Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content and health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen.
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Ryan Holiday. Ryan is the best-selling author of many books, including Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy. His first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, which basically predicted the rise of fake news, the conspiracy, and a number of other books about marketing, culture, the human condition.
As most recent book, Stillness is the key, came out recently. And while we talk about it quite a bit, it's actually not even the focus of our discussion. Instead, I think we talk more broadly about Ryan's influences work, the influence that Stoic philosophy has had in his thinking, and obviously as it permeates into this book, we talk about anger, we talk about just a number of things that I think factor into the way I try to think about longevity more broadly than just living longer, but also this idea of suffering less. And if there's anything I've learned from Ryan, I've learned a lot from Ryan, because as I mentioned in the podcast, then I'll say it again, now his daily newsletter, the Daily Stoic is one of the most important things that I look for in my inbox every morning.
Being able to go into a little bit more detail on that for me was great, and I've been wanting to talk with Ryan for probably about a year, and maybe six months ago, when we sort of realized what the book was gonna be coming out, we decided this would be as good time as any to do so. The book is fantastic, so without further a way, please enjoy my conversation with Ryan Holiday. Hi! Hi!
Ryan, thanks so much for making time and for coming out here today. Of course. Like I was saying to you, Midgong, I didn't get to come to the farm. Yeah, so the problem with the farm is it's very wonderful, except we've got like a weird animal balance going right now, so it's like, what'll happen is like a cow will come, and then the dogs will bark, and then that will make another bark, dog bark, and then it can be this whole cycle that takes many minutes to settle back down.
So it's great for writing, it's great for learning, it's not great for podcasts or interviews of any kind. Also the internet's no good. Well, I guess we're not doing this live to anything, but that's the other big problem. Talk to me about the joy of having lousy internet.
Yeah, it's great. Weirdly, the crappier it is, the more expensive it is. Like I have fiber at my place in town, and it's like 50 bucks a month for the fastest internet you can possibly imagine. And then in the country, it's like 150 or 200 bucks a month for barely Netflix streamable speeds, and it goes out, you know, if it rains, or if it goes out all the time.
But it's nice because that's not what you're there for. And we have, I've said this before, but we have like T-Mobile, and it works great in Austin for cell phones, but out there it sucks. And AT&T and Sprint both work pretty good, but we purposely haven't switched, just because you get less phone calls. Like if I have it at the house, like because you pick it up off the Wi-Fi, but if you walk too far from the house, you basically lose cell service, which is good, 99.9% of the time, I'm sure there will be some time when I cut off my leg with a chainsaw and I desperately need a call for help and I can't, but otherwise it creates a sort of an artificial silence, which is great.
Yeah, it's hard to believe that 20 years ago, the maybe a bit longer, but directionally 20 years ago, the idea that we would have had cell phones with us 24-7 seemed kind of foreign, certainly 30 years ago, completely a foreign idea. So from a relative standpoint of our existence on this planet, this notion of being tethered to that type of device is basically unbeknownst to our DNA. Yeah, 20, 30 years ago, maybe you would have a cell phone, but you weren't getting called on it all the time. So it was like, I remember when I got my first, I got a blackberry, my first job in Hollywood, and it was great because now I didn't feel like I had to rush home because there might be emails waiting for me.
It gave me some more freedom. And then increasingly that freedom turned into now, you know what I mean? Oh yeah. So and I think about that with Twitter, I remember when Twitter first came out and Facebook first came out and all these things, when I was using them on the desktop, they were wonderful.
But then when I was carrying them around in my pocket and I could always access them, they're always there, that's when it became much worse. So I think we're trying to figure out how do we, just some of these things would go away. Like when I hear someone, I don't even have a smartphone, I go, well, I want to get lost. I kind of use directions.
You know, there's a lot of benefits to it, but how can we find a way just to turn back the clock a little bit? Because it was like we almost had the right amount and now we have too much. That's right. It's a min-max problem that just missed its optimization point, I think, at least if you were optimizing for our lack of misery.
Yeah, yes. We still have more to gain on the max if the objective is, you know, making money for the companies and producing stuff like that. Now, you know, I read something that you wrote, and I've been following you for so long, Ryan, I've read so much of your stuff that at this point, I can no longer remember. Was this in a daily stoic one day?
Was this in this newsletter? Was this in this book? So I apologize in advance that I'm not even going to try to reference for the listener where this came up. But you talked about the sort of harsh realities of living on a farm, and we don't live on a farm, but you know, we've got our chickens, we've got our garden, we've got all that kind of stuff.
And I remember the first time one of our chickens got killed by what turned out to be a bobcat at the time, we took me a while to figure out if I assumed it was a raccoon or a coyote. Man, it was super upsetting. And more upsetting than you'd think you'd be upset over at chicken, right? Like you're like one of their chickens there, you know, it's not like it's when your kids are sick.
Someone asked me, not that long ago, they're like, what is it? Strangers are the most surprising thing about a farm. And I was like, there's a lot of death, like just overall a lot of death. Chickens died, chickens are weirdly, I think chickens are the hardest animal to have because they're the most defenseless and evolutionarily like the most pointless.
And pretty much everything is a predator to chickens, like including other chickens. We had chickens when we were more on the east side here and I'll send them, I remember I met my neighbor because I had to go over and say, hey, a raccoon grabs one of my chickens, ripped a ten off and then left its carcass on your roof. You know, I need to go get this, right? So it just familiarizes you with death in a way that I think human beings used to be a lot more familiar with because like your grandparents would die in your house, you know, or your wife would die of childbirth in your house or you would die being killed by Native Americans in your house, you know?
Like we were much more familiar with death, life was more brutal and violent, but it was also more present, you know? When we first got our farm, we bought this goose and we had this goose, it was super sweet and nice and it would fall everywhere, we played with it. And I remember, I was sitting in my office watching it and I watched it get attacked by something in our lake, either a snake or I think maybe a snapping turtle or something like that. So waddle back up on the thing and it was like gutted and we had them in the middle.
So we rushed to an emergency vet, we paid like $300 to get this goose, you know, the cost, you know, eight bucks or whatever, that had no purpose for the farm whatsoever. But it is what you do with pets and so we had it all stitched up and then we had some other goose or geese, I guess, but the nurse had back to health and then a couple of months later, like a dog gilded, one of the neighbors dogs just like that, gone. You're like, okay, one, that was pretty ridiculous that we paid $300 to have this thing stitched back up, but I thought it was also interesting the other geese, like they seem to care. Like it was just like, were, was it gaggle?
