Tech Investor Joe Lonsdale On How Philosophy Makes You Better at Business

Ryan speaks with entrepreneur and investor Joe Lonsdale about the intersections of business and philosophy, what Cicero means to him, why so many people are relocating to Texas, and more. Joe Lonsdale is a major Silicon Valley tech sector investor. A co-founder of Palantir Technologies, Lonsdale was an early investor in companies including Oculus, Oscar, Illumio, and Orca Bio, and is a partner at 8VC, his venture capital firm. Lonsdale also started the Cicero Institute, a group dedicated to public-private partnerships to solve problems. This episode is brought to you by GiveWell, the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. GiveWell’s team of researchers works countless hours to determine which charities make the most effective dollar-for-dollar contributions to the causes they support. Since 2010, GiveWell has helped over 50,000 donors donate over 500 million dollars to the most effective charities, leading to over 75,000 lives saved and millions more improved. Visit GiveWell.org/stoic and your first donation will be matched up to 100 dollars. This episode is also brought to you by Blinkist, the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. This episode is also brought to you by Trends. Trends is the ultimate online community for entrepreneurs and business aficionados who want to know the latest news about business trends and analysis. It features articles from the most knowledgeable people, interviews with movers and shakers, and a private community of like-minded people with whom you can discuss the latest insights from Trends. Visit trends.co/stoic to start your two-week trial for just one dollar.***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 Joe Lonsdale:Homepage: https://joelonsdale.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/JTLonsdaleSee 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My guest today is Joe Lonsdale, one of the great investors and technology entrepreneurs of our time. I've gotten to know Joe over the last couple of years. At some events, we both spoke at, some mutual friends that we both have. But most of all, we connected over our mutual love of the classics, the four virtues, of course, courage, justice, wisdom, temperance. As it happens, Joe, in addition to being one of the co-founders of Palantir,

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  founder of 8VC, a tech VC fund, an investor in a bunch of really interesting, cool companies. Joe is a philanthropist, an activist, involved in a lot of interesting, different ventures. But Joe is a lover of the classics, as I was saying, and he's the founder of the Cicero Institute, a public policy research think tank. And of course, I love the name, but as you'll hear in the interview, we sort of talk about, you know, why is Cicero a hero to Joe? What's the Cautionary elements of Cicero's character, what's also inspiring about Cicero,

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  what we can learn from about Cicero, a bunch of cool stuff like that. Joe is also has the honor of being one of the only human beings who I'm not married to or living with that I have seen in the last several months. He stopped by the Daily Stoic offices a couple of weeks ago when he was in town kicking around a move to Austin. And we had a socially distanced breakfast and then a walk around town. Welcome to Texas, Joe, and of course, welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think you guys will really like this. And Joe's thinking is, I think, provocative. I wouldn't say contrarian.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  Peter Thiel, who Lonsdale's obviously worked with for a long time, says, you know, sort of contrarian is to be opposite of someone. It's reactionary. And I don't think there's really anything that admirable about being contrarian. But it is important to be an independent thinker, to figure out what you think about something, independent of what other people think about it. Joe is an independent thinker. That means that he and I don't agree on everything. We may not agree on much, even as you'll see, we disagree on Cicero. Was Cicero a hero? Was Cicero a tragically flawed figure? I'm more in the latter camp. He's more in the former. But I always think it's important that we talk to and discuss with people who we think

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  differently than, because this is how we learn and this is how we get better. This is also how we change minds and this is also how we clarify what we think. So anyways, here's my interview with Joe Lonsdale. Enjoy. I thought we should start with our mutual friend Cicero. That's obviously what you named your, your foundation or your, your policy institute after, but I'm curious, like, why and what?

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  What does he mean to you? Like, where did he come into your life?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  I probably haven't studied the classics as much as you, although classics are something I'm very passionate about. But the, you know, partially it's just a symbol in general of ancient, of the ancient values and of ancient philosophy. And so I think, I think we were talking about this earlier, there's a lot of Cato in me. And I think my instincts as a young man was the, was to be a Cato. But I actually want to get things done in the world and be a realist. And Cicero, to me, represents, you know, somebody whose values stripped off the Renaissance and who's, who was just a really extraordinary person who got a lot done and was willing to do things even though they were unpopular. At least claimed anyway, you know, because they were the right thing to do.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  And so just bringing that ancient, ancient wisdom and acknowledgement of the history and the history of our society and applying it to the things we're working on today. That was very important to me.

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think that the dichotomy of Cato and Cicero is really interesting. And then it almost sets up kind of the perfect Aristotelian mean. If you then put sort of Caesar on the other end of the spectrum, because they're, they're all brilliant. They're all successful. They're all ambitious. They're all motivated by a certain sort of personal philosophy.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Definitely. And the reason I would choose, and I was, I've been very inspired by all three of those men, of course. And I think, I think little boys grew up in the 19th century, reading about Caesar and Alexander the Great. And in a way we don't anymore right now. As you learn more, you know, similar how as a Jewish young boy, you learn about King David. And then as you learn more, you realize actually there's a lot of flaws with King David and there are a lot of flaws with Caesar. And that's the, that's the nature of these. The reason Cicero more represented for my institute anyway, is Cicero really believed in the power of commerce in a way that the other guys didn't as much. He was very, you know, he and Cato as well were very famous for attacking special interests, which Caesar probably was not quite as much. Of course Cicero's more of a pragmatist. And then, you know, he supposedly invited integrity.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  I'm more, I'm more skeptical of this now after reading your recent work. But I do think overall, in general, he would, he would, he did have a lot of integrity in his legacy and what he did and how he approached the world.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think I think your your point about commerce is well made because, you know, when you look at a Cato or when you look at a Marcus Aurelius or you look at a Seneca, they have this sort of virtue about them and this sort of commitment to philosophy. But sort of what goes unsaid is that, you know, almost like the southern planting class in the United States, like it's disembodied from actually having to work for a living because

