The Daily Stoic - Venture Capitalist Brad Feld on How Nietzsche Empowers the Entrepreneur | This Must Be Done Daily

Episode Date: August 11, 2021

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Venture Capitalist and Author Brad Feld about his new book The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors, the common misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy and life, why entrepreneurs have to focus attention inward toward self-improvement, and more. Brad Feld is an American entrepreneur, author, blogger, and venture capitalist at Foundry Group in Boulder, Colorado, a firm he started with partners Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson. Feld began financing technology startups in the early 1990s, first as an angel and later an institutional investor. Feld was an early investor in Harmonix, Zynga, MakerBot, and Fitbit. He is also the author of several books including Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist and The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping.LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Brad Feld: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace in wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. This must be done daily. A successful day for a stoic is simple. It's not about having made more money or having gotten more famous or dazzled more people with your accomplishments. It's whether or not you got better.

Specifically, it's whether you got better at life, more prepared for the troubles, for the temptations, for the opportunities that lay ahead, as Sennaka wrote to Lucilius, the prescription for Stoicism is simple. Each day acquires something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against all other misfortunes, and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested each day. You may notice how well this fits with the idea of the one-page a day model of the Daily Stoic, with over a million copies sold, this daily email, over 350,000 daily subscribers, the Daily Stoic podcast, over 55 million downloads worldwide.

All of us are engaged in that crucial task together, acquiring what we need to be fortified for the twists and turns of fate, acquiring the skills and the insights and the ideas that make us better. Better humans, better citizens, better athletes, better parents, better, whatever. If we can accomplish that in the morning, no less, in the days of success. It's not always going to be easy, but it is at least straightforward. It's the work of a lifetime measured day by day. And look, if you know anyone that might benefit from this email, from this podcast, please forward to them, give us a recommendation, Radist.

On iTunes or your favorite podcast app, always appreciate word of mouth, always looking to bring more people into the folds, spread the word, find one thing a day, that's the journey we're on here at Daily Stoic. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As you know, I'm a big fan of the concept of daily reads. Obviously, I wrote the Daily Stoic,

but I read a number of daily books. I love The Daily Drucker. I love a calendar of wisdom. There's a book about workaholism that I've read for a long time called Calling a Day. There's another one here I have on my shelf called The Courage to See. There's another one here I have on my shelf called The Courage to See. That's a passage of great literature. There's a bunch of books in this category.

I don't have many in the weekly category. I guess technically the Daily Stoke journal is a you know a daily journal, but then there's a weekly meditation. But my guest today is actually someone who's work I've known for a long time, but only got to know a few years ago. I'm talking about Brad Feld, who's one of the great investors of our time. And he's the founder of TechStars, which is a tech incubator, and then he's the founder of the Founder Group, which is an investment company that's invested in tons of huge companies. Almost certainly you have used or benefited from one of the companies that he has invested in.

But Brad has a very long catalog of books that he's written. The most recent, he said, is actually inspired by the Daily Stoke, but it's the Entrepreneurs Weekly Nietzsche, a book for Disruptors, which he wrote with his longtime friend, Dave Jilk. But the idea is, one quote, one essay per week from Nietzsche that would help an entrepreneur that would help an executive that would help anyone sort of on some journey to greatness, if you will. And I know Nietzsche can be controversially certainly been co-opted and misrepresented by a number of groups. So that's something we definitely talk about in today's episode. But it's a great book. If you haven't read Nietzsche, it's a nice entry point into Nietzsche. I found that the daily books are a great,

I mentioned daily, daily, a drug or earlier. It's a great entry point into someone. Instead of just picking up one of the books, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, this is a great way to just sort of do a survey course of a certain philosopher or influencer. But Brad has written a number of books. He

did do more faster text or lessons to accelerate your startup. The startup community way and out of involve an entrepreneur ecosystem, which is sort of what I'm trying to build here as far as a community and master. Where my bookstore and where Daily Stoke is based, his book Startup Life, surviving and thriving in a relationship with the nonchpreneurs. Also really interesting. Look, he's written a ton of books. He's a great guy. I think you're really going to like this interview.

It was fun to do. I feel like we got to nerd out about philosophy, which is always a treat to do on this show. You can follow Brad on Twitter at BFeld. Great guy. I think you're really going to like this. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're making something for an artist, you should be studying philosophy. Hopefully that's why you're listening to this podcast, but if you heard about it for some other reason, I think Brad's book, The Weekly Nietzsche is a must read, and I hope you enjoy this interview with me in Brad. So let's start really, really basic as a self-taught student of philosophy. I know I struggle with the names.

So give me your pronunciation of Nietzsche. You said it correctly, it's Nietzsche. Okay. Is that the indisputable pronunciation or are there some other acceptable ones? I think that's pretty indisputable. I often hear people say Nietzsche and Nitschke. I think Americans struggle with german pronunciation sometimes and when david david jokhan i wrote the book uh... we we had an easter egg in a bunch of places but one of them was in the title which is the entrepreneur is weekly

which prompts you to say nichi uh... right right so it would rhyme a little ration with weekly so uh... that was kind of a fun we would We would joke to each other about our Nietzsche book. Yeah, I have embarrassed myself on several occasions. I remember once quoting Goath and being reminded, oh, it's actually Gerta, which is not at all how one would think that word would be pronounced. It's okay. Epicurus and Epoch... all those are challenging too. You've mastered them. I do appreciate Marcus Aurelis just being straight down the middle and obvious. So, why should a founder study philosophy? I was actually just reading, not

long ago, there was some exchange about Mark Zuckerberg. I think it was Donald Graham, who was one of the early investors at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg was telling him that he'd been given some book by a journalist, and Mark was maybe 22, 23 going, I don't have time to read this book. And Donald Graham sort of taking him aside and saying, no, this is actually exactly what you have to take the time to do is to read and to study and to sort of explore these classical ideas. Why should a founder, or all the things they have going on, study Nietzsche or any philosophy? I'd like to think that my answer is additive to what I believe your answer would be.