Were it gaggle and there were five of us and now there's four of us, do you know what I mean? Like it wasn't this like elaborate morning thing. Well, my daughter asked about this, right? After, cause all our chickens have names.
And I forget the first one that bit the dust, but we've lost a couple of them. But whatever the first one was, I think it was go-go, was the first one. And I mean, and it was really sort of tender to watch this, but you could tell like she was devastated, but she was also very sad for the other ones. She was like, well, what do you think Sarah and Ginger and so-and-so think?
Like you think they're afraid at night now. And I was like, I mean, those are great questions, sweetie. I don't know, but I don't think their brains are the same as ours. I'm not, I don't know, you know?
No, that's what's interesting. It's like, well, they're probably are afraid at night, but they've always been afraid at night. That's why it's no fun to be a chicken. There's a D.H.
Lawrence poem where he says, you know, I've never seen an animal feeling sorry for itself. A bird will drop dead of the cold before it feels sorry for itself or something like that. That's sort of one of the lessons I've taken from living in a form is that like, the animals are much more present and focused and not worried the way that humans are worried. And ironically, they have way more to be worried about.
Like, a mountain lion isn't going to come and attack me. But if I'm a goat, like, there's a pretty reasonable chance that can happen. So you can take some interesting lessons from it for sure. What do you think that that's robbed us of?
What do you think are sterile environment of not having the concerns you've described? Now that's not true, of course, for our species across the whole world, they're playing an interview an amazing doctor who is the only doctor that serves a million people in South Sudan. And they get bombed by their government every couple of weeks or months. And every time it happens, people are getting killed and he has to, you know, put bodies back together.
But if you're living here in the United States, for the most part, you've become insulated from that. There's lots of good that has come from that. What do you think is the most negative aspect of that? You begin to assume that you have unlimited amounts of time or that you're in control of your existence, right?
So you look at the actuary tables and it's like, oh, we're living longer on average. But we forget that we're individuals, right? So the average means nothing to you, right? And even if it did, even if you were given the genetics and you've taken care of yourself in such a way that you're likely to, let's say like, it's all preordained in the biological sense that I'm going to be 78, you're going to be 112 or whatever it is.
But like, I appreciate your time. Of course, I can still get hit by a bus, a war could break out tomorrow. I could still have an allergic reaction to something. So I think we have this sense of unlimited time that we take from it.
We just believe we're much more in control of our existence than we already are. So there's like a form of arrogance there. That's the biggest one. Seneca talks a lot about how we're really tight-fisted over the things that don't matter, which would be money, property stuff, things you can get more of.
And then time we're the most generous with. And I think that is rooted in the sense that, all we think about are old people. We don't even think about the people that died because they're not around. So you just assume, like I even think about this with war.
I think when we think about wars, we don't think about the people, like my grandfather found in World War II. So when I think about World War II, I think about it being really bad and horrible, but you come out the other side. I don't think about the people who got shot before the boats, as soon as they put down the door on the landing craft, I don't think about that guy. And so there's this weird survivorship bias that I think our lack of familiarity with death exposes us to.
And that's why we're so shocked when it does happen. Do you think it's even deeper than that, which is in addition to everything you've said, let's assume that not only do you have the biologic track to get you to 78, but let's assume you are guaranteed to get to 78. So somehow we've built a cocoon around you that no bus can hit you, no peanut can get lodged in your throat or give you an allergy. Isn't the other issue potentially that we are not in the moment that we're in anyway, because we have this view of infinite time?
And so in other words, there's sort of a lack of quality in our life beyond just quantity, is that possible? Yeah, so there's two really good insights from the Stokes I left. So one, Marcus really goes like, are you afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore? He's like, you should ask yourself that question all the time.
So much, we want to think about, we don't want to think about death, we don't want anything bad to happen. We don't really actually judge the quality of the existence that we have very much. I think there's a lot of people who are alive who are basically dead anyway, right? They're sleepwalking through life.
So I think that's one part of it. The other interesting way, and let's say, because I do think a lot of people go through, they go, oh, the average person is 78, like lives to be 70 or whatever. That's when, so they go like, okay, I'll start thinking about death at 60. Right, they're like, I'm so far from that, it's way off in the future, I'm not going to think about that.
Just like, when you're in elementary school, you're not thinking about graduating from college. You're like, I got to get through all this other crap first. The big flip for me, Seneca talks about, we think that death is something that lays off in the future, but actually death is something that's happening right now. He was saying, so you don't think about it, in my case, I'm gonna live to be 78, so that means I have 40 years left.
I should think about it instead that I've already died 30 odd years. Right, so he's like, the time that, he's like most of our time already belongs to death. The time that has passed is dead. And I think that's a much more active, empowering, adaptive way to think about it.
It's like, oh, I'm dying all the time. And every second that passes, you don't get back. And then that allows you to decide how you're gonna spend that time, or at least think about that you're spending it. You were given a finite amount of time.
Are you gonna spend it on whatever you're gonna spend it on? And then I think the other, the part where this gets tricky is people, well, I have to do this, I have to do that, or this happens, this happens to agree. But are you gonna spend time on top of that being mad that that happened? Or resenting that it happened that way?
Or regretting that, so people go, oh, I spent this, you know, I'm mad that I just spent an hour unnecessarily in traffic. Sure, but now you're spending an extra minute and a half complaining about it, and which part of that do you control? So I think the death conversation gives you some perspective and some urgency, and I think some prioritization and perspective on the day-to-day reality that's really valuable. Now, I suspect the number of people listening here are not gonna be as familiar with stoic philosophy as you are, probably very few are, but at least I've had the luxury of, I read your newsletter every single day, or Monday through Friday, on a weekend summary, the daily stoic, I can't plug it enough.
So thank you very much for, I mean, it literally is the single most important thing I subscribed to any mail, so thank you. Can we give people a little bit of stoic 101 here? Can we explain who Marcus Aurelius was, who Seneca was, who Nero was, at least enough to give people a context of the world in which these people came from, how it shaped a philosophical field or bent, and more importantly, why shouldn't anyone care about this today? Yeah.
