The Rich Roll Podcast - Ryan Holiday On The Perils of Ego & Inherent Value of Humility

Episode Date: July 25, 2016

Ask today's guest and he'll tell you our culture is currently mired in an unprecedented epidemic of ego — a societal blight of apocalyptic proportions precipitated by the advent of selfie-crazed social media, self-esteem parenting and spurious self-help gurus fomenting an illusory sense of entitlement. The result is a woefully misplaced celebration of ubiquity over meaningfulness: Of endless distractions over devotion to work ethic. Of self-congratulatory passion over fidelity to process. Of unbridled hubris over humility. And of rampant self-seeking over service. We often equate ego with confidence, self-assuredness and ultimately success. The domain of the great visionary.  But what if this notion is utterly false? A personality trait that, at every turn, thoroughly undermines that which we seek? And what if modesty, humility and self-honesty are not actual weaknesses but in fact our greatest asset? This week Ryan Holiday graces the podcast to explain. An autodidact of astute intellect that belies his 29 years, Ryan is many things — a voracious reader, prolific writer, shrewd observer of culture, media strategist and the author of four acclaimed bestselling books. Dropping out of college at 19, Ryan began his multi-faceted career as an apprentice under Robert Greene, the acclaimed author of The 48 Laws of Power*. He went on to amplify the work of several New York Times bestselling authors before serving as the director of marketing for American Apparel – a job he held at the ripe age of 22. When he’s not penning books or thought pieces for The Observer or Thought Catalog, Ryan oversees Brass Check– a consultancy firm he founded that advises New York Times bestselling authors like James Altucher, Arianna Huffington and even Tony Robbins, as well as corporate clients that include Google, Casey Neistat’s video sharing app Beme, Creative Live, Complex and Refinery 29. About a year ago, Ryan and I went deep on his life and his heralded book, The Obstacle Is The Way*– a primer on the functional applicability of stoic philosophy for turning modern-day obstacles into opportunities and adversity to advantage. Now translated into 17 languages, it's a read that achieved cult status among some of the world’s most successful CEOs, political leaders, world class athletes and NFL coaches. One of my most popular episodes, I highly suggest you check out RRP 168 if you missed it the first time around. Today, Ryan drops in to talk about his new book, Ego Is The Enemy*. Enjoy! Rich

Most successful people started with a very tiny goal, and then they expanded based on real evidence and feedback and progress, and it grew from there. That's Ryan Holiday, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. What's up, everybody? How are you guys doing? Are you okay? Do you feel good today? I hope so. My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. Welcome to The Rich Roll Podcast, the show where each week I go deep and long form with some of the most inspiring people currently walking planet Earth. Thought leaders, musicians, entrepreneurs, authors, as is the case with today's guest, deep and long form with some of the most inspiring people currently walking planet Earth. Thought leaders, musicians, entrepreneurs, authors, as is the case with today's guest,

scientists, doctors, filmmakers, environmentalists, world-class athletes, and even the occasional everyman, people with experience and expertise across all categories of positive living, social change, and performance. And my hope is that these conversations will serve you in your personal journey to unlock your best, most authentic self. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible. As always, I appreciate you guys tuning in today for sharing the show on social media, for reviewing the show, for subscribing to the show on iTunes. And on the subject of subscribing, I wanted to let you guys know that I just launched

something new I call Roll Call. It's this free, short, weekly email blast of instructive recommendations and resources, just a few things that I've discovered, enjoyed, and found helpful to grace your inbox every Thursday. That's it. It's really short. It's totally free. No spam. I'm just grateful for your support. And it's just a simple way for me to give back and be of greater service to you guys. So if this sounds like something you'd be into, you're interested in, you can sign up for the newsletter at richroll.com. Did I mention I have Ryan Holiday on the show back for the second time. Pretty excited about it. It's a really incredible conversation. If you missed our first episode

together, here's a little background. Ryan is what I would call an autodidact, for the most part, a self-taught guy. He dropped out of college at 19, and he's really quite an impressive young man who, although only 29 years old at this point, has forged a really successful career as a media strategist, as a writer, and an author of four acclaimed best-selling books. He began his career as an apprentice under Robert Greene, who's the author of a whole slew of amazing books, including The 48 Laws of Power. And Ryan went on to work with other acclaimed authors like Tim Ferriss and served as the director of marketing for American Apparel, a job he held at the ripe age of 22. Wrap your head around that.

best-selling authors like James Altucher, Arianna Huffington, and Tony Robbins, as well as corporate clients that include Google, Casey Neistat's video sharing app, Beam, Creative Live, Complex, and Refinery29. So Ryan and I sat down about a year ago to talk about his life and his book that had recently come out at that time, The Obstacle is the Way, which is this modern primer on the functional applicability of Stoicism, which is the ancient Roman philosophy originated by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus. And it's a book about turning modern-day obstacles into opportunities and adversity into advantage. And that book has gone on to great acclaim. It's been translated into 17 languages and has found this incredible fan base, sort of a cult following amongst some

of the world's most successful CEOs, political leaders, world-class athletes, and even NFL coaches. I highly recommend you check it out if you haven't already. If you missed that conversation, RRP168, I definitely go back and check it out. It is one of my most popular episodes to date. And today, Ryan drops in to talk about his brand new book. It's called Ego is the Enemy. I think it's his best book to date. That seems to be the consensus opinion on what I think is really a fantastic read. It's a book that takes Ryan's thinking that he originated in the obstacle is the way and applies it to our greatest internal obstacle, the ego. And in many ways, I think it's fair to say that

this book is a philosophical exploration based on numerous historic case studies of the difficulties that we all unnecessarily create for ourselves throughout life. So this is a conversation about just that, how early in our careers ego impedes learning and the cultivation of talent, how ego can blind us in success, and how ego magnifies failure to hold us back and impede recovery. It's about why we should be purposeful over passionate, and it's about how and why we should be humble in our aspirations, gracious in our success, and resilient in our failures. I have a ton of respect for Ryan. He's incredibly poised, mature, and intellectually curious. He is a fresh, true, deep thinker,

so rare in our culture of talking heads and white noise. So let's talk to him. Let's do it thanks for uh coming up to my version of your ranch thanks for having my holiday good to reprise our conversation round two with uh the next book ego is the enemy congrats thank you uh quite an achievement i i do think it's your best book yet that means a lot to me yeah it's a it's really an amazing work. You should be very, very proud and I'm excited for its early success. It's well-deserved. Thank you. Yeah. Books are weird because you work on them for a long time. And then when you're done, it's sort of, I don't know, maybe this is only for me, but like, I know that I wrote it,

but I'm still like not totally sure where it came. Like, it doesn't feel like it's me like it feels like i made this thing and now it exists and i know i was involved in making it exist but i don't like i don't walk around feeling like i wrote it that's a very interesting and i think telling and apropos statement in light of the subject matter of this book, because, you know, ego being the subject matter of the book, obviously, we're going to get into that and unpack that. But in reading your book, I was thinking a lot about what you hear from creative people, artists, you know, Steven Pressfield has written about this, the idea of the muse or kind of opening the channel and being the conduit to something that exists outside of our limited notion of what self and identity is like the expression of that comes from some other place