And I'll give you a lot of credit before I answer for, I think, helping make philosophy accessible to so many entrepreneurs who previously, you know, went back in time to their college time and sort of the torture that they had, you know, trying to read some of the classical philosophers, whether it was Kant or even more contemporary philosophers. It's just the challenge with it. Sure. And my additive comment would be, with it. And my additive comment would be, I think the best entrepreneurs view part of their experiences, entrepreneurship as a journey of the self. And looking very inward them, what is interesting to them, how to manage, navigate, explore, grow all aspects of themselves in the context of being an entrepreneur.

I think the people who wander into entrepreneurship and view entrepreneurship as the end point of their life experience are missing out on the richness of this experience of life. And in fact, turning it on its side is what is so powerful. And saying entrepreneurship is just an aspect of this experience I call life. And as a result, to really be awesome at the craft, business, experience, whatever you wanna call it, of entrepreneurship, I really have to or have the opportunity to, have to as the wrong phrase.

I really have the opportunity to explore myself as a human and as a result of exploring myself, a core part of that is to study and explore what historical, philosophical thinkers have thought said done in whatever their time is because that's part of the experience of one zone exploration. I think that's right. And especially if you're lucky enough to be successful, right? So you start some small tech company and for the first several months or several years, you're maniacally focused on product and customer acquisition and all these things.

But if you're lucky enough to be successful soon enough, you're bumping into the timeless questions of philosophy, which is dealing with other people, dealing with temptation, dealing with focus, trying to find balance. Human psychology, purpose, meaning, all those questions become not just part of the purview of a leader, but you could argue as the company becomes really successful pretty much entirely what the founder should be thinking about because they shouldn't be micromanaging all these sort of day to day product things. They should be thinking about,

where does this company fit in the world? Where is the world going? How do I get the most out of the people who have decided to and trust me with their time and retirement savings and all these things? Let's play with an important word that you said for a moment, which is meaning. It's so important because so much of entrepreneurship is filled with cliches about what to do and how to do it or even why you should do it or what success and accomplishment is. But very rarely do any of those cliches land on real meaning. And often in some ways they're really antithetical to the whole notion of meaning.

And an example would be the number of entrepreneurs who say, you know, I want to be an entrepreneur because I want to change the world. Or, you know, the Steve Jobs cliche, I want to put a dent in the, you know, are you going to put a dent in the universe? And, and sort of the whole notion that an entrepreneur is approaching that extraordinary impact, right, to change the world in such a casual statement, right? My goal of creating this company is to change the world. What does that actually mean? If that's only the first part of the sentence, right? What are you trying to, not just why are you changing the world,

but what change? I mean, a lot of horrible people have changed the world too for the worst. And there's a lot of things, where you say, well, I changed the world. And it's like, yeah, except for for the last 2000 years, that change happens every 20 years. For sure. 30 years. Like, you didn't really change the world. You just played a pattern that keeps

playing out over and over again. And that's just at the functional level of the business. Then you think about the behavior of the person. The experience that you have and play with another word, which is, why are you doing this? What is the meaning of what you are doing? What is your own why? why. And as you have failure or success or some of both, does the why change? And interestingly, do you ever accomplish your why? And then what? And these are all real questions about being a human and being part of this species on this planet and it doesn't have to do with 2021, it could.

You can instantiate it in 2021, but in the context of long arc of meaning, what again does that matter? And I think entrepreneurs who don't spend any time going deep on that within themselves and frankly it's entrepreneurs or people are missing such a huge element of the experience of existence. And at the core that's the essence of philosophy over a long period of our species. Yeah, to flash forward, you mentioned the idea of these trends happening every 20 or 30 years and that's a hint

at Nietzsche's sort of concept of eternal recurrence. But I am struck, for instance, and I remember being struck reading at 20 years old, Marcus Aurelius, and you have this incredibly powerful, successful person who did change the world, sort of meditating on, not how meaningless it was,

but that it didn't mean what he thought it was going to mean, or he was sort of, it's like he got to the top of the mountain, and he wanted to tell people like, hey, don't give up your entire life to get up here, because it's not exactly what you think. I am amazed, you know, the number of people who get into entrepreneurship because they want to be the richest or they want to like do this thing that they've seen other people do, even though if you look closely at it,

those people sort of also warn against trying to do that. So there is this weird tendency where we're all chasing this thing and then conveniently forgetting that people have gotten there before us and come back to say like, hey, make sure you're doing this for the right reasons. Well, the very powerful ending arc of that, I keep a copy of your book, The Daily Stoic in the bathroom

and each morning I read whatever that day is. And I particularly like December because December is about mortality and death. I'm reading a book right now called Quantum, I lost the last name of it. It's by David Kaiser. And it's sort of about, he's a physicist in this historian, and it's sort of about the different arcs of quantum thinking and all the different things that have happened along the way.

