The Daily Stoic - 6 Stoic Rules To Beat Ego

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

You don’t need to be an egotistical asshole to be successful. History is filled with powerful people whose pride ultimately destroyed them, from Caligula and Nero to Xerxes and Mussolini. The Stoics believed the antidote to ego was humility, self-awareness, reflection, and honest introspection. In this episode, Ryan explores the dangers of ego and the timeless practices that can help you keep it in check, stay grounded, and remain a good person as you become more successful.🎥 VIDEO EPISODE | Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhibdimmh7s🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here |  https://www.dailystoiclive.com/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You don't need to be an egotistical asshole to be successful. Are there a lot of egotistical assholes who are successful? Sure. But there's also quite a few catastrophic failures who were Caligula, Nero, Xerxes, Mussolini, and then, of course, business and art, entertainment show us the truth of the old Greek saying that whom the gods wish to destroy,

they first make proud. And so for the Stoics, the antidote to this was humility, was self-awareness, was introspection, was reflection. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Not just the dangers of ego, but timeless practices that help sweep it away, that help you get clean and stay good. My first squadron, there was a lot of jocon

for a position with the young pilots, the lieutenants, the captains. You're friends with everyone. Like you trust that person with your life, super tight-knit, but you're also very aware of how everyone's doing. You don't want to be made to look bad. And I think a lot of it is like you feel like you're really establishing your reputation in this career field you're going to be in for a decade. Yeah.

And you don't want to look incompetent. And for me, for a long time, I thought I was like, it was like too humble. Like I wasn't boisterous, I wasn't loud, I wasn't type A, and I felt like, like I had a hard time fitting in in that culture. Yeah. But in hindsight, I realized that my ego is actually getting in the way because I saw asking questions, asking for help, letting people know I was struggling with a concept in the airplane as weakness.

Yeah. And I felt like I could not show weakness in that environment. Yeah, there's an ego. People don't think about it this way, but there's an ego even in that kind of imposter syndrome or that sort of wallflowerness where you just think people are thinking about you way more than they are. Yes. And that these things say more about you than they do.

And so, yeah, because you don't want to look stupid, you'll stay stupid. Or because you don't want to ask for help, you don't get help, or you don't want to look like you want it too badly so you don't get it. It's this weird thing where, yeah, the person who needs to be the center of attention, they make everything about them, that's a very obvious and harmful form of ego. But then we have this other form of ego that maybe we can. convince ourself is humility or self-awareness or something, but it's actually just a similar self-absorption. Yeah. My whole world revolved around me in that I felt like everyone was watching every little

thing that I did. And so I was hyper-vigilant about how I reacted to people's comment. And part of this, I don't think you cannot talk about gender being layered in there. Right? I'm like one of two women in a squadron of 50 pilots. Yeah. And there's a lot of nuances of, oh, they said it an inappropriate joke. Everyone looks at me and waits for my reaction.

Yeah. And I felt the responsibility of that. And also, if I'm bad at something, now there's a stereotype that female fighter pilots are bad at this thing. I'm a data point of one. You're just spending too much time thinking about what other people are thinking. And you don't realize that the cost of that is thinking about things that you actually have some semblance of control over or would make a difference. You're just like, what are the critics going to say? How's this going to go?

Do they like me? Did that come off weird? And yeah, what you're not thinking about is like flight semantics, schematics or whatever. It's a massive distraction. Fearlessness. And then you would say ego, both of them are somewhat adaptive at the beginning of things. Because ego makes you go out for things that you have no business going out for. And so in the beginning it's an advantage, or at least it's not as costly as it becomes later.

But it's a real bad habit to pick up in both cases, I feel like. Not being afraid of things you should be afraid of. Yeah, right. Like you will not be an old fighter pilot with us. mentality. Especially when you're having to stand out in a field, you know, or you're having to get past a lot of reservations or resistance, all that can kind of work to your advantage. And then you get there and now you're an asshole. Or, you know, now you think you're exempt or you've made a bunch of enemies. Or again, yeah, you've picked up really bad habits and you don't have the kind

of sound fundamentals, which should be like self-awareness, empathy, etc. You know, a sense of caution and prudence and now even though it got you where you wanted whether it's a fighter pilot or a record deal or a successful business the irony is it gets you what you want and now the stakes are much higher so you're going to be learning these painful lessons like the cost of fearlessness or ego and now you're doing it in the air instead of in a simulator or you're doing it with something to lose like yeah all that you've built and and that's why they say pride go with before the fall. At what level do you want that fall to happen? I think our safety net for that because the what got you there, if you are very overly confident, if you are hangman from

