How Smart People Become Stupid

Why do smart people fall for dumb ideas? In this episode, Ryan explains how ego and overconfidence can trip up even the smartest minds and how Stoicism can help you avoid the same trap.📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎥 Watch this episode on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 📢 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 Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to a Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am recording this from Lake Tahoe, California. I was just down in Los Angeles doing some promo for the new book, which will all be coming out here very soon, because the new book is out on Tuesday. Then we drove from Los Angeles to Cerro Gordo, where I spent the night, did some sledding. There was a surprise snowstorm. And actually, when Discipline is Destiny was coming out, I ran from the bottom of Cerro Gordo to the top of Cerro Gordo. It starts at like 4,000 feet of elevation. I ran all the way up to 8,000 feet of elevation. It's about eight and a half miles and almost a mile of elevation climb. So that was pretty brutal. So I had some flashbacks driving up the road.

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  I did a nice run two days ago, a part of it, and out and around. I didn't do the whole thing, but I did a chunk of it. I thought it'd be a good luck charm with the new book coming out. As you know, the new book Wisdom Takes Work is the fourth and final in the Stoic Virtue Series. It's all about wisdom. But that's not what we're going to talk about in today's episode. In today's episode, we're talking about the opposite of wisdom. Why do stupid people do stupid things? Or I think more relevant for most of us, as I would not imply that you're a stupid person. Why do smart people do stupid things? How do smart people make themselves stupid? Or make themselves foolish? Part one of Wisdom Takes Work is all about how we make ourselves intelligent, how we acquire wisdom. And then part two of the book is about what we're going to talk about in today's

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  video, how we make ourselves foolish, or how we fight against foolishness or not. So anyways, we're going to dive into this. This is a controversial thing we did over on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel, but I think it's going to make a great listen. Hope it doesn't upset you too much. But if it does, then you really need the new book because talking about how being a sensitive little snowflake can make it hard for us to hear things that we need to hear, or hear from people that maybe we don't necessarily want to hear from, or be challenged in ways that make us uncomfortable. That's a big idea in the new book. Anyways, just a couple of days left to preorder. It's out on Tuesday. Still doing all the bonuses. It would mean so much to me if you could support the new book. Check it out at dailystoic.com/wisdom. You can get signed first editions.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  You can get signed manuscript pages. You can have dinner with me to discuss the book. A bunch of other awesome stuff. Grab it in audio, grab it in digital, or as I said, grab those signed first editions. And thanks so much to everyone who supported the book and enjoy this deep dive into avoiding foolishness.

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  Smart people do dumb things all the time. In fact, that's one of the things that history proves, that intelligence is no defense against stupidity. The ancient Greeks even had a word for it. Certainty, smugness, bias, groupthink, laziness, prejudice, closed-mindedness, the confirmation bias. These are the ways that we turn off our minds. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. How smart people do stupid things. What the Stoic can teach us about not doing that.

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  There is an old Zen story about a master who invites a student to tea. As the visitor extends their cup, the master pours and pours and pours. And the cup, it starts to overflow. And finally, the student says, "Stop, stop, stop. The cup is full. It can't hold anything else." The master replies, "Yes, and your mind is like this cup. It's full of opinions and speculations. I cannot show you Zen," he says, "unless you empty your cup." This is really a story about ego. As Epictetus said, "You cannot learn that which you think you already know." If you're a know-it-all, you're right. And then it becomes impossible for you to know anything else. You can't accept information that you are certain you already possess. In one sense, this is a story about ego.

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  But I think it's more a story about our preconceived notions. If we think we know how things are supposed to work, if we're bringing stuff with us, it becomes impossible for us to hear what we need to hear and to be taught what we need to be taught. The other way to think about this metaphor of the cup is that it's not only when the cup is full that it's a problem. Horace, the Roman poet, would say that if the vessel is not clean, then whatever you pour in it becomes sour. And I think where our mind can turn things sour is in our preconceptions, our biases, our certainties. These things make us stupid. If you ever run down the list of the cognitive biases,

• 5:21Ryan Holiday?

  you see all the ways that our mind is not necessarily our friend. That is a key part of Stoicism, realizing that our preconceptions are a kind of poison. Our biases are deforming what we see and hear. What we have to do, the Stoics say, is put each of our impressions to the test, to not just trust our instincts or our emotions. We want to be open to receiving, to taking in, to allow things to be what they are, not conform them to be what we think we need to see or what we think that we are. If we want to sit down with a master for tea, we have to empty our minds. We have to empty our cups.