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 6:47Ryan Holiday?

  somebody else is doing it for you.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  No, it was a new man and that's something that's something that was really, you know, new man in the Roman sense where he came from the equites, if I'm pronouncing that right, which is the landholder and commercial class, right, which is which is very different than coming from this like ancient aristocratic class.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like the Spartans, it's sure it's impressive. They were this, you know, fantastic warrior culture who, you know, sort of embraced every hardship and, you know, shared everything in common. But that's also because they had a race of slaves doing all of the work for them, which created the privilege to be able to, you know, sort of live in this fantasy world.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  And the and the and these days, these days, instead of having, instead of having that, we have this race of technology that's doing everything for us, for some people who are quite wealthy. But even even so, I think being tied to value creation, being tied to building, I think is a much healthier thing. You see a lot of people who are born into wealth, who've never created wealth themselves, tend to have very silly ideas of the world. They tend to be a lot more socialist, for example, because they actually don't understand how the world works, which then leads to these very dangerous lack of virtues if you're not careful.

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  I get that criticism. You know, people go like, what would Seneca think? Or what would Marcus Aurelius think that you're selling, you know, philosophy to which I would say, I actually think the income earned from writing a book, selling it in the open market, is actually a much more honest dollar earned than the than the sort of deeply stratified, hierarchical, you know, sort of slave based economy of ancient Rome. So I think, you know, commerce is actually the equalizer and the most honest way to make a living.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Totally agree, and this is one of those things where I think America and the classics are related, where people, you know, the values of the founding of America can be built upon to be greater than the founders themselves. And the values of ancient Rome, the values of the Stoics, for example, of what is justice and what is wisdom, you can take their insights and you can build upon them to have an even greater, you know, society and even greater choices you're making than they made themselves.

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  And you're right, like you sort of, you look at the germ of the idea originally, and then we build on it, like, you know, Zeno is a merchant. I mean, he made his living trading Tyrian purple dye. I do love the idea of philosophy and business not being at odds with each other. Eric Weinstein was telling me once that his description of Peter Thiel, who you know, is that he was the world's richest applied philosopher, which I thought was kind of a beautiful.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  That is a good way of looking at it. You know, 100 years ago, Peter would be, Peter would be a professor who was not very wealthy. And then I think these days, you're able to take that kind of intellectual leverage and apply it in ways you were definitely not in the past.

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  Why do people think that they're at odds with each other? I've never quite understood that.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  This seems to grow out of this very kind of leftist kind of view of the academy from the last 50 to 100 years, where they're, they're, they're, they kind of saw themselves as being above the merchant class, right? It's the old aristocratic view of the world. And they, and they assume that if you're busy making money, you're scrambling for yourself, and therefore you're, you're, you know, they're somehow against the higher values. And as opposed to realizing, especially today, especially the last few decades, you can have these values, you can apply them with intellectual leverage. But, you know, even in the past, of course, you could do that as well.

• 10:15Ryan Holiday?

  In one of my favorite books, I've recommended before, I think it's actually fictional, but it's called Letters From A Self-Made Merchant To His Son. And it was written in the 20s, I think. And the premise is that it's this sort of self-made sort of pork baron or something from Chicago who made his money in the stockyards, sort of a grimy, you know, blue collar trade that makes millions of dollars. And now his son's at Harvard, and he's trying to sort of pass along the virtues that made him who he was, but are almost completely alien to his now upper class from cradle to grave son.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Wow. That I haven't read that one yet. I'd love to see that.

• 10:59Ryan Holiday?

  But I think that's that, you know, that would have been, that's even the struggle in Cicero's life, right? Like Cicero is the new man, although he does come from a wealthy family. Like, he makes it to the top of Rome society, and then he writes his book on duties to his son Marcus because he, you know, like, his son didn't have to struggle the same way that he did.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  And that's, that's something that you and I have some mutual friends from very successful families here. And I think the ones who were brought up right, where I really admire their father did have them working on the farm and did have them working, you know, doing hard work as a young, as a young man. And I hope I can find the same, same way to do that with my kids, because it does seem to, there are these values and virtues of that hard work and understanding what it, what it is to build value in the world and understanding that businesses are very hard to build. And if, you know, the society's not naturally prosperous, you need people with the right virtues and the right hard work.

• 11:55Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and that, that discipline of, of moderation or self-discipline is tricky. Like, my parents, and I forget who I'm taking this from, but, you know, my parents were in a position often to say, we can't, like, we can't go to Disneyland just because you want to, you know, we can't buy you the car that you want, you know, just because you turn 16. Whereas, you know, my position, and certainly your position, is much, has to actually come from a, a more virtuous place in some degree, which is, it's not that we can't, it's that we won't.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:26Ryan Holiday?