often so is that your relationship with the material because there's a very workhorse aspect to how you put this book together well i think like steven from what I've gathered from him, like believes like in literal muses and I definitely don't feel it like that, but I feel like, I feel like it's, you sort of, you go, actually you were kind of telling me this about your race that you, your, your, your ultra marathons where it was like you did it and you were searching for something and then it's like done and that it's not like part of your day-to-day walking identity do you know what i mean so it's like i went into this place and i made this thing and i came out of it and then i'm obviously i'm very proud of it i'm very excited about it but i um and then the mind moves on to the next thing you You can't, if, if you're just dwelling on what you made and you're sort of, it's like looking at yourself in the mirror a lot or, or something like, I don't need to, I know what I look like. Right. But there's still that idea of like, where did this come from? Like, do you have that experience as a writer of saying, oh, wow, like this idea just

came to me and you get it down as quickly as possible before it eludes you. And you don't know really the genesis of that thought or that, you know, reflection on whatever idea you've been contemplating. That's a big part of it. Although not to take the magic out of it. I wonder if part of it is like, okay, so you work on this thing for two years or however many years. It's literally hundreds of hours of work. And it's really a collection of little pieces of work, right?

So on a random Tuesday morning, I had this idea. I wrote this sentence. And then three weeks later, I was editing that sentence. And then an editor was also editing that sentence. So it's a collaborative process. And it's also an iterative process over time. So it's like there's that Heraclitus line, like no man steps in the same river twice because it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

It's like that. Like, I know that I made it and I know I was involved, but I, I can't like tell you the moment that any of this stuff happened. Cause it's, it's not, it's not like you, you didn't sit down and write a book in a three day sprint. I think you would identify with the work very differently than if it's this long, hard process. Right. But that's the reality of it. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very blue collar pursuit in certain respects of showing up every single day and doing this stuff, you know, that no one wants to talk about that is hard and anonymous and, and literally a grind, right. In contrast to contrast to you know this idea of passion which

i know you talk about that i definitely want to get into with you and and you know kind of extending beyond the stephen pressfield idea of the muse to you know what liz gilbert calls big magic right you know like she'll she takes that even one step further and talks about how when she's embarking on a book project, like she's in partnership with this, you know, creative spirit, she's going to get in a car and go on a road trip with it. And that negative voice or the ego or whatever you want to label it, um, is going to come along too. And so there's a stern conversation about roles and responsibilities, right? It gets to come on the trip, but it doesn't get to drive or make any decisions.

Yeah, Anne Lamott, she says that every writer is listening to a station called KFKD, which is K-fuck. And in one ear, it's telling you how amazing. It's like, I think, you know, it's the most like self-indulgent, congratulatory music. And then the other, it's like the worst, nastiest gangster rap about.

And that you have to learn how to basically turn off the station entirely. Because you can't, either frequency is bad. Right. There's a lot of talk about that in 12 Step. The predicament of the alcoholic is to simultaneously entertain the idea that you're better and smarter than everybody, but that you're also a complete piece of shit and have nothing to offer. You know, like how do you entertain both of those ideas at the same time?

Yeah. Um, and there's a similar, you know, analogy with approaching a creative project. But I think like Keith says, uh uh he has this concept of negative capability like can he says like the mark of genius is to be able to hold sort of two conflicting or somewhat contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time and so you have to be able to do that right like you have to know like you have to know that you can do something and be humbled and scared by it at the same time or you have to know that you like i have to know that i made this book and be humbled and scared by it at the same time. Or you have to know that you, like, I have to know that I made this book and be proud of it, but also not dwell on that too much, or it prevents you

from doing the next thing. And I think there's a lot of things like that in life. Yeah. You have to think, you have to think you're worth something, but not, uh, you, you, you can't think that you're worth more than everyone else and so on and so forth. It's exhausting. Yes. Being a human being, right? Yeah. Well, let's get into why you decided to write this book.

What was it about this subject matter that attracted you to this project, the genesis of it, the allure? Yeah. I kind of talked about that at my signing where it's, it can be really easy because like what a book ends up being is often very different than whatever you thought you were going into. And so it's very easy to tell yourself that you knew all along what it was going to be, but you have to remember that you didn't. Like, um, I'm, I'm really interested. I was really interested in what they call the narrative fallacy, the way we like tell ourselves

stories about who we are. And I, I, I just love the idea that I've written an article about this too. Like, um, I feel like everyone on social media is just performing for other people. And I wanted to look at the way that that performance like shapes and impacts

our lives, like the way the, the face, uh, forms to fit the mask rather than the other way around. And so that's what I wanted to write about. So like the first title was the narrative fallacy. And then I wanted to call it like the rockstar delusion,

like the idea that we're all these rock stars and it just wouldn't like, couldn't get it right. The publisher wasn't super interested in it. And then, so I pivoted to the idea of like sort of the opposite of that, like keeping this small identity. There's a Paul Graham essay called Keep Your Identity Small, which is really great. And so I sort of thought and so from there, the publisher's like, well, you're really talking about as a book about humility. So, yeah, that's right. That's what I want to write about. But what you think you're going to write about and then what actually comes out, those are very different things.

what you think you're going to write about and then what actually comes out, those are very different things. And so, um, around that time. And I think I was, when I was here last time, we were sort of talking about it. It's like the collapse of American apparel. It's like, okay, it's not just about humility. Humility is a great positive virtue, but it's really, it's really about it being not whatever the opposite of humility is, right? Like humility is great, but it's really the absence of all the ego that makes it great. And so that's where ego came from. Right. So let's maybe, I mean, in our first conversation, we kind of recapped your whole personal journey, but maybe we can crystallize it to just give a little bit of context. Well, I mean, obviously the American apparel thing was a big part of it. I was the

director of marketing and to watch that company go from one of the biggest brands in the world to nothing was, was, and, and obviously that didn't come as a surprise to me, right? Like this is a process that I saw unfolding over several years, but, and so that was a big part of sort of forming, giving me some real insight into how this stuff works. But in my own life, it's like, you know, at 20 years old, I suddenly had an immense amount of responsibility. And I was working for people that were twice my age. And I was like the kid, right? Like I was going places and I realized very quickly how precarious that was.

And that like it was basically mine to lose and so i i think i was fascinated with ego and sort of not becoming full of yourself and having to remain really objective and to sort of play the long game rather than the short game because like i i realized that if i didn't do that they were just going to ship my ass out you know like they're nobody nobody has time to put up with um like a cocky up-and-comer that they don't need to have around do you know what i mean and yet at the same time the messaging like you were working in hollywood at the collective it's like we celebrate these giant out ofof-control personalities. Those are the people that find themselves on the front page of The Hollywood Reporter. And we, until it becomes that time where it's time to pull them down.