So it comes to be an Athens, the founder of Stoicism is this guy, and Zeno, he was a Greek merchant who sort of suffers his terrible shipwreck, he loses everything, and he gets exposed to philosophy, probably like a lot of people expected that philosophy was abstract, that was academic, was not things you use in real life. And he gets introduced to Socrates and cynicism, and ends up becoming instead a student of his own school, which becomes stoicism, and then stoicism worms its way from these sort of interesting Greek figures into Rome, as Rome takes over the world. And so this is Cicero and Julius Caesar and Cato, it sort of follows the rise of the Roman Empire, the fall of the Roman Republic, and then it's so integral into Rome and life that it becomes not just philosophy of ordinary people, and senators even, but Marcus Aurelius becomes the emperor of Rome, and he's this avid student of philosophy. So it's fascinating, basically in two generations, Epictetus is this former slave, philosophy is banned from Rome, so he's like sort of sent into exile, but this slave is writing about philosophy, writing about how to achieve freedom when you're literally in chains, all of this, and then a generation later, Marcus Aurelius the most powerful man in the world, is a student of the same philosophy.
So it's this really sort of open-ended, flexible philosophy for people in the real world doing real things, and sort of built around, depending on who I'm explaining, I sort of go one of two tracks, I'll do both. So I'd say this sort of central precept of stoicism, it's basically this idea that we don't control the world around us, but we control how we respond. That's like, that's the main, if I had to give you one thing, it'd just be like, you don't control other people, you control yourself, you don't control what happens, you control your reactions. So that's like the core of it, if I was gonna get a little bit more nuance, I'd say sort of stoicism is built around four virtues, and the virtuous life is what they're aiming towards, and today when we hear virtue, we think like, purity, chastity, some sort of religious component to the stoics, the four virtues were courage, justice, temperance, some moderation, and then in wisdom.
So it's sort of truth, self-control, doing the right thing, having the stones to stand up for those things, right? Then that to me is the essence of this philosophy. Tim Ferriss refers to as an operating system, I think that's an interesting way to do it, although that might be a bit reductive, I think it's more of a way of life than an operating system. We've learned a lot from the stoics, and I always find, I think one of the things I appreciate about the way you write about them is, they're still humans and they still make mistakes.
I mean, I think a couple of days ago, you were talking about, I mean, Seneca's a great example, right, on the one hand. This remarkable example of stoic philosophy, and yet in the end, probably a little bit of his desire to be approved by Nero, his desire to be in his good grace, has effectively cost him his life. Well, not just cost him his life, but it may well have forced him to contradict all the things he believed in, and for people of no idea what he's going to do. Yeah, let's tell the story about that transition.
Seneca is this fascinating figure, and that he's a Roman senator, he's a philosopher, he's a playwright, he's probably the smartest man in Rome at this time, and he's sent into exile by an emperor, Claudius, who sort of doesn't like him, sends him an exile. And so there, Seneca is, he's sort of on this rock in the mill of nowhere, and he's writing his philosophy, and he's sort of like, for philosophy, all about adversity and perseverance, it's like a sort of perfect opportunity. And then he gets this call, or a letter from Sheryl's messenger, but he basically gets summoned back to Rome, they said, look, you can come back, but your job is, you have to be the tutor to this young boy, and that young boy turned out to be Nero. And so Seneca has this complex, like Nero was this very promising student, but was about to be dictator, essentially.
At the same time, just a couple generations before, the stoics were the ones who were fighting to preserve the Roman Republican here, because this guy is a sort of emperor's guy behind the throne. And so there's a little contradiction there, but really, this promising student also has a dark side. It's almost like the plot of breaking that, right? Like he starts good, and towards the end, he's writing speeches that help Nero justify why he murdered his mother.
It gets very dark very quickly. Seneca becomes extraordinarily wealthy for his association with Nero. Ultimately, there's some analogies, I think, to the Trump administration, where you're like, I don't like the guy, but I feel called to serve, how can I mitigate the impulses, but it's a tough balance, right? And you're suddenly morally compromised in a bunch of ways that if you had your choice, you wouldn't be, but you also have the choice to leave at any time.
And so ultimately, Seneca decides to leave towards the end, and Nero's like, no, you don't get to leave. I decide when you leave. And so basically, he's caught up in this thing, he can't get out of it. Ultimately, he goes into a second exile, but he knows he traded his life for whatever he got, and eventually he knows sort of in a narrow sense his goons to call in the chit, and that's the end of Seneca.
And it's interesting because Sen, of course, is ordered to kill himself rather than being killed, which is the way that the time, you can't help but wonder what would Seneca go back and tell himself on the day that he was called to come and be the tutor for this boy, knowing what he knew at the end of his life. Yeah, it's endlessly complicated and complex because maybe he said yes, because he thought he could prevent this from happening. Or maybe he thought, again, not being polite, I think we just wanna look at analogies, but like John Kelly, Trump's former chief of staff, just gave these interesting comments where he was like, look, when I left, I told Trump, like you're gonna be in trouble because there are other people who are not gonna be able to tell you no the way that I can tell you no. And it's gonna be worse.
He's like, you'll be impeached if I leave. And he ended up leaving or Trump hadn't leave, but I think what Seneca probably told himself is like, I don't think he was in any denial about who Nero was, right? But I think he told himself who will do a better job than me. It's interesting, it's a slippery slope.
It's very complicated. It begs broader questions, right? Which is what are our obligations? Do we have a greater obligation to our own principles and our own personal beliefs?
Do we have a greater obligation to society to maximize the impact we can have on others? Again, through the lens you just described, you could argue that Seneca did the best he could have, which was if, I mean, Nero was obviously a complete dictator, we're live saved as a result of Seneca's association with him. Yeah, and there's another few stoics, it's not the only one. There's other stoics who did actively conspire to assassinate Nero, right?
Which is ultimately what Nero accused Seneca of, right? Yeah, this is the pretext that he uses. And I would say, you sort of go back and forth on the evidence. The evidence is not conclusive that he did.
In some ways it would be redeeming if he had, but I'm actually writing about this right now for a set of biographies I'm doing, but you only have to go back a generation or two with Julius Caesar to find that it's never as clear-cut as you think, right? Like Cato is the sort of stoic philosopher-resistance leader at the time. He was so led by his principles that one read on it is that he drives Caesar to do what he did. Like Cato's inability to compromise, his insistence on principle and perfect solutions essentially grind the Roman political machine to a halt.
And there's this interesting story where so Pompey returns from his conquests, this is before Julius Caesar and Pompey and I went to the leopard to join together in the triumvirate. But what happens is Pompey, seeing Cato largely agreeing with Cato says, well, we should come together. And in the way that one did back then, he proposed that he would marry Cato's nieces, and one of Cato's nieces. And Cato says, how dare you try to bribe me?
He's like, I will not have my politics corrupted through sort of female influence. But I'm not going to create this alliance. So Pompey is surprised by this. But he looks at his options, and he ends up aligning with Julius Caesar instead.