  Because it's not a good idea.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  This was all like really clear to me in theory before having kids. And now I have, you know, three daughters, a three and a half and a two-year-old, and they're very cute. And I am, I am guilty of not always saying, no, we can't do certain things. And it's actually, it's quite difficult and to put this into practice. So I'm, I'm still learning. I just have to take notes. My, my, my parents did a, did a great job on this, and I'm, I'm not as good at it. But yes, the theory, I agree with you.

• 12:53Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, it's tricky because you, the Stoics were fascinated with the idea of wealth, that sort of saying that it's not good or bad, but that it just provides its own sets of tests. So in some ways, like, like I was thinking about during the pandemic, it's easy to say no to meetings when they're illegal, you know, but then, once life does go back to normal to some degree, now, it's, it's difficult, even though you don't want to, but because you can, it's hard to say no, right? And so I think what money does is create the challenge of actually having to decide whether something's a good idea or not, not whether it's possible or not.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  It creates a whole set of challenges, which is like, no one wants to hear about the challenges money creates, of course, that's what we're not just going to talk about. But it's, it's actually very true. What I've, I've seen this with a lot of friends who are successful. There's just a whole set of new types of challenges. One of them, of course, is that, is that if you're already successful, there's just like infinite, interesting things you're invited to, and all these things you're supposed to spend time doing, being a successful person and showing others you're a successful person. And so if you're not, if you're not careful, you could just basically not do anything useful anymore. Cause like, being a successful person is very different than the activities you do to actually build and actually create and actually work. And it's, it's hugely challenging to, to basically like push all of that back and then keep to your core original values.

• 14:15Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I bet, like, certainly I experienced this as a writer, because like, most of what I do requires just like, sort of thinking time, like it's, and you can't be doing something else while you're doing it. But I've got to imagine, as you transitioned from like, founder, like actually building the business day in and day out, to investor slash, you know, applied philosopher, as we were talking about, what you actually need is like, time to think, time to have ideas, time to understand what's happening in the world. And you can't do that if you're saying yes to everything that comes your way.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. One of the reasons I'm excited to have moved to Texas and to be a little bit outside of Silicon Valley, because in Silicon Valley, there's literally every day, like a list of 50 people who want to, want to connect and need to connect and interesting heads of state and billionaires in town. And, and, you know, ironically, it turns out there's a lot of people here in Austin, too, who want to meet. But it's, but I am trying to create more open space for myself, because that's, that, you have to have time to think, and you have to have time to make your own plans versus just reacting.

• 15:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Yeah, I was curious about thinking about moving here. When I was thinking about Texas, what I wanted was, you know, you could move to Bozeman, Montana or something and you'd see nobody. So you don't want that. It's like, I was thinking of the idea of people flow. Like, I want people coming in and out of town so I can see them when I want to see them, but I don't want to be surrounded by so many people and so many events and so many opportunities that I never have time to do what I need to do.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, you know, Austin is heating up and it's exciting, this becoming a big center. But, you know, I think you're smart to live a little bit outside of the city too. Maybe, you know, one of my fantasies, maybe next year, I'll buy a bunch of land and build something a little more outside of the city. Just, you know, I like the whole Warren Buffett from Omaha, being out of the way, sort of thing.

• 16:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. No, there's also a little bit of a, of a sort of a power move to it too, where it's like, if you, people will come to you if, if it's worthwhile, and then if not, then you don't have to do it, you know? Like, I think, when, when everyone lives in a small block radius, it's more egalitarian in one sense, but then also you're much more accessible.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yep. And, yeah, and at some point, if you're too accessible, you're not actually getting your job done. As an investor, it's important, you're obviously seeing and networking with people, but you actually can have other people who are senior do that for you as well. The most important question are the macro questions, are the philosophical questions of where the world's going the next 10 years and what's possible now that wasn't possible before. And, and these are things you get more about reading and thinking.

• 16:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's what I was gonna ask. What is your process for that? Is it reading? Is it long dinner conversations? Like, how do you shape your, you know, macro worldview so you can do what you do?

• 17:05Speaker 01

  You know, you're constantly iterating on these theses and, and giving your ideas to smart people. And so, you know, Elon Musk is spending more time in this part of the world. When he comes through, I'll see him soon. I saw Peter Thiel last week, you know, who I work, work a lot with over the years. You know, Drew Houston, you probably know, is Dropbox CEOs now, actually based in Austin. I'll see him tonight, probably. And you just, you're constantly meeting people who are running things, who know what they're doing. And you're giving them, here's my ideas, here's what I think's going on in the world. And what do you think? And you're iterating with them. I think for me, it is, you have to get feedback. You have to iterate, you have to be challenged. So I'm being challenged by my team, by these other people. In terms of coming up with it, it's really based on seeing great companies, seeing what they're doing.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Seeing, you know, people, you know, I'll give you one example. I was pitched like 50 times in the last, about 50 times, the last year or two on these new gene therapies people are trying to do, where they need to raise, you know, over a hundred million dollars to do phase one of their gene therapy. And I realized, wow, there's just a lack of infrastructure for building these because not every one of them should raise a hundred million dollars. So, you know, how can we take the very top people in the pharma world and build an ability to, to manufacture these in one place? And so can we put several hundred million dollars in one thing that they can all use? And that was, you know, so, but it's like, this is obviously a trend where these all these gene therapies are going to be a big deal. How do you then capitalize on the infrastructure for that? And so being in the flow, being in the flow of a team, that obviously helps a lot with these.

