Adam Grant on Ego and Knowledge

On today’s podcast, Ryan talks to author Adam Grant about his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know, why the Stoics believed in the power of intellectual humility, how to keep your ego at bay, and more. Adam Grant is an author, organizational psychologist, and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Grant is the author of 4 New York Times bestselling books and the host of WorkLife, a highly rated TED original podcast. This episode is brought to you by Public Goods, the one stop shop for sustainable, high quality everyday essentials made from clean ingredients at an affordable price. Receive $15 off your first Public Goods order with no minimum purchase. Just go to publicgoods.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout. This episode is also brought to you by Talkspace, the online and mobile therapy company. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show. This episode is also brought to you by The School of Greatness podcast. Hosted by Lewis Howes it features interviews from athletes, influencers, authors , and more. Subscribe to The School of Greatness on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or visit lewishowes.com/podcast. This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. This episode is brought to you by Beekeeper’s Naturals, the company that’s reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. As a listener of the Daily Stoic Podcast you can receive 15% off your first order. Just go to beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout to claim this deal.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Adam Grant:Twitter: https://twitter.com/adammgrant Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adamgrant/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AdamMGrant YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2yY1krHd_ESN5DD9QaSTUA See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My guest today is one of the most connected people in the world, a practitioner of the very give and take philosophy that he helped bring to the masses with his first and very popular book, also the number one bestselling author of Originals, a book that I quite enjoyed, and the author of Plan B with Sheryl Sandberg, which is sort of a very real-world obstacle is the way, how do you survive the blows of fate kind of a book. Adam is a super-nice guy, someone I've gotten to know over the years.

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  His TED Talks have been seen millions and millions of times. His books have sold millions and millions of copies. He has a BA from Harvard, a PhD from the University of Michigan, and was even a junior Olympic diver. He is just a great guy. I can't wait for you to listen to this episode. We talk about his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. And as we talk about the Stoics believed in the kind of intellectual humility that Adam is talking about, and we get into how do you know what you don't know? How do you learn? How do you grow? How do you challenge yourself? How do you keep ego at bay? And I think this is a great interview, and I can't wait for you to hear it.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  I wanted to start with one of my favorite quotes from Epictetus, which I think connects nicely with the new book. He says, "It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know." And so for the Stoics, the sort of the main impediment to knowledge and growth was not ignorance or stupidity, it was conceit. It was sort of that if you think you already know everything, in a sense, you're right because you can't learn anything else, especially that you might be wrong about something.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  As with pretty much everything else, the Stoics nailed it.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, that seems like a big theme in the new book is that basically sort of ego is this thing that prevents us from getting better because it just gets in the way.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think some might even say that ego is the enemy.

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  I've heard, yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  But I would say, yeah, I think ego is part of the story, right? It's very easy for us to overestimate our knowledge because we want to feel like experts and we take pride in our convictions and sometimes they even become part of our identity. But there are also some cognitive traps that we run into, right? So I think about ego as more motivational. I have a desire to paint myself in a positive light and to look in the mirror and see somebody amazing and brilliant staring back at me. But the cognitive piece is not what I'm willing to see, but what I'm able to see. And if you think about the Dunning Kruger effect, for example, one of the things that

• 3:33Speaker 01

  David Dunning has pointed out so thoughtfully is that sometimes when you lack the knowledge or skills to produce excellence, you also lack the knowledge and skills to judge excellence. And Ryan, the easiest example of this that comes to mind for me is I had a friend in high school who one day accused me of having no sense of humor.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  And I said, well, what makes you think that? And she said, you don't laugh at all my jokes.

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yikes.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  I'll leave it to you to judge who lacked the sense of humor. But she, she just thought everything she said was funny because she had no sense of what other people found funny.

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  Right. It's like, I think we often think that sort of stupidity or ignorance is like a void, that this person just doesn't know anything about this. And that's why they're sort of going around, uh, acting in the way that they're acting. And it's, it's often the exact opposite. It's that they, they really know, like they, they have very strong opinions and a very clear rationale for what they're doing. It just happens to be either totally wrong or something that you very much disagree with.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sometimes it's the illusion of knowledge and sometimes they have bad taste. And separating those two things is hard. But one thing that, that I think is fascinating from this body of evidence is that people who are completely ignorant rarely fall victim to this kind of overconfidence. Because if you literally know nothing about a topic, it's pretty hard to feel like you know anything.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  It's when, it's when you have a little bit of knowledge that it becomes dangerous. Because your confidence tends to climb faster than your competence.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  Right. That's what I was going to say, right? There's that expression, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I always think about the Super Bowl as an example of this. So you gather a group of friends for a Super Bowl party. And the, of, of the ones who are football fans, the one who knows the least about football is the most likely to be screaming at the coach, you're calling the wrong play. And the people who really understand football know how complex it is, right? And how many, how many question marks there are and what's going to work out and what isn't. And they evaluate a coach on a whole series of decisions, not on one call. At the same time, if you have a friend who hates football and has never watched it, that friend is not going to be commenting very much.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, although I think what's interesting about that example is, is it's also often, and I think sort of ego and this go hand in hand, which is it's often the person who feels most insecure, either in their place or in their knowledge or any number of things, that, that, that feels the least secure is the one who somehow feels obligated to talk the most or, or compensate for that. So, so this tricky thing about not knowing things is that, as you said, it doesn't often lead one to a place of quiet ignorance or just like, hey, I hope nobody notices. It almost, it often seems to manifest itself in sort of an aggressiveness that paradoxically

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  makes it very unlikely that your mistake will ever be rectified.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like to think about this as the Joey Tribbiani effect. Because there are these moments on Friends where Joey has no idea what anyone else is talking about, but he'll try to jump in quickly with an early comment and then nod and smile so that he feels part of the conversation.