And even at the time the historians noted this, they were like, because of his purity, his inability to sort of make things work in a less than perfect scenario, Cato ends up bringing about exactly the thing that he was trying to prevent, right? Instead of aligning with the lesser of two evils, the two evils teamed up and destroyed the thing that ultimately Cato gives his life for. And what I think is really interesting is that then not long after, another sort of inspired stoic character takes up to assassinate Julius Caesar, thinking that this will be the end of it. And it's not the end of it.
It sends Rome into a second civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people die and more people are destroyed. And ultimately ensures that another emperor takes Caesar's place. So I think one of the things you end up taking as you study philosophy and history is just some humility about how complex these things are and how rarely they are as black and white as they seem and that I think what Stosism is really about is a sort of a personal code that lets you try to figure out what you should do in your individual situations and not be so concerned about what other people did or why or how or whether they were perfect. I wasn't planning to ask you about this because there's so many things I want to ask you about.
But I can't resist a slight detour in going down sort of your past and how you got here. I mean, you grew up in Sacramento. You got a college in LA. I remember the first time I heard about you was somehow after your time at American Apparel and how you've done all this amazing stuff there.
Can you pick up the story there? Like what are you doing and how at this point in time have you already acquired a taste for stoic philosophy? Yeah. I think I got introduced to philosophy early on in college, I'd read Epictetus or in R.
It's really, it's sort of interesting. And it was definitely life changing for me when I was exposed to it. But how much you're really getting at that age? It's hard to tell.
So this is a detour from the conversation. It was a detour in my life. I basically went and I was a research assistant for a really great writer. I did marketing for a couple of other writers.
And then through sort of all those experiences, somehow ended up as the director of marketing at American Apparel, which was a crazy, dysfunctional, chaotic, but ultimately really fascinating place to work for about six or seven years. What year did you start there? Oh, seven maybe, oh eight, something like that. So the company was already doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales but was sort of still early on in what its next phase was, which was as a retailer in a publicly traded company.
And it turns out a lot of the same dynamics that have always been true and sort of upstart ascendance or movements or businesses. It was just a lot of money, a lot of temptations, a lot of conflict, a lot of politics, a lot of the human condition out on display. But there was also just, it was a really interesting creative learning opportunity. And then I got to do all sorts of cool stuff from a marketing perspective that got seen by millions and millions of people.
And so I sort of learned how this might be how you write stuff, but this is where the rubber meets the road where you sell it to people. What was the most sort of insights that surprised you most as you made that transition? I mean, obviously you're an excellent writer but I have no delusions that people are born excellent writers, you've worked very hard at your craft. But how did you make that transition from being able to write to being able to market?
Because they're not really one of the same. No, I mean, they're both in the ideas business but they're very different ways of communicating ideas. One of the things Dove was fond of talking about that I liked and it's from. Dove was the CEO.
Yeah, this is actually from Robert Green who wrote the 40 Elas of Power and was on the board of directors and how he ended up working there. But there's a thing in the 40 Elas of Power that says never appealed to mercy or gratitude always appealed to self-interest. His premise was like, look, I want to build a company that's ethical. I want to build a company that pays its workers fairly, that doesn't destroy the environment.
But he's like, no one will buy clothes for those reasons. Like they ultimately buy clothes because they look good in them or they feel comfortable in them or they're the right price or whatever. And then it's this sort of tension between this sort of pure expression and the realities of the market. And I think that what one of the things I definitely took from that as a writer is like, first off, it's not just what you want to say.
It's where that overlaps with the market. The perfect book idea is like what you can't stop thinking about and what people can't stop saying they need a book about. That when those overlap, you get something really powerful. But more, it's that you have to figure out where people are.
Like people are not thinking, I really care about those workers slaving away in sweatshops. They're thinking, I need a t-shirt for tonight. So you can deliver them a t-shirt that solves that first problem. But if all you're solving is the first problem, you're not going to be successful.
And so it's funny, like people because my marketing career, they'll be like, oh, he's like a mercenary, or he's just in this for money, or he's just in this to get rich. And it's like, dude, of all the things that I could apply my marketing skills to, it seems kind of preposterous that I would have chosen an obscure school of ancient philosophy that's where I was going to cash in. So it's more like, I'm really interested in this stuff. This is what I find endlessly fascinating.
I can nerd out with you about Stosys' mold day. We're having dinner tomorrow night, so we're going to do just that. But how can I find a way to channel that passion I have for the obscure, boring, complicated thing, and give it to people who are busy, tired, overwhelmed, don't like books, don't like big ideas, can't pronounce any of the names. Do you know what I mean?
So it's about finding a way to take your idea and delivering it to people who are not interested in your idea. I see this often. It's like, oh, this is pop philosophy, or oh, this is, he's simplifying, oh, why don't you read the originals? And it's like, I would love for people to read the originals.
Because they're not. They were not doing it. The 1% of people who are reading the originals, sure, don't read my books. That's not who I'm writing these for.
I'm trying to reach people who wake up in the morning and think philosophy. I don't have time for that. And I think you learn that if you get out of the artistic side of your profession a little bit. At the outset of that, you explain that Venn diagram of things that are in your sweet spot, meaning you, as the creator of the author, are thinking about this constantly.
And if you're not doing that, you probably shouldn't be writing about it. And then secondly, the market says I want this. Those things rarely line up. Sometimes you're thinking about this a lot, but you almost have to make a market.
You almost have to create something that can be a bit more timeless. And again, you've either spoken about or written about this idea, which is you generally try to think about things that have a little bit, I don't want to say they're timeless, because maybe nothing is purely timeless. But they just have a longer tail to them. Was that a conscious decision or is that some, I mean, is that a conscious decision at the outset?
Or is that something that looking back now nine books into your career, you can say, no, that's actually, I got lucky in that I was always doing the right thing that was sort of creating content that was going to be relevant after a year after the book came out? Yeah, in publishing, there's the front list and the back list. And all anyone cares about is the front list, even though the back list is not only where all the money is, it's the only reason the industry can afford to buy front list titles. Because the vast majority of books never end up selling.
They buy a celebrity cookbook for $2 million, and it sells 20 copies, right? Or this big book flops. The reason this works is that the great Gatsby is selling all these copies, and the greatest selling all these copies, and the four hour work, we could selling all these copies into Kilimockingburg. It's the back list, right?
