The Daily Stoic - 5 Ways That Ego Holds Us Back And Unlocking Human Potential
Episode Date: January 21, 2024In today's weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks Unlocking Human Potential, and Conquering your ego with YPO West Michigan and YPO Gold Chapter in West Michigan. YPO is the g...lobal leadership community of extraordinary chief executives. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Welcome to the Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic.
Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you
live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom.
And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics.
We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied
to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a
little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think,
to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,
and most importantly, to prepare
for what the week ahead may bring.
We would like to welcome the Grand Rapids Economic Club.
They have a number of members joining us today.
And we'd like to thank you for our continuing partnership. Today, we are bringing you Ryan Holiday. If you are not familiar with his work, it certainly
prepares you for all times, but certainly times like these. From his work, The Daily Stoic,
to what he's going to talk about today, Ego is the enemy. My personal favorite is stillness is the key. I think it is the guide to life.
I've given it to all of my kids and it he teaches us how to settle our minds and that is so,
so important. With that, I give you Ryan Holiday.
I remember very specifically I rented an Airbnb in Santa Barbara. I was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
I just sold my first book and I've been working on it and I just needed a break.
I needed to get away and I needed to have some quiet time to write.
And that was one of the first Airbnb's I ever started with.
And then when the book came out and did well, I bought my first house, I would rent that house out during South
by Southwest and F one and other events in Austin. Maybe you've been in a similar place.
You've stayed in an Airbnb and you thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable.
Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. You could rent a spare bedroom. You could rent your
whole place when you're away. Maybe you're planning a ski getaway this winter or you're
planning on going somewhere warmer while you're away. You could Airbnb your whole place when you're away. Maybe you're planning a ski getaway this winter or you're planning on going somewhere warmer.
While you're away, you could Airbnb your home
and make some extra money towards the trip.
Whether you use the extra money to cover some bills
or for something a little more fun,
your home could be worth more than you think.
Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host.
Thank you so much.
It's good to be here with you guys or not be there with you guys. I'd
say that I'd rather be there in person, but it's pretty nice not having to get on a plane,
so not the worst thing in the world. For today's talk, we were kicking around this idea of unlocking one's potential sort of individually,
professionally, and sort of thinking about what is the biggest impediment to doing that, right?
What prevents us from realizing our potential? Obviously, it's different for each person,
but I would argue that for the vast majority of us, the things that are getting in our way are not,
it's not our business competition, it our way are not, it's not our
business competition, it's not our opponents, it's not our enemies, it's not bad luck, right?
It's not the market, it's not even the pandemic, it's not a lack of opportunities that I would
argue that the biggest obstacle that we face as human beings, as professionals as a country. The biggest obstacle is ego, right?
Most empires collapse from within for good reason.
I wish that ego wasn't a problem of our time,
but of course it is.
So great line from Cyril Connolly, the British writer,
he says, ego sucks us down like the law of gravity.
And it'd be nice if there was an example, you know, what if there was
some sort of prominent leader, president, if you will, who sort of embodied the costs
of ego that sort of showed us the almost on a Shakespearean scale, how ego gets us into
trouble and makes difficult things difficult.
But I think we all intuitively know that ego is a problem.
I would say that even if we are not individually egomaniacs, right?
Even if we don't have an ego problem, it doesn't mean that ego is not a problem.
Of course it is, right?
I don't think any of you have ever been in a situation and honestly thought to yourself,
you know what would solve this for me is ego, right?
You guys have never been at one of your events
and thought, you know, it would really improve
the culture of this room
as if we brought some bigger egos into YPO, right?
We understand intuitively, instinctually,
that ego is this sort of toxic force, this
thing that tears groups and teams and organizations and communities apart.
And we all have that within us.
I think one of the hard parts about judging other people for their egos is knowing that
deep down, if we were in that position, we might be doing the exact same thing.
That ego is this force that's very much alive in all of us,
but that it's not a thing that makes anything better.
And what I thought I'd do is I go through sort of five ways
that ego holds us back,
sort of five ways that we kind of can replace ego
if we're aware of this force inside of us.