Yes. Right. And it's that idea of regressing to the mean. Yeah. Yeah. Right. In some sense, the outsized ego and insanity can be like adaptive in the short term because it makes you take insane risks that

sometimes pay off but the vast majority of the time it doesn't pay off so i sort of saw i saw who i didn't want to be very clearly and i also saw that like hey i have to like earn my spot here every single day and if i'm focused on anything but earning that spot, this is not going to last very long. And especially when like I found that it was like, I would come in these meetings and everyone thought like everyone has these opinions about you just by who you are and how young you are, that if you're not like twice as good,

right. You have to exceed expectations. Yeah. And, and one of the ways to exceed those expectations I found was just to have your shit together. Like to not be a mess was adaptive. And I think that's why I was able to not mess up in the way that I think other people I knew did mess up. Right.

And when American Apparel starts to disintegrate around you, I mean, what did you have the awareness to understand? Like this is a result of ego gone haywire or were you just caught up in the micro aspect of what was happening day to day? It's definitely both. Right. So I had a sense of where this was going. And so, you know, in 2011, I left to be a writer and I, so I didn't leave completely, but I sort of swum far enough away from the, the ship that it wasn't going to suck me down with it. And then when, when it, when it, they made the decision to, to fire Dove, who is the founder and the interim CEO came in and the board of directors was just trying to sort of do some triage and keep the thing together. They asked me to come back.

And so obviously I debate this internally now, whether that was a good decision or not. I certainly learned a lot and it was certainly very illustrative. It was very like when you're writing a book about ego and they call you in for a corporate restructuring, like of, of, uh, that, that no, of,

of the likes of which no one has really ever seen before. That's like very helpful. That's very cool. On the other hand, it was just like a bomb going off in my life because all of a sudden I'm being sucked into all this drama and chaos and dysfunction and I'm absorbing it and I'm becoming part of it. You know, it was, it was a, not a pleasant time. Right. And that was going on while you were working on this very book.

Cause this book has been, this was, you know, in process for years, right? So, so I'd sold it before obstacle came out. Um, I don't know if I was hedging my bets, but I wanted to sort of be indifferent to how it did and so like i think that was like june let's say all this happened on june 26th i had gotten home from the book tour on obstacle on like june 24th and so it was like i'll take a month off and then i'll start the book like that that was my thinking. And then all of a sudden I spent the next six months in LA in this nightmare. Also knowing that, Hey, um, I have a, I have a book that I have to start soon. And so it, it sort of became the thing that I was, I was sort of channeling all these experiences. The nice part about being a writer is there's

almost nothing that can happen to you that doesn't make for good material. Yeah. Either way. Right. You can't judge any of these experiences. They're all just information that can fuel some future project. Yeah. But also, I mean, like if I blew up my life tomorrow and like, if I became a horrible drug addict, right. It's like, at least I know like, Hey, if I ever get my act together again, that would be a good book. Or if it gets really bad, even that's like, there's, there's an infinite number of directions you can go that you can at least make hay of, of the chaos that is your life. I really enjoyed the fact that you inserted your, some aspects of your personal journey into the prologue and the epilogue of this book. I think that it provided helpful and useful context for why you were writing the book. And I think it helps to emotionally connect the reader with the journey that they're embarking

upon. But I know that you have like this reticence about being open and talking about yourself in literary form. You have no problem doing it on podcasts. You do it all the time. So it's not like some weird feeling that you have about that. So I'm interested in why you're so, uh, resistant to. Well, and,

and in my other, in my two, my first two books, I'm in them all the time, but I don't know what it is. Um, I think one, it's like a respect for the material.

Like I'm really interested in the topic and I feel like it's somewhat, I feel like it's lazy to make it about you sometimes. Like, it's saying, like, I could have found a timeless historical story to make the same point, but let me tell you about breakfast this morning. Right. You know, so I don't like that. I get that. I mean, there's also very much a, you know, a sort of George Marshall aspect to this that, that kind of runs through everything that you do in some respect, like all the way down to your Twitter avatar with your hands over your face. Like that's a very conscious decision to use that as your face, you know, world facing. I mean, I'm, i'm hesitant to give myself too much credit there

like i also just think that's like a cool looking picture but and i think george marshall looks sort of passing on writing a memoir as it's like of all the major world war ii generals he decides he turns out a million dollars in like 1950 to not write his memoirs, which was an obscene amount of money. And, um, it's part of the reason that a lot of people have no idea who he is. And, and I admire that. I, I guess I don't want to compare myself to that because I, if someone offered, someone's offered me a lot less than a million dollars to write a memoir when I was 25 and I did it. So, you know, I'm not that, but I think it's partly the reverence for the material. It's partly that I want it. I want it to not be about me. I want it to be about the book. Like, it's like, it's also like, I think my point is strong enough that I don't need it. And, and

also thinking like, Hey, if you don't like me, but I make it about me, then I've, then I've but I make it about me, then I've, then I've imperiled the idea out of selfishness. And, and so I don't know, I just, I like Robert Greene, who I, whose work I'm sort of constantly holding as the sort of gold standard in terms of nonfiction storytelling. Like he's not in the 48 laws of power. The 48 laws of power are the 48 laws of power and so um that was what i went into but you i think you can't have hard and fast rules and it's like i every single reader that read an early version of the draft said like you have to be in this somewhere right or they said we the part i'd had so i was like okay i'll be in the afterwards so i wrote this afterward and they're like,

this is the strongest part of the book. You're an idiot to put it at the back. And so the hardest part I think about being a writer or doing any creative project is knowing when compromising your vision, like compromising is making it stronger or is compromising on some essential principle. And so I had to do a lot of thinking and working on that. But maybe even the word compromise is the wrong word.

Like you're getting feedback and you're intuiting that as an assault on your vision that you're going to have to compromise as opposed to perhaps these people. assault on your vision that you're going to have to compromise as opposed to perhaps these people like let me set aside my ego yeah and my story that i'm telling myself about what this book needs to be and my relationship to this book yes and try to objectively hear what these people are trying to tell me well and it's like realizing that i'm like the thing about me feeling like it's it it's the reverence of the work no one else is appreciating that that exists totally in my head right like no one else is like i like. That exists totally in my head, right? Like no one else is like, I like how you didn't, like, because they're not noticing it.