• 18:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was thinking about the idea of dinner parties as a sort of way to learn about the world. Like I remember I went to a thing at Peter's house when I was writing Conspiracy and it was this huge party and I said, like, did he just pay for this? Like as a favor to you? And he said, no, this is just part of his entertaining budget. And I realized that the entertaining budget was part, was essentially the research budget, right? Like he would have these dinner conversations and then learn things which would then, you know, if that affects one investment, could have a massive return on investment.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  So our fund, our funds puts on, and this year is obviously an exception, but our fund puts on about 180, 190 of these events per year, of which I'm at about a third of them. But they're mostly, by events, I mean, they're mostly dinner parties or they're, you know, get togethers with cigars and cocktails. Or we'll bring some philosopher or somebody interesting to speak, you know, to get to know.

• 19:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I was reading about Cato once and Cato sort of, he worked so much, he didn't have time to just like, take philosophy classes or attend philosophy lectures. So it was sort of long dinners that go late into the night, which isn't, doesn't maybe feel stoic, but in fact, if that's where you're learning, I guess it doesn't really matter what it is.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Why doesn't it feel stoic? I'm curious.

• 19:48Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it feels more epicurean is what I mean.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Bringing the dinner here, yeah.

• 19:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, like a long dinner with wine and food. And I mean, you could still be stoic.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  It's not very temperate if you drink too much. I try, I'm learning how to be more stoic on my temperance with that when these dinners go a long time.

• 20:06Ryan Holiday?

  No, I mean, I certainly find it to be more educational than going to a nightclub or even flying to a conference, right? Like, you know, over dinner, you, I think political correctness falls away, performance falls away, and people just sort of say what they think.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. These are important to do.

• 20:25Ryan Holiday?

  So I'm curious to go back to the conversation about money. Is this something I've been curious about? Like, so obviously, Palantir went public recently, you've been, you have big investments in other companies. There's sort of, there's sort of upper middle class, there's upper class, and then there's like, really hitting it big, right? Like, you know, one of these like 1000x investments, or what changes for a person when like, true kind of generational wealth is created? Does it change how you see things? Does it change how you see yourself? Like, when that first happened for you, like, did it take a while to sink in? Like, how did you integrate that into your understanding of the world when

• 21:08Ryan Holiday?

  you're like, suddenly, this is, you know, probably an amount of money that it would be difficult to spend in a lifetime if one is remotely temperate?

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course, that's the important caveat. When I first made money in my early twenties, I was probably not as temperate as I could have been. Solomon, path to wisdom, I guess is the excuse, right? Yeah. But, but, but, you know, and so I was doing quite well at this hedge fund that I was top trader at Peter's Fund for quite a while, and I was also doing some early angel investing and whatnot that is starting to work out very well in my twenties. And, you know, the very first thing I did is I got at a few different houses. I had the coolest place in New York City, living under A-Rod, you know, the baseball player. Birds came to my apartment by mistake and they're really giant. I'm like, wow. Anyway, it's like silly stuff. And then I had a place in Palo Alto in San Francisco because I was working hard, you know, both between the fund and these

• 22:00Speaker 01

  companies we were starting, Pounds here and Palo Alto. And it was actually very inconvenient. And like, I always have my favorite stuff at the wrong place and it'd just be a lot to manage and it was wasting my time. And I, and I finally, after a few years, just like, just gave it, just decided this is ridiculous. I need to have one place and I need to have like, not all of this, you know, you know, basically got tired of going to like expensive nightclubs, you know, tired of a few of these silly, big, giant, you know, intemperate trips and whatnot. Right. And, and kind of got past that stage, but, you know, I was obviously very lucky to have gone through that stage. I could see some people getting to the money later in life, like having to go through that stage later because they haven't done it before, which is probably a lot more disruptive. If you, if you, for me, being already single anyway, going through that stage was probably a lot healthier.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Um, and then, you know, the, the real thing you learn is that money is just leveraged to get done things you care about. And so you have to stop and think, what do I actually care about? What do I actually want to spend resources and energy on? And for, for me, a lot of that is, is working on, there's, there's certain philanthropy around the world where you can help people very cheaply. And then there's also certain things about helping to fix our society. And in my, in my mind, one of the biggest problems that, that, you know, businesses cannot fix is we have to teach our society to be a free society and to use its resources really well to solve, whether or not we're talking about, you know, prison, how prisons, criminal justice works, how education works, how. Healthcare works, there's these policy problems that I really want to solve and help people solve and make our society work better. So, so hiring smart people working on those

• 23:27Speaker 01

  has been a lot more meaningful to me now with the resources than it was obviously in the past. And yeah, I found most people with money are not very good at creating leverage and bringing in other smart people and applying to things that are meaningful. So that's a skill I've been trying to build out.

• 23:42Ryan Holiday?

