Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You don't need to be an egotistical asshole to be successful. Are there a lot of egotistical assholes who are successful? Sure. But there's also quite a few catastrophic failures who were Caligula, Nero, Xerxes, Mussolini, and then, of course, business and art. Entertainment show us the truth of the old Greek saying that whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make proud. And so for the Stoics, the antidote to this was humility, was self-awareness, was introspection, was reflection. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Not just the dangers of ego, but timeless practices that help sweep it away, that help you get clean and stay good.
My first squadron, there was a lot of jockeying for position with the young pilots, the lieutenants, the captains. You're friends with everyone. You trust that person with your life, super tight-knit, but you're also very aware of how everyone's doing. You don't want to be made to look bad. And I think a lot of it is you feel like you're really establishing your reputation in this career field. You're going to be in for a decade, and you don't want to look incompetent. And for me, for a long time, I thought I was too humble. I wasn't boisterous. I wasn't loud. I wasn't type A, and I felt like I had a hard time fitting in in that culture. But in hindsight, I realized that my ego was actually getting in the way because I saw asking questions, asking for help.
letting people know I was struggling with a concept in the airplane as weakness. And I felt like I could not show weakness in that environment. There's an ego, people don't think about it this way, but there's an ego even in that kind of imposter syndrome or that sort of wallflower-ness where... you just think people are thinking about you way more than they are and that these things say more about you than they do. And so, yeah, because you don't want to look stupid, you'll stay stupid or because you don't want to ask for help, you don't get help, or you don't want to look like you want it too badly so you don't get it. It's this weird thing where, yeah, the person who needs to be the center of attention, they make everything about them. That's a very obvious and harmful form of ego. But then we have this other form of ego that maybe we...
convince ourself is humility or self-awareness or something, but it's actually just a similar self-absorption. Yeah. My whole world revolved around me and that I felt like everyone was watching every little thing that I did. And so I was hypervigilant about how I reacted to people's comment. Part of this.
I don't think you can not talk about gender being layered in there, right? I'm like one of two women in a squadron of 50 pilots. And there's a lot of like nuances of, oh, they said an inappropriate joke. Everyone looks at me and waits for my reaction. And I felt the responsibility of that. And also if I'm bad at something, now there's a stereotype that female fighter pilots are bad at this thing. I'm a data point of one. You're just spending too much time thinking about what other people are thinking. And you don't realize that the cost of that is thinking about things that you actually have some semblance of control over or would make a difference. You're just like, what are the critics going to say? How's this going to go? Do they like me? Did that come off weird? And yeah, what you're not thinking about is like flight semantics, schematics or whatever. It's a massive distress.
fearlessness and then you would say ego both of them are somewhat adaptive at the beginning of things because ego makes you go out for things that you have no business going out for and so in the beginning it's an advantage or at least it's not as costly as it becomes later but it's a real bad habit to pick up in both cases i feel like not being afraid of things you should be afraid of yeah right like you will not be an old fighter pilot with that mentality. Especially when you're having to stand out in a field, you know, or you're having to get past a lot of reservations or resistance. All that can kind of work to your advantage. And then you get there and now you're an asshole. Or, you know, now you think you're exempt or you've made a bunch of enemies. Or again, yeah, you've picked up really bad habits and you don't have the kind of sound fundamentals, which should be like self-awareness, empathy, et cetera. You know, a sense of caution and prudence. And now, even though it got you where you wanted, whether it's a fighter pilot or a record deal or you have a successful business, the irony is it gets you what you want. And now...
the stakes are much higher. So you're going to be learning these painful lessons, like the cost of fearlessness or ego. And now you're doing it in the air instead of in a simulator, or you're doing it with something to lose, like all that you've built. And that's why they say pride go with before the fall. At what level do you want that fall to happen? I think our safety net for that, because the what got you there, if you are very overly confident, if you are hangman from Top Gun Maverick, that can get you places initially. But that debrief at the end of the flight and the way that's structured and the humility required in there.