And then I'd love to just talk sort of specifics with all of you.
But I think the first way that ego gets in our way
is this expression from Epictetus.
He's one of the early Stoke philosophers.
He says, remember it's impossible to learn
that which you think you already know.
And so I think where ego gets is so problematic
is that there's this part of ego that thinks that we know everything that there is to know. And so I think where ego gets is so problematic is that there's this
part of ego that thinks that we know everything that there is to know. And in a sense, that
ego is correct because when you think you know everything, you're right. It becomes
impossible for you to learn anything more. And actually, when you look at the true greats,
what you see is a real humility, right? Socrates, why is Socrates considered
the wisest man who ever lived?
Socrates is known to be wise because Socrates,
as they say, knows what he doesn't know.
Emerson has a great line, he says,
every man is better than me at something,
and in that I learned from him.
Really, you see that the best are humble
because they're truly students of the game.
They're students of life. They're students of their fellow human beings, and they're
always looking for how they can get better and for what there is left to learn. And when
you become a student of something, when you become a student of the game, of your space,
of your profession, of just sort of human potential. You're naturally humbled by all that you learn
that there is left to learn.
There's an expression by a great physicist, John Wheeler,
who says that as our island of knowledge grows,
so does the shoreline of ignorance.
So the converse of it's impossible to learn that
what you think you already know
is when you realize how little you know,
when you're actively curious about learning more,
when you become a student,
there becomes an infinite amount for you to learn, right?
So everything you learn is even exposing you
to things that you didn't know you didn't know about, right?
If you think about where you were
at the beginning of your career,
you thought, hey, I need to learn X to get to this place. Then, and you thought you understood what that place was
about, but you realized that you didn't even have a sense of all the things that those people were
doing. And so we want to become this place where we become a perpetual student of what we do,
not just because if we're not a student, we're stuck. We become a student because of the self-fulfilling
prophecy. It's an effective truth. The more curious student because of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's an effective truth.
The more curious we are, the more we focus
on what we don't know, the more there is for us to know
and the better that we can get.
The second area is that I think ego makes you a bad manager.
It doesn't just make you a bad manager
and that you're unpleasant to deal with.
It doesn't make you just a bad manager
and that you think you know everything that there is to know. In the book, I talk a lot about John DeLorean, who I think is this sort of
fascinating guy because he's brilliant. He's an innovator. Basically, everything that Elon Musk is
doing today, John DeLorean was trying to do a generation before him, almost 50 years ago now.
And the problem for John DeLorean was his ego. He was, he was not just
a micromanager. A subordinate once described his management style as chasing colored balloons.
He always wanted to be doing the sexy thing, the exciting thing, which tended to be a lot
of the marketing, which tended to be a lot of the public facing stuff, which tended to be the stuff that made him look important or special and not be
boring nuts and bolts of managing a difficult company.
He was convinced that GM was stodgy and boring and conservative.
Really what GM was was a well managed company, right?
He didn't like the controls and the constraints.
And he wanted to have a management style
that was all about him,
that was all centered on kind of a cult of personality.
There's something funny about micromanagers,
which is that a micromanager is really an egotist at heart.
You make yourself the center of things
because you can't stand other people being important.
I've seen this time and time again at
companies I've worked at or consulted at. The egotistical CEO is often the most insecure CEO,
and he or she is paranoid, afraid of talented other people and afraid of delegating because
they're worried about being irrelevant. And so at the core of Delorean's dysfunction was Delorean.
He made himself central.
What great leaders do is they have relatively few
direct reports, they have systems, they have structures,
they have controls, it's not as fun, it's not as sexy.
There's something exciting about putting out fires,
about always being in crisis mode,
about being the center of everything, about always being in crisis mode, about being the center of everything,
about there being drama.
But this, while it feeds the ego,
does not make for a successful, efficient, effective company.
Micro managers are what we're trying to avoid,
and we're also trying to avoid focusing on the wrong things.
So what a humble eater does is they focus on systems.
They focus on process. They focus on culture. You know,
famously, we have that expression, a servant leader, it's not about
them at all. It's about the customers. It's about the client.