I love how you didn't include yourself. Yeah. So like that, the idea of like, that's just an arbitrary, that's an arbitrary stylistic thing that I came up with. That doesn't mean it's not good. It's just something I came up with. So I have to decide, you know,

when that is serving me and not serving me. And then I think I saw it as a compromise because it's like, if I could publish whatever I wanted, and I mean, to a certain degree you can, but it was like, if you hadn't said anything, I would have done it my way. So you're telling, you're giving me information or, or a response that I had not anticipated. So now I have to determine whether you're right or I'm right or rather what is the right way to do it. Sharing your work as a creative person, for example, being a writer and letting somebody read your manuscript and being open to feedback

is a pretty good litmus test of where your ego sits, right? How are you going to receive that information is going to be very informative about where your ego resides. Yeah. And, and I tend to find that I'm a very pragmatic seeker of feedback. So like what, what I hate is when someone goes like, Oh, it was good. Or, you know, not good. I rather like, like, Oh, it was good. Or, you know, not good. I rather like, like, I don't want your general thoughts. I want you to tell me what you like. Like I want very specific feedback. Cause I do want, I do. Yeah. I want to use it. I want to be stronger for it. I don't just need an emotional reaction from you. Like that's, I have a good sense of that. Good job. Right. Right. That doesn't really help. Right. So I would imagine you're pretty selective though, in the people

that you sort of, you know, nominate to be part of this board of advisors. I think so. And I mean, obviously with a traditional publisher, you have an editor. I work with another editor. And then I think where, where it's the most essential is when you get feedback that you are not sure about. Like I learned this from Tim Ferriss. He'll go like, he'll ask like 10 people like this passage, do you like it or dislike it? And then he's comparing that. He's trying to get more of a sample size on that information so so it was like okay i've gotten some pretty strong i've gotten pretty strong feedback on like needing to tweak this afterward introduction thing now now i want to

i want to go out and find someone like i wanted disconfirmation like i wanted someone to tell me like don't listen like so i wanted to i wanted to get all the opinions and then make a decision not like not just responding to some trend or worry or some the worrisome possibility that people are all talking to each other and you're just getting the same feedback strengthened but it's it's i mean it's really hard because you don't there is there is no right answer and you could you know what what works at publishers publishers are like parents in the sense that they want you to do what's has the what's safest right they want it to be the most like other books basically and you as the author want it to be as different and

special as possible right and you're willing to gamble in a way that they're not and so that's the other element is like okay are they telling me this because I'm doing something new and groundbreaking and that's making them uncomfortable? Or are they doing it because I'm violating some fundamental rule of writing and they're helping steer me back from that? Yeah. Well, I think in this case, it definitely served you well, because you are still quite young. And, and as somebody who's a little bit older, you know, you can't escape like, all right, why am I reading this book? I'm like, what is this guy going to tell me? And if I can't connect with you emotionally and why you're writing this book, then it's going to, you risk it being like a textbook and just being too bland to really become completely engrossed in. The big thing that my editor gave me

that was very helpful as we were talking, the book was much harsher at first, especially without the intro. It just started, like I started, have you heard the Zen story about the student sits down to tea with the master and the master pours into the cup and it fills and fills and it overfills? And he says, you know, your cup was already full when you came in here. And that's that's why this is happening. And so that was the story that I wanted to start the book with. And the premise being that we're so full of ourselves that we're not able to learn and we're not as good as we're able to be because we bring these preconceived notions and conceptions. And so I think that's what people need to hear,

and I deeply believe that, and I think that's still the message of the book. The problem is if you hand that book to someone, like you read my book and then you hand it to your son or you hand it to someone who works for you, you are saying you're full of it. That's why you you read my book and then you hand it to your son or you hand it to someone who works for you you are saying you're full of it that's why you should read this book you need to read this yeah right and and although i think there is a huge percentage a huge portion of the population that needs that and would and people would appreciate that other people need that it is alienating a huge part you have to you to think like, here's what I have to say.

And then the second layer is what is the best methodology for delivering that so I can reach the most amount of people? Like appearances matter. One of the kind of precepts of recovery is, you know, don't give advice, share your experience. is, you know, don't give advice, share your experience, you know, and that's really the vehicle by which people can then let their guard down and say, oh, this guy's coming from an authentic place when he's going to then tell me these stories. Yeah, that's right. So let's get into the book. Before we do that though i feel like we have to kind of do a glossary like we got to define a few terms okay because your definition of ego might be different than what other people might bring to it or okay right so what is your what

is the definition of the working definition of ego that you're using throughout the book well so that was that was another big discussion i didn't think that ego needed to be defined because to me it's obvious and i almost feel like defining it makes it more complicated than it is right like i because i'm not using the psychological definition i'm not using the freudian definition i'm just right in a freudian context it would almost be id more than yes right yes to whatever degree I even understand what those concepts mean. I think, you know, Freud said the ego is sort of the rider on the back of the horse. But in a weird way, the ego to the ego, as we use it colloquial, ego is the wild horse that needs to be reined in. So I'm using it as a synonym for arrogance and selfishness and endless competitiveness and greed and recklessness.

All the things that Donald Trump is, right? That sort of thing. I like the, what's the recovery acronym. It's like edging God out. Um, it's when it's ego is this thing that comes into your life and pushes out good things because it, it, it expands to fill whatever space is possible and typically to your detriment. Right. And the journey of this book really is analyzing this, you know, thesis throughout all phases of somebody's life or career. When you aspire to something during the period in which you're enjoying some level of success and how you kind of weather setbacks and failure.

Yeah. And in none of these cases is ego a good idea to really, you know, fertilize. So it's never going to make it better because most of my personal experience has been the navigating and trying to corral ego on the as a young sort of striver right like someone trying to do something realizing that ego like in trying to become an author you know starting, starting my ego is the problem, right? Ego is what I know that if I want to do this thing, I have to make sure that ego is not preventing it. And then, you know, around the time I started writing the book, my stuff really began to take

off. So now I'm, now I'm navigating ego in a different, slightly different context, but my, the, the lessons on ego that a 17-old needs are fundamentally different than the lessons that a 50-year-old multimillionaire needs about ego. Just like somebody who just hit rock bottom, ego is probably the reason they just hit rock bottom. They don't need to be told about how you shouldn't believe that you have the golden touch when everything lately that you've touched turns to the opposite of gold. So I wanted to sort of split it. Although for a lot of those people, they have a victim mentality. So it's everybody else's fault. If everybody just did what they told them to do, then they wouldn't be in that situation. Yeah, no, I think that's so interesting. It's you still have to pierce that veil of, of, uh, delusion or denial.

Well, cause a lot of people will say like, I get why ego is bad, like on this end, but, but aren't most people dealing with like sort of crippling self doubt or self loathing. And in a weird way, I think if you've ever actually spent much time with those people or been that way yourself, it's actually a very similar form of ego because it's believing that you it's like, hey, like, you're great. It's like, no, I'm not. I'm the worst. It's like, why do you think you know better than everyone else? Right.

So it's it's that know it all ism. It's it's it's a weird sense of superiority. It's a reverse ego thing. It's still an attachment to an identity and a story that's destructive yeah it's just it's just it doesn't feel like because it doesn't feel like a grandiose story you you you you justify it yourself differently i think so uh the arc of this really the the the the book really pivots on these three ideas, right? Like, be humble in your aspirations, gracious in our success, and resilient in our failure.

These are kind of the triptych, like tripartite, you know, pillars upon which this book is built. I think the second two are kind of self-evident and self-explanatory. The first one's tricky, though, like be humble in our aspirations, because that's at odds with this whole ethos, this cultural moment that we're in that tells us to dream big and nothing is outside of our grasp and all of this. I tend to find that ambition is best when it's iterative, right? Like, for instance, I'll deal with like a lot of prospective authors. And I see this with fiction. They'll be like, so I'm writing a book. It's an eight-part sci-fi series. And I've already planned out the movie adaptation.