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  John Stuart Mill, the great economist and philosopher, was way ahead of his peers. As a toddler, he was reading the ancient Greeks in the original. And not just reading, but he could understand them. By seven, he'd read Plato. By eight, Mill was on to Latin and the great English writers. And he knew everything from Cicero to Aristotle to Shakespeare. By 17, he was working professionally in the world, impressing the great minds of his time in debate societies. He had an incredible career and life laid out in front of him. But he'd also been subjected to an inhuman amount of pressure and expectation. And it was inevitable that he would crash and burn.

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  He has a terrible nervous breakdown where he basically comes to think, was all this was pointless and meaningless. He asked himself one day, you know, if I achieve all the things that I've been working so hard for, would this be of happiness and joy to me? And he realizes, no. And it all comes crashing down. And it takes him years to rebuild his life after this breakdown. It's not a passing depression, but a full-blown intellectual and emotional crisis. And this is by no means a unique experience. You could argue that Elon Musk has done the same thing to himself as well. It is not possible to work the hours that he has worked, spend the amount of time he

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  has spent on social media, have as many children as he has had, do as many things as he's done. It is not sustainable. And that's what burnout is. Too much information, too much stress, too much stimulation, not enough time, not enough nourishment, not enough recovery, not enough self-care. It's like they say in the Bible, right? Much learning doth make thee mad. But actually, anything taken to these extremes creates an extreme pushback like this. And I guess that's the important lesson here, right? Which is that we only have one brain. We only have one body. We only have one life. We have to take care of it. We have to pace ourselves. Sometimes because we're ambitious, sometimes because we're driven, sometimes because we're getting great results, we just push and push and push.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  Push and push and eventually things snap. But wisdom comes from when we slow down, when we have quiet. Great elite performance comes from when we take care of ourself. And so it doesn't matter how brilliant you are. It doesn't matter how talented you are. If you blow it all up, if you break your brain, you give up all of those advantages.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  Although Nero is often seen as not just one of the worst emperors to ever live, he's one of the worst leaders to ever live. The start of his reign actually went quite well. It's actually known as the Quinquinum Neronus, or the Five Golden Years of Nero. And the reason the first five years of Nero's reign were good is that he listened to the advice of Burrus, a great military mind, who was one of his principal advisors, and his longtime teacher, Seneca, the Stoic philosopher. During the early days of his reign, he consulted with these advisors. He listened to them. He heard diverging opinions. He was challenged and he accepted the constraints on his power. But as time goes on, he becomes convinced of his specialness, of his brilliance. He starts to rely more on his instincts and emotions,

• 9:23Ryan Holiday?

  and he stops liking to have to listen to anyone else. There's actually a famous statue of Seneca that shows him giving an ancient version of what today we would call the Presidential Daily Brief to the Emperor Nero. And you can see in Nero's body language, he's slouched in his chair. He has a hood over. And as Seneca is attempting to teach and pass wisdom to this young king who desperately needs it, Nero is bored. Nero knows better. Nero is not interested. Nero does not want to be told what to do. He's sitting across from one of the wisest people to ever live, and he doesn't care. And this is also the moment where he fails. He begins to spin off the planet into delusion and cruelty and paranoia and fantasy.

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  Look, we're all limited, right? None of us are perfect. There are all things that we don't know. And this is why we have experts and teachers. And we have to be able to listen to their opinions and expertise. Right? One of the big questions in Stoic philosophy is what goes wrong with commoners? Right? Marx, Realist is The philosopher king, his son is the opposite of that. His son is as bad as Joaquin Phoenix portrays him in Gladiator. So why did this kid who should have been a great emperor go so bad? As Marcus Aurelius was preparing Commodus to succeed him, he understood that he needed advisors and teachers, as he himself had had in Antoninus and Rusticus and Fronto. And so he left as Commodus's advisors,

• 10:51Ryan Holiday?

  were told by ancient historians, many of the best men in the Senate. But Commodus rejects their suggestions and he doesn't listen to them. And unlike Nero, he does this right at the beginning. And so almost immediately, it goes sideways. It ends up destroying his reign. It costs the Roman people. These are cautionary tales. This is what happens when you don't have trusted advisors. We all need help. We need to be able to yield. We need to be able to listen.

