war, right?

He is an enemy combatant held against his will, right?

So

Stockdale is in effectively a re-education prison, right?

Like the job is to take these people, to break them, and to turn them into propaganda assets.

Okay, but the thing you need to know about Stockdale is Stockdale is in the air the night of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

So Stockdale is there at the beginning of the Vietnam War, which is begun under effectively false pretenses.

So when he is shot down several months later, and he's parachuting into this camp and he says to himself, you know, I'm entering the world of Epictetus.

He's not just going to be held captive and not seen his family for, you know, however long.

He possesses the most terrible secret that you could possibly possess.

Other than perhaps knowing the nuclear codes or the, you know, like there isn't a secret that his captors would have been more

motivated to know than to know that he was in the air and watched them effectively.

He says we were shooting at ghosts, that there was nothing there that

because

the North Vietnamese know know that they cannot win militarily they have to win in the court of global public opinion so imagine they were to come in possession of a pilot who was there who who saw his country do something wrong and imagine they could flip this person so breaking isn't like oh hey let me tell you like how a US aircraft carrier works or let me tell you like the secret vulnerable spots on the F-16 he possesses the most significant secret of and and and

piece of information.

Like he has a very special sort of artillery shell hidden inside of his brain.

Yeah.

And that can be deployed by people who would really like that specific weapon.

Or just imagine the moral weight of what he is dealing with.

So he's not, it's not like he's,

you know.

flying over Nazi Germany and he gets shot down and he's being held by the worst people of all time.

He's fighting.

He is not

fighting.

It's a morally complicated position.

He doesn't have pure virtue to stand on top of.

Yes.

And so he has to bear the weight of this.

It's a flimsy position to hold.

Yes.

And so

what is he holding on to?

He's holding on to this idea that he is his brother's keeper and that if he betrays his country, who he's really betraying is the other 200 or so prisoners and then all the other draftees and officers.

He's portraying, he's not worried about protecting Lyndon Johnson, right?

He's worried about the person in the cell next to him.

And so

the mental gymnastics and the moral injury and weight that this guy has is unfathomable if you think about it.

Yeah, whereas

when you look at Alistair Urquhart from The Forgotten Highlander,

disentry for four years, straight, forced march, bridge over the River

et cetera, et cetera, locked in a tin box, knocked off his feet by the bomb blast from Nagasaki.

Hardcore shit.

That's like the equivalent of just climbing Mount Everest, which is just you versus the elements, you versus this.

The battle of attrition that's on this sort of one plane of existence.

Yes.

What you're saying that Stockdale had was this like astral

karmic challenge that he's also fighting with.

Yeah.

And so far I've been fascinated by his childhood.

And then when he's at the Naval Academy, and this is what I've I've been learning out about, so when he's at the Naval Academy,

when he's a senior, the first,

the man, his name is Wes Brown, who would go on to be the first black graduate of the Naval Academy, is also there.

So he's the Jackie Robinson, effectively, of the Navy.

And so.

as Stockdale is this young student who's just trying to get ahead he's watching this other guy go through this you know horrendous ordeal like he had to have like basically guards on him because they were worried other midshipmen might kill him.

And he, there was a sustained campaign to give this guy, Wes Brown, demerit so he'd get kicked out of the academy.

So they wouldn't have to graduate him and then he wouldn't become a naval officer.

There have only been like 10 naval officers in history, black officers in history before this happened.

So he's watching another person

go through effectively what he has to go through 20 years later, a sustained campaign to break you as a person and crush your soul, right?

That's what the, the,

the,

the

captors in the prison are not just trying to go, hey, if we don't give them food and water, you know, will they turn on their country?

They're trying to break them as human beings.

You know, they're torturing them.

They're playing mind games.

And his famous thing, Stockdale is

tortured for days on end.

And then they basically, in a moment, they switch and they go, Okay,

it's too much.

We pushed you too far.

We're sorry.

Why don't you go to the bathroom, clean yourself up?

You can go back to your cell.

And he realizes that they would never give him anything for free.

They would never be nice to him for any reason.

So he realizes, oh, there must be a reason they want to clean me up.

And he realizes they're about to parade him in front of the cameras.

They want him to give a videotaped statement.

Maybe he's even sensing in this moment that they know what he knows.

And so at this moment, he walks into the bathroom.

He says he knew he had about a minute in there.

And he begins to beat his face to a bloody pulp with the stool.