top gun maverick, that can get you places initially. Yeah. But that debrief at the end of the flight and the way that's structured and the humility required in there, like every little thing you did wrong in the air is picked apart. Yeah. And not in like this ridicule shame you way, button like okay you relate to that why were you late what were you thinking about did you have the wrong information or did you have the right information to make a wrong decision like we just peel back the things until we're like oh here's the root cause of why we failed at our mission yeah and no one is spared from being criticized and we actually have language in our grade sheets like when you're an instructor and you're teaching someone new and they're just pushing back you're like hey you didn't do

this like you're supposed to what happened and they will come up with excuses not reasons but excuses right They won't take ownership of it. They won't walk away with, okay, next time I'm going to do this better. Yeah. It's just a failure to take instruction. Yeah. And people can get kicked out of programs or even out of the jet and move to a different career field if they just continue to, because it's dangerous. Yeah.

Behind me is an enormous mausoleum. Built by and four, one of the most powerful men in history, a man of enormous ego and enormous vanity. Hadrian, when he had this built in 139-8. He said to his architect, make it bigger and more impressive than Augustus. And indeed, it rivals not just Augustus, but it rivals some of the Egyptian pharaohs. And it held not just Hadrian's remains, but that of his successors to Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius himself. But Marcus Aurelius would have found this to be the antithesis of Stoic philosophy. He actually addresses it in meditations.

He says, consider that before long you'll be nobody just like Hadrian, just like Augustus. He said, so live and act with humility. Now you might think the fact that this is still here 2,000 years later, that it's a museum, that it's endured through all these centuries, that it might disprove Marcus's point. But actually, it doesn't, because you know what happened? In 400 AD, Rome was sacked by the Goths, and they broke into the temple, and they scattered the ashes everywhere.

We have no idea where they are. They were lost to the ages, which is also something Marcus Rios talks about in meditations. He says, Alexander the Great and his mule driver, they both died, and the same thing happened to both. And indeed, the same thing happened to Augustus. We have no idea where his body is. The same thing happened to Hadrian, the same thing happened to Antoninus, the same thing happened to Marcus Aurelius, and the very same thing will happen to you. He's saying, you know, ego is the enemy. Live with humility.

Remember, you are not immortal. You are not a god. You are not special. You cannot defy the laws ultimately of gravity or of... of time or of decomposition. We're traveling internationally this summer, and some of those places like in Europe, you know, you can't just go dress like you're slobby American. You've got to dress up a little bit.

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To see Optimize an action, visit scribe.com. And mention Stoic for a 30-day risk-free trial, Scribe.com. I used to be big into new atheism, right? And that was a movement that was afflicted hugely by a sense within it that people were just smarter than. Christians. I've seen that tendency everywhere now, and I'm sure I'm prone to it as much as anybody. So many social movements now were defined by a feeling of sort of about the kind of the people, the outside people, that, you know, they're the kind of benighted heathens outside the golden circle. Well, you said somewhere, and I think you're right, you said that the story of genius

is really the story of ego, or that every genius story is the story of ego. I think the tension of being smart or being right, it can be a real problem. Someone told me once that making a successful contrarian bet can be a sort of cognitively devastating experience. Because you did a thing and everyone told you were wrong. Everyone told you you're an idiot. They were incredibly condescending along the way and smug about it.

And then you proved them wrong. It is very hard for you to go back. to zero on the next thing and the next thing, right? You're starting now with a cynicism and a skepticism and a sense of superiority. That is an imbalance that affects your future endeavors and political and social opinions. Oh, I completely think that's true. I remember having this conversation with a journalist. There's a British journalist who died a couple of years ago called Christopher Booker and he became in his later years a climate change denialist. And I asked on someone who'd worked with him, you know, how did that happen? He was so smart. Like, how did he end up

just spending the last 10 years of his life talking about the hockey stick graph and all the stuff we used to hear about before, you know, every summer scorched Texas and wildfires raged across the Midwest and people kind of went, no, I do think this is a bit weird now. And this other journalist said, well, he was one of the Christopher Booker was one of the original journalist involved in uncovering the thalidomide scandal, which was a huge medical scandal in the 1960s in Britain, where women were given morning sickness drug. And it led to Limdafi. informities in their children. And for a long time, the medical establishment denied this, covered it up. And it took a really big investigation by the Sunday Times and others to, like to