  I heard this expression once, it was like, "We don't work to make money, we make money to make more work." Like, and that was, a creative person was saying this, that the point being, you're not just doing crappy work so you can have money. The point is you're trying to make money be successful, so then you can have sort of more artistic or creative, or in your case, sort of policy freedom to do what you really care about.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  And you know, and you know, the work I do myself is also a big motivator in the sense that one of the, one of the key lessons I learned is every success you have is a platform for then a much bigger success. There's certain things you can't do until you've done something else to kind of get you into the club that you now could do this bigger thing, right? So it's like multiple layers you're climbing where every success you can now do something bigger, then you can do something bigger with that. So like, I'm able to get access to resources and to people and to things I just never could have before thanks to this, and you can use that to build stuff. And I, and I really do believe, like, there's this whole, a lot of people say, "Oh, I'm making money and I'm not going to go give back separately," as if you took some money away when you made that money. Most of the things I'm making money on are not things I have to give back for. They're things that frankly are really good for the world that they exist. Like, most of the

• 24:51Speaker 01

  problems in the world you can solve with entrepreneurship, you can solve with new innovation, and that's a positive thing. But then there are some things you cannot solve with entrepreneurship that you then have to do philanthropically. That's my view.

• 25:01Ryan Holiday?

  So when you look at someone like Cicero, what's interesting is he has that ambition, which I admire too. But then it seems like, so, as I was saying in Lives, he gets this sort of prophecy that says, you know, like, "You will be great if your actions are guided by your conscience, not the crowd." I think maybe that, I've always read it as the sort of the trap that Cicero falls into, is he sort of is chasing ambition or success for its own sake a lot of the time, or advancement for its own sake, which is tempting and seductive, and I empathize with it because I've done it myself. But it seemed like, you know, unlike Akado, who had that sort of moral certainty, it wasn't always clear what Cicero was doing it all for.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  There's two, and there's, I think there's two different interpretations of that quote you gave. The other interpretation, so another, another, another quote Cicero, Cicero is famous for is, I've always been of the opinion that unpopularity earned by doing what is right is not unpopularity at all, but glory. There is a certain take to it that very often the right thing to do is the unpopular thing. And so, so, so not being guided by the crowd could also mean that like, that like this, this is this, even though not everyone else is doing this, like this is clearly right. And so it's a certain type of courage. It's certain type of, there's courage, there's justice, there's wisdom, kind of all built into that to go after the thing that you know and you see is right, which for me, there's a lot of things like this right now in healthcare where like, it's just like very obvious what

• 26:31Speaker 01

  the right thing for the world is and how to stop cronyism and all these areas. And like, no one else is doing it and they're paying off both parties. But that, but that would be like, for me, that's a very Cisarrian type of thing to do is just go after this when no one else is and take this orthogonal approach of just, just saying this actually is the right thing, even though none of you guys are talking about it.

• 26:48Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's a baffling thing for a lot of people. We look at these like, and be curious because you know them. You look at these sort of extremely successful people, people who have, you know, fuck you money in, in the, the true sense of that word, like billions of dollars, nothing could take it away from them. They have, they, they should be the freest of all people. And yet they seem to be the most conservative. And I don't mean politically, I mean like, as far as like preserving the status quo, not challenging things. Why is it that these people who have, who, who could be attacking those things that you're talking about, uh, seem to be so reluctant to shake things up or take risks?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  There's a lack, there's a lack of courage. There's, there's really is a lack of courage. A lot of people just say, my life is easy and good. And it's almost as if they've been trained that their, their job is to not have to have stress in their life. Like that is like the highest virtue for people is I don't want to create stress for my wife. Or my husband or my kids and I'm just gonna do whatever or people who work with me. Cause it's all that I want to be that person who's creating special people who work with me. And therefore I'm always just gonna go along with whatever is not gonna create anyone cause anyone to attack me. And so no one stands up for these against these special interests and for these things that are. And you know, once you if you really dig into it, they're obviously correct. It's like you obviously don't want, you know, health systems being able to pass laws to stop competitors.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  You obviously don't want insurance companies be able to force doctors to have to work with them versus work directly with people. You obviously don't want doctors not, you know, to be able to pass laws in certain states to stop nurses from doing things in order to help the doctor lobby. It's just there's just tons of this cronyism and just focusing on healthcare for now is the example. And it's just like, it's just, it's just too much of a headache for people to, for people to fight back against these special interests. And so, and you know, I think courage is not taught in our society.

• 28:37Ryan Holiday?

  I totally agree. I mean, so, so if I'm understanding it correctly, because I think from the outside, particularly on the, on the left. There seems to be this sense that what it is is sort of self-interest, it's corruption, it's, you know, you can't get someone to understand something. Their salary depends on them not understanding it. This kind of, that it's incentive based. Were you saying that a lot of this is, is actually sort of more cultural and social? Like it's just not wanting to get involved as opposed to it being financially painful for them to get involved?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, the, the left's not entirely wrong, right? It's, it, and there's, but there's a lot of tragedy of the commons here where it's very clear something the government is, is, is doing. Thanks to the fact that it's captured by some industry is bad for everyone, but good for that industry. And, and so there's a huge tragedy of the commons and then there's an acquire, it requires effort and courage to stand up for it. And the much easier thing to do is just not fight and just go along.

• 29:33Ryan Holiday?

  So how, how do you cultivate courage, both personally, I'm curious how you think about it. But then also how as a society or how amongst your peers do you try to?