And then he cuts, he shatters the mirror, and he basically scalps himself.

Like he cuts, he gives himself what he calls a reverse mohawk.

He just takes this jagged head and he cuts it off the back of his head.

He basically makes himself

unspeakable.

Yeah, he's bleeding everywhere.

And

they come in and they think he's trying to kill himself, and he hasn't.

He's just

maimed himself, so he is unfilmable.

Not pressworthy.

Yeah.

And they go, you know,

you know, what are we supposed to do?

We were supposed to take you downtown.

And he goes, you tell the major that the commander won't be going downtown.

And so he has this, you know, sort of this like.

this determination and this grit and this intensity that takes on a whole different color when you realize what he's holding and what he's been through.

And that he realizes that,

yeah, it's about his connection to these people, which I think is interesting.

What I'm,

you find these threads, you go, oh, this is something that you believe at 38,

however, he's in his late 30s when he's in this camp.

Now he's a commander.

That he fundamentally didn't believe when he was 20 at the Naval Academy.

He doesn't participate in the hazing of

this guy, Wes Brown, But like famously, Jimmy Carter, who's like from the deep south, is in their class.

And Jimmy Carter runs cross-country with them.

And Jimmy Carter is famously like this supporter, a guy who grows up in the segregated South is there helping and encouraging this guy.

And Stockdale is like sort of too busy doing his own thing.

And so I'm fascinated.

And how does this person go from like selfish in the way that when we're young, we're all, I'm into me and my thing and what I'm trying to do.

I don't know.

I love me.

Who do you love?

I don't have time for this other stuff.

You know, like the, if not, if I am not for me, who is?

And then he becomes by the end, if I am only for me, who am I?

And that's the arc of Stockton.

That's the arcam round.

I cannot wait for you to do that.

I'm loving it.

That's it.

That's sick.

And I guess

conspiracy tracking a story, but it's over like a tighter timeline, right?

But a lot of investigation, what's going on, but this is like archive shit.

Well, yeah, to go to what we started with, like the reason I'm doing the book is because I've never done a book like this.

And I wanted, I love those kinds of books.

So like the book could come out and sell zero copies.

The book could come out and everyone could say that I

suck and I failed at it.

But I have learned a lot.

Like

I have gotten better at what I actually do in struggling to do this thing, which is not what I normally do.

Actually, I want to bring up a video of yours that I remember seeing.

I want to say,

did you video yourself getting the call from your publisher about the New York Times list of the last book or the one before?

I think I've done it a couple of times.

Okay.

So you know when the call's coming in.

Okay.

So

yeah, there's this video.

Maybe your kid's in the room or maybe not.

Anyway, and you're there and you're talking to them and they say, Ryan, just congratulations, bestseller.

You came in at number, whatever the fuck.

And you

say, thank you very much.

That's good.

And then basically, but now I must get back to writing the next book.

Yes.

And I remember watching that.

And, you know, we've met, this is episode like seven.

First time you came on the show was like fucking six, seven years ago or something.

Yeah, yeah, forever ago.

Like when I was still in the show.

Oh, this is sick.

I thought you were saying I was on sick.

Got it.

I get it.

So I've got like a, you know, a good understanding of sort of, I think, where you're at.

I wanted to ask you about that because

that, at least from the outside, looks a little bit like somebody who is struggling to take a moment to celebrate their accomplishments because not, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's as

philosophically shallow as I'm just moving on to the next thing.

Yeah, I don't think it's that, but I do wonder whether there is a Puritan work ethic driving you to the point where this thing that happened that's great, that by all accounts, I probably should put the fucking book down get some cake and allow my like put the put a couple of banners up I know they're shit like light some candles and and have a little thing have a little celebration is that because I'm I'm very interested one of the criticisms typically of stoicism is sort of a

lack of celebration of the good this sort of um indifference to emotion that is good in times of strife, but kind of like having sex with a condom on in times of, you know, in times of good.

It's like a prophylactic against everything, fortunately, including the celebrations.

Did you consider taking the condom off at some point?

There's a couple of things there.

I think talking about wisdom, one of the things you'll, sometimes

you can hear from older people is like, take the fucking compliment.

You know, like, like some, you're, you're being like, oh, no, it was nothing or I don't care.

And they're like, no, no, no, I appreciate it.

You should take the compliment.

And I think that's something that everyone should work on.