It's about the mission. It's not about feeding their identity.
Some of the best CEOs, Warren Buffett, you know, talks about
some of his favorite CEOs of all time. And most of them are
people you've never heard of, right?
Even some of the ones you have,
like when you hear the name Catherine Graham,
she inherits the Washington Post.
You don't think Catherine Graham,
one of the great CEOs of all time, but in fact, she was.
People knew her as this sort of elegant society hostess,
but really she was quietly turning the Washington Post
into one of the most effective and profitable
companies in the world.
I'm Effwa Hirsch
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He was a genius and he was very problematic.
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And I would say that most of the great CEOs don't want you to know who they are.
They don't want to be in the press and they don't want to be the center of things.
They want to have a company that's profitable, inefficient, and effective in, and quite frankly,
that can operate without them.
Which sort of leads to the next place that ego is so problematic.
What ego does is it makes you believe your own
bullshit. And that was really a huge problem for someone like DeLorean. DeLorean famously,
after he leaves GM, collaborates on a book titled, On a Clear Day, You Can See General Motors.
Or on a clear day, we can see General Motors. Of course, he wasn't even in the ballpark of
General Motors. He'd started one company that even in the ballpark of General Motors.
He'd started one company that had launched one car brand,
and when that car came out, it was a disaster.
He was so focused on the marketing
and on the attention on the chasing the colored balloons
on creating this mythos of him as a person
that what he wasn't doing is operating the company.
What he wasn't doing is looking at, you know,
the nuts and bolts of the business
and looking in the mirror, honestly and effectively.
Like, look, marketing is essential, right?
Steve Jobs, one of the great marketers,
one of the great storytellers of all time.
But I kind of get this sense that as egotistical
as Steve Jobs was, when he would go up on stage
and tell this compelling story
about how this latest
Apple product was the greatest thing ever invented. It was going to change the world.
I think privately, just minutes before he had been criticizing every little thing on this product
about how it wasn't good enough, about how it needed to get better, about what he wanted to do next.
Kanye West famously an egomaniac, but there's no way that he is that egomaniacal
in the studio when he's making the music,
or it wouldn't be good, right?
You can't believe your own crap
and be great at what you do.
I think we're experiencing,
we talked about this earlier,
the idea you can't learn what you think you already know.
What do these conspiracy theories that have run amok,
whether it's anti-maskers or QAnon,
what are these people convinced they've done,
that they've done their own research
and discovered some fantastical secret
or brilliant explanation for the world
that of course is actually nonsense.
But what it's convinced them of
is that they're smarter and wiser and that they've discovered
something that other people haven't discovered.
You can argue this is the exact same thing that's
happening with this GameStop bubble
that we're in the middle of.
The hedge funds thought they knew better than everyone
that they discovered some secret thing.
And just like all the people piling on from the internet
think that they've discovered some secret thing,
we've got to remember, what does a con exploit? A con exploits the sense of superiority of
the other person. There's a great expression, you can't con an honest man, right? What a
con does is catch someone who thinks that they're smarter than everyone else, that they've
discovered the secret that the person being conned usually thinks they're smarter than everyone else, that they've discovered the secret, that the person
being conned usually thinks they're pulling something over on someone else, right? So what ego does is
it makes us really vulnerable in that we think that we're better. We think that we're God's gift
to humanity, that we're the greatest ever, that we're unbeat unbeatable. Think about every heavyweight champion that walked
into the ring thinking that they were unbeatable and they were beaten by someone who instead of
thinking they were unbeatable, spent a lot of time focusing on protecting their own vulnerabilities
and zeroing in on the weaknesses of their opponents. We see this in CEOs and leaders who don't want to listen to experts or don't want to
listen to advice because it conflicts with their intuitive sense.
Dr. Fauci just talked about this, his encounters with Trump, where Fauci would come in with
some long research report based on blah, blah, blah, blah, and Trump would go, but my friend
from New Jersey just called
and he said that this works really well.
And Fauci was asked,
what do you think Trump was doing?