And then here's the TV show. And then here are the spinoffs. And it's like, why don't you just start with one book? And, and it's like, what, what the delusion and the ego there is taking for like doing it once is incredibly hard. And most people who try fail, right? Like not because they're not good, but because it's hard. Right. So it's, it's like, if I was like, uh, you know, it's like when you're talking to a five-year-old, they're like, I'm going to be an astronaut and a baseball player and a football player. But as you get older, you realize like actually doing any one of these things is

extraordinarily hard. So I have to pick the one that I'm best at and I have to focus on it. And so I see, I see a lot of really ambitious people. They, they think they're dreaming big. Cause that's what they heard in a Ted talk or their mom told them they should do. And it's actually coming at the expense of reasonably achieving any of these other things. And it's ignoring the reality that like Google did not set out to become the world's most valuable company that would create driverless cars and do all these things. That might be the story that they present now. But the reality is it was two Stanford graduate students writing a thesis that they said, hey, there might be something here. Let's start a business. And then they started a business. And then they almost took a million dollars from Yahoo and walked away from the whole thing. And

it became a thing. And then it became public. And then they bought YouTube. But when YouTube was created, it was a dating site. The reality is when you look back at at our past it was much more complicated and much less certain than it feels now so that's where the original idea of the book comes in and so it's like actually most people start most successful people started with a very tiny goal, and then they expanded based on real evidence and feedback and progress, and it grew from there. But the wake of any of those people's success creates a very tidy narrative that can be written about and shared about and displayed on screen that creates a temptation to reverse engineer. Like, Oh, look, that guy created this billion dollar company. Like if I just do what he did, then I'm going to do that. But if you actually got to the truth of that person's journey, you know, that story obviates all the difficulties and missteps and mistakes and, and whatever, you and whatever myopic idea he began with.

So a few years ago, I read this book called The Accidental City, which is a history of New Orleans. And the premise is that New Orleans is like a complete geographic and historical freak, like different colonies, different countries coming in and this and that. And that's why it's such a wonderful place. But I remember I quit halfway through the book because like in reality, a book that says there is no narrative to this history is actually super unpleasant to read. And, and get all uncomfortable. I'm just like this, where's this going? Like none of these threads are being tied together so the human mind is i think designed to make sense of unrelated events or to create that narrative and so as it it's like

like from a from a marketing perspective or from a positioning perspective you have to have some cohesive story right you're not just like i don don't know. It's not like James Stockdale, like, who am I? What am I doing here? You know, you can't have that, but you do have to, you do have to separate the sort of the pithy three sentence bio of yourself from the complicated reality that brought you to wherever you are. And you have to understand that that's certainly true for other people. Um, and that you can't be comparing yourself to them because you don't know what went into it. You don't know how, you know, if Steve jobs hadn't sat on some random park bench at some random day and met this random person that he wouldn't be here telling you about

how you should be just like him or whatever it is. Right. So beyond very true, you know, and beyond, uh, your personal experiences with American apparel, et cetera. Um, you know, a big part of what has informed us for you is just, you know, culturally what's going on around us with social media. And we're all like sort of encouraged to, you know, sort of be the best version, you know, this, this glossy version of ourselves online. Right. And, you know, it's a the best version, you know, this, this glossy version of ourselves online. Right. And, you know, it's a, it's a culture of, you know, countless sort of inspirational guru people telling you that you can do anything that merges into, uh, you know, a sense of entitlement for young people that all of these things can kind of create this perfect

storm of ego out of control. And yet we, we are, we're looking to examples of this in our culture, successful people that appear to be, uh, you know, exuding this kind of unhealthy ego. So how do you, like, what is, how do you look at that? How do you wrestle with that and reconcile it with the message that you're trying to convey? Well, I think there's two really important cognitive biases there, right? So one's not a cognitive bias, but in academia, they have that concept of the publication bias, right? Like a scientist sits down and does an experiment and the experiment doesn't generate any conclusive results or perhaps the results are not interesting. That doesn't get published in an academic journal

because no one's like here, read this exciting new study that gives you nothing. Right. So, so in the, the, the shadowy bias in science is that it's always going towards proving something versus proving how little we know about things. And I think social media has created a similar effect, right? I don't publish the boring parts of my reality online and neither do anyone that I know. And so you start to, you're looking around as humans do comparing yourself to other people, but you're not comparing yourself against to what's real. You're comparing yourself to the illusions or the images that people want to project. So I think that's really interesting.

And then historically, we often confuse causation and correlation, right? Like, is Kanye West successful because he has a huge ego? Or, and this is my experience at somewhere like American Apparel, the people are successful in spite of this ego that is constantly causing problems. Or does the ego grow in proportion to the success? I think it's both. Dr. Drew did this study a few years ago on narcissism. And they found that of all the celebrities, the most narcissistic were reality stars.

of all the celebrities, the most narcissistic were reality stars. And that the more talented the person was, like the more technical their profession was, like the drummer of a band would have the least amount of narcissistic traits. But he was like, the response is like, oh yeah, that's because this, you know, being famous for nothing makes you narcissistic. And he's like, actually what I think it is, and I think he had some data that backs this up, it's that only a narcissistic person would think they deserve to be famous just for being

who they are. Right. And the fame that goes along with it fuels that narcissism. It's a loop. It grows into this huge monster. Right. Like Kim Kardashian is narcissistic for think it was narcissistic and that's why she thought we should have watched a reality show about her life and then now a world

that encourages her to publish books about of selfies of herself is also fueling those same negative impulses so it's it's a that's why it's so it's not just you learnses. So it's, it's a, that's why it's so, it's not just, you learn this one time. It's something you have to work on constantly. And the more, the more successful you are, the more people are asking about how you became successful. So now there's, now you're having, you have more opportunities to tell that fake story about yourself. The more, you know, the more successful you are, the more you're interacting with people who are dependent on you. And so you can feel like you're better than that. It gets reinforced and entrenched.

And, you know, what began as, on some level, fiction becomes reality by virtue of sheer self-will, almost. Yeah, well, the weird thing, and I don't talk about this a lot in the book, but I am fascinated by it, is... and I don't talk about this a lot in the book, but I am fascinated by it is so I'm known a number of very egotistical and I would say delusional people. But what impresses me about them is the sheer willpower, I guess they call it self-will and ego community or in the addiction community. Self-will run riot. Yeah. Where they can actually, to a certain degree, create reality that matches the fictions about themselves. And so it drives them to absurd heights, right? Like Donald Trump is not even close to one of the world's richest men, but he, but in thinking so, and in acting so, he has made himself quite wealthy, right? Like,

so, so that, that's really interesting is it's like these people, they thought they were a superstar, and they made themselves famous as a result. And so that's one of the worst things that can happen to a human being because now, like, if someone told you you shouldn't do something, like, that's a huge mistake. Like, I think about this with college. Most of the people in my life said, don't drop out of college. This is it. You know, my parents thought it was this huge mistake. Well, I ended up being right,

but I was really only right in that specific instance. I'm not right every time that everyone in my life says that I'm wrong and I shouldn't do this. And so that you have to have the self awareness and the objectivity to look at every situation fresh and not bring to it this, this overconfidence that, you know, better than everyone else all the time. And surround yourself with sycophants that are going to, you know, support that. Right. Like, like I think about that with American Apparel, the company is insane. If you think about it, right.