• 29:46Ryan Holiday?

  Get people to go down that path.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  It's tough. The first thing you need is you need to help people be more clear thinking about what's going on. It's very easy to muddy these waters and these interests are very good at doing it. So I think, I think, I think first helping approaching things in a clear thinking way where it's really clear, like what is cronyism and what is competition and how should a free society work and just agree and just like we try to just, we try to teach people these and teach people. And you know, the, the best way I've found is just, is just painting the optimistic picture of how well off everyone would be in this area if it was actually fixed and, and really showing that vision and sharing that vision. I think there's a lack of optimism in our society right now. So rather than focusing, which I'm guilty of as well, on, okay, this, this is, this is bad and the wrong way to do things. A better way to do it would be to say, listen,

• 30:33Speaker 01

  we could be spending, you know, a third as much here for better results. And you wouldn't have all these people probably, you know, protesting in the streets and, and et cetera, and going bankrupt on, on this type of stuff. And I think trying to show the optimistic possibilities in our society and then, and then allaying around that. In terms of getting people to be courageous, it's, that's hard. I think the best you could do is just give, do example yourself and step up yourself and, and try to, try to be a good role model. And the more we have role models to do this, maybe we can get a positive effect going. But it's, it's not, not an easy thing right now.

• 31:06Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. There's a General Mattis quote I love. He wrote it recently, but he's saying cynicism is cowardice. And I think, I think that's the other way to do it is like, obviously courage, you can lionize courage. I think that's important. But I think also we have to do a better job painting the decision to not get involved as not a morally neutral statement.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:35Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know what I mean? Like to ignore the problem makes you complicit.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  No, that there are most people are part of the problem because most people are just ignoring it and being cowardly and going on. And you know what? A lot of people have really tough lives and they have to work really hard to get by and they're really busy and this is not what they want to be doing. But a lot of people, especially a lot of people who are maybe 20, 30, 40 years older than me, I'm in my late 30s, I have a lot of these mentors and great people, 60s, 70s, 80s, they've made so much money and they're basically like, oh, there's no need to be involved in government. That's what weird people do who have problems or are strange and that's not what I do. And it's those, I lay at the feet of every billionaire who's in his 60s, 70s and 80s, who has not been actively involved in fixing our country. It is their cowardice that is why this is broken because that generation did not have the duty to go solve these problems.

• 32:24Ryan Holiday?

  Or maybe they thought that the extent of one's involvement in politics was putting money, like that and money is, you know, a corrupting force in politics, or at least it's sort of, it's like created all these giant proxy wars about this issue or that issue, when really, if smart, capable, competent individuals had just gotten involved in government, it could solve the problems and then those people could go home and back to their lives.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Well, there's different ways of getting involved. The question, most money in politics is pushing something that's your own interests, right?

• 32:58Ryan Holiday?

  Correct.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  I get a lot done in these state legislatures, so I've learned a lot about this. And the vast majority of the time where there's money involved, because this is your industry, this is your interest, this is your thing that you're focused on for a living.

• 33:10Ryan Holiday?

  Taxi cabs fighting Uber or something like that.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Right now, I happen to agree and Prop 22 in California is trying to fix the AB5 thing. It's, we're trying to make it so drivers, you know, don't have to, don't have to be employees because this is going to allow a lot more people to drive flexibly. It creates more jobs, it's good for the economy. It's a big battle between the unions and these companies. And so there's like $200 million going in from DoorDash and from, you know, Instacart and Uber on this thing. And that's the classic thing where all the money goes in. And you know, I think they're right in this case and they're right to be spending money on it, but that's, it's a thing for themselves. It's very rare to do what I'm doing and to do what only a few other groups I know are doing, where you go get involved in these issues because it's basically fighting special interests as the general public.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  And saying that this work, I'm not doing this because I'm gonna make a bunch of money on healthcare, this area, because of this happens. I'm not doing this because I gotta make a bunch of money because of criminal justice reform, because if I fix probation and parole, suddenly I'm richer than I am or something. I'm doing this because it's the right way to fight for our free society and to help people in our society. And you get that that's the type of duty. And money is a great way to do that, if fighting for the common good. But you haven't seen the billionaires do this. You haven't seen successful people in the 1980s, 90s, 2000s get involved in these issues very much at all. There's exceptions, but it's the exception, you know?

• 34:27Ryan Holiday?

  Right. No, and it seems like it's often the most pressing issues of our time. Unfortunately, our issues in which there's sort of very little financial interest, so they tend to get neglected. I was, you know, I was driving to my office yesterday and, you know, there's enormous lines to go vote. And I was thinking of the sort of the NBA thing where they opened up all the arenas to be voting centers. And it's like, it's such like an obvious idea that only came about because like basketball players pressured their billionaire owners to get involved. But it does, it does seem like, yeah, a lot of people sort of throw up their hands, whereas a society with a little bit more agency, particularly and ironically with the people who have, you know, created something from nothing, we could solve some of the pressing issues of our time.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  I'm lucky. I'm an entrepreneur. I built a lot of companies. And so I have a little bit of idea how to organize people and how to put things together. You know, on the voting one, it also reminds me of the DMV. These are obviously problematic. They take too much of your time. They have bad feedback. Like the way government should work as an entrepreneur who thinks about these things, is like every interaction with government should have some kind of NPS score, which is basically net promoter, which is basically saying like, the feedback of citizens unhappy. They just waited for four hours in line. They should be unhappy and they should get their feedback. And then there should be some kind of competition where every service government's providing, whether it's voting, whether it's DMV, should have, even if it has to be provided by government, have two or three different departments each doing their own way of serving people. And whichever one gets the worst