He said, I think Trump really believed
that this thing that he just heard about,
he said that Trump was so used to trusting his gut,
that he believed that his gut and
years of scientific experience and data were evenly matched.
And so this is where ego is so problematic.
On the one hand, as entrepreneurs, we got where we got by not listening to the people
who told us it was impossible, who told us it was a bad idea, who told us that it was too risky
that it would never work, right?
We wouldn't be successful if we weren't willing
to push the envelope to take risks to trust our gut.
But now the problem is we can take a really bad lesson
from that, which is never listen to experts,
always reject the evidence, always lean into risk.
Sometimes when people tell you you're about to drive over a cliff,
they're not haters,
they're not trying to pull you down,
they're trying to save your life.
I got to imagine that there were people that said,
hey, John DeLorean,
I know you think that this $30 million cocaine deal is going to save the company,
but it's a really, really,
really bad idea. And it's not going to work out well. But when we think we know better,
we prevent ourselves from seeing what's obviously in front of us. And we fall prey to that
magical thinking. We fall prey to those delusions. And then also, there's a great expression from
Seneca. He puts this in one of his plays, which is, I know, there's a great expression from Seneca.
He puts this in one of his plays, which is, I think, largely based on Nero, who he worked
for. So Seneca would add some real experience with these sort of crazy egotistical leaders.
But he says, one who indulges empty fears earns himself real fears. So the other thing
that ego does is it kind of, it's convinced everyone's out to get you. Everyone's trying
plotting against you. You know, there's that sort of paranoid, only the paranoid survive.
Well, that sort of crazy instability often generates precisely the things that we're
so worried about and that we fear and are afraid of. The fourth part of ego, the fourth sort of
negative part of ego, the exact opposite of what we're just talking about, which is that complacency.
You know, if you think you're the greatest, if you think you're God's gift to humanity, if you exact opposite of what we're just talking about, which is that complacency.
If you think you're the greatest, if you think you're God's gift to humanity,
if you think you're flawless and perfect,
what you're not doing is working on improving
and working on getting better.
And Bill Bradley famously says,
when you are not practicing,
somewhere in some other gym,
your opponent is practicing.
And when you meet that opponent, they will beat you.
And so as we want to think about where ego really holds its back, it's not only
you can't learn that, which you think you already know, but you can't improve
that, which you think is perfect, right?
So if you, if you're celebrating how fast your company is growing, if you're
celebrating the killer year that your company just had, if you're celebrating how fast your company is growing, if you're celebrating the killer year that your company just had,
if you're patting yourself on the back for what a great leader you are,
ironically, if you're thinking about how humble you are,
what you're actually doing is letting ego creep in and prevent you from getting better.
One of the things you learn as a writer is your last book will never write
the next one, that you're starting from zero every time. Jeff Bezos famously says, it's
day one over here, right? Every day you're starting from scratch. The past is irrelevant,
the Stokes would say, it's done, it's over. But what we're starting at zero today. There's
always, there's always room for improvement.
I would say there's always room to get better.
And not only is this a way to stay humble,
but by believing that it creates the opportunity
to get better.
Now, is there a downside to this a little bit?
If you're never satisfied,
if you're never happy, if there's never enough,
you're not gonna enjoy, you're not gonna celebrate the wins.
And I think we could have a long discussion
about how one sort of gets that balance.
But the point is, the more you focus on what you have left to do, where you have to get
better, the more likely you are to continue to get better and not become complacent.
And then just remembering that, you know, the second you are getting complacent, there
is somebody who would kill for your position, right?
We talked about prize fighters.
It's like for every fat and satisfied heavyweight champion,
there is a young kid coming from nothing
who would do anything to take that belt from them.
And that mismatch is what creates the upsets, right?
Springsteen says, you gotta stay hungry,
but they'll be carving you up all night.
That's the idea, right? It's those who get complacent, those who think they're invincible,
that they have a monopoly, that they own it. Those are the ones who get their luncheat. All and beyond. Contact us today at mademyhomes. I'm Peter Frankopern. And this is Legacy. Exploring the lives of the biggest characters in history
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Which leads kind of into the final part,
the idea of how ego also makes you fragile.