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. There's an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa says, I think it's quoting Abraham Lincoln, where it's like, I'd rather be seen as, as stupid than open my mouth and, and remove all doubt. And Homer hears this and he thinks to himself and then the voice in his head says, you have to respond. And he just goes, takes one to know one.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  The ability to, in a way, it requires a kind of a confidence to say like, I don't know, or to just be silent and listen. And so it's funny that we, what we often... You know, we go like, there's no dumb questions. We really do have to say that because people are afraid of asking. And they're sometimes so afraid that they they'll do the opposite of asking, which is pretend that they already know the answer.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of my biggest pet peeves in life is what's called feigned knowledge, which is when people claim to know things that they don't actually understand. And one of the things I've started doing after writing Think Again is trying to get out of that trap myself by making a list of all the things that I'm ignorant on. And some of them were really easy. You know, I just, I actually started, I started a list one day and I said, okay, what do other people talk about a lot that I just feel completely clueless about? And I went, okay, financial markets, music, food, art. And then it started getting a little more specific. And I said, okay, I don't understand certain economic policies very well.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  I'm pretty clueless about why people belong to political parties in other countries. And actually, I'm clueless about why people belong to political parties at all. And what I decided to do is every day I would add something to the list of ignorance. And the goal is for it to keep growing as opposed to shrinking because it reminds me of all the things that I lack information about. And it also encourages me when these topics come up to do what you're describing, which is, I think, confident humility, to have the confidence instead of insecurity to say, actually, you know what? I have no idea what you're talking about right now. Could you explain?

• 9:23Ryan Holiday?

  Do you find that as a public person, that's you have to be almost more disciplined about that? Because like, for instance, I'm interviewing you right now. I get interviewed, you know, back before the pandemic, we would get on stage and hundreds of people would have, you know, raised their hands to ask a Q and A at the end of a thing. You know, reporters might ask for your opinion about stuff. I find one of the tricky parts is, is as you become successful at anything, the amount, the pressure to pretend that you know about stuff because you're being asked a question and it feels weird, almost rude to not answer the question, can also sort of inflate your sense of knowledge and brilliance about things.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  I think you just nailed it in that.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  It's interesting because I think a lot of people look at this trap and they say, "Okay, you know, when you end up answering questions that you have no business responding to, you've become overconfident in your knowledge." And this is a great example of an area where you don't know what you don't know. But I think you're highlighting that there's another pressure here, which is if you're an agreeable person, if you want to please other people, if you like to fit in, if you want to maintain harmony, if also you're somebody who cares about being helpful or generous, then it's really hard to dodge the question, right? Or to bridge to, "Well, here's what I actually know," because you feel like you're doing the person who asked the question a disservice. So what I've tried

• 10:49Speaker 01

  to remind myself of, Ryan, is not only that in the long run, that does a disservice to everyone to try to wax poetic about things that I'm ignorant on, but also that if I express uncertainty, because I'm seen as knowledgeable, at least in my broad area of organizational psychology, people will actually listen to me more carefully. There's a great paper by Karl Merker and Tormola, which shows that when experts express doubt, they actually become more persuasive. Because people are surprised to hear someone knowledgeable say, "I'm not actually sure." And then they pay more attention to the substance of the answer, which then means they're gathering new information. So that, for me, is a good reminder.

• 11:33Ryan Holiday?

  It also, I think, prevents some embarrassment, too. Like, when I've gone back, I've had this sort of privilege and burden of doing updated editions of a couple of my earlier books.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:45Ryan Holiday?

  And just reading old writing, too. It's so mortifying because you're like, "Where did I get off being so certain about this?" Like, not only was nobody asking me, I was just unsolicitedly waging into something that I really only understood the very tip of the iceberg about. And had I expressed this more generally, or, I don't want to say hedged it, but what you were saying, sort of expressed some of the uncertainty about it, it probably would have aged better and I would look like less of an asshole. Yeah, I think I'm not going to call you an asshole necessarily, but I think a lot of people miss those moments of learning because they're afraid to revisit their old ideas and their old work.

• 12:29Ryan Holiday?

  Because, like you said, it can be embarrassing. You're like, who is this moron? Why does he think these things? Why did he seem so full of conviction about something that he hardly understood? And I think we should look back at those moments more often because they're signs that we've actually evolved in our thinking and grown in our understanding. And if you don't look back and feel just a little bit embarrassed by your past work, it seems like you might be stagnating.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 13:03Ryan Holiday?

  Well, let me ask you for some advice then, because I'm struggling with this right now. I'm, when I look back at, so there's, there's some work where I'm like, okay, I shouldn't have said that at all. Then there's other work where I'm like, I sort of, I really, I'm like, wow, this is so punchy and to the point and it's, it's really, it's stylistically exactly where I want to be. But now, when I try to write that way, I have trouble because part of the reason I think it's so punchy into the point is that there is, I don't want to say, it's not the certainty so much as now that I understand the topics more, there's more nuance, right? One of the tricky things I think about, the more you learn is the more complex the world gets.

• 13:43Ryan Holiday?

  So how do you balance sort of that desire to always know more, but then also, you know, not, not have everything descend into sort of chaos and uncertainty and complexity? Do you know what I mean?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  I do. I've been grappling with the same thing myself, which means I'm definitely not qualified to give advice on it. But let me react at least, which is to say, I, I think there's, there are two things that jumped to mind right away. The first one is, there's an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote where he said, for, it was something like, for the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give a fig, but for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, I would give anything.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  And I think what you're looking for is to avoid ignorant simplicity, but to try to get to elegant simplicity. And it's hard, right? I think it-

• 14:36Ryan Holiday?