And so it was certainly both convenient, but also cultivated that I write about a philosophy that has endured about 2,500 years of diverse human experiences. I think if you're sitting down and you're writing something that you just made up, the chances of it being relevant 2,500 years from now are much slimmer. I mean, it can happen. Maybe you're such a genius that you nailed it, but I'm not so convinced I have that ability.
So I do think about that. I would say almost every single one of my books is rooted in or inspired or in some way, almost a rip off of some very brilliant, sometimes obscure, sometimes popular title from the past. So even my first book was this book called Trust Me on Mine, which is sort of an exposive of how the media works. And it was.
Which many people, by the way, have said in retrospect, was sort of the canary in the coal mine talking about what would become fake news and this idea that you sort of called a shot on that one. Yeah, I wish subsequent events had proven me terribly wrong. That would probably be a better world to live in. But yeah, I think I got some things right with that book.
But ironically, that book, as much as I'm talking about blogs and social media and tech and all these sort of things that were even more new than then, my main model for that book was a book that Up in Sinclair published in 1913 called The Brass Check. And that book sold well when it came out. It's still in print today. It sold quite well.
And so the point is I'm less interested in doing, although I do want to do things that haven't been done before, I'm still kind of thinking, how can I take some risk off the table by modeling it on something that has some proven staying power? That's a really interesting way to think about it, actually. I never considered that the idea that you can at least de-risk the market appetite for something. Again, you still have to do a good job, but that's one fewer risk.
Well, you think about Star Wars. Like on the one hand, you can see Star Wars as this cutting edge sci-fi movie sort of inventing a new genre. It's using all these expensive technologies. It's breaking.
It's introducing robots and all this sort of stuff in what it was. Or you can see it as a timeless story based on the hero's journey. I mean, 40 years later, people still watch the movie. I'm not sure it's because of the cutting edge special effects.
It's the story. And so I think when you root things in some arc or story or deeper truth, you are taking some of that risk off the table. I just think that's a strategy not employed enough. When did you first become aware of this idea that we all tell ourselves a story?
Well, I mean, I think narrative is one of the things that makes us human. We've been telling stories in writing for 5,000 years. We've been telling stories. We have an oral epic poem tradition that's probably 10,000 years old.
So it goes to the core of who we are. And I go back and forth. Sometimes I think it's very powerful. Sometimes I think it's very dangerous.
I sort of written about it both ways. But at the end of the day, the core premise of my writing also ripped off from someone. This is what I got from Robert Greene, which is like, you can tell people facts or you can tell them stories that leave them with the conclusions that are the same as the facts that you have told them. And so what I decided to do with obstacle ego and now still in this was not write a book that tells people what the stoics say, but give people books that illustrate what the stoics said or believed through story.
And ironically, this is also often how the stoics told stories made their points themselves. But it's just I think a far more compelling medium. It's far more memorable. It's far more enjoyable.
And it's less preachy and condescending as well, I think. What do you think is the downside of the story? The story we tell ourselves. Like, how does, again, you've written about both sides of that or both ends of that book.
What are the negative parts of this? So I think stories are a great way to learn lessons about other people. Stories are a bad way to think about your own life. So I just see lots of people who are very clearly believing that they live in a movie or a novel.
And they're going through life as if they are performing for an imaginary audience. And I think this is a very dangerous, egotistical, and often misleading sort of tendency. So I think this is honestly why social media has exploded in terms of why it's such a valuable lucrative addictive business. It's that people want to, like, we all used to have an imaginary audience.
We thought people cared about us a lot more than they did. And what Twitter allows you to do or Instagram allows you to do is actually believe that your life is a movie. So we get caught up in this sort of performance. And this sort of comes at the expense of actually living in that moment.
I want to come back to talking about stillness and being present. But I know that once we start there, we're not going to leave. So there's a few other things that we'll talk about first. You alluded to it just briefly at the outside of what you said there.
This idea of having enough. You tell a story. I can't even recall where. I know it's not an, well, I shouldn't say it again.
Your worlds are all one to me now. But you tell the story about Kurt Vonnegut at a party. Yeah, that's in stillness. I guess I had such an early copy of it.
Because the book only actually came out a month ago, right? Yeah, exactly a month ago. But I think I got a copy of it six months ago. Maybe that's why I don't realize it.
Tell the story about the party that Kurt Vonnegut was at and the discussion that ensued. So Kurt Vonnegut was at a party with Joseph Heller. Joseph Heller wrote Catch 22. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse 5, two writers of the generation.
And they're at the party of this billionaire. I'm sure you've been in events like this, where you're sort of the candy. You're like the status symbol. Like, look who I got to come to my party.
I never that guy. But I can make a picture. I know that you've been that guy. Because you're like, why am I here?
I have no business being here. And so they're standing in this enormous mansion. And you want to get his tees and Heller. And he says, how does it feel to know that he made more money this week than your book will probably ever make in its life?
And Heller said, well, I have something he doesn't have. And he said, look at that possibly be. And he said, I have enough. I have a sense of what enough is.
And I just, that's a very powerful word. I think a lot of people see enough as the enemy. If I have enough, I won't be good at what I do. My lack of satisfaction is what propelled me to greatness.
And this is certainly true, I guess, with athletes, especially where it's like, your desire to always improve, always get better, to never be satisfied with your last performance, is what compels you to keep going. And it can be responsible for a lot of victories. It can also be responsible for why you fail to appreciate or enjoy any of those victories. So when I talk about the book, when I'm interested, when I'm exploring myself, I've been experiencing some success and certainly accomplished more things than I thought I would relatively early in my life, is this idea of, I think this is what hell I meant.
Can you do what you're doing well, at an elite level, even, from a place of fullness? What does it have to come from a place of craving? Do you know what I mean? Like, is it just very much?
Does it have to come from the, I'm going to prove them all wrong? I am going to beat anyone that doubts me. I'm going to earn my father's approval. Whatever that motivation is, does it have to be from there that's never good enough?
Or can it come from a place of passion and appreciation and gratitude and what they call the sort of the love of the game? Is it possible to do it the other way? Could you at least have a balance of the two? That's what I think about.
I mean, I have a lot of thoughts on this because it's a topic I've been interested in since I was a teenager. But what is your take on that now? Do you think those states can coexist? Do you think one can achieve the highest levels without, call it, a certain fire that is coming from a place of more rather than enough?
Well, it's hard to know because you're only speculating about other people. And then it's sort of awkward to think about it with yourself. But I suspect you've spoken with a lot of these people as well. Yeah, yeah.
I would say my opinion is probably the minority view, right? I think you can do it from a place of fullness. But most coaches are like, oh, you've got to have that hunger. You've got to have that.