And it's both the specifics and the sort of the philosophy of it. And this notion that there's this big struggle in quantum physics today around the big bang starting 14 billion years ago and the different philosophies of, or the different thesis, I don't wanna say theories, I guess they're theories, I was gonna say thesis,

but I guess they're really theories of, well, what happened immediately before the Big Bang? And if the universe is the universe really infinite or is it finite, and then there's now the multiple parallel universe theory that is picking up some steam, is that there's this continual instantiation of multiple parallel universes. And this whole notion that is a human being, right, you know, our lifespan is less than, less than a hundred years or a hundred years would be a very long life for somebody. And the idea that we're 14 billion years into the existing universe that we're in as current quantum philosophy has.

And then on top of all of that, the notion that if you sort of scale way back and look at it, it's kind of no different than in some ways a different flavor of religion, right? It's the creation myth of the universe and the role of humans in the context of the universe. And today we have such a deep understanding in just in the last hundred years

of so much more of what's going on than 2000 years ago in terms of the mechanics of everything. But if you go back 2000 years and you think about this notion of meaning, those patterns play out over and over and over again. The Joseph Campbell hero, the incredibly successful person who dies unhappy or penniless or some tragedy occurs along the way and even though they had incredible success,

the loss of child, family, country, whatever. I mean, these things just play out over and over and over again and we abuse so much meaning in them. Philosophy and studying philosophy and applying it to our lives gives us a moment to really step back and Go deeper on the meaning to us forget about the meaning to everyone else forget about what we're told is important But that introspection and playing around with it is is so powerful

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You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondering app. Well, then it's sort of part of the job, right? So obviously flattered that the Daily Stoic is in your bathroom and what I love about the idea of the weekly Nietzsche is that it's not something you read one time, but that you're supposed to go through it over and over and over again, that it's this ongoing process. I am curious, like, when you, for me, the idea of the Daily Stoic was the idea that, you know, you don't read the Stoics once, there's not the right stoke to start with, you know, sort of what's your entry point and then how do you sort of get in this loop about it.

Another great book that I love that I recommend to people is a calendar of wisdom, which is Tolstoy, sort of collecting his collecting his best greatest hits from his own writing and from the people that influence 10. But when you were thinking about weekly versus daily, walk me through why you decided weekly. Sure. And just a footnote, the book from Kaiser that I was mentioning a few moments ago is daily legacy. Or a quantum legacy. Quantum legacy. Okay. So, well, a couple things on weekly instead of daily.

For starters, and we say this in the book, we acknowledge, the inspiration for weekly was you. How? And in a lot of ways, the inspiration for the book was you and what you had done with stoicism in the context of business and entrepreneurship. And when Dave, my author Dave, and I started talking about it, and Dave, Jill, was my first business partner. So we've been best friends and work together on various things for over 30 years now.

So this was a really fun project for both of us to do. We're both solidly in mid-life. I'm 55, he's approaching 60. And the ability or the opportunity for us to do a project like this that had some reflections from us was significant, but it's important to start with the inspiration. And we actually started working on the project going back to 2013. So as before the Daily Stoa I could come out, but you were just starting to come out with your books.

And I remember when the Daily Stoa came out, we had written a bunch of stuff, but it was sort of slow and we're playing around with things. And I said, let's do something like this. And we talked about a little bit and we're like, geez, 365 Nietzsche quotes. That sounds just like a little too much, a little too much for anyone, including us to put together a book with that many of them.

So we probably come up with at that time, maybe 20 or 30 quotes that we felt like, from different parts of Nietzsche applied to entrepreneurship. And we said, let's do a weekly version. So that's where the weekly instead of the daily came out. Then one of the things that I think you did brilliantly with the daily Sto is, you know, you put a, you had 12 themes one for each month and then you put out, you know, an assay that was less than a page. And I think that's very, it's incredibly powerful because it's very digestible and it creates a rhythm.

I mean, I don't know how many times I've read the Daily Stoke. Now probably three or four, you know, just sort of beginning to end on a daily basis. I read it all the way through once, but that kind of a cadence. Nietzsche was different. We, as we played with Nietzsche, we realized that Nietzsche is much less giving advice in his philosophy, what Nietzsche is doing, and his cliche about Nietzsche are often quoted in line about him. He's very misunderstood as a philosopher, and I hope we get to spend a few minutes talking about that. Of course. But he's incredibly important as a philosopher, because he's really the crossover between classical

and contemporary philosopher. He's the bridge, at least in my mind. And one of the quechettes is that he philosophizes with a hammer. And he really is the classic disruptor. The subtitle of this book is a book for disruptors. And the word disruptor is so overused in entrepreneurship today. But we built on it, which is this notion that what Nietzsche did was he challenged so much

of conventional philosophy and conventional wisdom. But by smashing it with a hammer, he was provocative, he was aggressive, he was willing to contradict himself, he was trying to get people to think, he was not saying this is the answer, he was saying think about this thing and how you relate to it and how you relate to it in the world and as a result giving each of these quotes a week felt better than a day because for a lot of these if you read the Nietzsche and you read his quote It means nothing you can't probably like I have to read it out loud three or four times,

like reading poetry, you have to read it slowly and sort of the words are beautiful and powerful and unique. And it's of course, you know, English translation of late 1800s German. So it's colorful, but it's chewy. And so what we tried to do was take the Nietzsche quote, we then would sort of translate or translate it, I guess is a better word, into contemporary English.