It's like, we're going to, we're going to manufacture our own clothes. We're not going to put any logos on them. We're going to do our, all our own advertisements. We're not going to put any logos on them. We're going to do all our own advertisements. We're not going to use professional models. We're going to own our own stores. And we're going to sell these t-shirts for like $25, $30. Like that's nuts, right? And a lot of entrepreneurial ideas are crazy.

Like because they're projections of what might be possible in the future. And they're, but they're like, Amazon is an insane concept in 1995 or whenever it's made. So there has to be that, there is that element of craziness. But when that craziness is confirmed, like you make that craziness uncrazy, you have a very dangerous precedent that if you apply widely throughout your own life will get you in very serious trouble. Right. So how do you rebut this idea that works across purposes with the thesis of your book? Because the argument can be made that, you know, whether it's Amazon or American Apparel, these were birthed out of ego. You know, that ego contains the seeds of its own destruction eventually when you play it out over the long run. But to the casual observer,

they're going to look at someone like Dove and say, look what that guy did. That's amazing. I want to do that. Look at what Kim Kardashian built because she had the audacity to believe that people would be into this thing that, you know, now they are. Yeah, that's where it gets tricky. So one, I do think you have to look at it on a longer time, on a longer timeline. And because it doesn't, it doesn't typically work out. Although sometimes it does, right? No one is saying that life is fair. Donald Trump might become president, right?

But I think what you would, what you would say is first off, is this the exception that proves the rule or is this an exception to the rule? Right. So it's like, okay, it worked for this person, but are there not many, many failed people who acted and had equally crazy ideas? Right. So you want to make sure that you're, that you're not conflating correlation and causation, right? Like a lot of musicians have drug and alcohol problems. Um, a lot of entrepreneurs have manic energy, you know, depression is correlated with a lot of things that doesn't mean that it's causing what makes them great. And in fact, you know, if, if, if it leads to a drug overdose that kills the musician,

it's obviously not a good, it's not on the whole, it's not a positive contribution. Unless you're just into legacy and like martyrdom. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. It's like Jimi Hendrix doesn't appreciate how famous he is right now because he's dead. Right. If you play it out to the deathbed, you know, to kind of extend your, you know, your thinking you use, you know, Howard Hughes in the book and this, you know, thing that he says when he's about to pass, which is actually like, the loneliness and the isolation and all the terrible decisions and paranoia and mental illness and hoarding and you name it, right? Yeah, and I think you, like, I don't know Kanye West, although I've heard some very interesting stories from people who do,

but you look at someone like that, it does not look like he is enjoying the fruits of his labor. Do you know what I mean? And so I think you see. He's constantly irritated and annoyed that somebody else is doing something. Yes. Or that he's not. It's very outwardly fixated on like, why isn't that me?

Right. Or why is he not being fully appreciated? Or why is he, why is the world not matching his opinion? It's like, like, look, I could have thought Beyonce should have won that award, but I'm not, I wouldn't feel compelled to get on stage and humiliate another person because the world, some voting body, you know, bothered to disagree with me. Right. So, um, I think you, you realize that in some ways it's its own punishment and, and, um,

that it's not like one of the, I think like all people, I deal with jealousy and envy. And one of the ways I've, I've, one of the exercises I've come up with to sort of bat that back down as I go like, okay, this person who I'm like jealous of what they have, I need to stop isolating it from everything else that they are. So would I fully trade places? Is that thing nice enough or do I want it bad enough that I would fully trade places with them? So it's like if I look at another author that maybe I think, like people will look at a famous or successful person and be like,

oh, Taylor Swift, she's not a real musician because she uses songwriters. And I'm a real musician because I don't do that. And that's why I'm not as famous or something. It's like, well, you could work with songwriters. You chose your career path instead of a different career path. Would you fully trade places with that person? And I think you can do this personally and professionally. And most of the time, it's like, oh, wait, these good things that maybe I feel drawn to come at a cost in other places of their life.

And you can't separate them. It's ego to think, oh, I could have Malcolm Gladwell's platform, but not, you know, whatever is going on in Malcolm Gladwell's personal life that I don't know about. And we're all complicated. We all have all things have tradeoffs and came from places, you know. Yeah, there's there's there's also ego in the idea that that you have to adopt a certain sort of personality trait or perspective in order to create. personality trait or perspective in order to create, like if this, if you didn't suffer and chew all your fingernails off and destroy your marriage for this book, then you didn't give it everything that you had. Right. Yes. That's a story. Right. And there is ego built into that. Like I'm such a genius that if I just do this, go into isolation in the cave, I'm going to birth this timeless piece of literature, you know? Right. Right. And it, and I'm going to, and it's

going to be a scorched earth and that's just fine because when i'm dead you know everyone will remember me yeah and liz gilbert talks about that too like the illusion of that right right so taking that idea and then butting it up against this notion that people that achieve great things a by necessity go out of balance in their life. And the sort of character or personality traits and elements that allow them to reach those great heights are the same character traits that ultimately bring them down. Like if you look at any case study in your book or look at, you know, like Lance Armstrong, right? Like he achieved amazing things because he had this drive and this determination, he was willing to do anything. And it's that same, you know, tweak that compelled him to make this comeback that kind of unraveled everything that has followed.

Yeah. And Cyril Connolly is one of my favorite writers. He's a obscure British writer. He says, you go like cancer is an over-assertion of cells. And I think that's what it is. It's like what, what, what propelled someone like Lance Armstrong to success is also what propels him past the point of reasonable utility. It's like people go like, but you can't have one without the other. Well, yeah, that's what you're saying. Like in your book, you're admonishing against these character traits to a certain degree. I guess what I'm saying, I'm agreeing with you in that people go like, why did he have to come back? And it's like, he had to come back because it's the same thing,

right? Yeah. They're not, they're not separable. And people say this about Donald Trump. If he could just act presidential, he would win this thing. In a weird way, it's almost more alarming that you think that it's been an act up until this point, and now he can do a different act. It's like, no, this is authentically the train wreck that is him. And so I think when you actually dig deeper, you take away some of the outliers. You find that actually there are plenty of successful people who, um, who did plenty, who didn't have that over assertion. Right. And, and so like, um, there's this Nassim Taleb quote, where he's, he's basically saying it's like a professorship, a BMW and flying first class. These are things you can earn by hard work and a private jet or a Nobel Prize or any of these other things.