Like every little thing you did wrong in the air is picked apart. And not in like this ridicule, shame you way, but in like, okay, you were late to that. Why were you late? What were you thinking about? Did you have the wrong information? Or did you have the right information to make a wrong decision? Like we just peel back the things until we're like, oh, here's the root cause of why we failed at our mission. And no one is spared from being criticized. And we actually have language in our grade sheets. Like when you're an instructor and you're teaching someone new and they're just pushing back, you're like, hey, you didn't do this like you were supposed to. What happened? And they will come up with excuses, not reasons, but excuses, right? They won't take ownership of it. They won't walk away with, okay, next time I'm gonna do this better. It's just failure to take instruction.
And people can get kicked out of programs or even out of the jet and move to a different career field if they just continue to because it's dangerous. Yeah. Behind me is an enormous mausoleum. built by and for one of the most powerful men in history, a man of enormous ego and enormous vanity. Hadrian, when he had this built in 139 AD, he said to his architect, make it bigger and more impressive than Augustus's. And indeed, it rivals not just Augustus, but it rivals some of the Egyptian pharaohs. And it held not just Hadrian's remains, but that of his successors too, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius himself. But Marcus Aurelius would have found this to be the antithesis of Stoic philosophy. He actually addresses it in meditation. He says, consider that before long, you'll be nobody just like Hadrian, just like Augustus. He said, so live and act with humility. Now, you might think the fact that this is still here, 2000.
and years later, that it's a museum that has endured through all these centuries, that it might disprove Marcus's point. But actually, it doesn't. Because you know what happened? In 400 AD, Rome was sacked by the Goths. And they broke into the temple. And they scattered the ashes everywhere. We have no idea where they are. They were lost to the ages. Which is also something Marcus Aurelius talks about in Meditations. He says, Alexander the Great and his mule driver, they both died. And the same thing happened to both. And indeed, the same thing happened to Augustus. We have no idea where his body is. The same thing happened to Hadrian. The same thing happened to Antoninus. The same thing happened to Marcus Aurelius. And the very same thing will happen to you. He's saying, you know, ego is the enemy.
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I used to be big into new atheism, right? And that was a movement that was afflicted hugely by a sense within it that people were just smarter than Christians. I see that tendency everywhere now, and I'm sure I'm prone to it as much as anybody. So many social movements now were defined by a feeling of sort of about the kind of the people, the outside people, that, you know, they're the kind of benighted heathens outside the golden circle. You said somewhere, and I think you're right, you said that the story of genius is really the story of ego or that every genius story is the story of ego. I think the tension of being smart or being right, it can be a real problem. Someone told me once that making...
A successful contrarian bet can be a sort of cognitively devastating experience because you did a thing and everyone told you you were wrong. Everyone told you you're an idiot. They were incredibly condescending along the way and smug about it. And then you proved them wrong. It is very hard for you to go back to zero on the next thing and the next thing, right? You're starting now with a cynicism and a skepticism and a sense of superiority. That is an imbalance that affects your future endeavors and political and social opinions.
Oh, I completely think that's true. I remember having this conversation with a journalist, a British journalist who died a couple of years ago called Christopher Booker, and he became in his later years a climate change denialist. And I asked someone who'd worked with him, you know, how did that happen? He was so smart. Like, how did he end up just spending the last 10 years of his life talking about the hockey stick graph and all the stuff we used to hear about before, you know, every summer scorched Texas and wildfires raged across the Midwest and people kind of went, no, I do think this is a bit weird now. And this other journalist said, well, he was one of the, Christopher Booker was one of the original journalists involved in uncovering the Thalidomide scandal.
which was a huge medical scandal in the 1960s in Britain where women were given morning sickness drug and it led to limb deformities in their children. And for a long time, the medical establishment denied this, covered it up. And it took a really big investigation by the Sunday Times and others to bust this open and get people compensation. And he said, essentially, that generation of journalists was ruined by it because they had seen this massive conspiracy where the establishment were lying to them and they were right. And I think that's true. My friend Sarah Dighton once said this about the Iraq War ruining the left. Being everybody in the left who was like, the Iraq War was a very bad idea. I think it's a foreign policy disaster, you know. And then it was.