And then we wrote an essay, and the essays we couldn't do two or three paragraphs. The essays were two or three pages, not saying, here's how you apply this quote to entrepreneurship. But here's what this quote makes us think about in the context of entrepreneurship. And here's some contradictory ideas, and here's some ideas that we used to think about this,

and now we think about this. And then for about half of them, there's an essay from an entrepreneur, maybe two thirds of them. And in a few cases, there are entrepreneurs whose names people recognize, but many of them are not. We chose entrepreneurs from our very extended network, but people who are not famous entrepreneurs, are not intended to be soundbites from super successful, rich, famous people, but practical stories where we gave each entrepreneur

the quote and our translation, and said write an essay about what this speaks to you about. And we didn't edit the essays, we let them be blog posts and we fix the commas and make sure the quotation marks and the punctuation were in the right places and stuff like that. But we let them be in the person's voice rather than in our voice. Again, to show and to try to give people the tools to reflect. And in some ways, be able to have a practicum around it.

You know, you're not reading to learn what you should learn from Nietzsche's quotes. You're being provoked by Nietzsche and hopefully by us and stimulated, maybe as a better word than provoked, to reflect on your own experiences as an entrepreneur, whether you're super experienced or just beginning, against the backdrop of this very important, provocative, stimulating, and I'm using the same words, because those are the words that we try to get through. Philosopher, and as Addison applies to entrepreneurship?

Yeah, I struggled with each of the first time that I sort of picked up all of his books actually. And I think the breakthrough that I had for him before your book was Stefan Zweig's little biography of him. He's not an easy philosopher to get into. And I think there is something special about either breaking it down in a day or a week because then you are spending just the way that a philosophy student wouldn't read one author for a week. They would spend a year or three months. You'd spend a guided sort of exploration

of the person's thinking. To me, that's just much more immersively close to how you pick up ideas and philosophy. Very well said. And, I mean mean to this day, you know, I I continue to read the original the original lecha works Dave read them much faster than I did or I should fastress around where he was systematic about it. And you know, when I when I pick up and read, I read Beyond Good Neville, which is, you know, one of the better known books by Nietzsche. And I think the first time I read

it, I understood almost nothing. And then I read a bunch of stuff about Beyond Good Neville. And I started to understand what Beyond Good Neville was about. And then I went back and read it again after we've been working on the book for a long time, and read it maybe a year ago. And it was such a different experience to read it then. In our book, we have a chapter that, near the end, we have a couple of chapters in the appendix. We have a chapter that, near the end, we have a couple of chapters in the appendix. And those chapters, we have, it's about 10 page essay on Nietzsche's life and legacy. So you just sort of get a sense of Nietzsche. We also have about a 20 page section on, don't believe everything you hear about Nietzsche,

because there's so much misinformation, especially today, about Nietzsche, because he's been co-opted by so many different entities and people along the way. I was going to ask you about that, because that's one of the things that I get from people, the sort of connection between Silicon Valley and stoicism tends to be sort of ready-made for a hit piece trend story of like, look at all these rich white guys studying philosophy, designed by slave owners 2000 years ago, it sort of writes itself as far as like wanting to

wanting to manipulate something to make it look preposterous or evil, Nietzsche's like that times 50. What do people miss about Nietzsche? I almost feel like when people hear the name, they almost have some kind of visceral reaction that it's somehow like a Nazi philosophy or that it's somehow from an insane person, or it's just from some deeply unpleasant person

that they associate it with some deeply unpleasant or pretentious person that was in grad school with them and they just have this sort of negative understanding. What do people get wrong about Nietzsche? Yeah, there's a long, long list. And the irony of what people get wrong about Nietzsche in some ways is that many of the things that he's accused of are the opposite of what he believed and how he believed. And I'll give a couple of examples. One is that he's a Nazi. Another is that he was a huge advocate of everything around German nationalism and Nazism because of his time frame. He had an association with Wagner.

And so there is this whole linkage to because of Nietzsche's association of Wagner, therefore he must be a Nazi. And then of course anti-Semitism, I'm Jewish, so anti-Semitism flows right into that. So it turns out that not only was Nietzsche not a Nazi, he was stateless. He renounced his citizenship or a statehood.

He was extremely opposed to nationalism and German nationalism. He broke with Wagner, their relationship fractured, it would very close relationship, the fractured. When Wagner started to embrace nationalism and of course you know that carried on to Wagner being essentially co-opted by the Nazi party. It is important to get the timelines right. Nietzsche did most of his writing between 1860 and 18 writing between 1860 and 1880s. He went insane in 1890 and he died in 1900. When he died, his sister

inherited his literary estate. And it turns out she became a Nazi. And as part of that, she released a book called The Will to Power, which was essentially edited, arranged, and published by her. Her name was Elizabeth. And The Will to Power was not Nietzsche's book, even though it's a book that is often attributed to him, because much of it came from his notes and lectures and all the manuscripts that he had. But she arranged it in such a way to support the thesis of the Nazis. And as a result, the book is a perversion, really, of the magnum opus that probably it would have been a very, very different book if Nietzsche had written it. And it goes on and on and on. I mean, like the layers of this stuff are so wild. He did go insane. He was always sickly and infirmed. And there's

a, you know, if you go online, you very quickly go down the rabbit hole of, he got syphilis from a prostitute in a brothel, and yet there's also this long arc of Nietzsche not being particularly sexual, and in fact his whole experience with being and in fact his whole experience with being in a brothel one time is, you know, his intense desire to get out of the brothel because he was so disgusted by, it's probably the wrong word, but so unhappy with it. So you have all of these things that, as you go down the rapid of Nietzsche himself are contorted. And you know, there's a threat about misogyny and sort of the things that he said about women. And yet if you actually look at his relationship