bust this open and get people compensation. And he said essentially that generation of journalists was ruined by it because they had seen this massive conspiracy where the establishment were lying to them and they were right. And I think that's true. My friend Sarah Daitan once said this about the Iraq war ruining the left, right? Being everybody in the left who was like, the Iraq was a very bad idea. I think it's a foreign policy disaster, you know. And then it was, got the idea that actually, like, this is true of everything. And you just, you know, you end up applying the same paradigm because it was right last time. And as you say, the key thing is that humiliation, the humiliation and vindication. And I write about this in the book because there's an idea

of the kind of scientist as rebel that comes through. You see it in the Galileo story. You see it in Ignace Semmelweis and his work on antiseptics and maternal mortality. That's such a compelling story to the idea of the one, usually the one man standing up against the crowd and being laughed at and then being vindicated. It's so unbelievably emotionally satisfying that unfortunately we vastly over-index on it and we see it, you know, we almost want it to happen every time. Yes. Because it's just, whereas obviously that would be absurd. You'd never be able to get in an airplane if it turned out that every, you know, every engineering thing was wrong. You'd never go to a hospital

of every bit of medicine was actually wrong. And when you watch people not engage in good faith with your ideas and you're, you know, be intellectually dishonest and you watch what you actually really were thoughtful about be sort of caricatured and treated as a straw man. It's hard for you later when you actually aren't on his sound of footing not to convince yourself the same thing as happening. And so I think you see that a lot. And this is actually, I think, the trap of scientific genius.

It's the trap of entrepreneurial genius. Like everything that worked, it was doubted at that time. I mean, Nikki, our mutual editor, when I came to them and I said, I wanted to write a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy, you know, she told me later that they were like basically just humoring me and that they hoped I would go back to writing marketing books after, right? And so I feel like I've had to do a lot of work with the success of that, of reminding myself that it actually was a bad idea.

Like the conventional wisdom, like she was not like being elitist. The amount of money that they offered me and the expectations they had for the book were within the bounds of reason and made sense given their past experience. They were not snubbing me. They were not insulting me. I did not know better. I had a hunch and they had a hunch and my hunch turned out to be not even right. right? Because it succeeded more than I thought it would succeed. I can't retroactively give myself more prescience than I had because I didn't have any.

I was just interested in something and I thought it could work. And the fact that it did work at a pretty extraordinary level, that is a surprise to both parties. Right. And so what can happen? I saw this when I was at American Apparel. You know, the idea was insane. What Dev Charnie was trying to do and what he was trying to pull off is that everyone was right to say that it wasn't going to work. It worked despite itself. But if you tell yourself a story afterwards that you're a genius and that you knew better and that all these people are idiots, then you're going to get yourself in trouble later on

when you have the other idea or when those people go, okay, hey, you did succeed, but you should be careful of X, Y, and Z. Yeah, they call it Nobel syndrome, I think, don't they? when people win a Nobel Prize and then they start going, well, you know, never mind organic chemistry. Wouldn't you like to hear a few of my thoughts about astrobiology? Yeah, didn't Newton get into alchemy? Yeah, Newton spent a lot of his life in alchemy and also a lot of his life on something called biblical chronology, which is so wacky that we don't even remember it today, basically trying

to work out when events in the Bible would have happened to work out how old the Earth would be from that point. There's loads of examples like that. You know, Mary Curie, one of the greatest scientists, she was, she would go to seances, you know, she would go and see mediums. It was a very popular thing to do at the end of the 19th century. And I think there's an interesting bit about that, right, because she was working with radiation, which was an invisible force. Yes. That, you know, but that was real. So, you know, why not ectoplasm? And I think that's the thing. If you're working at the edge of the kind of the known, then maybe you're, your sense, you are going to end up with quite a fluid sense of reality. But I think isn't what you're

talking about a bit narcissism. If you go along with the conventionalism and you're right, doesn't distinguish you or say anything about you. But if you buck the conventionalism and you're right, that means you are better. And I just, I think so much of the troubles we see across our society are essentially narcissism. Conspiracy theorizing fundamentally to some extent is narcissism, right? It's like your sheephole, your NPCs, and I've seen the truth. I think it's very important to lots and lots of people now to feel special, to not feel ordinary. But I think it is a real challenge of modern life, is working at which experts to trust and which all

to trust and to calibrate that, right? Not to just take everything that you're told by people with letters after their name as gospel, but also not to go so far out that you just, you know, you just don't believe anything at that point. I always find it remarkable how easy it is to see ego and other people. Oh, God. As if, and then how insidious it is to see it in yourself. Oh, yes. You know, horrifying.