  There's a valley there.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a valley. And if you make it through, you're still worried on the other side that you've glossed over a bunch of important nuances. So I think one of my favorite principles is that every truth has an equal and opposite truth. And I wonder if this is one of the ways to get around this problem is to say, okay, look, I've, you know, I found a really punchy, compelling, simple way of capturing deep wisdom. Let me see if I can write the converse of it. And if that one's true, maybe I'm on to something. And the insight that I want to deliver then is not one or the other, but to try to explain when each is true. So let's take a concrete example.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  A great truth, people who have grit are more successful than people who don't. The opposite great truth, people who know when to quit are more successful than people who don't. So I'm not going to come out and make either claim alone, right? I'm not going to say grit is the only key to success. I'm also not going to say quitters always win. What I want to understand is how do you find the right balance between grit and quit?

• 15:43Ryan Holiday?

  Right, yeah. I've talked about this before where it's like, okay, you learn about the Civil War in like high school and you're like, oh, it was about slavery. Then in college or you read some books afterwards and obviously we're going through this as a society right now, it becomes clear that it's much more complicated, right? And then you really study it, like you really get into the primary source documents and you read the diary and you're like, oh, it was exclusively 100% about slavery, right? It's like there, things go, it's like really simple, then you study it more and it becomes hopelessly complex. And then you come out of the other side and it's distilled down into wisdom where you truly do understand that thing. And you make a good point where it's like, sometimes, sometimes you got to that complexity

• 16:27Ryan Holiday?

  because you're leaving out a bunch of stuff. And then other times you got it because you fully do understand the relationality between all the facts that are involved.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that, you know, part of what I'm pushing for when I run into this trap is the contingencies to say, okay, what are the times when this thing that I think is good might be bad? Or even just to offer a couple of caveats to say, hey, you know what? There, there might be a few situations where this important idea doesn't hold. And I think if you qualify it, right, you're, you're still getting the powerful insight, but you're also letting people know, hey, I don't expect it to work for all the people, all the time and all the situations.

• 17:06Ryan Holiday?

  Right. And we, I think we think humility is always a good thing, and it is. But one of the notes I sometimes get on drafts of my writing is like, okay, you've used two examples here where one will do, right? Or you're, you're, you're repeating your point. And so on the one hand, I sort of actually like this note because it's, it's, I think that's the job of the author is to sort of emphatically make your point and to leave no stone unturned. But at the same time, if you're, if you're sort of unable to just come out and say it and own it, right? If you're, if you're sort of trying to, to, to just throw a preponderance of evidence and let that do the speaking instead of owning it as the sort of authorial voice, it's not

• 17:51Ryan Holiday?

  going to be effective either. So, so humility can be this tricky thing where you've got to get, you can't, you've got to be intellectually humble, but then almost from a, from another standpoint, you've got to, you've got to be like, I'm just going to come out and say what I think.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I feel like there's a lot of pressure on authors to, to make that case and do it with a lot of, a lot of oomph, right? To say, you know, you think X is true, I'm going to tell you why reverse X is true. And I wonder if, if we're putting a little bit too much pressure on, you know, on having answers as opposed to saying, here's a perspective I think is really worth considering. And here's what you'll see differently once you, you know, you're able to look at the world this way, as opposed to saying, okay, I have now found truth and here I am. My job is to enlighten all of you. And this goes, Ryan, to what, for me, has been one of the most powerful frameworks I've ever come across, which became one of the anchors for Think Again, which is

• 18:51Speaker 01

  the idea that we spend too much of our lives, our thoughts, our conversations, our jobs, in the mindsets of preachers and prosecutors and politicians. And I was so intrigued when I first came across this idea in a classic paper by Phil Tetlock, because I thought, OK, it's clear that when you're in preacher mode, you think your job is basically to proselytize the truth you've already discovered. When you're in prosecutor mode, it's sort of the reverse. What you want to do is you want to prove somebody else wrong and win your case. And it's clear that if you're in either mode, if you're preaching that you're right and prosecuting other people for being wrong, you're not going to be that open to rethinking

• 19:36Speaker 01

  your own views. And then if we go to politician mindset, it's a little more flexible. The problem is, though, when we're trying to politic, we're basically looking for the approval of an audience. So we're busy campaigning and lobbying and trying to convince them to support us. And that might mean that we cater to whatever they think is true, but we're changing our mind for the wrong reasons at the wrong times. And we may actually be even saying things that we don't really believe deep down. So I guess part of what I've been wondering about is, can we get out of those mindsets? Can we not feel like we have to preach a perspective or prosecute an audience's wrong

• 20:16Speaker 01

  belief, or politic by catering to what our tribe thinks, but actually start to think a little bit more like scientists? And I'm not talking about putting on a white coat and carrying around a beaker and a bunch of test tubes. I'm talking about having the mindset, the mentality of a scientist to say, OK, my ultimate goal is to get closer to the truth here. That means whatever my opinions are, I should treat those as some working theories, as a bunch of hypotheses, and then I should figure out, OK, what experiments do I need to run? What observations do I need to conduct in order to figure out if my hunches might be true or false?

• 20:54Ryan Holiday?

  But it bumps right into some of the realities of the market, right? It's I talk to authors about this all the time, where it's like, yeah, that's an interesting idea, but your value proposition to the reader here is essentially, I haven't quite figured it out. It's complicated. There's truth on both sides, which nobody wants to read a book about, right? The publication bias is obviously a tricky part in the scientific literature. But the reality is, who wants to read an academic study or about a science experiment that didn't work? So it's hard to get a it's like it makes sense as an individual why you live that way.

• 21:35Ryan Holiday?

  But then it sort of bumps into the reality of life where sometimes you gotta pick a side.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yes, although I think it depends in part on how you define what it means to have an experiment not work. Right? I think for too many people, not working means it didn't confirm my either my expectation or my preference.