These are this is where luck comes into our lives. So instead of instead of accepting that and going like, look, I'm going to do the right thing. I'm going to work hard. I'm going to get these plenty. I'm going to get the right thing. I'm going to work hard. I'm going to get these plenty. I'm going to get these wonderful results for it. We go, Oh, there's a most powerful man in the world. I should be that, you know, like it's, it's, I think that's where the ego is, is to think that, you know, this it's like, I got to write a book. That was my dream. But then what we do is then it's like, and, but it won't count unless it's bigger than everyone else's dreams like that i think that's where we have the ability to rein

ourselves in a little bit yeah it's that delusion you know that that i mean implicit in all of it of course is that satisfying the ego is going to lead to happiness the ego but the ego cannot be satisfied and we will go to our deathbed you know believing otherwise and no matter what the ego cannot be satisfied and we will go to our deathbed, you know, believing otherwise. And no matter what the ego achieves, it is the hungry ghost that always wants more. Yeah. Like I'm always interested. I go to a lot of tech conferences because I talk and there'll be like billionaires there like talking. And I just remember thinking like, if I was a billionaire, the first thing I would do is never attend another technology conference. Right. And then you realize it's like,

oh, there is no number that you get that's really enough or that you ever feel comfortable. You have to dispense with that fiction entirely. Like happiness cannot be conditional or contentment cannot be conditional because right when you think you have it some fine print is revealed and then you realize you don't have it and so you have to do some other thing yeah if you're if you have a hundred million dollars in the bank if i had a hundred million dollars in the bank i'd be like oh my god i would travel i would like you know i would just

i would enjoy the fruits of that and that's's why I'm never going to have a hundred million dollars because the person who has a hundred million dollars gets there because they're not that guy. And that's the- Because they didn't stop at $10 million, which is also a lot, right? It's the tragic, you know, seeds of destruction built within all of this. And I think, you know, as I'm reading your book and we're going through it and you're using all these amazing, you know, case studies from history, some dated further back than others to illustrate this point of how at every phase of your life infusing ego or an out of control or unhealthy, you know, egoistic approach to whatever is going on is ultimately destructive. Yeah. And so intellectually, like I get it. Sure like I'm sold. Like I get the, yes, I understand that humility is the path. And, and, you know, I arrive at this from

an experiential perspective of, you know, being humbled to my core through sobriety and, and having to kind of grapple with all of these ideas like surrender and non-attachment and, you know, the serenity prayer, which are all kind of very similar to a lot of the stoic ideas that infuse your work. Right. So I understand it, but what happened, there's a, there's a gap between the intellectual understanding and the means of practice. Right. So if you're going to hand this book to Donald Trump and say, listen, the keys to the kingdom lie in this book. You just read this book and listen to this. All will be well.

Yes. He you are not going to be able to penetrate that ego or that, you know, his cranium is not going to is not the message isn't going to get through. Right. Right. No, no, there isn't. And I honestly don't have any hope in that regard. So it's almost like the people that need to read this the most are going to be the least receptive to it. And I think that speaks to how powerful this issue is, like just how powerful and defensive the ego will be against its dismantling. But I'll tell you something that has been interesting because i'm connected with some organizations that are connected to donald trump through my writing and and then i i know some people that some really smart people that have sort of become donald trump supporters and at first i was very judgmental of this and then i realized in my own life like why have i been attached to people and organizations like that and what i think what

so it's it's not that you know donald trump needs a wake-up call about his ego it's like that guy's too far gone right and and hopefully he does not take us all down with him but it's the people around him that know that should know better and probably deep down feel differently that gets sucked into the vortex because so it's like um these people if you're just a delusional arrogant awful human being you're alone what the problem with ego is that it's often connected with very seductive charisma. And it's a magnet, right? It's like when you see someone, and I was very attracted to this when I was younger,

if you're someone who's humble or maybe even a little bit self-effacing or unconfident in yourself, and you see someone who from the outside has none of the insecurities that you have and is certain about everything in the world and can endlessly pontificate and believes they know all the answers you can be attracted to that like intoxicating it's it's and it's exhilarating and it makes you feel powerful and this is where cult leaders come from. This is where, you know, dictators come from. This is where all that that is. It's the people around him that also need the not just humility, but empathy and understanding and and and and accepting that the world is complex and that there is, you know, that is who I would want to reach is the people who have started to see this powerful man rising.

And then instead of going, this is wrong, I don't support this, they go, well, how can this benefit me? You know, I think that's interesting, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think behind, I think it's worth kind of talking about what's behind ego. Like, it's complicated psychologically. Yeah, sure. It's not a matter of saying oh my god i'm in my ego i need to be humble and now i'm going to be humble like the the root of of an out of

control or unhealthy ego is you know that it is derived from all kinds of weird things like it could be abuse it could be trauma it could be you, parents who were providing you with bizarre information, you know, growing up that, that, you know, created fear in you. It's, it's a, it's a mask just like anything else is. And I think it's a case by case basis. It's very individual. What leads to somebody's, you know, destructive ego. And the only way to, you know, on that case by case basis to get that person to recognize and really change their behavior or gain some objectivity on where they might be going awry is to like, I mean, they got to get into therapy. They have to be willing to look at themselves objectively. They have to be willing to, you know, receive feedback and sort of adjust accordingly. And those behavior patterns are at odds with

somebody who is, who is in their ego. So it's very difficult. Yeah. It, it, I would say it usually comes from a place of pain, right? That's what, where the ego, because the ego is the bomb on top of that pain. And then ironically, it's only when the ego begins to cause more pain than it treats that you might get a small gap that someone could come in and fix things. But like I remember at American Apparel sort of realizing like getting the truth to this person. And I'm not just talking about the leadership. and and i'm not just talking about the leadership there's different people in the company but it's like getting the truth to this person that they desperately need is essentially a kamikaze mission and so it's like it people around you go is that worth it to me like do i care about this person enough that i will by telling them what i know they need, essentially write myself out of their life if they don't hear me.

And I imagine with addiction too. I'm dealing with this with a friend right now who's going through some stuff. It's like, I know there's a problem, but he is so in his place where there's not a problem that speaking that truth is probably not going to work. And so the result will be, will be estranged. And that's where, you know, other people around you actually end up encouraging, or at least not discouraging you when you're going down a bad road. And it's tricky as the carrier of that message too, because you can be in your ego as the deliverer of the truth. And you can be, you you know overly or unhealthily attached to the outcome

of what that message is going to cause or not cause like i saved this person yeah or whatever and like you have to be divorced from the results of your actions and that's another big thing that infuses this book yeah right yeah it's you have to it's uh i think there's a gertrude quote where he's saying it's like to a wise man it's just doing the right thing is all, what comes of it is not your concern. It's just that you do the right thing. Right. Which is, which is hard, right? Like, it's like, oh, okay, I'm going to do the right thing, but that's going to end a salaried position for me.

Are you going to do that? You know, that most people, they say, what's that saying? It's not a principle unless it costs you money. And, you know, it's like, are you going to tell this person that you think that they're doing something wrong when they're going to punish you for telling them that? Yeah. Pain fuels that sense of vulnerability, you know,

that's going to allow that message to come in. I mean, it, it kind of, it's, it makes me think about a lot of the stuff that Brene Brown does. Like I just recently listened to her audio book, power vulnerability, and there's so much amazing stuff in that. And it requires dismantling this idea, uh, that strength comes from, you know, sort of shrouding yourself from any level of vulnerability. And the opposite, in fact, being true that like being vulnerable is how you tap into your strength. Right. And ego guards against that. Like ego is the guardian of vulnerability. Yeah. And I think vulnerability is such a loaded word for a lot of people.

