Prof G Markets - How Stoicism Makes Us Better at Money — ft. Ryan Holiday

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Ryan Holiday, one of the world’s foremost philosophers of the modern era, joins the show to talk about how stoicism can improve our perspective on money. He discusses how to handle wins and losses in every situation and why limiting your options can lead to better decisions. He also advises on some healthy habits that can help improve your financial responsibility.  Order "The Algebra of Wealth," out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Follow Scott on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join Capital Group CEO Mike Gitlin on the Capital Ideas Podcast. In unscripted conversations with investment professionals, you'll hear real stories about successes and lessons learned, informed by decades of experience. It's your look inside one of the world's most experienced active investment managers. Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact.

If you struggle just to get your customers to notice you, Constant Contact has what you need to grab their attention. Constant Contact's award-winning marketing platform offers all the automation, integration, and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly. Thank you. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca Today's number eight. That's the age of this year's ugliest dog, a Pekingese named Wild Thing. True story.

I was walking with a close, close friend, and he saw a dog licking himself and said, I wish I could do that. And I said, well, why don't you try petting him first? Welcome to Prop G Markets. Ed, today, this is an exciting day. We're speaking with one of our favorite multi-appearance, kind of soon getting a jacket like on SNL, Ryan Holiday, one of the world's foremost philosophers of the modern era. We discuss how stoicism can improve our relationship

with money and whether justice can exist in a capitalist society. Very deep, very deep. I'd rather go back to the dog jokes. But here with the news is Prof G analyst, Ed Elson. Ed, what is the palabra buena? I don't know if you know, but that's Spanish for what is a good word, Ed. I'm very well. I'm waiting to get out of here and watch the Euros. It's England's final game. We're playing Slovenia in 15 minutes. Oh, tonight's Slovenia. That's right. That 15 minutes oh tonight's Slovenia that's right oh that's right England versus Slovenia oh my god if Southgate

if we lose literally Southgate is going to have to leave the country and go into the witness protection program for those of you who don't know

Southgate is the manager of England and everyone's furious because he had the gall to tie British fans are literally the worst fans in the world

I'm so glad you think that I totally agree I thought you were going to rail against him everyone's shitting on him what's he been like raping children i mean god it's like okay they tied they tied he won the first game they won one and they tied and they tied it's like okay we're gonna be fine folks and people are just outraged they're outraged it's like i tell you what i tell you what don't like don't like cancel every economic agreement that raises prices and lower productivity be angry and not pretend nigel farage didn't start cole palmer and then you'll kind of get

it half right anyways get to the news really good get to the news Let's start with the headlines. Now is the time to buy. I hope you have plenty of the wherewithal. Housing prices rose in May to hit a record high of $419,300. That's almost 6% higher than a year earlier. Sales of previously owned homes decreased 0.7% from last month due to both the rising prices and elevated mortgage rates. The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple and Meta were discussing integrating Meta's generative AI into Apple intelligence. That report was swiftly denied by Bloomberg sources,

however, who were unequivocal that Apple had rejected Meta's outreach because, quote, it doesn't see that company's privacy practices as stringent enough. However, Apple is believed to be in talks with other AI providers, including Google and Anthropic. And finally, according to a Financial Times analysis, since the end of March, nearly all gains in the S&P 500 have come from AI stocks and AI adjacent stocks. Since March, if you removed AI stocks from the S&P 500, the stock market would be down 2%. Scott, your thoughts? Well, let's start with housing. So this is a bummer. So insufficient supply and elevated mortgage rates, actually mortgage rates are turning to kind of historical averages,

are having a real impact. Nationwide housing inventory has decreased by more than 30%. About 28% of existing homes sold in May were purchased in cash. That's 3% higher than a year earlier. And some of the only people buying houses are people who are making really good money or can pay all cash, i.e. old people. I think this is terrible. It's a perfect example of our rejectionist exclusionary culture where once you have a house, you put pressure on the local review board not to issue more housing permits, thereby artificially constraining supply, taking housing prices up, which is great for incumbents. It's literally pulling up the drawbridge behind you. I think the federal government needs to come in with some sort of program to build a massive amount

of housing. It is happening more on a state level. But I think this is a big deal for a lot of reasons. And I think it's such a psychological tax on young people when they make good money and they're working hard and they're saving. And housing is like a car they're trying to catch that keeps just slowly pulling away from them. What are your thoughts as someone who is a budding homeowner? This is getting crazy now. Median home prices are now six times median income. That's the highest ever. 50% of Americans are struggling to make their mortgage payments. 70% of low-income families are spending more than half of their income on rent. More than half of Americans ages 18 to 24 still live with their parents. And this one really shocked me. 70% of Americans