• 21:58Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  And I think there's been a lot of conversation about how we need to get out of confirmation bias mode. And we need to look for data or evidence or information that challenges our convictions. I think we could go even further. This is something I learned. One of the things I did while I was writing Think Again was I spent time with a bunch of super forecasters who compete in tournaments to try to predict future world events. And arguably, the world's best super forecaster is a military historian named Jean Pierre Begum. And Jean Pierre predicted the rise of Donald Trump back when he was considered a joke by most experts and pundits. He's predicted all sorts of elections around the world, as well as a range of other events.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  And one of the things that Jean Pierre does is when he forms an opinion, he makes a list of the conditions when he would change his mind. And that way, he's keeping himself honest to say, okay, in a couple of weeks now, when I confront this situation that I'm tempted to dismiss because it doesn't conform to what I already believe, let me go back and look at before I was attached to this belief, what did I think might be valid information to change it? And that way, he's a little bit more accountable for maintaining some independent thought about, okay, here are my criteria, here are my standards, and I would love to see more people do this, right? It doesn't necessarily have to show up in the way that you speak and write every day, but just to have a working set of ideas about, okay,

• 23:28Speaker 01

  this important truth that I think I found, what would I have to learn in order to question it? That's something we should identify before we decide we found the truth.

• 23:37Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 23:43Ryan Holiday?

  No, and you've seen people struggle with that so much during the pandemic. I mean, you see it in journalism, right? Like, a reporter will write a piece, and then they'll have to detract, you know, they'll retract, you know, sorry, they'll append the story and be like, oh, it turned out this source was incorrect, or, you know, this assumption was not true, blah, blah, blah, blah. But these are central, you know, parts of the entire story, and that the story remains. I think you see it, you've seen it during the pandemic, you know, people made decisions when, you know, there were 50,000 cases a day, and now there's 300,000 or 400,000 cases a day, and they haven't changed that decision.

• 24:25Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, things are exponentially worse, or significantly worse, and the thing you were on the fence about in June, you're just kept trucking along, because I think changing one's mind is so hard, because it requires admitting error. And that's obviously where cognitive dissonance and stuff comes in. And we just, we just seem to be utterly unable to do that as human beings.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard, particularly when we've gone public with our plans.

• 24:54Ryan Holiday?

  Right, yes.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  So, you know, I think one of the things we need to do is culturally, we need to just, we need to really rethink what it means to be a flip-flopper, right? Because what so many people are afraid of is admitting to themselves, well, I was wrong, therefore, you know, I'm an idiot, or I'm inconsistent, but also admitting to other people, yep, I'm a hypocrite. And again, if you're doing, if you're shifting your views because you're following a tribe that you belong to, then you're stuck in politician mode and you are flip-flopping, right? But if you have a more scientific stance and you're saying, okay, I have rigorously evaluated the information, I set my criteria up in advance for when I would change my mind, and now I've changed, right? That's actually progress.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  And I think we should give people credit for that. I think we should say, okay, you have just grown, you have evolved your thinking. And last time I checked, you can't say you've learned anything if all you've done is you've just affirmed what you already believed, right? The whole point of learning is to continue revising your beliefs.

• 25:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, Cicero talks about this in one of his dialogues. He goes like, someone accuses him of changing his mind, and he says, I'm a free agent. You know, just because I believe something, you know, when you were, you know, the other way I think about this when people go, oh, you know, 16-year-old me could, could, could see me now like they'd kick my ass or something. And it's like, who cares what a 16-year-old thinks? You know, we, we sort of have these opinions that we form early on, or these impressions we form early on, when really we had such, we had a fraction of the knowledge and experiences that we have now. Of course, we should think and act and believe differently. It would be weird if we didn't.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think particularly because the world is changing faster and knowledge is evolving more quickly than it ever did before, right? If, if you were, if you were alive, Ryan, in 1432, you could probably spend a good chunk of your life not having to change your mind about a whole lot, right? But if you look at the, the proliferation of information, the advances in science and medicine and technology, we have to update our thoughts a lot more often because there's new knowledge, right? And also, as the world changes, we can't stand still, we have to adapt with it. If we don't, it's really easy, and I've just seen this happen in so many companies.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I get, I get a decent number of, of queries from founders and CEOs to, you know, to talk about leadership. And one of the hardest challenges for me is getting them to admit that their strategy might not be working, or that it might be time to reconsider their, their vision and their values. And they'll say things like, well, that's not how we've always done it, or no, that'll never work in my industry. I I I've stopped arguing with them, actually, and I just respond with a simple question, which is BlackBerry, Blockbuster, Kodak, Sears? Should I keep going? Is that is that the group you're hoping to join?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  And it's it's amazing how many leaders believe that their job is to figure out the perfect vision or strategy and then execute on it as opposed to constantly updating what they think might be effective.

• 28:09Ryan Holiday?

  One what's weird, too, is like if the leader is not taking in new information at that level and reevaluating the plan and setting the long term plan, like, who do they think is doing it and where do they think that change is going to come from? You know, it's not like some mid level manager is going to discover the fundamental flaw in the cultural values of the company or the the, you know, the the product offering, and then that's just going to bubble up to the top. It's got to come the other way.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, if they do, right? The odds that it will float to the top are pretty low in most organizations.

• 28:45Ryan Holiday?

  It'll get crushed.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think, you know, it's interesting because you you see a version of this in sports, too. I know you've been spending a lot of time with pro sports teams. And there's a great study by Berman and colleagues, which looked at how long a team has to play together, the core nucleus in basketball, before they maximize their odds of becoming a great team. And it turned out it wasn't until the the core team had been together for about three and a half years that they ended up winning the most games because they had to learn each other's strengths and weaknesses and figure out effective routines. But after that three and a half year period, you start to see the benefits of shared experience level off, and there might be some costs that emerge. And one of those costs is obviously that the players start to get old.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  But there's also a routine rigidity effect where you get used to your old playbook and you just keep running the same plays over and over again. And then other teams start to review your stats, they watch your game films, and they can outsmart you. And so I think the the moment that you've figured out a successful strategy is the moment that you need to start rethinking that strategy because other people are either going to copy it or they're going to figure out how to beat it.