• 35:55Speaker 01

  NPS score is out and someone else is in charge of it, everyone's getting the best one gets more budget next time. And just have them keep competing each time and guess. What the competition of ideas, that's how free societies work is you compete, you compete and get better. You have accountability. I mean, the fact that we don't have competition of ideas, don't have accountability for things like DMV or things like voting, it's just, it's ridiculous. It's obviously wrong. And so this is like, this is basic leadership. And, and you know, the government unions try to put in rules to stop this stuff. We just have to, as a society, say, no, I'm sorry, government unions, you can't stop this. We're going to have accountability. We're going to make it better every time. And, and, and we're, you know, we're going to have competition. And so this is the kind of stuff, we just need leaders to do this. And frankly, the leaders right now in charge are, are pretty poor. And so I think we could, it's pretty obvious we do a lot better.

• 36:38Ryan Holiday?

  It's funny, I was, believe it or not, I was talking to Nick Denton two days ago, the founder of Gawker, who I got to really know, writing the, the same book about Peter Thiel and, and their sort of battle with each other. And I was saying to him, I was like, what is during the pandemic, what's an institution that you feel like has done a good job? Cause I feel like what this has really done is shown us just how weak and fragile and antiquated a lot of our institutions were. I think the military's done okay, not amazing. But he was like, like apps, he was like, he's like, apps have done a great job, like, which, which was a category and institution you didn't really think of, because it's non-governmental.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:18Ryan Holiday?

  But it's true. Like, you know, I can get my groceries easily. I could pick up an Uber if I wanted, you know, like that those things have done really well. Meanwhile, the things that we actually rely on the most, that are the most essential have sort of really struggled to, to hold up.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. The thing, the parts of our society, there are parts of a free society that are accountable, that have to compete, have done extremely well during this. And you know, there were some mess ups in logistics, but, but we adapted. I'm involved in a lot of things in logistics space, a lot of things supporting companies like Wish, uh, you know, which I'm a big investor in the number three e-commerce company in the U S, which has obviously grown a lot during this. And there were, there were new challenges, but, but they adapted and they worked and, and that, and that force of competition of, you know, worked on it. And so you need to bring that in government as well.

• 38:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was reading about an app that Brown University came up with, which I guess you could say is semi governmental and that it's a, you know, an institution of higher learning, but it was like, because I was thinking like, you know, I was starting to get, you know, Opportunities to talk again, like to give talks. And, and they were like, what this app does is you go like, okay, here's where I am. Here's how many people are going to be there. Here are the conditions that we're meeting. You know, here's the ages, here's the help. You like, you put in all these factors and it gives you out sort of like a risk profile of whether you should have Thanksgiving in Cleveland with your two parents who are 60 and your brother who's a, you know, a worker in a meat factory and you have to fly there.

• 38:48Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like you put in all the inputs and it, it gives you information. And I was like, man, that is like a great idea. The exact kind of thing that you would expect to be bubbling up in a system like this. But unfortunately, we've lost both the technical competence and the policy acumen to be able to execute on something like that, aside from just like one person making it and hoping that it takes off.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Well, that's the great thing about these is that one person can make it. That's why these platforms are so cool. But the one person can make it and it can bubble up. Like, it's, it's funny, I have a dinner in two weeks with some very prominent people and there's a whole big email chamber. They're all fighting now because some of them say, this is bullshit and I don't want to take a test.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  The other one's like, I have to have someone take a test or I can't go. And everyone take a test anyway. Yes, it would be good to have some app helping with this.

• 39:36Ryan Holiday?

  So I have, I have two, two last questions. So one, we talked about courage. I think one of the interesting things about Cicero, and I put this in the book, or actually, I don't think it was in the book, I found it later, but of the quip against Cicero, Cicero invites this guy who's sort of over, he's, he's just challenged Caesar to his face and Cicero says, oh, you should come sit with us. And the guy says, oh, I'm, I'm surprised there's room, given that you Cicero typically occupy two stools, right? His point being that Cicero in the, in this sort of breakdown of Rome, kind of fails to choose a side. And I'm, I'm curious too, like, what do you feel like?

• 40:17Ryan Holiday?

  But you know what I mean, there's a sort of a wishy-washiness in our society. Obviously, some people are very polarized. But then it seems like there is a lot of smart people who are just kind of like standing on the sidelines, waiting for things to figure themselves out, which was sadly Cicero's stance in the Civil War.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  If you, I mean, to bring in a little bit of German philosophy into this, you know, in my view, the world tends to be, truth tends to be broken down into dialectics, right? So you tend to have extreme truth on both sides of most issues. This is a really important part of reality. And so therefore, in order to get things done, you actually do need, in a sense, to partially occupy both sides because you need to acknowledge the deep truth of what each side is saying. But then, of course, you need to propose a policy. So what we do at the Cicero Institute is you do, we try to be nonpartisan. We try to say, there is a deep truth there, there's a deep truth here. But then you have to, you have to compromise. You have to say, okay, well, we want to move this towards how it should work. And here's a better policy that would help hundreds of thousands of people, would save money.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Everyone wins, except maybe the special interest. And you push it forward, but you have to push it forward while being allies with each side. It's very dangerous, especially in our society today. You can't, you just push things forward, something that only one side is going to work with. You're not really contributing to the conversation because we're only going to move forward with positive, optimistic, positive-sum compromises, is my view.