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  We think that this time we're living in is so new. It's so different. We deal with all these sorts of modern problems. But most of the things that we fall for today, people fell for in the ancient world. In the ancient world, they had sophists and they had demagogues. They had con artists. There were people who profited from rage. There were people who scapegoated. There were people who made up lies. There were people who sucked other people into cults and into fads, who whipped up the mob and the crowd to do terrible things. And so then, as now, people had to be skeptical. They had to be on guard against these influences. But this is hard to do, right? Seneca falls for Nero's charms.

• 12:12Ryan Holiday?

  Plato is flattered into serving a tyrant in Syracuse, who really just wanted to use Plato and his reputation. There was a philosophical rival to the Stoics named Carnetides, who would argue one thing one day and then the exact opposite the next day. This is why Marcus Aurelius's teacher Rusticus talks to him about being on guard against the smooth talkers. This is why the Stoics talked about putting every impression up to the test. Prysippus, one of the early Stoics, would say, "Look, the whole point of being a Stoic philosopher is to be above and not a part of the mob. Now, as then, we have to be ever vigilant against bullshit, which can spread in ways that the ancients could not have imagined.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  And very smart people fall for it all the time. If you are someone who became successful by being skeptical, you become too skeptical and you question everything until there's nothing left. If you're someone who became successful trusting your instincts, what happens when those instincts now lead you astray? Look, this is a time of conspiracy theories, of nonsense. I mean, most podcasts are two people just bullshitting, and neither of them know what they're talking about. But it feels like thinking. It is presented to you as if this is intellectual rigor, and it's not. Wisdom is the ability to ask good questions, to spot bullshit,

• 13:39Ryan Holiday?

  to not fall for scams and conspiracies, to know what's too good to be true, to be able to spot a smooth talker, or a demagogue, or a salesperson, or a grifter. And lacking this ability will set you up for an embarrassing fall.

• 14:00Ryan Holiday?

  Look, Elon Musk is obviously incredibly smart. He's incredibly brilliant, and he is incredibly successful. So what explains some of the mistakes he's made? Some of the dumb things that he has said? Some of the dumb things he has done? And some of the things he has fallen for? I would argue you could trace this back to his childhood. His childhood was horrendous. Even if his family was wealthy and privileged, it was a violent childhood. It was an abusive childhood. It was a lonely childhood. Talked about, he was relentlessly and violently bullied. He's been quoted as saying that his father was a terrible human being, and no kid should have to say that. I don't think, really, anyone could emerge from a childhood like that completely normal. No, there is a wounded child.

• 14:45Ryan Holiday?

  There, and we are all wounded children in this way. But the problem is, we're not children anymore. We're adults with adult responsibilities. And if we can't figure out how to become that functional adult with some kind of awareness of the trauma and patterns and experiences we had, we're going to end up repeating a lot of those patterns, making a lot of those same mistakes, acting immaturely in situations that require profound maturity. I mean, I think about Alexander the Great, right? Here you have a guy who goes literally to the ends of the earth to surpass his father and impress his mother. I think of Leonardo da Vinci, who was never fully accepted by his father,

• 15:29Ryan Holiday?

  wasting years of his life trying to find the perfect patron who would support and celebrate him. And we all have versions of this, something we're chasing, some wound that we are trying to heal, some hole we are trying to fill, some arrested state of development that we are stuck in. And that's really the problem. You wouldn't entrust a teenager with a huge, high-stakes project. But at some point, we have to put away those childish things. We have to do work on ourselves, right? Or else the mature, responsible, successful version of ourselves will be overridden by the young, immature, wounded, scared version of ourselves.

• 16:11Ryan Holiday?

  And at some key or critical moment, we're going to make the teenage decision. A part of wisdom is about integrating the experiences and the things that we have learned about ourselves and about the world as we go, not staying as you were at that moment in your childhood.

• 16:32Ryan Holiday?

  Imagine someone who's glued to their phone from the moment that they wake up, someone with multiple TVs in their bedroom that watches nothing but opinion cable news shows, someone just mainlining outrage every breaking story. I think what you would say about this person is what JFK's doctor supposedly said when he heard all the drugs that the president was taking. He said, No one with their finger on the button should be taking things like that. The information diet of the president is critical because this is a person you want to be informed on the one hand, yet you also want to be able to see the big picture, to have equanimity and poise. And the information diet that I just described to you, you know whose diet that is.