My goal in my life is to be great at what I do, but somehow be a normal person. That's for whatever reason, it's important to me, not to have some semblance of a normal life, to not be so lopsided to not be miserable, to actually like what I'm doing. And I would like to think that I know objectively in one sense like I'm performing at an elite level. There's the results and there's the impact the work is had and there's the sales and there's the financial success.
So I go, oh, it's working, right? Like you can. But then I also sometimes the doubts come in and go, oh, but what have I left on the tape? Could I have sold more copies?
Could the books have more impact? Could my speaking feed be higher? Blah, blah, blah. If maybe I was a little hungrier.
So again, I think these are complicated questions. And I don't pretend to have the definitive answer. But I do generally think fullness is better than craving. And it's more sustainable, right?
Like how long can you exist in the I'm going to shove it all in their faces? That's what's driving me. How long can you operate on that fuel? Or does it eventually corrode the engine?
Especially with writing, I think about it as like a, I'm not in this to win in the short term. I'm interested in to do this for a long time. And so you've got to come up with a sustainable process and a sustainable motivation because maybe it works in football or basketball. Because your career, even if it's a great one, it's like 20 years max, but probably closer to two years.
I don't have a good answer. But I'd be curious to hear what you think. Well, I don't think my thoughts are nearly as well thought out as yours, frankly. But I think the way I look at it is it all comes down to these optimization problems and what you're optimizing for.
So if you're optimizing to have the most trophies or the most dollars or the most whatever metric it is by which we measure things, and by the way, those things generally have to be external and quantifiable for this game to work. You have to be able to display it. It can't be ambiguous. And again, lots of things in our life do fit that criteria.
If you were playing the PEWER Max game, so you're looking for the absolute maxima, not versus the local maxima, my view is it's probably difficult to achieve that without being my optically focused on that. But I also think, like when you talk about multivariate calculus, every time you go to an absolute maxima, you're achieving local minima elsewhere. Or if you're going to be more accurate, you're very likely not achieving local maxima in other areas. So if one of those other areas is some measure of suffering, or the inverse of suffering, I just think the likelihood, so again, it's all sarcastic, the likelihood you're going to hit an absolute maxima, not the local, the absolute maxima of your quantifiable metric, money, likes, except it, whatever, trophies, whatever.
And that you could actually hit a local maxima with the inverse of suffering. I think that's incredibly rare. I just don't see how that would happen. I think that would be, that's like getting hit by lightning three times in terms of probabilistic.
I think more likely if you choose to select a local maxima around some measure of the inverse of suffering, you probably aren't going to hit an absolute maxima on those other things. But as we were talking about even before we started the podcast, who cares? Like, what game are we playing? And I just think, if I'm only speaking for myself, if I'm not thinking about or speculating on anybody else and only viewing this through the lens of my own life, I think sometimes we suffer and we don't even know we're suffering.
We've been suffering so long. Yeah, it's like you eat carbs. You grew up knowing anything about gluten or carbohydrates. You had sandwich for lunch, then you had pizza for dinner, then you had cereal for breakfast.
You cut all that out and you're like, well, I didn't even know I felt like shit, but I felt like shit every day of my life. I was fascinated by this, so I wrote a lot about him and I'm fascinated with him now, someone like Tiger Woods, where, you know, that's what he said, he was like, I don't play it because I love golf, he's like, I play for the hardware. He's like, he didn't care about the money. He's like, I care about the trophies.
And he even said this like, even after all this shit happened, he said, winning is great, but beating someone is always better. And there's no question that made him the greatest golfer of all time, maybe the greatest run in the history sports. There's the number one ranked golfer in the world. So the number one ranked person in his sport, with a lot of really good people in it, for like 252 consecutive weeks.
It was like, that's unprecedented. And he did it all on his own. It's not like, you know, Tumbradia also has a benefit of Bill Belichick, right? Like, and an entire team of other people.
He did this all on his own. And yet, as you said, he's not just not achieving good results in other areas. Those other areas are actually ticking time bombs that when they go off, those charges take down the entire edifice that he'd spent so much time building and doing. And I don't know him.
I've never met him. I don't really even know anyone that knows him. But I would imagine these last two victories, the US Open, and then the tournament that he just won. From what I can see, maybe I'm projecting, but I bet those victories feel profoundly different.
And I bet they are coming from a different place. Because there's no, if all he was motivated by was beating other people, he would not have survived that tenure drought. You know, it would have been inhumanly difficult. He must have come to actually like golf and some, like to love the process of it in some way.
Because why wouldn't he just walk away? I mean, he has unlimited amounts of money. He hates the public side of things. So even playing an internment that he wins has some cost to him, right?
And he does it. I don't know. I also go like, look, you look at some of these sort of tortured artists and actors, and then you go, Tom Hanks looks like he's having a good time. You know what I mean?
And doing great work. So I'd like to think that there is some balance where you can be world-class at what you do, not be a shitty human being. My friend Austin Cleone, who was in Austin, he said, he calls them art monsters. You know, like the writer who's been married six times, there was just a baseball player who got arrested for beating a shot of his daughter.
It's like, there's got to be a way to be world-class at what you do, and you don't have to trade that. And I think the reason for that balance is like, and this is where we get back into the snow, it's like Tiger Woods will be remembered for many, many years after his death, right? Maybe in 100 years we'll still be talking about Tiger Woods. But what good will that do, Tiger Woods?
And that market's really good. It's because people who long for posthumous fame forget, first off that the people in the future are just as dumb as the people who are alive right now. And second, you're not going to be around to appreciate it. So what are you trading now, like happiness now, for the fact that Alexandria is still named after Alexander the Great.
Like, doesn't do him any good. This is why I think snow philosophy is unbelievable to me, not being a person who ever studied philosophy. So I'm exactly the person that the philosophy snobs hate, right? Because I just wasn't smart enough to study philosophy, right?
I mean, I'd like to make the excuse and say it was because I was taking all those math and engineering classes, but the reality of it is I wasn't smart enough. If I showed up to philosophy classes, I would have done, I would have been a very mediocre student. So now I'm just a poser who gets to go back as an adult into it, but to a point you made earlier, I wasn't ready to hear it then. I'd love to believe I could have been caught sooner, but I don't know if I would have.
I think it's very difficult for humans to change without hitting a local minimum. You have to have pain to change. And even if that's not true, it's true of me. Even if it's not true broadly, it's absolutely true of Peter Thea.