with women and you sort of think about the times, again, the late 1800s, and you sort of think about the times, again, the late 1800s, the dynamics, you know, was he an idealistic male who was, you know, treated women equally in that context absolutely not, but was he an extraordinary misogynist? Not at all relative to the context. So I put all that out there, not in a defensive niche, but it's actually one of the challenges of our contemporary society,

which is, and I'll just pick on one specific example. In the US when the alt-right movement really became visible, I don't remember, 2017, 2018, and became kind of the front and center thing that was going on in politics in the US. And this whole notion of white nationalism again became emergent in a significant way. And for me, a deplorable way, again, an American Jew, second generation probably wouldn't be here if my mother's father who immigrated from Russia hadn't been able to get to the US from Russia because would have been wiped out in Russia, you know, by the programs. The whole notion of the alt-right co-opting Nietzsche and saying Nietzsche is our philosophical inspiration. Dave,

Dave, and I went on this journey to try to find that. And we write about this in a book what we found was one reference to Nietzsche that was affiliated with Richard Spencer, well known, you know, participant in the outright, that was then amplified hundreds or thousands of times through contemporary media. When it sort of like, you know, Nietzsche or the Stokes would want nothing to do with these losers, if, you know, if they could actually, if they knew how their work was being perceived by these people, I think they would be the first and the fastest to disavow themselves from even the slightest association with these people who are pretending to be the heirs to the mantle. It builds on top of it even more significantly. So a friend of mine, after we came out with the book,

sent me a note about Stephen Pinker's book, the Enlightenment or Enlightenment, I can remember the full title. And he said, you know, what's your reaction to what Pinker says? And I don't know, I hadn't read the book. So I grabbed the book online, and I just went and read I hadn't read the book. So I grabbed the book online and I just went and read the sections about Nietzsche.

And he refers to Nietzsche over and over again as this horrific human being and this abysmal floss. I mean, the words are so aggressive. And yeah, everybody's allowed to have their own point of view, but it's out of the context of what the actual meaning is. And so then I expanded out and read the kind of sections that the Nietzsche stuff was in. And I'm like, wow, this has nothing to do with what Nietzsche is trying to say in his philosophy. So over and over again, it gets the dynamics to reinforce, which just comes back to the point you made, which is, and maybe what we started with,

is it's not that the goal of our book is to tell you what the answers are, nor do we believe Nietzsche is telling you what the answers are. What Nietzsche is doing is he's stimulating thinking, and we've chosen what we think are quotes from Nietzsche's very broad body of work. I'm going to give an example to end this so it ends on a specific example, to stimulate thinking among entrepreneurs.

And I'm going to use one from early in the book. And the chapter is called finding your way. I think Ryan, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll see this because it is, it is one of the ones that comes up a lot in stoicism. The Nietzsche quote is, I'm going to try to read it with emphasis correct. This is now my way. Where is yours? now my way, where is yours? Thus did I answer those who asked me the way for the way it does not exist. So I'm just going to read that first sentence again. This is now my way, where is yours? So our translation of this, in other words, people often ask me how to do something. I tell them how I do it, but then I ask them how they're going to do it, because there is no one way to do something. If you think about that in the context of mentorship, entrepreneurship, accomplishments, success, failure, you know, the cliche, you learn more from failure than you do from success.

But this notion that the idea that there is one way to do something is completely nonsensical. In entrepreneurship, especially among venture-back companies, you often hear the phrase playbook. Investors have a playbook, we have a playbook, this is how we're going to execute our playbook. And I keep thinking that I'm just going to come out with a book that's called the Entrepreneur's Playbook or the VC Playbook that's 300 pages long. In the first book, the first page is the title page that says, you know, the entrepreneur and VC's playbook. And the other 299 pages are blank. Yeah, there's a great line from Epic Titus page that says, you know, the entrepreneur and VCs playbook, and the other 299 pages are blank. Yeah, there's a great line from Epictetus. He says, you know, you ask me to tell you

what to do, and I say, wouldn't it be better to be made adaptable to circumstances? The idea that anyone can tell you what to do, or the play playbook is to sort of miss the entire point. They can give you principles that can give you practices, but every situation, every journey is totally unique and you've got to figure out your own way through it. Right on. So you know, hearing what you're saying, I think it's almost like Nietzsche is cursed by the fact that he's a very quotable philosopher, but a very difficult philosopher to read.

So his quotes are genius, but his books are hard, and there is no sort of singular Nietzsche book where you're like, this is it. So that almost primes him kind of like a Machiavelli or something to be wildly abused and sort of contorted to fit one's purposes, but at the same time, very poorly understood. I think that's right. There's a good translation of a book just called Nietzsche by Lou Salome, who he had a they didn't have a sexual relationship, but they had an emotionally intellectual relationship for

some period of time and it was a very important sort of as a couple and it was actually a threesome between him her and and another close friend of between him, her and another close friend of Nietzsche and a close friend of hers. And the translation of that book, which I think the best translation, let me look it up real quick, the best translation of the translation I see Friedman Dal, is in some ways helpful there, because it gives you sort of this frame of reference to navigate through everything. The interesting thing about Nietzsche's writing is that he didn't write, you know, he didn't write a diary and he didn't write a novel and he didn't write

a long academic treatise. Classical philosophy would have been, you know, a long academic treatise with lots of referring back to other things and building on other things. He wrote poetry, he wrote songs, he wrote anecdotes, he wrote all mixtures of things. He wrote some Longark stories, but the Longark stories were interjected with all kinds of stuff. So in a lot of ways, the writing has a feeling of being chaotic, but if you're willing to give it the time, it's actually quite understandable. And that's the issue.