• 41:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, Keats had that idea of negative capability, the capability of holding two semi-contradictory ideas in your same, in the same mind at the same time. Maybe that's sort of the

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the point of the dialectic. And almost everything we see, I've written about this a bunch online myself, but in both in business and policy, there's these really important dialectics and you need to constantly be understanding them and then using them to move forward to craft the answer.

• 42:09Ryan Holiday?

  So as dark and divisive and, you know, bad as things are right now, I mean, you know, 200-plus thousand dead Americans, you know, economic shutdown, all the stuff that's happened in the world, as a biotech investor, someone who's sort of seeing what people actually are doing in the medical space, are you optimistic, pessimistic? Do you have anything that we should be optimistic about?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Well, I'm a diehard optimist. And so I'm, I'm obviously somewhat distraught at a lot of tough things going on in the world right now. But there's, there's, I mean, we invest across the board in technology and in the Renaissance, there's a Renaissance in biology going on. It's about a third of what HVC does these days. And, you know, one of the, one of the ways to think about it, maybe to be really excited, I'll give you two things really quick. One is, you know, the cell has become a unit of therapeutics. And so if you think it used to be all the best chemists in the world would be in pharma, you know, 1940s, 50s, 60s on, and these molecules they were creating drugs with. And then you had something called biologics, where rather than use a cell, you're using parts of cells, like peptides or antibodies in the 1980s, which Nentec and et cetera, and

• 43:18Speaker 01

  that became the unit. And now in the 2010s, you're actually taking cells. A cell is like, you know, million times the size of a, you know, a billion times the size of a molecule, of course, is a much bigger, bigger thing. It's like a skyscraper, whereas a peptide's like a pencil, right? And so suddenly you're programming these, these giant skyscrapers inside the body to be these machines to go around and perform things. And this is not just science fiction. You've already saved, and you know, there's two companies sold for $10 billion each, like four years ago, Kite and Juno, that were saving, you know, late-stage cancer patients who were supposed to be dead. They take out their white blood cells, they reprogram them, they send them back in, and suddenly you're able to like target the cancer and keep people alive and live for years, years longer, even cure them. And so there's all these really cool new cell therapies coming that are very exciting. And then on top of that, what there's

• 44:03Speaker 01

  There's a Nobel Prize in Biology won, you know, by Yamanaka, I believe, or I don't know if he got the prize yet, but he will if he hasn't, for figuring out 15 years ago how you can trip a certain part of a cell's genome and it turns it back into a chloropotent stem cell age zero. So you're suddenly basically like learning how to take cells and put them back to be very, very young again with the information in them. And we're using this right now in the lab to reprogram white blood cells to all of a sudden be back to stem cells, then be really young white blood cells and they kill the cancer. And there's all sorts of other longevity things coming where we're learning how to take the epigenetic information in cells and turn it back to age zero. So these are just two examples, but there's so many things happening right now with the systems in biology that we're turning in information systems

• 44:46Speaker 01

  and using to help cure diseases. So very, very bullish on curing disease in the next 10, 20 years. As long as we allow us to keep putting billions of dollars into this space, allow the market forces to work along with the scientific research forces. As long as we don't break capitalism and we keep things going, we're going to save so many lives.

• 45:05Ryan Holiday?

  So do you feel like what's happening right now is sort of is a cloud over what should be a sort of a medium to long-term positive outlook? Like we should be excited, but instead we're too blinded by the, you know, the what's happening around?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  The tough thing is happening right now is that the least well-off are not doing nearly as well as they should because there's all sorts of cost disease in healthcare and education, our criminal justice system's broken, housing costs way too much. So there's all these reasons why you have these people coming out and being, you know, for the socialist candidates because they're frustrated and they probably don't understand how all capitalism works, but they do understand that they're being screwed. And so I think the number one job we have as a society is how we help the working class like not want socialism. How do we help them participate in the market economy? And it'd be very easy with good policy to cut the cost of their lives in half. Like these people could be living way better lives for the value they're already creating.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  So I think there's a lot of reason these people are frustrated, a lot of reason the cost of their lives are tough. So I think we have to help them because if we don't help them, they're not going to want to keep capitalism in markets. If we don't keep capitalism in markets, we're not going to be able to achieve all these amazing things with biology and a bunch of other areas going on right now that are very exciting for everyone for the next decades.

• 46:23Ryan Holiday?

  I think the Stoics in Cicero would have certainly liked the symmetry of just how very similar the pressing problems of our time were to roam around the turn of the millennium.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Agreed, agreed. And maybe courage, there requires some leadership, requires some courage.

• 46:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and courage, most of all.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Courage, most of all.

• 46:42Ryan Holiday?

  Joe, thank you so much. This was awesome.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate it. See you soon.

• 46:48Ryan Holiday?

  Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. And if you don't get the Daily Stoic email, go to dailystoic.com/email.