If someone's saying they like something, if someone's saying great job, be gracious with it because you think you're being self-effacing, but actually, you're rejecting the middle finger to them, yes, exactly.

And I, I, I think that's something I've tried to work on.

Some people see that, they go, Okay, like, so you

hit number one, which I've been lucky enough to do a couple times, and and then you just work right back to work.

Where's the joy?

Where's the fun?

Um, and my answer is that the joy and the fun is not in throwing a party for hitting number one.

I like doing it, like, I, like, I like writing books.

Like, where I am right now in the book that I am writing is my absolute favorite place to be.

Like, I, I, I'm not in the early phases of like, what is this?

Is this anything?

I'm in the

thick of like every day, there's like a challenging, uh, invigorating problem to solve.

And then I'm making progress on it.

And it's coming together.

And I'm learning and I'm growing and I'm, I'm doing what I like am meant to do.

So

one of the hardest parts of the schedule that I am on is that usually

my last project is coming out when I'm in my favorite part of the next one, which is why you still fight up about Stocktale and we should be talking

wisdom.

Yeah, like I didn't really do, I maybe got like 45 minutes of writing done today because I had a doctor's appointment and then I'm here and then I got pick up my, so like I'm actually not doing the thing that I like to do.

Um, not that I don't like this, that this is amazing, but like I like doing the thing.

That's and and I

think early in my career, career, like all people,

I was somewhat extrinsically motivated.

Like I wanted to hit the

bestseller list.

I wanted you to say it was amazing.

I wanted recognition.

I wanted all that.

And I still do like those things.

And I'm not shrugging them off as nothing.

It's just,

I just feel like the reward for succeeding should not be taking away from that.

Like, I'll tell you, like, my first, the first time I hit the New York Times bestseller list,

still and this is a key debut at number one in 2019.

And I remember I woke up, I was in LA on book tour, and

I could, I, you know, my alarm goes off my phone.

And one of my rules is I don't check my phone the first thing that I do when I wake up because I try to-

Yeah.

Exactly.

The iPhone is the alum.

And so, so it's like, you know, you pick up your phone and you're like, some stuff has happened.

You know, like, I can tell some stuff has happened.

And, and, and I remember going yeah um as i was staying at the los angeles athletic club which is one of my favorite places to swim and i i go okay like this is either good news or it's bad news about the book because it's coming from new york right so i'm on the west coast uh your three hour spots yeah so i i woke up and i was like i'm gonna go for a swim i'm gonna swim my exercise i'm gonna do the thing i love to do here

and the news is the news it's like you know the cat in the box right it's like i'm either a bestseller or i'm i'm not yep um I should get to enjoy the swim either way.

And so I went, I had this great swim.

And then I checked in and I, I, you know, it was a call from my agent and my publisher and my wife, and it was great.

But like, even if it had been- Where the fuck have you been?

I was, I, I, I was swimming, uh, front stroke.

In a way, the good news is just as much a catastrophe as the bad news, right?

Like the, the, the good news, if, if I get the good news and then I go swimming, I'm just thinking about that the whole time.

Like presence is the gift.

Just being in the moment, enjoying the thing is what you like.

I am going to interject there.

I

abhor open loops.

Okay.

Fucking,

I am allergic.

You couldn't leave that out.

I am allergic.

I'm working on it.

And

I know that it's a challenge of mine that not knowing what's going on with this thing to me is the sort of shit that keeps me awake, the sort of shit that wakes me up at four in the morning.

It's the sort of thing that causes me to be thinking about that when I should be thinking about whatever else.

I would struggle with that.

And yet, I would say as well, I've seen other videos, random shit that just pops up from you.

There's this video where you were complaining about trash.

Someone had left loads of trash like near the driveway to your ranch or something.

There was another one about fence posts that might have even been like five years ago.

And I do remember seeing some of these different way markers.

And it's not a representative, it's what you've recorded and chosen to put online that the algorithm's chosen to give to me that I can remember.

There's a lot of filter here, but

I do get a sense of like regulation

from

seeing your stuff.

And there is something

sort of wonderful in the purity and the almost

complimentarily, the boneheadedness, the stubbornness, some might say, right?

The

single-mindedness

of some of these approaches that, sure, some days days I'm only going to get 45 minutes in, but for the most part, like this is, I am a writer, I am a thinker, I am a musician, and this is the main thing.

And the main thing is for me to keep that the main thing.