It's, again, it's very hard. I mean, I don't read German. I read English, right? So I'm reading translations of German from 1870s and the translations often are from, you know, the 19, Walter Kaufman's probably the best translator. The 1940s or 50s or something like that. And so even the translations are not, you know, the words matter a lot. And I had an exchange with Dave once where I read something

and I misinterpreted exactly the opposite because of the words. And my interpretation of the words, I said, this doesn't seem right to me. This seems backwards. And he very patiently with me as my friend and co-author said, well, this one word in 1860s means something very different than it means today. And you go look up the definition and pick your box for definition. It has both definitions.

But the older definition is seven lines down versus the contemporary definition. So you just have to be careful with it and be willing to sort of dig in it. But the fun part is because Nietzsche's words are so beautiful and his language is so beautiful. In some ways, it does have an element of reading poetry where you sort of let yourself

be immersed in it rather than feel like, okay, I'm on page 72 and the book has 180 pages and I'm almost halfway done. And an example I would give you another quote that I just love, that's so powerful contemporaneously is from a section we call, we title monsters. And again, this is the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, open source translation so most of these translations are from the early 1900s so that they would be public domain Hugh fights with monsters should be careful

Lest he thereby become a monster and if thou gaze long into an abyss The abyss will also gaze into the and The abyss will also gaze into the And the other in other words and this applies to all aspects of life if your opponents are bad people and And you know, you get to judge what a bad people or a bad person is if your opponents are bad people There is a risk that you will also become a bad person If you become too familiar with bad behavior It may start to seem normal and infect your own thinking. And think of all of the entrepreneurial experiences where

the idealistic view of the entrepreneur at the origin of their business or early in the life of their business and their strong, moralistic statements about how they are going to put whatever you want between quotes in a positive moralistic, idealistic way when they became very large successful companies were almost the behavior of their organizations and their own behavior was almost antithetical to what they said at the beginning. Yep. Yep. No, and I think it's a cautionary tale where we are sort of politically and culturally

now where you have sort of one significant chunk of the American population that sort of embraced the absolute worst and most shameless sort of elements of the human psyche, it's effective because it catches us so off guard and it can be doubly dangerous in that it motivates you to go to the extremes in response. It makes that it motivates you to go to the extremes in response. It makes you so angry that you can lose sight of what you believe in, what the norms are, what the principles are. It's a dangerous situation.

And I think that quote is amazing. Here's another fun one to play with that. I was just looking at a couple that I felt were really reflective of stoicism in different ways, but added to. This one is delightful because I think it was either yesterdays or this morning's, it was todays from the Daily Stoic in the Pragmatism section, so that the title for us is work as reward of the chapter and the quote is, but there are still, sorry, but still there are rare men who would rather perish than work without delight in their labor. The fastidious people, difficult to satisfy, whose object is not

served by an abundant profit, unless the work itself be the reward of all rewards. In other words, there are rare individuals who would rather die than work without enjoyment. Such people are very particular about the quality of the work and making money is secondary to the reward of the work itself. And from yesterday, and sorry, from today in pragmatism, we can work anyway, and it's a quote from Rufus and lectures, indeed, how could exile be an obstacle to a person's own cultivation,

or to a taining virtue when no one has ever been cut off from learning or practicing what is needed by exile? I know, I love that. Isn't it great? And you start off with a Teddy Roosevelt quote, and I'm a big Teddy Roosevelt fan, so it made me smile when I read it this morning. Layton's life after surgery, Theodore Roosevelt was told he might be confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life, remainder of his days, with his trademark ambulance.

He responded, all right, I can work that way too. And think about as humans, how much of our existence is spent doing things that we feel either obligated to do or oppressed by, and I've talked very openly about my own struggles with mental health as an entrepreneur and as an investor and as an adult. And I will say that part of what has been so helpful to me in the last decade with my own mental health is not recognizing or configuring things so that every single thing I do is fun. I mean, I do lots of shit. It's not fun. That's the nature of the kind of work we do. But that the work itself is the reward, not the outcome. And so whether it's a successful business, unsuccessful business, the relationship is one that ends up successful or not,

whether the specific thing that's creating a lot of anxiety for all the people around the system is something that we can resolve or not resolve, I approach the work that do I have as much money as the other person and was this business successful and is my ego satisfied and am I satisfying the needs of the super ego like it's it's a complete separation of that I would I would rather perish than work without the light in my labor. and work without delight in my labor. It, what you're expressing reminds me, I think of the most direct connection between Nietzsche and the Stoics. Although I know Nietzsche wasn't the biggest fan of the Stoics and sometimes people get really mad when I quote him, but this is the idea of a Morphati,

which I learned from Robert Green, not merely to bear what is necessary, but love it. It's sort of turning those things that you have to do and to things that you get to do, to accepting things as they are, making the most of them, pushing through them, understanding sort of this idea that whatever it was, it was chosen for you in some way by nature of it happening. And now it's really about what can you do with it, what can you make of it. To me, that's also the prescription of a great entrepreneur. Of course, an entrepreneur has to change reality, but it is trying to

change the world. But at the same time, day to day, is trying to make the most of a series of shit sandwiches that sort of seem to constantly pop up and surprise them. So, well said. I mean, I like to say that entrepreneurship is an endless series of experiments, most of which fail. Yes. And when one succeeds, you figure out, you do more of it. When it fails, you learn from it,