• 29:52Ryan Holiday?

  I was curious, another sort of classical reference for you that I'm sure you're very familiar with, but Socrates' wisdom, sort of being rooted in the idea that he knew what he didn't know, or that he knew that he knew nothing. How does one get there? Because it seems like the tricky thing is, how do you know that you don't know something? How can you know what you don't know?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think, obviously, in areas where there's well-established evidence and independently verified facts, it's a little bit easier than it would be in areas where there's not a lot of consensus among knowledgeable people. But I guess as a caveat, I'd say, often, the consensus of experts is wrong. And that's where revolutions in science happen, that's where technological progress often occurs. So I guess the place I would start is to say, look, a lot of people are still sadly determined to be the smartest person in the room, or the person with the most expertise in the room.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  And I think we all have a responsibility to try to enter more rooms where we're the least knowledgeable person, or we're definitely not an expert. And ideally, those are rooms where there are people with a lot of knowledge, but who actually have different opinions, or different values, or different beliefs, so that we can see a range of ideas on the table. And a simple step in that direction for me is to look at who you follow on social media. I'm really shocked by the number of people who only follow someone if they agree with their conclusions. And I don't want to follow you if I agree with all of your conclusions. I want to follow you if I think you have an interesting and rigorous thought process, and you might then teach me something about how to think, even if I disagree with where you've landed.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Or you actually are one of my most thoughtful critics, and you consistently challenge the arguments that I make. That's how I learn, is by being exposed to those views. And the goal is to sometimes figure out how to make my own arguments stronger. And those people are sort of a steel man as opposed to a straw man. But other times to say, you know what? These people might convince me that I was wrong, and maybe I should be disagreeing with my own arguments.

• 32:14Ryan Holiday?

  It's one of the tricky things I think we're seeing with social media to go to what you're talking about, though, is like, how do you, how do you expose yourself to people who you disagree with or have different opinions while also keeping away, say, people who are operating in bad faith, people who are, you know, attempting to undermine the credibility of certain institutions or certain fundamental bedrock truths, right? Like, it, it, there's an irony in like, the people that have sort of been captured by ridiculous conspiracy theories, and you go, well, how do you believe that? And they go, do your research, right? They're under the impression that they actually are doing their research and getting information

• 32:59Ryan Holiday?

  from people they disagree with. It's just, sort of, they've been almost sucked into kind of like a funhouse mirror or something.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is tricky, because if you, if you meet somebody who believes strongly in conspiracy theories, they seem to have the same standards that you do.

• 33:18Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Around, you know, around gathering lots of knowledge and being skeptical of the information you come across and questioning assumptions. There's, I think there's a great, there's a great idea from psychology that, that I found helpful in conversations with people who have gone down this rabbit hole. So, let me give you a concrete example. I was, I was talking to a friend recently who has bought into a bunch of conspiracy theories. And he was, you know, he was talking about how the government is spewing lies and vaccines are unsafe and, you know, we can't trust politicians and, you know, pharma companies have a profit motive. And, you know, my, my initial instinct was to start prosecuting

• 34:03Speaker 01

  all of his arguments and preaching about mine. But that only makes people who are already resistant more defensive. So I said, okay, what would a scientist do? What a scientist would do right now is get really curious and say, look, you know what? I don't know what's going to change his mind, and I don't know how he formed his beliefs, but I definitely want to understand that better. And so I'm going to interview him, right? I'm going to try to figure out, okay, how does his mind work? And what I started thinking about right away was this research on what's called the illusion of explanatory depth. It's about the basic idea that when it comes to complex systems, we think we understand them better than we do. And if we have to actually explain them and unpack the mechanisms, we start to realize

• 34:47Speaker 01

  there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge. So Ryan, the original demonstration of this was with mechanical objects. So you'd ask people, okay, you know, how well do you understand the earbuds that are currently transmitting my voice into your ears and how those work? And a lot of people would say, oh, you know, I have pretty good working knowledge. And then you follow up and you say, okay, explain it to me. What happens right now? Like, how is this actually working? Walk me through the steps. And of course, people can't do it. And after trying to explain and seeing all these holes in their understanding, they become more intellectually humble, they become more curious, they're more likely then to depolarize their views and admit what they don't know. And this has been shown too for for political conversations that, you know, if somebody

• 35:32Speaker 01

  is passionate about a particular policy on climate change or on on healthcare, if you just ask them to explain all the consequences that their preferred policy would have. So how is this going to work? Not why do you favor it? They start to realize again, well, I don't, I don't actually fully understand all the second order effects and this is really complicated. And you want them to see the complexity of the problem and also the complexity of of some of their own thoughts, or at least the ambiguity in those thoughts. So I had all this in the back of my mind and I said to my friend, okay, so just walk me through how the government would trick not only, you know, 300 million people, but

• 36:13Speaker 01

  also communities of independent scientists who have tenure. And, you know, he started explaining how easy it is to manipulate people. And I said, okay, yeah, you know what? Possible that people could be manipulated in certain situations, but imagine then the incentives for going against that consensus, right? If you're the scientist who debunks the whole conspiracy, you might win a Nobel Prize one day. If you're the one journalist who's willing to tell the truth and get the the cold, hard facts, then that is a Pulitzer Prize waiting to happen. And are you telling me there is not one competent scientist or one competent journalist in these mainstream institutions who doesn't have the motivation and the ability to try to get to the truth? And he got stumped at that point.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  And he said, well, you know, there, there might be a couple, but you know, this is really hard and it's difficult to go against the establishment. And I said, yeah, absolutely. And how hard do you think it is for all these people that you think are incompetent to coordinate a conspiracy on this scale?