are saying that buying a home is just unrealistic. Now, I'm going to offer a cultural observation. If you go on Netflix, or you go on Max, or you go on whatever your streaming platform is, and you go to the reality TV section, you'll find that basically every other show now is some series that follows the lives of luxury real estate brokers. So whether it's, there are a ton of them, there's million dollar listing, there's buying Beverly Hills, selling Sunset, selling the Hamptons. So we have millions of Americans who are, according to the data, giving up on their dreams of buying a home and at the same time, binge watching luxury real estate porn every week. And all of this is to basically say, this is where we're headed now. It's like housing prices have gotten so bad. We just hit another record. Inequality is getting so bad that Americans are now simulating their dreams of buying a home. The reality is just becoming borderline unlivable.

People cannot afford houses anymore. So I just think this housing statistic, combined with what I'm seeing in entertainment, I think this should really scare people, especially young people. I see your point. When young people can't form households, and they're working hard, playing by the rules. I remember the first house I bought with my girlfriend, it was really meaningful for us. It was a commitment to each other. It was starting to build something together. It just, it's another example of why we have more rage and shame and then the wealth porn that's thrown up on everybody. I think it's discouraging. The good news is we know how to fix it. We need more housing.

Let's move on to Apple intelligence. I think what's going on here is pretty straightforward and I think it's genius. I think someone at strategy, whoever runs runs strategy at apple i think deserves a raise um i guess they probably make a good living but he came back and said all right what what strategy would drive the most shareholder value for us if we go into the ai business it's going to cost us tens of billions of dollars to figure this shit out and compete. Here's an idea. Let's sequester the billion most desirable consumers, i.e. iOS consumers, users from all of these LLMs and give them a taste of the crack cocaine. Let them offer applications on their LLM, whether it's ChatGPT or Llama. I'm sure they'll do some sort of pilot project with Anthropic. And then slowly but surely,

as the competition heats up between these players and the ones that pull away get trillion-dollar valuations and the ones that are left by the side of the road get sold for scrap, they're positioning themselves similar to how they position themselves getting in front of them and search and saying, hey, Google, we could develop our own search engine. No, that would take us tens of billions of dollars to do something not as good as Google, so we'll just bid it out. And Google gives us gives us 20 billion, 19 billion hits the bottom line, P of 30, okay, $570 billion or 15, 20% of our market cap is this search deal. I think they are trying to position themselves to be in a similar position to at some point turn to all of these AI companies and go, fellas, who wants to be the AI company, the LLM,

that becomes the default for the billion wealthiest consumers in the world? Okay, it's going to cost you. And when they announced Apple intelligence, what was interesting is since then the stock's up 10%. And if you look at these features, none of them are really groundbreaking or that exciting, but I think analysts sense the same champagne and cocaine coming their way in terms of their ability to mature and close a search-like licensing agreement with one of these deals. And right now they're giving them all a taste of those billion iOS crack cocaine. Oh my God, I love this analogy. This is why you come to the prof. This is why you're here. Not for these hot takes from the young British Ed Elson.

No, no, no. It's for these drug analogies about AI. What do you think? Oh yeah, I love that analogy. As it accords to the LLM versus GPT, I think the most interesting thing about LLM is that it's one of the very, very few large models that is completely free and completely open source, which was a very interesting decision

by Zuckerberg. I mean, clearly his view was that the best method for AI was to take the Facebook method. And that is, we're going to open it up to everyone. We're going to make it free to use. We're going to make it open source. And then hopefully with scale and with mass adoption, we'll become the best product and we'll figure out monetization later. Very different from GPT-4, which is closed source, meaning the model is proprietary. No one actually knows how it works unless you work at the company. So I like this story because it sets up GPT versus Lama in a head-to-head. And yes, this is a story about meta versus open AI, but on a larger level, it's an economic story about closed versus open source. Which one is going to win? I think it'll

be interesting to see if this does play out. Hopefully it plays out that they're competing on the same device, but I would like to see which will end up out. Hopefully, it plays out that they're competing on the same device, but I would like to see which will end up winning as the stronger business model for AI, which is the most important technology in the world right now. We shall see. So the last thing, the stat, it just blows my mind. Excluding big tech and chip companies, the S&P 500 has declined 2% since March. The three largest companies in the S&P 500 make up a record 21% of the index. In 1999, the three largest made up 12%. Excluding AI, nine of the S&P's 11 sectors are down since March. I mean, last week, there was another great stat. NVIDIA was down, I don't know,