and you create a new hypothesis and run a new experiment. And in our book, near the end, we have a chart in the section on Nietzsche's life and legacy. And we have a bunch of different categories of influencers of Nietzsche and then people who he influenced. And I'm going to say this to make you chuckle, we have one box of influencers that we call foils. And Socrates is one of the great foils of Nietzsche. And a foil, of course, is not necessarily your,

your opposer, a foil is someone who stimulates you, challenges you, and who you respond to, you react to, you challenge yourself. And so, Socrates had a huge impact on Nietzsche, both in Nietzsche agreed with and disagreed with, but we separated it, by the way, from philosophers who influenced Nietzsche who included deeply influence, which was Schopenhauer and Hegel and Spinoza. And then as you go forward, it's very interesting to look at some of the poets, right? Poets in influence to include Gerta,

Sophocles, Holderlen was another one that influenced him greatly. And then of course, he had enormous influence on Freud and young poets like Yates and Rilka artists like Rolfko and Dali, you know, the existentialists. And so it's a very interesting dynamic. And when you say, you know, people get frustrated with you when you quote Nietzsche, I would encourage them to approach it differently and the difference would be to view Nietzsche as some way as a compliment, as well as a challenger of different aspects of the Stelx. And as a compliment and a challenger, it causes you to think harder about the specific things that are important to you, which by definition is what Nietzsche was trying to get people to do in his own philosophy, was just to get them to think harder about stuff. He was not trying to say this is the answer. The last thing I wanted to talk to you about, and this is something you and I have connected

about before, but you brought it up earlier with mental health. I remember, this must have been like two or three years ago now. I had been working on a bunch of stuff, I've been traveling a lot for speaking, I had a bunch of projects going on, and I remember I came down with Mono, and you and I were emailing back and forth, and I told you that it had happened, and came down with Mono and you and I were emailing him back and forth and I told you that it had happened and you replied with Mono equals Ryan War himself out. And it's totally true and that was obvious

that I was sort of beating the crap out of my immune system from overwork. It's something I sort of continually deal with. But I wondered how much your study of Nietzsche makes you think that, I don't know, when I read him and when I think about him, he seems to be someone who kind of like broke his own brain. I know there's some people think it's syphilis, some people think it's cancer. There's also a part of me that wonders if he just sort of wore himself into some kind of dementia or insanity the way that sometimes like genius mathematicians or physicist will do. Do you feel like Nietzsche burned himself out?

It didn't seem like he had a happy life. Yeah, I have goose bumps from the statement. I use that phrase goosebumps from the statement. I use that phrase myself. I believe that Nietzsche broke his brain. It's actually the phrase I use. And if you read any of the history, like the book I mentioned earlier, the translation of the The List of Lemmy book, you see this tortured evolution. And it's not tortured because of his lack of effort. It's that he he so stripped apart his search for meaning. Come back to that word at the beginning. And, you know, he had plenty of issues, every human being has issues. And, you know, he had much of many of his issues were health-related, both physical and mental health-related, that grew with his intense that grew with his intense search for meaning in the context of his philosophy. And as, you know, he was extremely productive in the last decade before he won insane. And you can imagine this world, and we see it over and over again with people who they may not go insane in the

same way that we would have called it, you know, Nietzsche in 1890, but they lose their connection with reality. They have to become untethered. Untethered. And you think about our contemporary world untethered. Untethered. And you think about our contemporary world and the people that you would say, okay, make a list of people in our contemporary world who you believe have become untethered with reality. And I believe anybody who challenges themselves to do that, regardless of their political, philosophical, or functional, or socio-economic situation, can make a pretty healthy list of very well-known, very famous, successful, influential people, at some point, who have become untoward with reality who may still be very influential. We're hyperforming.

I think social media compounds it because now you have, like, you know, Nietzsche had to write this stuff down in a book or a letter, but, you know, you couldn't instantaneously publish it to lots of people and be validated for it. So I think you see people and we don't need to go into names But I think you see people who you know, it becomes this vicious feedback loop where they say something and it gets attention and it encourages that sort of already you know fragile part of their brain and it just goes on and on and on and then you go

Man, when did so-and-so turn into a you know a insert whatever nut and it just goes on and on and on and then you go, man, when did so and so turn into a, you know, a insert, whatever nut and it's a cautionary tale for sure. It's very powerful and I'm on a positive note around that. The positive note is I think Nietzsche would have been incredible on Twitter. Yes, that's incredible. And I'm watching the Dr. Dramma genius, the first year of it,

which is Einstein, who is another heroic figure of mine. Yeah. And I remember reading the show is based on I lost his name Thomas Friedman's book on Einstein. Not Thomas Friedman. Walter Isaacson? Walter Isaacson, sorry. It's based on Walter Isaacson's book on Einstein, which was, I read a while when it came out. It was, it's a very big book. It's, it's very, very detailed and very good. I think it's his toughest book, yeah. Yeah, but it was hard. It was hard to kind of put the pieces together. And I'm watching this. I'm in about episode seven or episode eight. So I'm almost done. It's awesome. I mean, awesome. And I was thinking, I said, this day, we've got the day Einstein would have been incredible on Twitter. And what the thing that happens with genius, and again, I want to end on a positive note

because even though Nietzsche went insane, I think that was just the, the physical and instantiation of the human being at the end of his existence, right? You have this thinking that in its time is so far ahead of other thinking. And when you look back with the benefit of time, you say, wow, it was remarkable. I mean, Einstein's year of 1905, when he was a patent clerk and came out with four papers that were, all four papers were transformational