I think we think that ego is, you know, sort of a form of confidence, right?
We go, oh, but isn't a little bit of ego important?
I say, no, there's a big difference between ego and confidence.
Ego is stolen, ego is made up, ego is delusional, confidence is earned.
The problem with ego is that it can feel, it can look like confidence, especially early
on, right?
If you don't believe you can do something, you're very unlikely to do it.
But just because you believe you can do something doesn't mean you can do it.
But let's say that your belief, you know, gets you somewhere.
You reach for something that shouldn't have been possible, you pull it off.
Well, fantastic.
But now you
learned this lesson that ego is a good thing. And eventually that ego is going to make you
either can place in or make you overreach. And now you experience some sort of failure or adversity,
which is inevitable, right? No one bats 100. We always struggle. We always experience setbacks.
And then what? I was the director of marketing at American Apparel and and Jeff Charny basically ran the company into the ground. There was a
bunch of factors, ego being a big one, but ultimately he's fired by the board
of directors. Now the board of directors presents him a set of choices. They say,
Dove, look, you're obviously an integral part of the history of the company. You
form the company. We want your advice. We don't want this to be acrimonious.
And they said, we'll pay you a million dollars a year to step down as CEO,
be retained as an advisor.
You'll keep all your stock in the company, which is at that point,
something like 55%.
And we'll bring in a bunch of experts, people who you weren't able to work with.
We'll bring them in, we'll turn the company around. You'll be a very rich man.
You will be seen as the, you know, the you will be seen as the great leader of the company
who got us as far.
And who knows, maybe you come back in the future.
The idea of being seen as a failure,
being seen as a loser,
being not having to give up control
was so ego shattering to Doug
that he decided instead to mount a hostile takeover, file so many lawsuits,
and so actively campaign to get control back of the company, that he ends up driving it
into double bankruptcy. He not only loses all of his shares, not only gives up the $1
million salary that he would have had, but ends up owing the hedge fund that he partnered
with $20 million on the other side of it.
So we went from, you know, share's error at one point probably worth $600 or $700 million
to being in the whole $20 million, right?
This is what ego does.
Ego can't lose because if ego is part of your identity on the way up, look at how amazing
I am.
Look at what I've accomplished.
Look at how special I am.
Look at what this says accomplished. Look at how special I am. Look at what this says
about me as a human. Well, think about how fragile you then are when you inevitably fail or are
embarrassed or are criticized, right? You saw this again in the election. I don't think these are,
I hope this doesn't come across as political. I'm talking merely on personality level.
Trump says at one of his last rallies,
can you imagine losing to this guy?
And though what he did lose to this guy
is identity was so caught up in winning
that it was actually easier for him to spin a fantastic tail
that he'd won in a sacred landslide
and it had been stolen from him
than to face the fact that, hey, maybe he made mistakes
and maybe he
screwed up and that maybe if you learn from those things, he
could run again in four years and win, right? So what ego does
is it prevents us from from doing the only the only worthwhile
thing that there is to do when we fail, which is to learn from
that failure to grow from it and to be improved by it. But ego can't do that because the pain of loss,
the pain of being seen as a failure is like death.
And I remember I asked Dove right after he got fired.
I said, Dove, what are you gonna do?
I said, are you gonna plot a comeback like Steve Jobs?
And I remember this like two in the morning on the phone
and he just said, Brian, Steve Jobs died.
And I just said, what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, to him, all he could think about,
failure and death were like the same thing to him. Just the idea that it was possible to come back
was incomprehensible to him because all he could feel was the pain and the embarrassment of that loss.
And he ended up taking a bad situation and making it worse and worse and worse and worse.
I'm writing about this now in my book rate, in the book that I'm working on.
Lyndon Johnson knows that Vietnam is a war that can't be won.
So why doesn't he detangle America from it?
He's not even going gonna run for reelection.
Why doesn't he solve this problem?
Well, he didn't wanna be seen as a coward, right?