Exactly. It's something constantly work on keeping it checked. constantly, you know, especially being in a band. Yeah, I would say being a lead singer is probably the, of a successful band. Maybe even, maybe it's actually harder to be it in a not successful band. But there's something about it that is uniquely toxic to the ego. Yeah. It's like gasoline.

It also is a requirement a little bit, I think, to be the front man of a band. Is to have a bit of ego or it. Because you think I should be the one, I should be the main one. Yes. I don't know. It's interesting. I kind of became the singer of my band by mistake. Yeah. You know, but like to be a good front man, you have to have the willingness to get up and make an idiot out of yourself again. And besides a smidgen of talent, the only requirement to be a good front man is the willingness to get in front of other people and make an idiot of yourself again and again and again until you get good at it. Right? And in order to do that, I believe there has a little bit of other people and make an idiot of yourself again and again and again until you get good at it. Right? And in order to do that, I believe there has to be a healthy amount of the ego.

Well, that's why it meant I think it might actually be worse for the ego to be in a failed or an up-and-coming band than a successful band. Because a successful band, you can be like, you understand it's unhealthy and you can create some artificial distance. Sure. Right. You can be like, it's not about me. You know, I don't want to take it too seriously. You can serve self-of-face. To me, where the ego is required in the sort of performative, whether it's sitting down to write a book, and write a song, whatever, is the part of you that goes, everyone wants to hear this when no one has asked for it, right? Literally no one has asked for it. And in fact, they're actually telling you for a good chunk of the time you're doing it,

that they are fundamentally not interested. Like, you are getting rejected over and over and over again. And you're like, no, but this is really good. Everyone needs to hear it. And that is the definition of ego, right? Like the rejection of the evidence. Right. over your belief or faith in yourself.

And so I think in that way, ego can be adaptive early on. The problem is it's so fundamentally maladaptive later on. And this is, I think the lead singers or artists or whatever that we know about that we would say as egotistical are the ones who are fundamentally stuck at how they were. Yes. Whatever they had to be to be the up-and-coming lead singer of Guns and Roses, you are still the lead singer of Guns. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

And we call it LSD, lead singer's disease. You know, he's got a bad case of the LSD. I managed to keep mine in check. I think if you're not looking very closely, or you're not very informed. Yeah. Like you're not savvy. Ego and confidence look very similar.

Right. Just like mania can look like charisma. Yeah. But if you, so if you've never been around someone to be like, oh, this is what a crazy person does. Yeah. You're like, I'm pumped around this guy. You don't realize like it's going to crash at some point.

Yeah. Especially if you're not confident, the confidence of egotistical or narcissistic people. I mean, like, you look at the first couple people that I worked for. I was clearly searching for something. Most people see that kind of boss and run the other way. We're like, I love it here. Yeah. This is normal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. On a long enough timeline, it becomes a disadvantage. Mm-hmm. That's why I think you can confidently go like ego is the enemy. But it clearly, I mean, there's obviously an extraordinary amount of very successful, very egotistical people. Yeah. I just think it's two things. One, like you got to like that's the myth of, was it Croesus?

Where it's like you can't, you got to wait till the end to you judge a person happy. But I also think unless you're really, really studying them closely, you're not seeing all the ways that they actually could have been more successful. Right. So it's like maybe, yeah, that person's ego makes them shameless enough to ask for stuff that they have no business doing. But by the same token, they tend not to do the work to then earn the thing because they think they're in time. Like, you know what I mean? Like it seems like confidence to be like, give me the shot. Games on the line.

Yeah. But like actually a great athlete's like they know they have to do the work to earn that, you know? Yeah. And if you're just like, no, no, give it to me, but you don't have the goods. Yeah. Then you're going to lose said game when it's on the line. Yeah. Yeah, it's the confidence to want to get the opportunity to to put yourself in that position.