• 17:17Ryan Holiday?

  That's Donald Trump's. And quite frankly, J.D. Vance's and Elon Musk's are not much better. Your sense of the world, your sense of what's important, your sense of what's really happening, your sense of other people, your fellow human beings, is shaped by the information that you take in and the mediums in which you consume it. And so, yes, obviously, the president has to get the latest in breaking news. That's what the presidential daily briefing is supposed to be. And actually, the CIA published a book a few years ago where they talked about the different presidents and how they consumed information. And Trump would supposedly look at this booklet and go, and can you summarize it for me? He wanted it reduced in bullets.

• 17:58Ryan Holiday?

  And then what they often found is that to get him to read it, they had to make it extra entertaining, and they often had to make it about him. Now, different presidents have different approaches and make themselves stupid in other ways. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Jimmy Carter, who was a brilliant man, his problem was that he would read anything. One of his aides talked about how he once read a 350-page memo on a minor tax law. And the aide was talking about how they never should have given it to him in the first place, but he also should have had the discipline not to read it. It wasn't a good use of a busy person's time. Each of us in our devices has more information than a Marcus Aurelius could have ever even

• 18:39Ryan Holiday?

  dreamed of, but we're also subjected to more misinformation and disinformation and divisive, misleading, provoking, and outrage-inducing information that they could have imagined in their worst nightmare. And so, if you want to stay wise, if you want to be able to see things philosophically, get to the truth of them, you're going to need to know how to filter out bad information. And you're going to need to choose very wisely what you allow in. YouTube is great, and podcasts are great, and even social media can be great. But these things can also break your brain. They can make the vessel dirty, to go to Horace's point.

• 19:18Ryan Holiday?

  Look, obviously Socrates was brilliant. He's one of the smartest people who ever lived. The oracle at Delphi says that there is no one wiser than Socrates because he had a kind of intellectual humility. He knew what he didn't know. That's the good part of Socrates. The part we don't talk about that much is that he was also pretty obnoxious. Like, it wouldn't have been fun to be interrogated in one of the Socratic dialogues. He wasn't always nice. He belittled, he demeaned, he made people feel stupid. We call them his interlocutors, but really, they were victims. And he often humiliated them. Then he was surprised that there was pushback. He's arrested ultimately and tried for corrupting the youth. After Socrates is convicted on these charges,

• 20:02Ryan Holiday?

  and he's convicted by a very slim majority, is given a chance to speak at his sentencing. And you know what he did? He insults the jury. He says that they're wrong and that actually he should have been rewarded and celebrated. He suggests that as a sentence, they should pay him for how helpful he is. And so in this moment, right, when he could have asked for mercy, he could have, with some social adeptness, maybe gotten off with a slap on the wrist, actually, a larger majority votes to convict him of the crime that some of those people had just said he was innocent of. There's a line from the historian Macaulay, who said, "The more I hear about Socrates, the less surprised I am that they killed him." Meaning that Socrates lacked a certain social intelligence.

• 20:47Ryan Holiday?

  Socrates called himself "the gadfly of Athens." Did he miss the fact that people hate flies? Right? Like, he understood the human condition, but he was oblivious to his effect on human beings. In the end, it was this, not his supposed crimes, that sealed his fate. And without the ability to understand what's going on with other people, how smart are you? How effective can you be? I like to contrast Socrates with Benjamin Franklin, who was brilliant, widely believed to be one of the smartest people of his time. But he's also one of the most beloved figures of his time. He didn't have very many enemies. He was liked by commoners and nobles alike. And this is something that we lack at our peril.

• 21:29Ryan Holiday?

  You have to learn how to understand people, how to build relationships with them. And if you can't do that, not only will you be unpopular, but you will be very ineffective. And eventually, you will screw yourself and your mission up.

• 21:46Ryan Holiday?

  These men met in houses across the empire. They were Stoics and philosophers and historians and soldiers. And they were known as the Cypionic Circle. And the leader of the Cypionic Circle was a Roman general named Cipio. That's who it was named after. And in these get togethers, they talked about justice. They shared books. They recited poetry. They talked about the theater and drama. They talked about what they wanted the world to look like. They tried to solve problems together. They gave each other advice. They supported and they encouraged each other. Almost 2,000 years later, Ben Franklin started his own version of the Cypionic Circle, which he called the Junto, which was a mutual improvement society.

• 22:30Ryan Holiday?