And I do find that, you know, as a supporter from the sidelines of that stuff, it is good to see somebody who I think,

at least from the outside, appears to be trying to find that balance between I want to enjoy my life.

I want to care for my family.

I don't want to sacrifice everything in pursuit of the goal.

But given that I don't want to sacrifice everything and I want to make a dent in the world, I have to constrain the aperture of shit that I do down to a really, really, really small number of things.

That's interesting.

Yeah, there's a lot there.

I would say regulation is the key to life, right?

Getting emotionally regulated.

That's what stoicism is.

People think stoicism is the eradication of emotions.

It is the regulation of emotions.

It's not having none.

It's It's I'm feeling anger.

I am feeling frustration.

I am feeling envy.

I am feeling worry.

I am feeling anxiety.

And I don't have to impulsively act on that information, right?

And so how do you find, how do you build the practice of like, this is what I'm feeling, but this is what I'm gonna do, right?

Exercise, a physical practice is a great metaphor, a training ground for this because you're able to go like, I am feeling tired, I am feeling not into it, I am feeling cold, I am feeling whatever.

And you're saying to yourself, but that doesn't fucking matter.

Here's what you're going to do.

Right.

And so how do you practice deciding who's in charge?

That's, I think, really important.

And

it's something I think I've gotten better at over time.

And

you work on throughout your life.

I think I know that what I control is, and what I enjoy is the doing of the thing.

And I try to think less about the things that are not related to the doing of the thing.

And so

writing is what I like.

It's what I enjoy.

It's what I'm best at.

That's what I want to be doing.

And then publishing is the stuff that comes out the other side.

It's the byproduct of the discipline and whatever.

And so

that's kind of how I think about it.

Your point about these open loops,

I think that's a capacity you like, again, just it's it's It's a capacity you develop and increase.

Like, hey, I'm deciding I'm not going to think about this until tomorrow, or I I am going to be here for this school performance.

I'm going to, uh, I'm going to sit here for this, you know, however long this plane is delayed.

I'm going to, I, they told me I'm not going to get an answer back on this medical test for two weeks.

I'm not going to

waste two weeks feeling shitty.

And so, how, how do you, how do you go?

I decide what I'm going to think about.

And to me, that's a very stoic practice.

Like, and I think you, you, you do it in the,

in,

you develop it intentionally over often insignificant things so that in the significant things you could you can do it.

That's a good point.

I mean the

the ability to learn how to get out of quicksand is probably something that both of us could work out in an afternoon.

Yeah.

And we could practice it.

If you're trying to learn that while you're in quicksand, that's going to be significantly more difficult.

Also, quicksand doesn't exist.

It's basically a trope from Westerns in the 50s.

I've been psyoped by fucking American TV.

Well, I mean, it's one of those things where you're like, I got to be aware of Quicksand.

It's like, have you ever experienced?

You've been all over the world.

Have you ever seen Quicksand?

I haven't seen Quicksand, but I wasn't in America in the 50s.

So maybe that's it.

But yes, exactly.

Do you think intelligence then is overrated when compared with equanimity?

Well, I think intelligence poised with equanimity is a very powerful thing.

And there's a lot of intelligent people who don't have it.

And it prevents them from being as smart as they can be.

You know, Marcus Aurelius's stepfather, the emperor before him, Antoninus, his last, his final dying word is equanimitas or equanimity.

That's what he's trying to pass to

his son.

It's like the most powerful thing that a leader, a parent, a human being can have, right?

Is the ability to sort of

be even, to be regulated.

Again, this is easy to do when the world is simple and things are calm and nice, but that's not how it is, right?

So it's like, like when you have children, especially, like

they can't be regulated if you're not.

You see this if you have a dog, right?

You're like, the dog is crazy because you're crazy.

The dog is responding to your energy.

And what is, it can, it can sometimes be helpful to have something as unbiased as.

That's why people love equine therapy, right?

Because you have this creature which is really fucking sensitive.

it it gets a little woo there's some stuff that i went to equine therapy done it uh the the lady that was there that was really lovely was telling me about how the horse heart has a magnetosphere and it's able and i'm like this i'm we're getting into some astral realm shit here but i do not deny prey animal twitchy as fuck if you have bad energy it'll hurt you you'll you you you go oh okay and and then you yeah some of these things can seem very woo and then you go okay but i came into this this way, and now it's acting this way.

There's clearly been some kind of literally false, functionally true.