in physics and all of science. You think about Nietzsche's five-year stretch between the late 1870s and the early 1883 or something like that. I don't know exactly the five-year stretch, maybe it was plus or minus two years. Incredible amount of stuff that, with the benefit of 150 years looking back, say that was absolute genius in the context of Germany and classical philosophy and religion and non-democratic societies to be able to say those kinds of things and come up with those kinds of constructs that are so deep and so relevant today. It's a similar kind of genius that you get when you read meditations and you say,

wow, this person who has accomplished, you know, the pinnacle, their internal reflections about so many different things. It's so powerful to just allow oneself in their own arc of existence to spend some time on it. And, you know, I say this over and over again to the entrepreneurs I work with and the leaders I work with, work on yourself, spend time on yourself. And as I think you, you have brought to me and many others. And hopefully we do our little part with Dave and I do our little part with this book. Part of working on yourself is to explore things, not by becoming a scholar, not by dedicating huge amounts of your life to it.

by becoming a scholar, not by dedicating huge amounts of your life to it, but by allowing yourself to be exposed to something you might not otherwise pick up and then relate it to yourself and trust from others, you know, people that have done the deeper work that they're surfacing relevant things to you. Yeah, and I would just as a nod to your other books, I would say is sort of related to Nietzsche and some of the people that we see go nuts. And that sounds really flimsy. People will become untethered,

is that often the reason they become untethered is because either modern technology or lifestyle choices have cut the cords that typically binds one to reality. So, you know, these are people whose marriages fall apart or who sort of rejected the institution altogether. These are people who, you know, decided to sell all their possessions and live out of a backpack while they travel around in hotels.

You know, these are people who work remotely. You know, like, these are people who have, who have, have, feel no obligation to a community. You know, so I'm thinking of your book on, on sort of, uh, uh, you know, spouses and your book on startup communities. The, the idea of it is very hard to stay sane while being smart, while being disruptive, while being ambitious, and to not have anything connecting you to other people, to a place, to community. And I wonder if that's partly what happened to Nietzsche as well, as he was just sort of this lone wolf,

and it kind of turned on himself at some point. Well, really well said, because if you look at his arc, I mean, he spent an enormous amount of time alone and over, you know, sort of later and later in his, in his professional time, he was even more and more isolated. And I think that, you know, one can be isolated and be surrounded by people. Yes. And that's a lesson of modern society.

And we just went through this period of time with the pandemic, right? Where you're physically isolated from others. And we can be endlessly surrounded by people and physically isolated. But are you surrounded by people who are good for you? Are you surrounded by people who are good for you? Are you surrounded by people who are creating, you know, the feedback loop that's healthy in your own growth and development? And I know many who might answer when I would point at them and say, that person is not surrounded by healthy people.

Right. Right. No, I mean, this is the tragedy of Tony Shea, for example, somewhat recently. Sad, but powerful example of somebody who, I was fortunate to have a little bit of a relationship with Tony and spend a little bit of time with him and know him a little bit. And my experiences with him fortunately were all magnificent, but they were also dated. They were probably six, seven, eight years ago. And it's such a great example of what happens when you're not surrounded by, when you're not healthy or you're not surrounded

by healthy people. And when you're a considerable genius and drive all the virtues can be twisted and turned around, you can start to either eat at you or eat at those sort of ropes that we're talking about, the KB Tether to reality. All of a sudden, your disruptiveness is disrupting your own rhythm and sanity. And yeah, it's not, you're not disrupting the shoe market, you're disrupting the sort of stability of your own life. And I think we want to look at those people, whether it's Nietzsche or Tony, not from a place of judgment, but from a place of sobering humility that, like, sort of there, but for the place of sort of sobering humility that like, you know,

sort of there, but for the grace of God, go, I like it. I think that can happen to anyone. And part of the reason you want to study philosophy is to learn from those people and where, how that can happen, I feel like. Yep. I, I, I, I would end with love, right? Yes. I would end with love, right? Yeah. At the essence, it's, you know, some people, so many people have a strong desire to be loved, and even if you don't have a strong desire to be loved, you know, your own reflection

on yourself and your own, you know, growth and development over this finite journey as a living human being is one where even, go back to entrepreneurship, even the failures, even the super difficult things, you can emerge from them with lessons, whether they're your failures, other people's failures. And I love what you said, Ryan, is that no judgment. It's not a judgment on the person. It's not a judgment of what happened or what they became, but it's to look at it empathetically and to learn from it in ways that can be powerful. And that is so much of the value for me at least of reflecting on the Stoics,

on reflecting on Nietzsche, and reflecting on other, not just philosophers, but other people, you know, used Einstein earlier as an example that I learned from who had many, many weaknesses and lots of challenges, but also had incredible strengths. And trying to understand how in the context of,

the finite life that I have, how I can have the experience that is the most powerful. And that's what we hope this book helps a tiny bit with. I think it does, Brad. Thanks so much. It's a fantastic book and part of my weekly routine now. Oh well, congrats on the bookstore. I hope it shows up on the shelves there.

I will, I will. Hey, it's Ryan. If you want to take your study of stoicism to the next level, I want to invite you to join us over at Daily Stoic Life. We have daily conversations about the podcast episodes, about the daily email. We actually do a special weekend set of emails for everyone. You get all our daily stoic courses and challenges totally for free. That's hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New Year Challenge, which we're going to launch in January. You get a special

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