got the idea that actually this is true of everything. And you end up applying the same paradigm because it was right last time. And as you say, the key thing is that humiliation, the humiliation and vindication. And I write about this in the book because there's an idea of a kind of scientist as rebel that comes through. You see it in the Galileo story. You see it in Ignaz Semmelweis and his work on antiseptics and maternal mortality. That's such a compelling story to us, the idea of the one man standing up against the crowd and being laughed at and then being vindicated. It's so unbelievably emotionally satisfying that unfortunately we vastly over-index on it and we almost want it to happen every time.
Because it's just, whereas obviously that would be absurd. You'd never be able to get in an airplane if it turned out that every engineering thing was wrong. You never go to a hospital, but every bit of medicine was actually wrong. And when you watch people not engage in good faith with your ideas and be intellectually dishonest, and you watch what you actually really were thoughtful about be sort of caricatured and treated as a straw man, it's hard for you later, when you actually aren't on as sound a footing, not to convince yourself the same thing is happening. And so I think you see that a lot. And this is actually, I think, the trap of scientific genius. It's the trap of entrepreneurial genius. Like everything that worked, it was doubted at the time. I mean, Nikki, our mutual editor, when I came to them and I said I wanted to write a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy, she told me later that they were like basically just humoring me and that they hoped I would go back to writing marketing books after, right? And so I feel like I've had to do a lot of work with the success of that, of reminding myself that it actually was a bad idea. Like the conventional wisdom, like she was not like.
being elitist, the amount of money that they offered me and the expectations they had for the book were within the bounds of reason and made sense given their past experience. They were not snubbing me. They were not insulting me. I did not know better. I had a hunch and they had a hunch and my hunch turned out to be not even right, right? Because it succeeded more than I thought it would succeed. I can't retroactively give myself more prescience than I had because I didn't have any. I was just interested in something and I thought it could work. And the fact that it did work at a pretty extraordinary level.
That is a surprise to both parties, right? And so what can happen? I saw this when I was at American Apparel. You know, the idea was insane. What Dov Charny was trying to do and what he was trying to pull off and he said, everyone was right to say that it wasn't going to work. It worked despite itself. But if you tell yourself a story afterwards that you're a genius and that you knew better and that all these people are idiots, then you're going to get yourself in trouble later on when you have the other idea or when those people go, okay, hey, you did succeed, but you should be careful of X, Y, and Z.
yeah they call it nobel syndrome i think don't they when people win a nobel prize and then they start going well you know never mind organic chemistry wouldn't you like to hear a few of my thoughts about astrobiology yeah didn't get into alchemy yeah newton spent a lot of his life on alchemy and also a lot of his life on something called biblical chronology which is so wacky that we don't even remember it today basically trying to work out when like when events in the bible would have happened to work out how old the earth would be from that point there's loads of examples like that you know um mary curie one of the greatest scientists she was she would go to seances you know she would go and see mediums it was a very um popular thing to do at the end of the 19th century and i think there's an interesting bit about that right because she was working with radiation which was an invisible force Yes. You know, but that was real. So, you know, why not ectoplasm? And I think that's the thing. If you're working at the edge of the kind of the known, then maybe you're going to end up with quite a fluid sense of reality. But I think it's what you're talking about a bit narcissism. If you go along with the conventional wisdom and you're right, that doesn't distinguish you or say anything about you. But if you box the conventional wisdom and you're right, that means you are better. And I just, I think so much of the troubles we see across the society are essentially narcissism. Conspiracy theorizing fundamentally to some extent is narcissism, right? It's like your sheeple, your NPCs, and I've seen the truth. I think it's very important to lots and lots of people now to feel.
special, to not feel ordinary. But I think it is a real challenge of modern life is working at which experts to trust and which authority to trust and to calibrate that, right? Not to just take everything that you're told by people with letters after their name as gospel, but also not to go so far out that you just, you know, you just don't believe anything at that point. I always find it remarkable how easy it is to see ego in other people. Oh, God. As if, and then how insidious it is to see it in yourself. Oh, yes. You know, it's horrifying. Exactly. It's something constantly we're going to keep in check. Constantly, you know.