Yes, yes, or maybe fucking literally true, functionally true.

Yes,

yes, it exists.

It doesn't, it obviously isn't real, but it's obviously real.

Something's happening.

You know what's another good example of that?

It's like a hot streak.

Like statistically, obviously it makes no sense, but there is something about being in the zone, right?

But yeah, you go, oh, okay,

it's about how well can you,

how good are are you at going from dysregulated to regulated?

That's what stoicism is.

I think a wonderful game for couples to play

is something like, when we get out of connection, the game is how quickly can we get back into it.

Yes.

And what a wonderful goal for you both, because it's the dopamine.

It's this sort of cohesive, we're working together thing.

It's a challenge.

It's not you against each other.

It's you against the problem.

Yeah.

And the third thing that is your relationship.

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

How quickly can we both get back into that?

Well, I'm going to do the thing that I know brings you back in and you're going to do the thing.

And I that's something it feels like some shit that Matthew Hosey's probably said.

He probably has it somehow.

Have you had Dr.

Becky on?

Dr.

Becky.

Dr.

Becky Kennedy?

No.

She's, I know you don't have kids, but it's the, she's like the parenting guru of our time, one of the

fucking greatest.

She's like, don't try to be a perfect parent.

Try to get better at repair.

Because you're going to screw up.

You're going to get dysregulated.

You're going to get distracted.

It's about how quickly you can come back and fix it.

And

Dr.

Becky stole my idea.

So it's about that.

Talking about the intelligence equanimity thing, and I think

a lot of very intelligent people struggle to be equanimous.

And

I don't know whether a lot of equanimous people struggle to be intelligent, but I think that one of the things that people who have got sort of deep inner peace

at least in my experience sometimes struggle with is that sort of outward drive to make a dent in the world.

And that's fine because

you are your own unit.

Yeah.

And who the fuck is anyone to say you're peaceful and largely content?

But have you not considered making yourself feel unworthy so that you can go and you know, write best-selling books?

Anyway,

I guess another, like an interesting question with regards to the wisdom thing is:

what are the mistakes that otherwise smart people make

most often that stops them from becoming wise?

Basically, what is the disadvantage that a person person who is very clever has

of achieving wisdom?

Are there certain hurdles that they need to overcome?

Well, I think we could say that there's a number of things that really smart people do that make them stupid, right?

Ego is obviously one of the things that makes us very dumb, right?

Because it...

filters everything through the lens of what we want to be true or how we see ourselves, what our identity is and not how things actually are.

So ego obviously makes us pretty stupid.

Obviously bad information makes

smart people stupid.

And of course ego contributes to this.

If you

crafted information diet that's about confirming what you already think or what you want to be true because you're so fragile and it challenges your ego, you're obviously going to get very stupid.

I think we could say that

Again, they seem to all center around ego, but

becoming complacent, ceasing to learn.

If you're a know-it-all, right?

You've learned everything that it's possible for you to know, right?

That's that line that you've got about you can't learn something you think you already know.

Yes, that's Epictetus.

But I think another way we get very stupid is

you see people acting stupidly.

out of a lack of empathy.

Like Elon said, you know, empathy is going to be the death of Western civilization.

Empathy is like the key to the greatest achievements of Western civilization and humanity, the ability to strategically understand what is going on over there.

What do they think?

So going back to Socrates, Socrates says, you know, no one is wrong on purpose, right?

Going, oh, they've thought themselves into this position.

They don't think they're being stupid.

They think they're being right.

You know, Temple Grandin famously watches this video.

She gets called in by these.

by these cattle ranchers who are trying to vaccinate their cows against these different illnesses and they put them through this chute.

And the cows are freaking out.

They didn't want to go in the chute.

They weren't even being like killed or hurt.

They just didn't want to go in the chute.

And they're forcing them and forcing them and forcing them.

And she, with a black and white camera, gets in and takes pictures.

And the black and white camera approximates how the cow is seeing the world.

She realizes that a lot of these things

are seem scary to a cat.

Like a hose on the ground looks like a snake in black and white.

Or she goes, when you get down in the cattle chute,

this chain that's rattling against the gate sounds incredibly loud.

And then it makes one cow scared, which makes another cow.

And then that energy is so the ability to get down and think about why someone else is thinking about what is, there's this German word, umwelt, which means like the world view of someone else.

What is it like to be a bat?