• 37:14Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  And again, trying to walk through the mechanisms for how that worked. He couldn't do it. And afterward, he became much more nuanced in our conversation. So I don't know that I debunked all of his beliefs, but I at least got him to recognize that maybe he wasn't as right as he thought he was.

• 37:30Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 37:38Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, when you talk to those people, your point about like, so wouldn't someone be debunking this? And their answer is always like, well, what is this? What about this person? And they point you to some other crazy person, right? Like there, you can see how, how sort of one, either one particularly malicious, bad actor, or one true believing crazy person can infect, you know, it's like one person operating either from insanity or bad faith can infect the thinking of countless other people because we have a hard time understanding that like, oh, you have to almost quarantine yourself off from influences like that.

• 38:21Ryan Holiday?

  Like, that's something I found on like some communities I run. It's like, you'll see someone come in and, you know, it'll be like your friend and there's part of you that wants to have a nice, long discussion with this person. But, but it's like, meanwhile, they're infecting other people who are on the edge. So it's, it's like this tricky thing with thinking where you want to be open minded, but at the same time, you have to be very protective.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very tricky. And Ryan, I'm curious to hear your take on this because, you know, in some ways you're a reformed marketer, right? You, you've, you've gone on the record saying you used to lie to people for a living. So how do we make the truth more viral?

• 39:02Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think, I don't know if I would say I lied to people for a living, but I would say that marketing is essentially a deceptive art, right? The whole purpose of marketing is to get people to do things that, you know, maybe otherwise they wouldn't be inclined to do. I think it's a couple of things. One, as far as like sort of community management, a big, I'm a big believer in shadow banning. So it's like these sort of people just quietly go away. So I think, obviously, in the wake of the January 6th insurrection, I think the public banning of a lot of these personalities was the right move. But I think algorithmically, leading up to it and over the last, you know, several years, the social media platforms have done a bad job

• 39:49Ryan Holiday?

  algorithmically punishing these things, likely because it was not always in their interest to do so. But I think the problem with truth not being viral goes to exactly where we were starting this conversation, which is certainty is attractive and compelling and spreads well. Nuance and complexity and complications do not. And just look at a platform like Twitter. It's like, what can you fit in 240 characters verse, you know, what can you, what can you fit there?

• 40:30Ryan Holiday?

  By definition, that is going to incentivize and prioritize short, concise, sort of limited ways of thinking as opposed to complexity, which I feel like describes most of the world.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  So I'm not so convinced that it has to be this difficult. In part because there's some evidence that's come out recently showing that if we can use just a little bit of humility or uncertainty to highlight the complexity of the point of view that we're trying to communicate, that people are just as interested in what we have to say, but they also are less likely to blindly believe it. So, for example, if you were trying to write a headline about how, let's say, some recent research has suggested that, I don't know, coffee might be dangerous for your health, right? Instead of saying, "New study says coffee toxic," what you could say is, "New study

• 41:31Speaker 01

  shows problematic effects of coffee for some people," right? Not that hard.

• 41:38Ryan Holiday?

  But what really depends, the difference there, and we were talking about market forces earlier, and I talk about this a lot in Trust Me, I'm Lying. To me, it's the sort of, it's the original sin of our modern media system. If I'm a paying subscriber of the New York Times, which headline am I going to prefer? The manipulative one or the straightforward one? Because I have an infinite game going with the New York Times, I want the nuanced but truthful headline, right? And so, in that case, the New York Times and my interests are aligned. The New York Times is not going to mislead me because they want me to continue being a subscriber.

• 42:19Ryan Holiday?

  Like, when you look at the headline of the New York Times breaking the Pentagon Papers, it's like a 40-word boring headline. It's like, you know, "Released study," you know, it's like, it's beyond boring, right? But that's because millions of people were getting the New York Times delivered, and it was on the front page in a physical item. So, it's like, either you read the story or you don't, but you already paid for the newspaper, right? If, on the other hand, I am a website

• 42:53Ryan Holiday?

  That has no subscriber base and the the primary source of my traffic is how this thing spreads on social media, then your interest of getting the truth is at odds with my interest of what drives social sharing. And from what we understand from what drives social sharing, it's high valence emotions, the anger anger being the most. And again, you're not my customer. So I don't care if if telling you the story is more extreme than it actually is gets you to click. There's no repercussions for me for having deceived you. And by not deceiving you, I didn't get your click. Does that make sense? So the market

• 43:36Ryan Holiday?

  is unfortunately what's distorting the the the truth here.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  It does. I think that makes sense. And so, yeah, if you if you have a market that's based on outrage, or that's based on, you know, certainty and intense emotions, then I think it requires some rethinking of of the way that the algorithms work. And I would say, look, we're all entitled to freedom of speech, but nobody has a right to freedom of megaphone. There's no reason why we couldn't have independent moderators that say, okay, if somebody is not a credible source of information, then we're gonna independently fact check before we let it go outside of their immediate community.

• 44:17Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think two sort of two other good examples. One, I think the incentives of books, obviously, you and I are biased are quite good, right? Like, you and I spent years working on a book. It's for sale. And we have a lot of room to discuss what we're talking about, right? We don't have 240 characters, we have 240 pages. And we know that, you know, somebody is going to pay, you know, 15 to 25 dollars for this. So it has to have strong word of mouth saying that this is good. And people have recourse with the retailer and so on and so forth, or they'll never buy a book from us again. So I think that's good. The other medium that I think has has has good incentives or economics for the most part, I mean, there's certainly bad ones. But I think podcasts, even though

• 45:01Ryan Holiday?

  podcasts are advertising supported, and most people don't pay for them.