Especially being in a band. Yeah, I would say being a lead singer is probably of a successful band. Maybe it's actually harder to be in a not successful band. But there's something about it that is uniquely toxic to the ego. Yeah. It's like gasoline. It also is a requirement a little bit, I think, to be the front man of a band. Is to have a bit of ego. Because you think I should be the one. I should be the main one. Yes. I don't know. It's interesting. I kind of became the singer of my band by mistake. But to be a good front man.
You have to have the willingness to get up and make an idiot out of yourself again. And besides a smidgen of talent, the only requirement to be a good front man is the willingness to get in front of other people and make an idiot of yourself again and again and again until you get good at it. And in order to do that, I believe there has to be a healthy amount of ego. Well, that's why I think it might actually be worse for the ego to be in a failed or an up-and-coming band than a successful band. Because a successful band, you can be like, you understand it's unhealthy and you can create some artificial distance. You can be like, it's not about me. I don't want to take it too seriously. You can serve self-efface. To me, where the ego is required in the sort of performative, whether it's sitting down to write a book and write a song, whatever, is the part of you that goes, everyone wants to hear this when no one has asked for it.
Literally no one has asked for it. And in fact, they're actually telling you for a good chunk of the time you're doing it that they are fundamentally not interested. Like you are getting rejected over and over and over again. And you're like, no, but this is really good. Everyone needs to hear it. And that is the definition of ego, right? Like the rejection of the evidence over your belief or faith in yourself. And so I think in that way, ego can be adaptive early on. The problem is it's so fundamentally maladaptive later on. And this is, I think the lead singers or artists or whatever that we know about that we would say is egotistical are the ones who are fundamentally stuck at how they were.
yes whatever they had to be to be the up and coming lead singer of guns and roses you are still the lead singer you know yeah yeah for sure and we call it lsd lead singer's disease you know he's got a bad case of the lsd i've managed to keep mine in check i think if you're not looking very closely yeah or you're not very informed yeah like you're not savvy ego and confidence look very similar right just like mania can look like charisma yeah but if you so if you've never been around someone to be like oh this is what a crazy person does yeah you're like pumped around the sky. You don't realize it's going to crash at some point. Especially if you're not competent, the competence of egotistical or narcissistic people. I mean, you look at the first couple people that I worked for, I was clearly searching for something. Most people see that kind of boss and run the other way. We're like, I love it here. This is normal. On a long enough timeline, it becomes a disadvantage. That's why I think you can confidently go, ego's the enemy.
But it clearly, I mean, there's obviously an extraordinary amount of very successful, very egotistical people. Yeah. I think it's two things. One, like, you got to, like, that's the myth of, was it Krosis? Where it's like, you can't, you got to wait till the end to judge a person happy. But I also think unless you're really, really studying them closely, you're not seeing all the ways that they actually could have been more successful. Right. So it's like, maybe, yeah, that person's ego makes them shameless enough to ask for stuff that they have no business doing. But by the same token, they tend not to do the work to then earn the thing because they think they're entitled, like, you know what I mean? Like, it seems like confidence to be like, give me the shot, game's on the line. Yeah.
But actually a great athlete, they know they have to do the work to earn that. And if you're just like, no, no, give it to me, but you don't have the goods, then you're going to lose said game when it's on the line. It's the confidence to want to get the opportunity to put yourself in that position. Even when I was starting out, there's these things called bringer shows for stand-up. Have you heard of them? Basically, you get stage time if you bring five friends. If you bring the audience, you get stage time. And so early on, I did an open mic, and then there's a bringer show. They're like, yeah, we can give you stage time at the comedy store. And I'm like, amazing.