What's it like, you know,

what's it like to be my eight-year-old?

Because it's not the same as how I can.

So I'm going like, do this, you have to do this.

But that's, from my view, of 30, you know, more decades on this planet than him.

And so we go, yeah, what is it actually, how are you thinking about this?

What do you not understand?

What have you not had time to experience?

So empathy to me is the key, not just to like being a good person.

It's key to the virtue of justice.

But like when you look at most of the enormous blunders of history, you know, Iraq, Vietnam.

Fundamentally, it's this sense of like, well, here's what we think should happen.

Here's how we think it's going to go.

And then this

inability to conceive of the other people in the equation as being rational or reasonable or even

significant actors, right?

Engraved on the Temple of Apollo where the Oracle of Delphi sat, it said, you know,

one of the epigrams famously, we know, one of the famous ones is know thyself.

But the other one is, offer a guarantee and disaster threatens.

Right.

So you think you know how it's going to be.

You think you know how it should be.

This is often exactly what precedes like the biggest blunders of history, the lack of empathy to go, what do they think?

What do they want?

What are they going to do if we do this?

Right.

And so I think there's a number of kind of blind spots or

impediments to our intelligence or wisdom.

And so really

being wise is the removal of some of those things.

Like Socrates, you know,

someone is sent to that same oracle to ask why Socrates is so wise because he doesn't think that he's wise.

And it comes back, you know, he's the wisest man in Athens.

And as Socrates thinks about it, he realizes it's because he doesn't think that he's the wisest person, that he is, in fact, wisdom.

So it's like, what are the,

if we go, hey, I want to be wiser, I want to be smarter.

It's stepping back and going, well, where am I being stupid?

Like, what are, what are the things that are making me stupid that are impeding my judgment, impeding my ability to discern, to see what's really here?

And how do I strip those away?

That's how we get wiser.

Do you know the idea from mathematics of never multiply by zero?

No.

Okay.

So

take as big of a number as you want, 2,343,000, times it by 5, times by 52, times by 17 million,

times by zero.

You get zero.

Yes.

Right.

So you never multiply by zero.

And it's basically an argument that you can continue playing the game as long as you're not kicked out.

It's the reason that using too much leverage when you're trading is a bad idea.

Yeah.

But going bankrupt is a bad idea.

You can spend all of the time that you want looking after your health.

You eat a grass-fed diet.

You avoid seed oils and red 40.

But one day you decide to not wear your seatbelt in the car.

Yes.

Sure.

Zero.

Yes.

You spend your teenage years working very hard at your education.

You make it to university.

You're just about to start on this brand new adventure.

And you have unprotected sex and get somebody pregnant.

Not quite zero, but fucking big, big change.

Avoid the major stupid things.

Correct.

Avoid the major stupid things.

And

that idea of, okay,

in the world of business and in the world of sort of objective outward metrics of success, I probably should double down on my strengths because my highest point of contribution is where all the gains accrue to the very, very top, right?

Power law.

So move yourself up.

Oh, you're 99.5, get to 99.6.

That's really great.

It's a huge, big change.

However, when it comes to life, like the shortcomings are what's going to kill you.

There's a great idea from Visekan Varasami, and he says, he calls it the divorce paradox, which is why do people who are seemingly the best friends in public so reliably end up breaking their marriage apart?

And it's because we don't realize that the bad times and the way you deal with bad times are a much better predictor of long-term marriage success than how much you enjoy the good ones.

Nobody,

I would estimate most marriages don't end because of too few peak experiences.

Sure.

We're not having many will

from too many and too much rupture without repair, effectively.

Like that is what pulls you down into negative equity within a relationship.

And you can reinvest that back in.

But really, it's like calories, right?

Why is it that you control your diet more than you control your expenditure when it comes to exercise?

Because it's way easier to eat 400 calories than it is to expend them.

And I think marriage, as the non-married guy in the room, is similar to that.

That the amount of work you need to do in terms of good things to offset that fucking shit argument you just had last night is an awful lot.

So, hey, control your calories.

Like, make sure you get good at repair after rupture in the same way as ensure that you don't multiply by zero in your personal life.

I was just thinking of a couple more things that smart people do that make them stupid.

One is like you don't deal with your childhood issues, right?

So you, you are very smart.

You are very successful.

You are very powerful.

But there is a part of you that's an 11-year-old.

There's a part of you that's an angry teenager.

And that person is not who you trust with these high-stakes.