3%, 5%. It had, you know, a down day, not a terrible day, but it was down. And it lost more market cap in that day than like 420 of the S&P 500. Half a trillion in three days, yeah. So that was, what was that? Like a 16% decline in three days. Yeah. This is, I don't think this is healthy. This isn't a robust market. And what it's becoming is that one, it's an ad for index funds because to try and pick stocks is impossible when it's three or five companies. It's just in the largest economy, in the largest stock market, the largest asset class, there's a handful. Maybe you can count on one finger at the companies that are moving and supporting the markets in the world's largest economy.

That's just not a good thing. This feels very fragile because, I mean, if NVIDIA goes down and this could happen, 80%, right? Keep in mind, Amazon down 90% from 99 to 2001. You got to think the S&P is going to go down. What would that mean? 12, 15, 20% if some of the other ones follow them. Nassim Taleb has this thing called fragility, and he talks about the importance of anti-fragility. And essentially what it says is a robust market is no one company can have too great an impact on an industry. So I would argue the banking sector is somewhat battle-tested and somewhat stress-tested, but I think the reality is if Jamie Dimon called President Biden and said, oh, God, I'm really embarrassed, but there was some 26-year-old who compliance missed in Singapore, and he went long credit default swaps and figured out a way to leverage them up 40-fold, and we're going to have to be out of business at the opening market tomorrow, and I need a massive federal bailout, otherwise JP Morgan going under could start a global panic and we could all be collecting guns and butter. I think the government would bail them out. If McDonald's calls and goes, oh no, someone fucked

up and bought beef futures and we're out of business tomorrow, they're like, fine, go out of business. McDonald's can't take the global economy down, so it can't even threaten fast food. You could still get really high-calorie, low-cost food that will, if you eat it long enough, will give you colorectal cancer. So what we have now is an economy that's becoming less robust. And while business startups, business permits, new business permits are up, a lot of that is pent-up demand. It just worries me to have companies that, as they go, so goes the market. Because, I mean, I'm sure he followed that earlier, but I just love the timing on that. I think that came out on Thursday. I'm pretty sure that the filing was revealed on Friday. Or at the end of the day on Thursday, Jensen sold some of his stock. I think it was $90 million. And that's why the stock came down.

$19 million? $90, I want to say. Oh, $90. Okay, that's something. That's probably about, what, 1% of his holding? I like Jensen. We should roll with that guy. Let's have him on the pod.

100%. Just one personal final headline from me. Our listeners might remember, we have my uncle, the professor of corporate governance on Charles Ellison a few months ago, and he's been critical of Elon's compensation package. We had a whole discussion about it. You can hear that on our episode. But here's the headline. I was scrolling on Twitter yesterday. Elon called him out on Twitter this week and he called him, quote, such a creep. That was such a creep. No reasoning.

Are you sure he didn't think it was you? Are you sure he didn't think it was Ed Elson? And he'd heard from some ladies at some tacky Brooklyn bar where they play shuffleboard in a two-for-one Pabst or something. Isn't that what they do? Isn't that what young people do? Oh, I wouldn't even. They drink Pabst beer and play shuffleboard. That is my impression of every millennial. Isn't that what you do?

Yeah, that's exactly what I do. It's so fun. You know what? To be called a creep by Elon Musk is a badge of honor. He can retire now. It's almost as good as being called a numbskull. No, no, no. Insufferable numbskull. Although you say he tweeted about me recently. He's such a fucking idiot. He retweeted my TED Talk and he wrote, I'm a fan of Scott Galloway,

but he may have a point. What he meant to say was, I am not a fan of Scott Galloway, but he may have a point. What he meant to say was, I am not a fan of Scott Galloway. So he wrote, I am a fan of Scott Galloway, but he may have a point. And he retweeted my TED Talk. Oh, he's an idiot. We'll be right back after the break with our conversation with Ryan Holiday. Fox Creative.

This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank.

Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward

conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim and we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at Vox.com slash Zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. Support for this show comes from Grammarly. 88% of the work week is spent communicating, typing, talking, and going back and forth on

topics until everyone is on the same page. It's time for a change. It's time for Grammarly. Grammarly's AI ensures your team gets their points across the first time, eliminating misunderstandings and streamlining collaboration. It goes beyond basic grammar to help tailor writing to specific audiences. Whether that means adding an executive summary, fine-tuning tone, or cutting out jargon in just one click. Plus it surfaces relevant information as employees type, so they don't waste time digging through documents.

4 out of 5 professionals say Grammarly's AI boosts buy-in and moves work forward. It integrates seamlessly with over 500,000 apps and websites. It's implemented in just days, and it's IT-approved. Join the 70,000 teams and 30 million people who trust Grammarly to elevate their communication. Visit grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more. Grammarly. Enterprise-ready AI. Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out. Procrastination, putting it off, kicking the can down the road.

In. Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out. Carpet in the bathroom. Like, why? In. Knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Ryan Holiday, philosopher and New York Times bestselling author. Ryan, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. So let's start with stoicism, which you're sort of an expert in. For those who don't know about this philosophy, could you just give us a brief summary? What is Stoicism and where did it come from? So it's a philosophy that comes to us from ancient Greece, makes its way to Rome. It's a

philosophy, I sort of say it's based around this idea, we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens. And then it's built around these sort of four key virtues—courage, self-discipline, justice, and wisdom. And the idea for the Stoics is that, you know, every situation demands or presents the opportunity to act with those four virtues. So this little philosophy that originates from a shipwreck in Athens in the 4th century ends up having an immense amount of resonance 2,300, 2,400 years later with people all over the world. It's pretty incredible. What was that shipwreck you're describing? was a merchant. He was a dealer in what was called Tyrian purple. It's the dye that would make the cloaks of the fanciest Greeks. So he suffers this shipwreck, and he ends up penniless in Athens in a bookstore, and he hears the bookseller reading some of the dialogues of

Socrates, and this turns him into philosophy. And he would joke later that he makes a great fortune when he suffers a shipwreck, because although he loses all his money, it turns him on to an entirely different way of thinking and living. And, I mean, he ends up changing the trajectory of Western civilization as a result of how he responds to this thing that if you had asked him, do you want to suffer a shipwreck and lose everything that you have? He of course would have said no, but, but you know, what he makes of it is to me, what stoicism is about. It's funny because I feel like this philosophy, people often think about it as applying to mental health, but it's interesting to hear that the origins of this philosophy, it really has mostly to do with money, which is what we dedicate this podcast to. So I'd love to get your take on how has Stoicism helped you when it comes to thinking about money and how could it help other people? Yeah, look, what I think is interesting about Stoicism, the two most well-known Stoics are Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome, and Epictetus, who was a slave about a generation before Marcus Aurelius. So you of Rome, and Epictetus, who was a slave about a generation before

Marcus Rius. So you have this—what I love about sociism is here you have it encompassing both extreme ends of the social spectrum and hierarchy, and yet they're both talking about the same thing, which is how does one find freedom and self-command inside either extreme powerlessness or extreme power, extreme adversity or extreme success. And so the Stoics, I would say as a rule, Epictetus is the exception. Most of the Stoics are quite successful and quite wealthy, but they understand, as I'm sure many people listening do, that just because you have money, you know, we say, you know, it'll set you free.

And it doesn't. Many of us are sort of slaves to ambition, slaves to status, slaves to maintaining, protecting what we have or growing what we have. And so stoicism is really about finding sort of freedom within whatever circumstance one happens to find themselves in. I think it's interesting how many people for whom wealth and power actually decreases their autonomy rather than increases it. And that's something stoicism is very helpful for me with is like, if I'm getting more successful, why do I have less control of my schedule? Why is the reward for my success less time to do the thing I actually want to do, which is write or spend time with my family? And so I think Stoicism has a lot to teach us and talks a lot about that.

So we have a chapter in our book, The Algebra of Wealth, where we talk about the four virtues, courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Break down for us those virtues for our listeners and particularly how they relate to our relationship with money. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting about the virtues is that it's hard to define each one of them, but we kind of know it when we see it. You know, courage, I think we all understand is running into battle, but it's also the moral courage to stand up, to speak truth, to take risks as an entrepreneur or a creative. Self-discipline, you know, is sort of what you put in your body, how you treat your body, the habits you practice. Wisdom is, you know, the decision