And yeah, just bring five friends. So immediately I was like, I'm already on stage at the Comedy Store. This is crazy. And then I just quickly, you know, wore out all my friends. They were like, dude, we're not coming to any more shows. It was this thing where I had like the naivete or to be like, no, I can be on stage at the Comedy Store. But then quickly learning, I'm like, oh, no, it takes what it really takes is two to three open mics a night every night for 10 years. You need a certain amount of shamelessness to get up and do the thing when you're bad, which you invariably are at the beginning. Yeah.
But you also need like the humility and maybe even the self-loathing to like think that you're bad. Yes. So you do the work to get good. Yeah. And you see that a lot. Yeah. Like the people who will get off stage and be like, man, I crushed. Yeah. Like, no, you didn't. Yeah. If you walk up feeling like you crushed, it's like the best in the world don't feel that way. No. So that you feel that way. So that's where ego is the enemy because it's making you stay as you are. It's probably more pleasant to not feel.
shitty yeah but the shitty is like um ira glass talks about this he's like there's a taste talent gap yeah when you start and you have good taste which is you know what is funny or you know what's beautiful or you know what's good writing but like you can't do it but the desire to bridge that gap is like the propulsive force that makes you good but if you're just like maybe you have good taste but then you're also biased when it comes to yourself or you're delusional when it comes to yourself that's a problem because now you're just not you're just like confidently being shitty if you don't believe you can do something you're not gonna be able to do it yeah just because you believe you can do something is not even close to sufficient to being able to do it yeah it's always having this kind of a this mindset of like no there's always room for improvement yeah like you're never perfect always a student that's one of my favorite things is just because like you know you'll see like bill burgh go off stage at the comedy store and he to me i'm like he just crushed yeah but to him he's like oh that one bit like i'm not getting it right you know there's that there's that criticism there's like self-criticism of like no i need to improve this to really kind of it's always perfecting it and it's it's it's kind of never reaching that destination and i think well dr drew did a study many years ago of he as guests would come in the love line he gave them like this narcissistic personality test because like it's interesting like you'd think you'd be able to study narcissism but most really successful narcissists are obviously inaccessible to like clinical research right most studies are done on like college students for class credit you know yeah so he was able to give this narcissistic personality uh test to like all the guests so like a range of celebrities and musicians and then also like reality tv stars and whatever and what i remember from the study is that
they found that yeah like most celebrities are at some level of narcissism but it's this interesting question of like are narcissists attracted to celebrity or does celebrity make you narcissistic it's probably a little of both but one of the things they found was that the more technical the thing you did was the less narcissistic you were so like drummers might be very famous because they're a huge band but what they do is really fucking hard yeah and it's like a craft that you love so it's like inherently humbling and it's inherently about like solving this like puzzle you know versus like someone who was on the real world road rules challenge is like attractive in good shape made a good like pitch video yeah and then is maybe like dramatic so like they they're both famous but one is getting their ass kicked by the craft of the thing yeah and the other one is mostly just thinking about like how can i get more on tv yeah it's like the craft itself humbles you yeah and keeps you in check yeah that makes a lot of sense stand-up is like a thing you're going and doing every night and it's whether you're doing it for a thousand people or
10 people, it's fucking hard. And you get humbled by the audience too. If you're not improving, if you're not constantly putting your A game forward, the audience will humble you. I feel lucky because like my first book came out and did well, but the stoic stuff was much more gradual. And then I know people who like their first book are just like crushed. That's like now you're the person instead of like trying to be the person. I spend a lot more time writing than being the writer. If you're first thing, now you're the guy, the person who did the thing. And that I think can be destabilizing and disorienting. The part of you that can't waste a single snap.