• 45:07Ryan Holiday?

  The other thing about podcasts is that, again, because they're long form, you and I have talked for 43 minutes already. It's much more than we'd go back and forth on social media. But podcast episodes don't seem seem to be outside of the social media ecosystem. So they don't go viral. So there's not really any pressure exerting. There's not even really a publication bias. Like, it's just like, is it good? Do I subscribe to the Adam Grant podcast? If so, I like it. You know, I'm not, I'm not hearing about it on Twitter or Facebook or, or even over email. It's just, if it's good, I listen to it. Right? And I think that things that are have sort of opted out of these feedback loops tend to be of higher quality.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  That's interesting because my first instinct coming into this discussion would be, would have been that podcasts are vulnerable to some of the same pressures. That, you know, it's easy to attract a tribe who believes a certain set of things and then create must listen episodes around your daily outrage about whatever's happening in the political cycle. And then pretty soon people are, you know, trapped in an echo chamber and they're surrounded, they're encased in a filter bubble and nothing can penetrate it.

• 46:20Ryan Holiday?

  It's true. I mean, right wing talk radio definitely is suffers from that. But I think maybe it's the scale that podcasts are currently being done that insulates it a little bit. But I also think like, because it tends to be two people talking, there is just more of a Socratic element to it that I think is, is, is, is good for the most part. I'm not saying it's a flawless medium, but I would certainly, I think there's probably less disinformation or misinformation from a, from an hour podcast of two people than, than, you know, a 15 minute CNN talking heads segment where the people are all trying to, to get their quick hit in and, and sort of battling for attention in a very, very noisy cycle.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think soundbite culture is definitely part of the problem. And ideally, right, we'd, before we let, I mean, nobody's ever going to watch this, let alone participate in it. But I think in an ideal world, what we would do is we would record half hour, hour long conversations and then extract soundbites from them after the fact, when people have had the more nuanced conversation. And then the hope is that they've arrived at some elegant simplicity as opposed to ignorant simplicity.

• 47:34Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. I don't know. That's a good point. Maybe it's the live element of television that's that's sort of problematic. And it's, you know, Neil Postman would say probably that it's, it's the, it's the visual medium that's adding the extra layer of it, which is that you have to look a certain way. You have to capture the attention in a certain way. I think one of the reasons podcasts are exempt from social media is that we just, for whatever reason, don't share audio the same way. Right? So, so clips of, you know, clips of somebody doing something on television seems to be much more viral than a clip of Ryan Holiday

• 48:15Ryan Holiday?

  and Adam Grant talking about something because, I don't know, it's just less exciting and I think therefore less pressure.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Are you saying, are you saying, Ryan, that this conversation is not going to go viral?

• 48:25Ryan Holiday?

  I am, I am fairly certain it will not go viral.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Well, then we need to create some outrage.

• 48:31Ryan Holiday?

  Exactly. Um, hey, last thing I wanted to ask you about, because I think it goes, it's, it's not technically from the new book, but it goes to the ideas in the new book, I felt like. I was fascinated. I think the story is in originals where you tell the story of not, not investing in Warby Parker, or not advising it, even though they were your students and, and that company went on to be this huge company. What did, what did that exchange, maybe tell that story, but, but what did that exchange teach you about your own thinking? Because it seemed like to me, it sort of, it, the reason you didn't invest is you had these sort of rules or assumptions about what a good investment was versus a bad investment, and they violated all the rules. And so in that sense, it was

• 49:15Ryan Holiday?

  a good decision, but maybe it, in retrospect, challenges some of those assumptions for you.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. My experience with the Warby founders definitely led me to rethink a bunch of my assumptions about how to invest in entrepreneurs and startups. So I think coming in, I, I hadn't really started doing much investing yet. So my assumptions were much more implicit, but I assumed that if you wanted to be a successful entrepreneur, you needed to be committed, you needed to be ahead of things as opposed to falling behind, and you probably also needed some degree of first mover advantage. And when I looked at what the Warby founders were doing, it was very obvious to me that they were not going to make it. So from a commitment standpoint, three of the four founders had lined up backup jobs and internships, just in case their idea didn't work out.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  How serious can you be about this? Right? When it came time to name their company, they dragged their heels for about six months and just could not settle on a name. And they lacked the decisiveness and the conviction that I thought that a great entrepreneur was supposed to have. And when they're, finally, their company launches, they are an online retailer. They don't even have a functioning website. And so they've just been procrastinating way too much for my taste. And of course, you know, now they're a unicorn startup. I did rethink my view of them. I actually invested last year, finally, better late than never. But I think I learned a couple of things from that experience. The first one is that, that commitment signals are not what we think they are.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  So if somebody is hedging their bets, it doesn't mean that they're not passionate about their startup. It means they have a healthy relationship with risk. And I've started to think about risk a little bit like a stock portfolio, where if you're going to bet on a very risky set of stocks, you better have some of your money in some boring mutual funds. And that's what they were doing with their backup plans, with the jobs and internships. They were, you know, instead of being risk lovers, they were being risk hedgers, which I think is a smart thing to do. And the data even suggests that entrepreneurs who keep their jobs instead of going all in are 33% less likely to fail than the ones who, when they have an idea, quit right away. I think there's another benefit, too, of hedging, which is it's a little bit easier

• 51:33Speaker 01

  to rethink your own strategies. So if you quit your job to work on a startup, or if you're completely focused on the startup, you have all your eggs in that basket. Whereas if you treat it as a little bit of an experiment, you're not sure if it's going to work. It's a lot easier to say, all right, you know what? That idea tanked. Let me move on to something else. So that was a, that was a big aha for me. And then the other, I guess, the other thing that I rethought based on that experience was that procrastination was always a bad thing. I went on to do some research with G H Shin, where we showed that moderate procrastination can make you more creative if you're putting the task off because it's a hard problem and you haven't figured it out yet. And you have the intrinsic motivation to actually solve it. You just know that you can't force it.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  So that's exactly what the Warby founders had done. They had spent six months testing over 2,000 different ideas for what to name the company, knowing that branding was important. And the reason they didn't have a functioning website was they were trying to work out the best way to be able to sell eyeglasses over the internet and ultimately landed in a much better spot. And they would have if they had gone forward with their first plan. So yeah, very different view of, of how I would now invest in startups than, than what I had before, but I'm glad that I learned it that way.