to become a lifelong student, to always be learning, to sort of push ego away. To me, the virtue that's most interesting that I think is kind of the north star for all the others is this virtue of justice. Because to what end are we pursuing the other virtues? You know, if your courage is about taking risk after risk after risk to just create a ginormous pile of money that came at the expense or the cost of, you know, other people, the environment, you know, ethics, etc., I don't think the Stoics would consider that a virtue. So, what I think is interesting about these virtues is how interrelated they are and how interconnected they are. Again, with self-discipline, you know, I think some of us have a problem, we spend too much money. Then there's other people, I'm sure you've met these people, Scott, where they have more money they could possibly spend in a lifetime, and they've become addicted to sort of frugality or growing the money. And so they lack the Epicurean insight of, hey, you only live once. How are you going to spend this time that you have on this planet? Yeah, it's so funny. Spending money is really a skill, and that is,

you want to spend less than you make when you're a young person so you can establish an army of capital. But then, as you get older, if you're blessed enough to have economic security, I don't understand why people don't spend it. I don't understand why they don't enjoy themselves, why they don't do amazing things with their family. And I think it's just hardwired into you that, or they get so focused on having more, not recognizing it's really not going to do much for you. book. It strikes us that in capitalism, there's no such thing as fair. I would say fair is a dangerous word. Despite that, how do you think we can practice the virtue of justice within a capitalist society? Yeah, I mean, look, what you're allowed to do in a capitalist society, how you are legally able to run a business, I think is different than the choices that you're going

to decide to make as an individual. So yeah, look, life is not fair. If you think things are going to be fair, you're going to be rudely disappointed. But I struggle to understand why one would not strive to treat people fairly. So to me, the essence of stoicism is like, what's in your control? How other people treat you is not in your control. What other people do, how other countries operate, how whatever the standard business practices are, that's not in your control. But how you decide to operate your business, how you treat people inside it, what you choose to do or not do, to me, this is where this virtue of justice comes in. So I love that we live in a society that gives individuals an immense amount of freedom to do what they want. But I think the

expectation, and the founders who were all steeped in stoicism, I think, would have agreed on this. The expectation was that private virtue would govern the choices that we make as individuals. And in fact, the whole system doesn't work without that willingness to go, hey, I don't care if I can do this. I think it's wrong to do X, Y, or Z. So I'm not going to do it. Yeah. Just following up on that idea of justice, you describe in your new book, Right Thing Right Now, you define justice as holding the line. Can you explain a little bit more about that and perhaps how that might relate to spending and saving? Well, I'm referring to, you know,

if discipline is sort of enforcing the rules, justice is like, what are those rules? What are the standards that you set for yourself about the things that you're willing to do and not willing to do, what you think is okay and what you think is not okay? You know, the decision, it's like keeping your word doesn't just demand the sort of ethical virtue from us, but also requires the discipline virtue to do the thing that maybe you don't want to do anymore, or to do the thing that's hard, or to do the thing that's uncomfortable, I think, call the right thing, if there isn't an ethical

component, a moral compass to what you're doing, then yeah, you're just piling up, you know, dollar after dollar, success after success, you know, follower after follower to what end? Yeah, it sounds like it's not necessarily that you're prescribing a code of ethics. It's just that one should exist and you should recognize that. Yeah, yeah. Look, the book isn't a bunch of policy arguments and sort of political arguments, but it's saying that if you don't have... Here's what I found. If you don't have a North Star, like if you don't have, here's what I'm trying to do, here's what's important to me, here's the positive difference that I'm trying to make. Here are my values. What often ends up happening is that you default

to money. So you do the thing that pays the most. You do the thing that is safest. You do the thing that everyone else is doing instead of being able to evaluate each individual choice in accordance with these values. And so you can end up one day very far from where you wanted to end up or the kind of person that you wanna be because you were making a series of rational decisions along the way. Do I take this job, which pays this amount,

or this job, which pays 10% more, or do I go into this industry versus that industry? You kind of end up just getting guided around by these less than stellar values, money just being a proxy for other things. And I think you're going to end up in a place that isn't particularly fulfilling or meaningful. Do you think the Stoics valued money? I mean, it feels like sort of the direction where you're going in is like, you know, money's great, but it's not everything and maybe it doesn't even matter. And this guy got shipwrecked, he lost everything and he was still okay.