His idea, how that would affect his ego,
how it would affect how other people saw him,
it made it inconceivable that he would do this difficult
thing, we all regressed towards the mean, we all experienced setbacks and failures. And so if your identity is tied up in what you
do, if you have ego instead of confidence, confidence says, here's who I am. Here's what's
intrinsically mine. I don't identify with things that are outside my control that are not me as a
human being. I identify with, you know, how fancy my plane is or how much money I make or how much press I get
or how big my house is.
Those things can be taken away.
Those things can be jeopardized.
And if your ego is tied up in those things,
you'll be devastated and you won't be able to bounce back.
Humble people are able to learn from their failures.
Confident people are able to grow
and learn from their failures. Egotistical able to grow and learn from their failures,
egotistical people are ultimately destroyed by failures
and setbacks and criticism.
They're very fragile.
So those are the five things.
I thought I'd conclude with one more thing
that I think helps me put some ego and perspective.
It's a deeply stoic exercise.
I carry this coin in my pocket,
just as a memento mori on it.
And on the back from Marcus Aurelius,
he says, you could leave life right now,
let that determine what you do and say and think.
So Marcus Aurelius is the most powerful man in the world.
And when you read meditations,
what is he talking about over and over again?
How short life is, how unimportant he is,
how quickly he's gonna be forgotten after he dies.
You know, he says, Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and they're both
buried in the same ground. The same thing happens to both. He says, what good is posthumous fame?
You're not going to be around for it. He's reminding himself that these things don't
say anything about you as a person. And that if you start to get too high on your own supply,
you're taking life too seriously and you're lying
to yourself. The philosopher Bertrand Russell has a line that I remind myself of when I start to get
stressed, when I feel that ego creeping up, when I get really, you know, he says, the belief that
your work is terribly, terribly important is the first sign of an impending nervous collapse.
important is the first sign of an impending nervous collapse. And so having some humility about what you do, about your place in the world, to me is
a sign of healthy, well-adjusted maturity.
Realizing that this is not a grand monument to yourself.
We're all playing the game of life and business, and obviously you want to be a winner at it.
Obviously you want things to go your way,
but none of this changes really anything.
And none of us know how long we're gonna be here for.
And so to take it too seriously,
to let it go to your head is quite silly.
I live out in the country in Texas
and none of my neighbors know that I'm a writer.
I think that helps keep me sane, spending time out in the country in Texas and none of my neighbors know that I'm a writer. I think that helps keep me sane.
Spending time out in nature, you can't be outside.
You can't walk in your guys' case down a snowy street on a nice evening and just feel that
sort of quietude and that calmness and not be taken down a peg or two, right?
The walk I take each morning helps center me,
helps remind me of what's important.
To me, it's the opposite of whatever the ego boost
you get every time you check your email
or log into social media.
We remind ourselves of Memento Mori that we're mortal,
not just because life is short, but because it's important. The impetus for that phrase, the idea of Memento Mori that we're mortal? Not just because life is short, but because it's important.
The impetus for that phrase, the idea of Memento Mori, the Romans would chant it to a triumphant
general as he walked through the streets of Rome after his biggest victories. Memento Mori, remember
you are man, remember you are mortal. You're not special. The rules still apply to you. Gravity
still applies to you. And that idea from Cyril Connolly that we opened with still apply to you, gravity still applies to you,
and that idea from Cyril Connolly
that we opened with still applies to you.
Nothing sucks us down quite like gravity as ego.
Humility is important,
and it's not just important
for some sort of religious or moral reasons.
To me, it's a business strategy.
Egotistical people might be successful in the short term,
but on a long enough timeline,
they're all brought back down to earth.
And I think generally we would wanna,
you know, not crash too hard.
So that to me is why ego is the enemy.
That's why I've been talking about it for all these years.
I actually have it tattooed on my arm here.
It's a reminder.
I wanna see it constantly through the day, through my life as a reminder. Look, ego does not make this better.
Ego is not the ingredient for this difficult problem. Humility, confidence, connectedness, These are what we need. This is what makes us better. And that to me is why he goes the enemy. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon Music,
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