I mean, I get it because I like the idea of like, I don't actually need this. I can say no to this and be fine. Or like people will be like, hey, do you want to write this thing for this thing? And I'm like, why am I even considering this? Do you know, like I have, I have three books I have to write and then an unsolicited request to do something. Now, because it's there, I'm considering it, right? And so you can see how the part of you that goes, no, I fucking seize every opportunity that's in front of me. That's what actually makes you a great quarterback. But then it makes it hard for you to be a good quarterback and then regular person because you're just that all the time. You're applying the quarterback mentality to do you want to do this other thing or not?
other thing that's superfluous. Yeah. I mean, that entire, in my own way, I can relate to that, what you were saying. And like, it's that entire thing. It's that jockeying between insecurity and needing to be praised or the rush you get from a byline, the rush you get from standing in front of people and giving, you know, a speech and having people give you a standing ovation. It's all of those things wrapped up in that. And, you know, when you're out of the quarterback space, there are things in place maybe to check you here or there, even though it's ultimately up to you. And when you're in that tunnel of the quarterback space, there's very, very few. Yeah. And that's where I think it becomes difficult. And that's where I think that for all these guys.
you know, Steve Young loved Roger Staubach and he asked Roger Staubach when he retired, because Staubach obviously has probably become the most successful great quarterback ever in retirement. I mean, he's a real estate, has a real estate empire. And, you know, Steve asked him, like, you seem like you've done pretty good. Like, how do you walk away from football? And Staubach was like, run. You have to run away from the game. You can never look back. Interesting. And Steve kind of ran. You know, he stayed, he kept one foot in the pool. But like, it's the exact thing because Joe Montana, you know, says, I wish that everyone could experience being an NFL quarterback for just one Sunday. Yeah. Because then they'd get it. Yeah, yeah. Right. But it is weird. It's like, why was Kobe Bryant like producing movies?
Or why did Kobe Bryant need a venture capital fund? Some part of it's probably like, yeah, you got to put that energy somewhere. But also, like, if you don't wrestle with why you have that energy, there's just never enoughness. And so you're just doing, and, you know, at the end of the day, we all fucking die. I think that he, and Brady did this too, but I think that he knew that it was going to be devastating. It was going to be a death of sorts when he walked away. And so he was looking for exit ramps to, so that when he was exiting, he was exiting into things. And, you know, when you had Brady, here at Brady, you know, has this like,
career that spans two decades accomplishes everything you could accomplish. Years before he retired, he had set up his Fox deal. He had these other businesses. You know, he had a production outfit. He had his TB12 quote unquote lifestyle brand. You know, he had all these things he was planning to do. And yet still, he's talked about it where, you know, he said he felt like he was like, you know, in a washing machine where you're just bouncing everywhere. And even it got Brady. Even with all of that, it got Brady. And Elway was talking about how, you know, you exit.
Super Bowl champion, all these things, perfect ending. Then you go into these other spaces and you're behind everyone else. Yeah. And your name only gets you so far. Yeah. Elway went and became the GM of the Arena League Colorado Crush.
Like, what is the great John Elway doing becoming the GM of an arena league team and doing these goofy commercials with Jon Bon Jovi? It's because that was his graduate school. He knew that he wanted to get back into football and he wanted to learn how to run a team. And he looked at that like his graduate school for it. Yeah, it's funny. You'll be like, why is the president, why is the ex-president on The View? You know, you're like, but like, because you need your, not your fix, but you're just, you're used to being able to tell people what you're thinking. And like, you know, and then all of a sudden you're just a guy, you know, like they asked Truman what he did the first day he was out of the White House. And he goes, I had to take the suitcases up to the attic.
and you're just like what come like that that's not there there's no transition there and you go from being a not regular to a regular person and you spent your whole life trying not to be regular right and then and then it catches up with you and that that's a that's a brutal thing because if you if you were content to be a regular person you would have walked away the second you got like the absolutely you know springsteen talks about how he you know goes off a cliff into depression when he comes back from a tour and you go from being king to being a highly paid chauffeur, you know, basically. And, you know, even in his 60s and into his 70s, when he spent his entire life doing this and he knows the ebbs and flows of it, it would still get him. Like, that's how powerful that is.