Is part of the learning that we should learn to live without caring about money? Or is there a way to live a Stoic life while also wanting to get rich and wanting to be financially successful? One of my favorite stories from the Stoics, there's a Stoic named Musonius Rufus, and he was in this position of local leadership, and there was this particularly obnoxious man

that everyone hated, who was obsessed with money. And so ultimately, the story goes that he awards this guy a grant, a large chunk of money. And people said, why would you do this? This man's horrible. And he said, I know he's horrible. Money's exactly what he deserved. And so the idea is, is this money that you're after, is this success that you're after, is it going to make you better or worse? And I think for some people, it makes us worse. And for other people, it makes us better. And the idea for stoicism was that, look, as long as it makes you better, as long as you respond to it well,

it's neither good nor bad. You wrote in The Obstacle is the Way, and I think we quoted this in our book, there is no good or bad without us. There is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means. Can you talk to some of the people who are earlier in their careers about that way of thinking to remain balanced as they start to experience real wins and real losses. Yeah, one of the great lines from Mark Surrealist, he says, you have to be able to accept it without arrogance and let it go with indifference. If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it.

Isn't that Brokeback Mountain? I think what he's saying is like, look, when you wear the success lightly and you bear the adversity with sort of fortitude and perseverance, and I think sometimes, especially early in your career, you're like, is this a good job? Am I getting paid enough? Am I being respected? You have all these opinions about the situation that you're in instead of thinking about how to

get the most out of it, how to learn the most, how to get closer to where you ultimately want to end up. And these opinions, I think, kind of get in our way of us, you know, we hate our boss. And instead of thinking about what can we learn from this person, good and bad, right? Or we think that we're in a position that isn't, you know, up to our standards or isn't fully taking advantage of our skills. And instead of, again, thinking that this is a temporary position and what can I get out of it while I'm in it that can move me closer to what I want to get? So again, this power of sort of indifference is the ability to be where you are in a given moment and get the most out of it. It's not this kind of passive resignation and you're just there forever, but it's the ability not to be so emotional about something and thus actually be able to take advantage of it. What are some of the healthiest habits or healthy habits you've developed throughout your life when it comes to money. How do you think about,

you know, what, in addition to being happier, what habits have you adopted that you can relate back to the Stoics that you have found have been really helped you professionally and economically? I mean, I think a big one is, you know, obviously the Stoics are big on self-discipline. And so discipline is important. Delayed gratification is important. As you said, the key to wealth is sort of early on to accumulate capital, invest it, and then be able to spend it later. So this is the marshmallow test 101. But I think sometimes we think of discipline as this active thing when really it's about making good decisions. So, like, if saving is this daily act, the more it takes the day-to-day discipline out of it.

And you don't have to be that smart or that strong. Yeah, I'm convinced that 99% of us will spend 99% of whatever we get our hands on. Yeah. That's a really interesting insight that discipline is one thing, but the easiest discipline is to make it easy, right? To start from a position of victory. So, Ryan, the last time we talked, you said that if you hadn't been on a track to getting married when you had your success in your early 20s, that you would have spun off the planet. That stuck with me. Yeah. Like what, well, let's go back to that. Would have spun off the planet had you not been on a track to getting married. What did you mean by that? You know, it's probably similar to the forced savings thing that we're talking about. Like when you limit your options, you tend to make better decisions, right? Oh my God. I love that.

Having someone to come home to that's like, hey, when are you going to be home tonight? Means that you're not going out and getting into trouble, right? It means you're not, it means it forces you to practice some kind of boundaries or balance. Like, I think for me at 23, to have been in the positions I was in, to have the opportunities that I was in, and to be responsible only for myself and to answer only to myself, I don't think I would have had the self-awareness to make good decisions, to delay certain kinds of gratification. I also wouldn't have had the ability to deal with both success and failure, I, I can't imagine going through some of the, the things I went through alone, good or bad. And so, um, there is this, uh, you know,

sometimes people ask me like what the secret to, uh, you know, a long-term relationship is. And I, I say it's, um, it's not breaking up there. It's not like this magical thing. It's the decision to not go always to greener pastures, to not take the easy way out, to stick with your commitments. And you benefit from that in many, many ways. But I think having some checks on my personal life and having another person who I trusted and loved who saw me from outside me helped keep me sane and healthy and reasonable and a whole bunch of other positive traits. Did it tie me down a little bit? Sure.

But I would say it tied me down to reality in a positive way. So I think one of the biggest takeaways from spending time with one of the great domain experts on stoicism is that Ed is spinning out of control. Ed, Ed, we've got to rein you in. This really isn't a podcast with Ryan Holiday. This is an intervention. We'll be right back. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees.