He must hurt to change. This idea that it used to matter to me that I did something that was going to be bigger than me. You would look at that at the first layer and say, oh, that's not altruistic. You want to serve something that started than you?
But I actually don't think it was altruistic at all. I think it was really this sense of insecurity. Like, I want to do something that will be remembered after I go away. I want to advance thinking in a way around a discipline of science or medicine or something like that.
But as Marcus really points out, who cares? You're not going to be there anyway. And furthermore, even though this is to me the subtext of what he says, what does it cost you while you are alive? Yes.
And I think maybe this is evidence of my point that you can do important meaningful things and not need to do it from that place of craving, which is what's interesting about Marcus really is that we are talking about him right now, 2000 years. So unless he was lying or really didn't mean what he was saying, and he really did just crave and care about his legacy and surviving for thousands of years, which it seems like he would have taken more active steps. But somehow the journal that he wrote to himself privately for his own self- betterment and never wanted to be published, somehow the purity of that experience and the lack of intentionality and the true egolessness inside of it, is what actually allowed him to create something that has survived for thousands of years and trying to be a good person as an emperor rather than trying to expand the empire or build enormous buildings in his own honor. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Somehow managed to create an example or a sort of a different story that's actually proved more enduring than more people know who Marcus really says than Nero, right? And one of them was trying and one of them wasn't. And so I think that's really interesting. What role do you think ego plays in this?
You've written about this idea that there are just certain things where the harder you try and the more you want them, the further you get from them. Yeah. I mean, I make a big distinction. I didn't do it as well and it goes in on me as I should have in retrospect, but now I'm able to be a bit more explicit about it.
But a big distinction between ego and confidence. Confidence is important, right? You've got to know what you're capable of. You've got to have some evidence of it.
You've got to have some knowledge of strength and weakness. I think the problem with ego is that it's not any of that. Ego comes from some third place, right? And I think that the core of ego is an association of our identity with results or with external things.
And so in some sense, it can be helpful in terms of driving external results, but we see just as often that ego undermines those results once we get them. Yeah, I think you said that, again, it's a long tail game here, but in the long run, you're probably coming out below than above if you're driven exclusively from this place. How would you explain that to the 15-year-old version of you? Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, like historically, it's like, are there any super-eater? Any super-egotistical people who died with their boots-off surrounded by people who loved them? Do you know what I mean? Or does the dictator tend to die like Saddam Hussein or Julius Caesar or what?
You know what I mean? Like it very rarely ends well. Over a long enough timeline, the ego eventually comes back to get you. You know?
So I think the problem for young people, and I think this is also true, people who are more sheltered, right, who have less sort of life experiences or more sort of outsiders, is very easy to confuse ego and confidence because you don't actually know, right? I think there are people who go, we need a president, I was going to trouble talking politics, but we need someone like Donald Trump, you know, he knows what he's doing. Someone like Putin is like, I can't wait to get in a room with this person. I'm going to fucking break this guy in half.
Do you know what I mean? Because he knows that Trump's simplified version of reality, and you can see all the weaknesses in that ego and bluster. Do you know what I mean? I think the problem in your 15 is you see Kanye West, where you read a book about Steve Jobs, and you see these athletes doing X, Y, or Z, and you think that's what confidence looks like, because you're not, you haven't experienced it enough to know what profound insecurities and weaknesses these strategies are compensating for, and how vulnerable these guys are to slumps or mistakes or how often they get in their own way.
I think that's the other interesting thing we don't calculate when we think about ego. We look at super successful people who have egos and we go, oh, look at what they've done. The graveyard is something we don't get to examine. We have no idea what the denominator looks like for that field of observation.
That's true, but look at Steve Jobs, right? He comes back. He's the most successful CEO of probably the 21st century. But what about that loss period?
Was that necessary? Did he actually have to get fired from Apple? The graveyard is we don't think about all the people who got fired from the company they started because of ego and never came back. The Adam Newman's of WeWork or whatever.
We don't see how many of them never even got that far. But let's say Travis Kalan, it comes back and is the CEO of Uber again, and he leads it to stratospheric success. He learned, what did he lose? The little thing about the time that he lost, the mistakes that he made.
Yes, of course, we learn my experiences sometimes. It's a touch the stove. But the point is, we're really bad at calculating how much more successful a person could be if their ego wasn't getting in the way. Anyone who's ever worked with or around other powerful people, like everyone knows.
I bet if you took every presidential candidate right now and you talked to the people on their staff, they could give you a list of five ways that person's ego was hurting them in the campaign. So one of them is going to win, but that doesn't mean those traits were good. You can be successful despite ego, and that's different from saying you can be successful because of ego. Yes, we're really bad at calculating that cost.
I think maybe you just have to see it enough times to know. I mean, the other end up getting fired from the company. The company goes bankrupt twice. He lost everything.
Not only did he lose everything. He lost shares. He shares worth about $500 million. He now owes, which he will never be able to pay, about $20 million to the hedge fund that effectively destroyed the company in his plan to save it.
And 10, 12,000 people lost their jobs. It's not until you really see just how toxic and dysfunctional ego is at the sort of malignant level that you walk away and go, I don't want any of that in my life. So what's our checklist? If we weren't sitting here on this podcast and we're just sitting here talking about this and saying, Ryan, I want to make sure that I have an internal audit.
I want to catch my ego when it is creeping up. What are some of the things you would teach me? Yeah, I wish I had a magical checklist, but it's more just sort of ideas. And I think why we look at stories from history is we go, Oh, it's a pattern recognition.
Being a little bit like this person here. I mean a little bit like this person here. I think when you feel like it all rests and falls on you, you know what I mean? Like when you're atlas with the world on your shoulders, you have profoundly inflated your importance in whatever situation you're in.
So that it's like when I feel when you feel like Hercules and I'm the one like that is ego, right? The other one is like when you feel paranoia, like people are out to get me. They're fucking screwing me over. I mean held back.
I usually find that's ego. Colin Powell talks about like, you know, making sure your ego is not associated with your position, right? So it's like when your identity and worth as a human being is tied up in what you have or what you've done. This is where the story you're telling yourself can be so dangerous.
When you have really started to identify with what you've accomplished, when you're like, you know, I've hit this best out of this. Like I said, this many downloads, you know, I'm the best in the world at X. When you have really locked in these sort of arbitrary ratings or rankings or status, to me that's ego because now you're not present. You're thinking about how do you maintain and control and get these things.
The last one I would probably say is when you are comparing yourself to other people. So like if you're comparing yourself against other people versus comparing yourself against your intention or your own standards, also probably a decent sign of ego. Those are really great. One I might add to it that I find myself having to check is when I'm more interested in being right than knowing what the truth is.