Have you done

much sort of emotional work?

What's that look like?

Yeah, the inner child work, I think, is really key.

When you find that kind of very young, very impulsive, very impetuous, very sensitive part of yourself, that's usually something that you haven't dealt with.

That's kind of a state of arrested development inside you.

Like that, you know, there's the, there's the, they say there's the adapted child, right?

The child that has to, the thing, the decisions, the assumptions you make about the world because your environment was not perfect growing up, right?

Those are coping mechanisms that made sense when you were 13 and your parents were splitting apart or, you know, you were

unattractive nerd who was bullied or, you know,

you lost a bunch of people.

You make these, you were abused, you went through these things.

So you made certain assumptions or adaptations to survive that.

And maybe that's not good now that you're the leader of a company of a thousand people or that you're making films in Hollywood.

You can't afford to be that 13-year-old, right?

So

I think you sometimes you see people, you know, like, this is the classic midlife crisis.

Like you're blowing up your life because there's some part of you that's like trying to get back to some earlier part of you.

Right.

And so I think you can see people who have sort of very smart, very rational in most aspects of their life, but they're making sort of very impetuous, irresponsible decisions because they've left something unaddressed.

The other thing I think we see people do that makes them stupid is like, and this goes to the idea of information diets, but I think

as I've gotten older, I've just seen more and more smart people that I know just kind of lose it, like lose, like go crazy, right?

Like, like your, your inputs are very important.

And also, taking care of this vessel is important.

And so, you know, I think sleep deprivation is cumulative.

The drugs you take are cumulative.

The stress you put on yourself is cumulative.

Your, the, the lonely nights is cumulative, right?

The, the hours that you work is cumulative.

And,

you know, you

get to a place where something snaps right uh jon stewart mills one of the smartest people who ever lived he has this crazy education and he snaps at like 20 years old um

you know you can only wind the rubber band so tight and and i think you see that so people people make really bad decisions and it's it's this it's like this trauma that they're not addressing and then it's producing new trauma in the present moment there's something that sort of fall

is especially in someone who's really really smart it feels

extra catastrophic pitiful um there's this sense of oh wow it happened to them

therefore

how am i a mere mortal protected from this thing well they're actually more vulnerable to it than you are because imagine you've gotten really used to trusting your instincts you've gotten really used to being right you've gotten really used to making contrarian bets like a friend of mine said you know having a a, making a contrarian bet that you turn out to be like massively right about can be a brain-destroying experience.

Oh, that's so great.

Because you've just learned that everyone else is an idiot and you're really smart.

And that

even though everyone is pointing out this problem and that problem, what about this?

And what about this?

You are,

you, you are learning the wrong lesson from that, which is like not like, oh, this is the one in a thousand times.

You're like, no, no, this is every time.

And so often that's why people who build like transformative companies or artists who had this reputation for being transgressive and, you know, they get themselves into trouble later because

they drink their own Kool-Aid.

They're just playing that same

thing again.

And it's different circumstances.

I think we all have this sense that our view of the world is the right one, right?

We're all biased toward that.

And if there is a time where your view of the world seems to be contrary to most or all other people, and you get to stand atop this big pedestal and say, fuck you all, I was right.

Yes.

The allure to think, run it back, like we're doing it again.

Yes.

Is so strong.

And this goes to what we're talking about, though.

It's like, okay, so that's a historical fact.

Right.

Like there are so many great historical examples of that same thing happening.

So you want to learn, you want to see that so you can recognize the pattern in your own life, which is almost certainly not going to be as catastrophic or as significant, right?

So, when I went to my publisher in 2011 or 2012, and I was like, hey, I'd like to write about Stoic philosophy, they were like, what?

And that was not a thing they were excited about.

Now, I ended up being obviously very right about that, but I try to actively think about why they thought it was a bad idea and in what ways they were right and and in what ways i was correct but only accidentally so you know what i mean like i wasn't this far-seeing genius who predicted all of this was going to happen i had an idea for one thing that i wanted to do so question on that how and i i've i put myself in the camp of someone who uh doesn't have the courage of his convictions as much as i think i should

i think uh not fantastic at listening to my instinct, not fantastic at listening to my gut, very sort of top-down, not bottom-up, very sort of existing above the neck.

For me, I get the sense that it would probably be a good thing for me to maybe go, I think I'm right on this, and I'm going to commit to that.