  Emerson did this with the transcendentalists. The PayPal Mafia is a version of this. Samuel Johnson's The Club is a version of this. What today we call masterminds is a version of this. Right? Doesn't matter how talented you are. Doesn't matter how individually brilliant you are. You gotta have a scene that brings out the best in you, that also holds you accountable and challenges you. Iron sharpens iron, as they say. We become better when we're surrounded by people better than us. We become worse when we surround ourselves with people worse than us. Epictetus talked about this. He said, "If you live with a lame man, you will learn how to limp." "You must associate with people who are likely to improve you," Seneca advised,

• 23:13Ryan Holiday?

  "and you must welcome those whom you are capable of improving."

• 23:21Ryan Holiday?

  Look, most empires aren't destroyed by outside forces. No, most of them destroy themselves. This is what we mean when we say ego is the enemy. It was Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, who said, "Remember, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know." It's precisely when we become successful, when we become smart, when we've learned a lot, that we get in very dangerous territory. The danger of being a know-it-all is that it becomes impossible for you to know anything else because you think you already know everything. Zeno once said that we have two ears and one mouth. For a reason. Ego wants to talk. Humility and openness wants to listen. Ego gets in the way. It prevents us from learning. It prevents us from growing. It is also easy to manipulate, right?

• 24:06Ryan Holiday?

  How do you get an egotistical person to do something? Make them think it was their idea. Egotistical people have this massive bias. They make everything about themselves. They filter everything through this very dangerous filter. Do I want this to be true? How does this fact challenge or confirm my identity? And so it makes us very stupid. Ego is the enemy. Ego makes us stupid. Ego is a very dangerous thing. So find activities that humble you. Spend time with people who humble you, who tell you the truth. Don't obsess with all the things that you've done. Don't pat yourself on the back for all the things that you know. Focus on what you don't know. Stay curious. Stay humble. Stay hungry. Don't get complacent.

• 24:51Ryan Holiday?

  Keep pushing yourself. Keep challenging yourself. Stay open. Stay humble. Stay a student.

• 25:04Ryan Holiday?

  One of the ways that we make ourselves very stupid is by getting caught up with our own understanding of the world. That's why I think the story of Temple Grandin is so powerful. These cattle ranchers were trying to vaccinate their cows. So they had to get the cows to go through this shoot. And the cows hated it. So they tried to force them through. And this was creating all these problems. Cue Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin gets down with the cows and with a black and white camera, begins to take pictures. And here with this black and white camera, she's able to see something closer to the reality that the cows experience. She sees how this hose looks like a snake or the banging of a chain against a fence could create a chain reaction within the herd of cows. So no wonder they don't want to go through.

• 25:49Ryan Holiday?

  Basically, she has the curiosity and the empathy, right? Even though she's on the autism spectrum, to get down there and understand it from their point of view. Elon Musk was recently on Joe Rogan, and he said that he felt like empathy was like the ...secret weakness of Western civilization, which is about the dumbest thing you could possibly say. Empathy is the strength of Western civilization. It's the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and understand why they are doing what they're doing. Socrates said, "Nobody is wrong on purpose." That person that's doing something dumb or weird or strange, there's a logic to it. Why do they think that? What is wrong with that? I can think of why Elon Musk thinks that. Because of his cruel childhood,

• 26:32Ryan Holiday?

  where people had very little empathy for him. Or perhaps because having empathy for other people, when you're the richest person in the world, might cost you a lot of money, might get in the way of the plans that you have. And this is important in strategy, in business, in art, in life. If you're making this stuff for you because you're an egomaniac and you're the only experience you can understand, you're going to wonder why your stuff doesn't convince other people, why it's not exciting to them, why they don't love it, why it doesn't touch them, why it doesn't move them. Smart people, it's not just enough to know yourself. You have to know other people. You have to understand why they are doing what they are doing. And you have to genuinely care. That's the virtue of justice for the Stoics as well. So yes, smart people are in their own heads,

• 27:17Ryan Holiday?

  but wise people have the ability to get out of their heads into the heads of someone else. So, look, if you liked the ideas in this video and you want a little more wisdom in your life or you want to be less stupid in your life, that's what the new book is about. Wisdom takes work. And it is a lot of work. This is the work of one's life. That's the new book. It's the fourth book in the Stoic Virtue Series. And you can grab it anywhere books are sold.

• 27:43Ryan Holiday?

  When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com/email.