• 52:46Ryan Holiday?

  Well, see, if we were trying to make this go viral and we were doing two minutes on television or I was doing, you know, a Huffington Post article, it would be, you know, Adam Grant's $30 million mistake, right? It would be all about, you know, the sensational elements of it. But I think what I'm interested in is, yeah, like, how, how does one sort of have a set of rules, talk about, you know, learn from it and, and, and grow? Although I've got to imagine to a certain degree, those rules that you had probably served you well 99% of the time.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  They might've, although I think, you know, there's a soundbite version of this and you can decide whether this is ignorant or elegant simplicity. But the soundbite version of this is that if you want to be a great innovator, you don't have to, well, I guess I'd say it differently. The soundbite version is that great innovators hedge their bets. They sometimes procrastinate and they're willing to let other people create a market as opposed to doing all the work themselves.

• 53:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. The other lesson you could probably take from what you went through, which I've struggled with a bit myself is it's like, hey, also, maybe I'm just not cut out for this, right? Like, maybe, maybe my level of thinking, my impulses, the rules I've developed for going through the world are not particularly conducive to a cutthroat, unpredictable industry like in venture capital.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Are you trying to tell me I should stop angel investing, Ryan?

• 54:11Ryan Holiday?

  No, I'm, I'm, I do a little myself. I'm just saying that, that one of the things I think at the core also of, of the new book and where we started is, is sort of humility, knowing, you know, what you're, knowing that the thing you're doing is very hard and that just because you're good at writing books or teaching classes doesn't necessarily mean that those same, that the same sort of voyeuristics are, are going to be really successful in a totally different field.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think that kind of humility is, is obviously needed. And it's funny, when I, a few years after passing on Warby, so I said no when they, they first took, well, actually, I said no back in 2009, which was when they were just beginning to, to start the company and they hadn't even gotten off the ground yet. And a few years later, I reached out to a venture capitalist I know well and said, all right, I'm thinking of doing more investing. What would your advice be? And he said, well, my advice is really simple. You should invest if number one, you're willing to put in the same amount of energy and effort that you do to writing a successful book or publishing research. You know, this is, this is not something you can do well as a passive hobby. You have to take it seriously. He said, number two, you could do this if you want to be a philanthropist

• 55:25Speaker 01

  and the group that you really want to donate your money to is entrepreneurs. And number three, you could do this if you want to be a gambler and you think this is more fun than blowing your money in Vegas at a slot machine. And I thought, okay, door number one is clearly the way to go. But also there are ways to leverage some of my existing knowledge. So I'm going to invest more in people, culture and HR related startups than I will in tech. I'm probably also, and I've ended up doing this, I'm going to focus on a couple of consumer products that I feel reasonably knowledgeable about and I'm excited to learn more about. Or I'm going to partner with investors who know the areas that I don't. And I'm only going to go in after their due diligence says yes.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  And I think I've made fewer mistakes since adopting those practices, but you be the judge.

• 56:11Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, you're totally right. It's sort of like, where do you have an unfair advantage? Go there as opposed to, I'm sure you hear from venture, I was just hearing from one the other day, you all hear from venture capitalists who are like, oh, I want to write a book. And they think because they're good at venture capital, of course, they will be successful at this thing, which I know everything about, right? Like, so it's like when we, when we watch other people get outweigh over their, their skis, you know, we go, how stupid, how could you do it? And then we turn around and do that in other industries because of our own intellectual hubris.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  It's hilarious how often that happens. Every time I get a request from somebody in the business worlds or in the sports world who wants to write a book, my first question to them is, do you actually want to be a writer? Like, if you're, if you're going to write one book, you should have a ghostwriter, you should have a co-author, you should have a researcher with you, or you should consider whether there's a more efficient and effective way to get your knowledge out, like, you know, writing an article first and seeing if anyone reads it, or joining a podcast and seeing if people are interested in your ideas and insights. And it's funny because, you know, I've started telling people, look, if you want to write a book, you're basically starting a business around your book. And, you know, you're going to invest at least, if it's going to be any good, you're going to invest

• 57:30Ryan Holiday?

  A very minimal upside.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  A year of your life in it. Sorry?

• 57:32Ryan Holiday?

  A business with very minimal upside compared to the businesses you normally do.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Minimal upside if you measure the returns financially. Yes, I would say the intellectual engagement and the impact are definitely worth the trade off if it works.

• 57:47Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, totally. It's, it's, I mean, I love it. It's, but your point is one I tell people all the time, too. It's like, oh, you don't want to write a book. You want to have a book. And that is very different than, just like, I would love to have a billion dollars. I just haven't taken the time to figure out how one might make that, you know, inventing a new biotech, you know, company or something, right? Like, wanting to have the end result is not the same as being willing to go through all the steps of the process that, that, that one would actually have to do to get it.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing how many people like the idea of having created a product, but are not at all interested in the process of producing it.

• 58:32Ryan Holiday?

  Adam, thank you so much. This was awesome. I love the new book and of course, love the old ones, too.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for having me.

• 58:40Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend, whatever you want. We'd love for you to have a copy. I know I love signed copies of some of my favorite books. If you love a signed copy of The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather bound edition of the Daily Stoic, we have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.