What is your,

give me the contrarian perspective on this?

What you want to do is go, okay, I'm having this feel, like I'm doing this and I'm getting this pushback, or people are questioning it for this reason, or it seems, you know, like an impossible task for this reason.

And then is the part of me that's resisting that

ego?

Or is it like, no, I have secret knowledge here?

Is it that I've really done the work?

I've really thought about this and I have an answer for that, right?

I think about this when I get edits back on my book.

I don't like getting edits, right?

Is my objection to the idea of, am I feeling this as the 15-year-old who doesn't like to be told what to do?

Or, and some of those notes, that is what's happening.

And I need to put, I need to talk to that kid and go,

this

is trying to help you.

You should listen to them.

And then there's the part of me that knows what I'm trying to do and knows what I'm trying to say and has really thought about this.

And I have an answer to why that's not a correct bit of feedback.

And distinguishing between the impulsive emotional resistance and the sort of rational

courage of your convictions is a different, these are very different things.

And I think that's really important.

And so it's probably better that you're not,

you know, blowing shit up on a whim.

Yeah, this sort of missionary,

you know, profit thing of like,

that's, that's what's going to, that might serve you well until eventually it blows you up.

It's a higher likelihood of multiplying by zero by doing that.

And so I go, I try to think about, okay, I wanted to write these books about stoicism, this book about stoicism, and it turned out I was right.

What are the good lessons to learn from that?

And what are the lessons, the lies that I want to make sure I'm not taking from that?

And then, you know, like this bookstore that I opened, you know, like it was a stupid idea.

It was crazy.

It shouldn't have worked.

It did work.

Now, why did it work?

It was because I thought about why it would work and I minimized the downside and I

turned it into a fucking office.

Yeah.

That's

not the lesson.

The lesson is not when I feel like doing something, I should just do it.

And people...

you know, are always trying to hold me back.

And so those are just like a couple minor examples in my life that

I was able to learn and recognize in the moment because I watched, you know, because I've read about, you know, this Nobel Prize winner who thinks they found a magical cure for this.

I mean, like Newton got into like alchemy.

You watch how smart people learn the wrong lesson from their success.

And then you want to make sure that when you experience success or you have these analogous moments in your life, you're like, okay, this is my opportunity in a low stakes, low-key way to learn the same lesson as opposed to needing to escalate, escalate, escalate to eventually learn it catastrophically.

I love that idea of sort of a dose response or there's a particular waterline that you need to get past in order to have this unteachable lesson.

Well, some people are more and less teachable than others.

Yes.

So I guess.

We mentioned that what are some of the impediments of intelligence to wisdom.

Another interesting question would be something like, what are the prices that a wise person pays that an unwise person doesn't?

What are the costs of being wise?

Yeah.

I mean, self-consciousness can be tricky.

Like there is a,

you've never done it before, you know, you don't know how hard it's going to be.

You don't know what to be wary of.

You don't know what to be intimidated by.

You can just plow ahead, right?

And I do think in art, creativity, business, self-consciousness is sometimes an impediment it's an it you're overthinking right and so wisdom if wisdom paralyzes you if wisdom makes you think about everything from every angle uh and thus deprives you of the energy or the enthusiasm to do the thing that can be a real problem i think the other the other

side effect of wisdom, although it's not really wisdom, but they can be associated with each other, is like a sort of certain cynicism, right?

Like

Feynman talked about how like you shouldn't lose the wonder.

Like, you know, he says, you look in through a microscope, he says, you know, does it make your heart flutter?

It should still make your heart flutter.

And there is something where the

byproduct of the learning and the understanding and the experience and the years of it can make you kind of jaded and cynical.

And that

that's sad and tragic.

And I think you, you have to,

it shouldn't deprive you of hope.

It shouldn't deprive you of purpose, it shouldn't deprive you of these really wonderful things.

It just means you have to work for them in a new way.

Ryan Holiday, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you're great.

I appreciate you.

I can't wait for the Stockdale book.

Uh,

where should people go?

Keep up to date with the million things that you

daily stoic on YouTube.

I think my name on YouTube.

I don't know.

Just Google around.

They'll figure it out.

Fuck yeah.

Ryan, I appreciate you.

Thanks, man.

If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out.

And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful, and entertaining that I've ever found.

Fiction and non-fiction and real-life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it.

And it's completely free.

You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com/slash slash books.

That's chriswillx.com slash books.