And it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing and makes writing blogs, creating videos and posting on social a breeze. So now it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Autograph Collection Hotels offer over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Hand selected for their inherent craft, each hotel tells its own unique story through distinctive design and immersive experiences, from medieval falconry to volcanic wine tasting. Autograph Collection is

part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. Food insecurity still affects millions of individuals around the globe. And Nestle, a global leader in nutrition, health, and wellness, understands the importance of working together to create lasting change. Nestle's partnerships extend beyond just financial support. From building urban hoop houses to producing custom seasoning for food banks, Nestle and their partners actively engage with local communities,

listening to their needs, and working together to find innovative solutions. Nestle is committed to helping support thriving, resilient communities today and for generations to come. Together, we can help to build stronger, healthier communities. Learn more at Nestle.com. We're back with Profit Markets. Just to shift gears here, Ryan, you know, Marcus Aurelius is long gone, but you probably know him better than anyone else today. if we brought him back to life today and just sort of took him around America, what do you think would be his greatest concerns? What would he be most critical of that we're doing wrong in our society right now? I think he would be appalled at the lack of time

and space for reflection that each of us have. You know, what meditations is, is the most powerful person in the world taking a few minutes every day or night to have a little conversation with themselves, to remind themselves of their values, to sort of interrogate themselves, push themselves to improve. And everyone's just busy all the time. And the idea of taking that time and space to think, to practice philosophy, you know, that seems like this preposterous luxury. And I think because we're always doing and doing and doing, we don't have the ability to kind of get in touch with ourselves in the way that he was.

Do you think he'd want to regulate social media? Do you think he'd want to ban phones for kids? Yeah, that's where I was going. I can't imagine he would think much of the like button. And I've read a bunch of stuff that you've written, and I've thought, I need to be less concerned with what people I will never meet think of me and more concerned with what the people in my life feel about me. And it feels like social media, talking about things you can't control or really don't matter very much, having a big impact on your mental health. I got to think he would have hated Facebook. I think that obviously the ancients did not have social media or sort of mass media culture in any way, but there was such a thing as the mob.

There was tens of thousands of Romans getting together in the Colosseum, and people were intimately familiar with sort of surfing the crowd, figuratively taking the energy from the crowd, performing from the crowd. And there's a line in meditations where Marcus is sort of chastising himself. He says, you know, you're sort of up at the podium and he's like, they're really cheering and clapping for you. And then he goes, yeah, you're giving them what they want. And he says, but they want an idiot. He's like, you're performing, I think the equivalent of this is be like, you're performing for the algorithm.

You're giving people what they want. You're doing what drives engagement, but you know that's not good. You know it's not good for them. You know it's not good. You know, it's not good for them. You know, it's not good for you. And I think the Stoics would have seen what happens to people every day. You know, these people that just sort of get consumed by performing for this audience and it changes them, there's audience capture, but there's also just like what fame does to a person where you become kind of addicted to the endless validation and attention seeking, the Stokes would have seen that very human trait all the time. And the idea that we would create a way for everyone to do that at every second of the day, I think they would have been horrified. Do you have any hacks for, I think a lot of people look at your life

and think, I would love to do what that guy's doing, to find a topic I'm really interested in and then figure out a way to use it as a platform and develop economic security and do something I'm interested in, I'm passionate about and become influential in a positive way. Are there hacks and advice for a young person thinking, I want some of that? What surprised you to the upside and the downside around your career path? I think I got lucky in that what I really wanted to be was a writer. I loved books, and I wanted to be an author. And I went at it a somewhat untraditional way in that I was a research assistant for a great writer, a guy named Robert Greene, who wrote The 48 Laws of Power.

So I really learned how to do, of all the sort of intellectual sort of thought leadership things, I started with the hardest, least sexy of the mediums. So I think people see podcasts or they see TikTok or a 60 second clip that gets millions of views or whatever. And they're like, I wanna do that. And in many ways, that's the easiest part of it or it's the least intellectually rigorous of the mediums. And so if you start there, you don't actually have the goods or the skills. And I'm not saying you have to start with books, but I'm saying we often see people

that get blessed by the algorithm. They blow up in some way on some medium, but because they don't have like an actual point of view, an actual skill set, like a thing that they do, they just become like a person who chases more and more on that particular platform. Like I write books. That's what I was doing before I did this. That's what I'm going to go do after I close the laptop on this is I'm going to go back and sit in my chair by myself and work on a chapter in the book that I'm writing now. Now, what I generate there ultimately can be translated and can do well on social media, on podcasts, on news media or whatever,