Even when I was starting out, it was like, you know, there's these things called bringer shows for stand-up. Have you heard of that? Yeah, like, basically, you get stage time if you bring five friends. If you bring the audience, you get stage time. And so early on, I like did like an open mic and I like, and then there's a bringer show that like, yeah, we can give you stage at the, we can give you stage time at the comedy store. I'm like, amazing. Yeah. And they're like, yeah, just bring five friends.

So immediately I was like, I'm already on stage at the comedy store. Yeah, this is crazy. And then I quickly, you know, wore out all my friends. I'm like, they were like, dude, we're not coming to any more shows. It was this thing where I had like the naivete or to be like, no, I can be on stage at the comedy store. But then quickly learning of like, oh, no, it takes what it really takes is two to three open mics a night.

Yeah. Every night for 10 years. Yeah, you need a certain amount of shamelessness to get up and do the things. when you're bad, which you invariably are at the beginning. Yeah. But you also need like the humility and maybe even the self-loathing. Yeah. To like think that you're bad.

Yes. So you do the work to get good. Yeah. And you see that a lot. Yeah. Like the people who will get offstage and be, man, I crushed. Yeah. And you're like, no, you didn't.

Yeah. If you walk off feeling like you crushed, it's like the best in the world don't feel that way. No. So that you feel that way. So that's where ego is the enemy because it's making you stay as you are. It's probably more pleasant to not feel shitty. Yeah. But the shitty is, like, Ira Glass talks about this.

There's a taste talent gap when you start. And you have good taste, which is you know what is funny or you know what's beautiful or you know what's good writing. But like, you can't do it. But the desire to bridge that gap is like the propulsive force that makes you good. But if you're just like, maybe you have good taste, but then you're also biased when it comes to yourself or you're delusional when it comes to yourself. that's a problem because now you're just not, you're just like confidently being shitty. If you don't believe you can do something, you're not going to be able to do it. Yeah.

Just because you believe you can do something is not even close to sufficient to being able to do it. Yeah. It's always having this kind of this mindset of like, no, there's always room for improvement. Yeah. Like you're never perfect. Always a student. That's one of my favorite things is just because like, you know, you'll see like Bill Berg got off stage at the comedy store and he, to me, I'm like, he just crushed. Yeah.

But to him, he's like, oh, that was. one bit like I'm not getting it right you know these there's that there's that criticism there's like self-criticism of like no I need to improve this to really kind of it's always perfecting it and it's it's it's kind of never reaching that destination I think well Dr. Drew did a study many years ago of he as guests would come in to Loveline he gave them like this narcissistic personality test because like it's interesting like you'd think you'd be able to study narcissism but most really successful narcissists are obviously inaccessible to like clinical research, right? Most studies are done on like college students for class credit, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was able to

give this narcissistic personality test to like all the guests. So like a range of celebrities and musicians and then also like reality TV stars and whatever. And what I remember from the study is that they found that yeah, like most celebrities are at some level of narcissism, but it's this interesting question of like are narcissists attracted to celebrity or does celebrity make you narcissistic is probably a little both but one of the things they found was that the more technical the thing you did was the less narcissistic you were so like drummers might be very famous because they're in a huge band but what they do is really fucking hard yeah and it's like a craft that you love so it's like inherently humbling and it's inherently about like solving this like puzzle

you know, versus like someone who was on the real world road rules challenge is like attractive in good shape made a good like pitch video. Yeah. And then is maybe like dramatic. So like they're both famous, but one is getting their ass kicked by the craft of the thing. Yeah. And the other one is mostly just thinking about like how can I get more on TV? Yeah.

Yeah, it's like the craft itself humbles you. Yes. And keeps you in check. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Stand up is like a thing you're going and doing every night. And it's whether you're doing it for a thousand people or 10 people, it's fucking hard. And you get humbled by the audience too.

If you're not improving, if you're not constantly putting your A game forward, the audience will humble you. I feel lucky because like my first book came out and did well. But the Stoic stuff that was much more gradual. And then I know people who like their first book had just like crushed. Yeah. That's like now you're the person instead of like trying to be the person. I spend a lot more time writing than being the writer. If you if your first thing just cry, now you're the guy.

Yeah. The person who did the thing. And I think can be destabilizing and disorienting. The part of you that can't waste a single snap. I mean, I get it because I'm like the idea of like I don't actually need this. I can say no to this and be fine. Or like people will be like, hey, do you want to write this thing for this thing?