Which I find can happen in the stupidest example, like literally an argument with my wife could easily, if I'm going to be brutally honest, turn into, wait, stop for a second Peter. This is an internal dialogue. You're arguing with her and because you're a better arguer, you can probably look like you are right here. There are five other ways that this could be viewed.
If you're really being brutally honest, you should be stepping out of yourself and seeing them all of these other ways. That's a loving example because it's with a person you care about. Where you really see it I think is when you're having a debate with someone you don't care about. Someone on Twitter, some random person on Twitter attacks you.
For me at least that's very powerful. That's certainly where I catch my ego the most. What you're doing is you're associating your identity with a totally meaningless encounter or situation. I can't let this person be better than me.
My identity is that I'm the best I win. I'm right. Not I just want to know what is true or real or I'm going to have a conversation with this person. So yeah, I think that's ultimately what you go so dangerous is that it just sucks us into bullshit that we don't need to be doing.
Whether they're competitions or arguments or they're, you know, I think the sort of rise and fall if we were such a great example of someone who's just like what happens when ego is just utterly unchecked. And how it served him well up until the point it all came. There's a joke about gangsters that everything is wonderful until the last 15 minutes and then it's brutal and violent and pathetic. I think that tends to be it goes and it often goes much longer than anyone thought.
And then when it crumbles, it crumbles very quickly. Not only there's nothing left, but there's not a lot of mercy from other people. Again, I always think about things in terms of math. So to me, like that's just an amazing example of non-linearity in everything, non-linearity in time and non-linearity in response.
So that's an interesting thing. You can think of ego as an amplifier of those curves. Yeah, zero-connelies line is that ego sucks us down like the law of gravity. And so I think the way you think about it is like, look, if you're not ever getting up off the couch, gravity is not a big problem for you.
But if you know you're jumping between buildings or you're doing something really hard, really high up there, that falls to be real painful. What do you think are the antidotes to the negative effects of ego? Well, it's very hard to be. You get to school while you're learning something.
Ego can prevent you from learning something. But I think the philosopher's mindset, the martial art mindset of like, I am a student in a thing in which you never truly master is sort of humility embodied. So Epictetus is as long as you can't learn that, which you think you already know. John Wheeler, the physicist, he says, as your island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance.
And so if you think about it that way, it's like, oh, as I'm getting smarter, I'm actually getting more aware of what I don't know. And to me, that's a much better way to get through the world. There's people who as they get more successful, there's less and less you can teach them and there's less and less that they want to hear. And then there are people who as they get better become more curious, more interested, more open, less rigid.
I think that's where you want to go. Bob Kaplan, who's my head of research, he says this eloquently and I'm sure he's paraphrasing it from somebody else. But the further and further you get from the shore, the deeper and deeper the water gets. I mean, sometimes Bob and I, we talk almost every day.
And a lot of times I'm just lamenting how little we know. I'm like, God, Bob, does it ever just bug the shit out of you that we spend so much time. We've got seven analysts, like we eat, sleep and breathe this literature. And I think I know less than I knew three years ago.
On a relative basis, that's absolutely true. On an absolute basis, it might not be true, but on a relative basis, which is we perceive relative changes, not absolute changes. That is unquestionably correct. It's also sort of like the second valley of the Dunning-Kruger curve, right?
It's like, once you, you know, I think I know what's going on here. Nope, actually I have no clue what's going on here. I've written about this before where it's like, okay, let's say the Civil War. You learn about it in elementary school, whether you live in the north or the south.
It's very simple. It's like, we went to war to free the slaves. It was a war of northern aggression, right? Like you learn one of two things.
It's very simple. And you read about it a little bit more, and it's really complicated. Now it's not so clear. It's like, hey, Lincoln said over and over again, he didn't really want to free the slaves, you know?
And how can we say it's just a war of northern aggression when the states wrote all these, you know, constitutions that basically all they talk about is slavery. It becomes complicated. And then there's really no good guys. There's really no bad guys.
And then it blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden you're in this morass. And you've, this is like, you heard it from a teacher. It's simple.
You've read one book. It's complex. You've read 10 books. It's complex.
You can't. And you read 20 books. You really study it. It was only about slavery.
And it's very simple. Even though you've come to the same conclusion that you had before, you're understanding it in a profoundly different way. One is sort of egotistical. One is humility because you're aware of all the threads that go into it.
You know what I mean? When I look at this trilogy, now I just finished it. Like when I look at Obstacle, in some ways it's the tightest of the books. And it's sold, you know, it sells great.
I hear from people how it's resonated. But I don't know if I could write it again. I couldn't write it that way again because I wouldn't, in having done two other books, I haven't read more studied, more experienced, more. I don't think I would allow myself to be as simple as I was.
Does that make sense? It makes so much sense, Ryan, because I'm, which I wanted to ask you this tomorrow night over dinner, but I haven't asked you now. Apologies to listen if you don't care about the nuts and bolts of writing a book. As I'm getting closer to that first submission, which is probably a month away.
In fact, the time people listen to this, I will have already submitted it and it'll be, you know, going through the editing process. For so long, because I've been working on this book for three years, all I wanted to do was get here. And now I'm like, oh, no, no, no, I don't want to hand it in because I'm still learning. And I know things today I didn't know three years ago.
And that means that on the day this book comes out, there's going to be things I know that aren't in the book. And there's probably going to be things in this book I don't fully think are the most accurate representation of knowledge. And I just, now that I've had this profound empathy for authors now, which is how the hell do you do this? How do you take your hands off something knowing that knowledge is ecstatic?
Yeah, it's really tough. Winston Churchill, who most people don't think of as a writer, probably wrote more books than just about anyone in the 20th century. And he says, at some point, you have to like, kill the book and fling it to the public. And I think it's right.
You do. You have to stop at some point. The book has to be what you were capable of in that moment. It has to be a closed thing.
Like, the game is four quarters and then it's over. You don't really play the same game. You play again the next night or the next season. You know what I mean?
But my point was more like I look at the book and it's just I didn't know what I didn't know. So there's a certainty to some of the things that in retrospect I see of I see it with more nuance now. And so in a way each of the books is a balance, right? Because you want the books to be tight.
You want them to be straightforward. You want them to be compelling. But also you have to be intellectually honest. So each one of the books has gotten a little bit longer because not because I feel like I'm droning on, but because what I was comfortable saying in one short sentence before I now have to qualify.