but it starts from the core originating thing. And people oftentimes don't wanna do that work. What attracts them to like being an influencer or whatever is not just the fame and attention, but that it seems easy. It seems like they're just turning on the GoPro or the phone or whatever and riffing to millions of people, and that's not really how you do it. Yeah, there's, when people ask, what was the fulcrum or the moment or the single point of leverage where your career really took off? The honest answer is it's a series of little things

that accumulate and add up. But if there is one thing where I look back and think that's where things really took off, it was also the hardest thing I've ever done. And that was my first book. But wouldn't you say the hard work for you before writing the book, though, was the years of experience that you had starting your companies? So it's not that everyone just has to write a book, but you do have to develop- Something to say. The competence. Yeah say the competence.

Yeah. The competence first. Yeah. Well, I worked my ass off for 35 years to become an overnight success. Um, Ed, bring us home. One last question. Um, do you care about what people think of you? Like when you put your work out there and let you, you know, you're on social media, you're on Tik TOK, I'm sure people are criticizing you or not. But I feel like part of your philosophy is to not focus on that stuff. Yet at the same time, you have to balance the priority of, I need to sell books. I need to say things that people like. How do you deal with criticism and feedback? Do you care about it? Well, it's a preferred indifferent, like we're talking about. Obviously, I want the book to sell more copies than less copies. I want people to like it more than they dislike it. At the same time, I understand

my job is not to tell people what they want to hear or else I'm very replaceable. And so it's a balance. There's a tension. I think a lot about what is it that I have to say? What is it that I need to say, like needs to be said? And then what is the way that I can get that to people? So when I'm thinking about what people think, it's not in the generative side of things. Like what is my message? What do I think the truth is? I think about it like I did this book on justice, which just came out, which I was lucky enough it debuted at number one. If I had called this book, if the packaging and the titling and the marketing and all this book had been about justice, I guarantee it would not debut at number one, right? I had to spend a lot of time thinking

about how you take a topic that people are not interested in hearing about and have a lot of preconceived notions about. And I had to figure out how to make that palatable, interesting, exciting, relevant, all of that. So it's in the messaging, but not the message that you want to think about what other people think. Ryan Holiday is a philosopher and New York Times bestselling author.

His books include The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, and Stillness is the Key. Ryan's latest book, Right Thing, Right Now, is available now. Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Ryan. Always a pleasure, Scott. Thanks. Algebra of Wealth. Scott, we discussed this idea with Ryan that a person should decide on a code to live by and try to hold that line. In your book, The Algebra of Wealth, you wrote, quote,

the gap between your intentions and your actions is a decent forward-looking indicator of your future success emotionally and financially. Can you say more about how you've attempted to close that gap in your own life? In other words, how have you held the line? Well, look, there's two things. I want to start a business, and I'm going to go to business school before I start a business. I'm going to get some credibility. I'm going to save some money before I start a business, and that is fear. That's thinking that if I just get more credibility, more money, more experience, then I can start a company. And I've never been qualified to do anything I've ever done. And especially, I started a strategy firm with two years experience in fixed incumbent investment

bank. Entrepreneurs are kind of, quite frankly, they're born, not made. But the thing that gets in the way of really oftentimes achieving real success is fear. You have desires, but they don't translate to action because fear gets in the way, fear of shaming, fear of public failure. You see someone you're drawn to or you want to speak to or you're attracted to, the fear of rejection. Your intention would be to go up and establish contact with someone or say, I'd be interested in being your friend, or you're interested in introducing yourself to potential co-founders. Fear gets in the way. Your intentions don't match your action because of fear. On the flip side, something that has really haunted me my whole life is I have a lot of nice thoughts about people, a lot of positive emotions, and I think that they're telepathic, that if I care for them or I think that they're doing a good job, that somehow they register that telepathically. And what you realize is that you

have to articulate things, you have to express appreciation, affection, concern for people, admiration. Otherwise, you are spilling the most valuable resource in the world, and that is your good intentions and your emotions. And articulating these things makes you much happier. So you're missing out on a huge opportunity when you let these good intentions, these good emotions, these ambitions just lie fallow in your head. When they're in your head, it is a resource in the ground. It never gets pulled out. It never amounts to much. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss. Our executive producers are Jason Stavis and Catherine Dillon. Mia Silverio is our research lead and Drew Burrows

is our technical director. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back with a fresh take on markets on Monday. Kind Reunion As the world turns And the dove flies In love, love, love, love