And I'm like, why am I even considering this? Do you know? Like I have three books I have to write. And then an unsolicited request to do something. Now because it's there, I'm considering it, right? And so you can see how the part of you that goes, no, I fucking sees every opportunity that's in front of me. That's what actually makes you a great quarterback.

But then it makes it hard for you to be a, good quarterback and then regular person because you're just that all the time. You're applying the quarterback mentality to do you want to do this other thing or not. And this other thing is superfluous. Yeah. I mean, that entire, in my own way, I can relate to that what you were saying. And like, it's that entire thing. It's that jockeying between insecurity and needing to be praised or the rush you get from a byline,

the rush you get from standing in front of people and giving, you know, a speech and having people give you a standing ovation. It's all of those things wrapped up in that. And when you're out of the quarterback space, there are things in place maybe to check you here or there, even though it's ultimately up to you. And when you're in that tunnel of the quarterback space, there's very, very few.

And that's where I think it becomes difficult. And that's where I think that for all these guys, you know, Steve Young loved Roger Staubach. And he asked Roger Staubach when he retired. Because Staubach obviously has probably become the most successful great quarterback ever in retirement. I mean, he's a real estate, has a real estate empire.

And, you know, Steve asked him, like, you seem like you've done pretty good. Like, how do you walk away from football? And Staubach was like, run. You have to run away from the game. You can never look back. Interesting. And Steve kind of ran.

You know, he stayed, he kept one foot in the pool, but like, it's that exact thing because Joe Montana, you know, says, I wish that everyone could experience being an NFL quarterback for just one Sunday. Yeah. because then they'd get it.

Yeah, yeah. Right. But it is, yeah, it's weird. It's like, why was Kobe Bryant, like, producing movies? Or, like, why did Kobe Bryant need a venture capital fund? Some part of it's probably like, yeah, you got to put that energy somewhere. But also, like, if you don't wrestle with why you have that energy, there's just never enoughness.

And so you're just doing, doing it. And, you know, at the end of the day, we all fucking die and nothing happens, you know. I think that he and Brady did this too, but I think that he knew that it was going to be devastating. Yeah. It was going to be a death of sorts when he walked away. And so he was looking for exit ramps to, so that when he was exiting, he was exiting into things. Yeah. And, you know, when you at Brady, here at Brady, you know, has this like career that spans two decades,

accomplishes everything you could accomplish. Years before he retired, he had set up his Fox deal. He had these other businesses. You know, he had a production outfit. He had his TB12, quote unquote, lifestyle brand. You know, he had all these things he was planning to do. And yet still, he's talked about it where, you know, he said he felt like he was like, you know, in a washing machine where you're just bouncing everywhere. Yeah.

And even it got Brady. Yeah. Like, even with all of that, it got Brady. And Elway was talking about how, you know, you exit Super Bowl champion, all these things, perfect ending. Then you go into these other spaces and you're behind everyone else. Yeah. And your name only gets you so far. Yeah. Elway went and became the GM of the Arena League Colorado Crush.

Like, what is the great John Elway doing, becoming the GM of an arena league team and doing these goofy commercials with John Bon Jovi? Yeah. It's because that was his graduate school. He knew that he wanted to get back into football and he wanted to learn how to run a team. And he looked at that like his graduate school for it. Yeah, it's funny. You'll be like, why is the president, why is the ex president on the view or what? You know, like, you're like, but like, because you need your, not your. not you're fixed, but you're used to being able to tell people what you're thinking. And like, you know, and then all of a sudden you're just a guy.

You know, like they asked Truman what he did the first day he was out of the White House and he goes, I had to take the suitcases up to the attic. And you're just like, what a cum, like that's not, there's no transition there. And you go from being a not regular to a regular. person and you spent your whole life trying not to be regular, right? And then it catches up with you and that that's a that's a brutal thing. Because if you if you were content to be a regular person, you would have walked away the second you got like the fuck you money. Absolutely. Springsteen talks about how he, you know, goes off a cliff into depression when he comes back from a tour and you go from being king to being a highly paid chauffeur, you know, basically.

And even in his 60s and into his 70s when he spent his entire life doing this and he knows the ebbs and flows of it, it would still get him. Like that's how powerful that is.