And so in the book, I like to use the word reality. It's just being real. Yeah. And I think vulnerability is such a loaded word for a lot of people. And so in the book, I like to use the word reality. It's just being real, right? Like not how you want things to be, you know, not, um, not your projections, not your defenses, but it's like, this is, let's have a moment here where we're speaking truth or we're looking at things as they are just real and i think that's very scary to people because they'd rather them be the way that they want them to be of course and the intellectual objective truth doesn't necessarily carry the day like okay did you listen to um malcolm gladwell just started this new podcast revisionist history no but i want to check it out it's really cool he has this amazing i think it's the third episode, where he talks about, it's very related to ego.

He talks about the history of the underhanded free throw shot. Yes, yes, yes, I've read about this. And, you know, obviously, like, Rick Barry pioneers this, and he shoots, like, 94% from the free throw line. And, like, why didn't anybody else adopt this practice? It clearly works. And games and why didn't anybody else adopt this practice? It clearly works and games and seasons and championships are won and lost off percentages from the free throw line. And he uses this amazing case study of Will Chamberlain, who just dominates the sport like

no other, like he just, there's no one even close to this guy, but he's horrible from the free throw line. And if he could just get that dialed in, he would just, there's he's unstoppable, right? His team would be unstoppable. It would just be a freight train. So there's one season where he does it. Like he trains, you know, he figures out how to do this. I think he trains with Rick Barry. I can't remember specifically. And his percentage goes up like 30%. It's like, it's for really tall players that it works the best. I don't even know. Like it almost doesn't even matter. Like he decides he's going to do it. And he goes from, I don't even know like it almost doesn't even matter like he decides he's gonna do it and he goes from i don't remember exactly what it is like 56 from the line to like 90 or 80 or something like that right and like has this incredible season he scores more points in one game than anybody ever has like i think 100 point i don't i can't remember specifically

and then the following year he goes back to the regular way you know it's like right it doesn't make sense intellectually it doesn't make sense objectively it doesn't make sense where is ego coming into play it's like it's not wanting to look like a sissy or whatever yeah the idea that he could be so dominant was still not powerful enough to overcome this idea that he might look foolish right doing it right and that's an insecurity that's rooted in ego totally right totally and here we are however many years later and still nobody does it right right it's insane it's it yeah it's it's sort of i don't care what the data says it doesn't jive with what i how i want to be seen. That's not my vibe now. Yeah, right. No, and look, I think we all have versions of that in our own lives.

We all know that if we did this slightly differently, it would be better for us. But we're afraid of, we don't want to pay the cost associated with it. Even though it's on the whole a great deal, we still don't want to do it. And there may not even be a cost associated with it. Even though it's, on the whole, a great deal, we still don't want to do it. And there may not even be a cost. We're imagining this cost that perhaps is true or not. Right, right. Well, and then some other psychological research I've done which is so ironic about all of it on top of that

is that if we actually did do it, the mind, in mysterious ways, works to reduce that cost. We're always afraid, like, if I don't do this, I'm going to regret it for the mind in mysterious ways works to reduce that cost. Like we're always afraid, like if I don't do this, I'm going to regret it for the rest of my life. But I've never met anyone that really regrets anything, right? Daniel Gilbert has done this research. Like regret is an emotion that makes us afraid to do a lot of things, but you very few people talk about regret in any profound way because cognitive dissonance makes you not regret things. You're like, yeah,

I've never thought of it that way. Right. Right. Like the idea is like, I don't want to be an old man thinking about how I, you know, I, I,

um, I, you know, like, like the, the, the person dreaming of the person they, they shouldn't,

they should have been with or whatever. No, you meet someone else and then that becomes the best thing in your life and you forget all about it that's what the mind does right yeah interesting let's talk about passion okay so you have a great uh chapter in the book tell me the title of this chapter um don't be passionate i think don't be passionate right this is like anathema yeah how could you possibly be saying this all we're told is follow your passion passion which has got to be the easiest piece of advice to give someone that means like the least you know it's like

just follow your passion oh really that's it like just do that okay well i think it's interesting because obviously you have to be passionate about things like you have to if you're not passionate about what you're doing it's going to grind on you certainly but no one would think that being passionate about something is sufficient in any way right it's like i, I'm passionate about a number of things. I can't make my living doing them as I don't have any, like, I might be passionate about basketball, but I'm not, not good. Right. I haven't put in the time, you know, I figured this out when I was 30. So it's too late for, you know, there's lots of things that you sort of passion is, is an important ingredient, but not an essential one, I would say.

But, but, you know, historically passion has been a horrible concept, right? The Stoics talk about the passions for the Stoics, the passions are like lust, greed, anger. These are the destructive emotions that they're warning you against indulging. And so one, I like that. I always like playing with semantics that way, but I think the problem with passion is that it thinks it is enough, right? That's the insidious part of it. It thinks it's enough. It's like, I think this is the right thing to do. Therefore it is the right thing to do. And therefore it will definitely work out for me. So like, I love that we have kids read Into the Wild as this inspiring story. And it's like, he dies at the end. It's a tragic, cautionary tale of passion.

But we don't see it that way. Right. But we don't see it that way. Right. Passion is the out-of-control wildfire. And purpose is like the directed laser beam. Yeah. Purpose is passion with constraints. It's like, look, an explosion is dangerous.

A handgun is an explosion directed out one end and and therefore i mean it's still dangerous but it's it's it's it's taking this unwieldy force and turning it into a tool and so it's like like i don't want passionate people to work for me like i might it's like i can be passionate right but like i don't want you're having arguments in the I might, it's like, I can be passionate. Right. But like, I don't want you having arguments in the kitchen and yeah, it's like, it's like, I don't want to have to, it's like, and I actually see this with young people that have worked for me where it's like, why did you do this? Well, I just got excited and I thought that's what you wanted. And it's like, so I just paid you to like go work for 10 hours on something that if you'd asked me about, I would have saved you the trouble

entirely man you're stepping on my passion right that's i mean it's like your passion is secondary to whatever i'm paying you to do and and so you you just see that it's like like i meet a lot of i'll give you an example i work with a lot of authors and like they're incredibly passionate like i'm gonna be a number one new york times bestseller. Like, I just believe in this. I'm all, they'll go, I'm all in on this. It's like, I don't want you to be all in. I want you to be focused and disciplined and attentive. And I want you to listen. That's how we're going to get to where you want to get. Because the problem is you think that it's hiring all these people and being excited and getting on the phone a lot when really it's doing the work. The business person's approach to writing a book.

Right. Yeah. It's like there's so much more to this than being excited about it. I don't want you to not be excited about it, but that's that excitement can't come at the cost of all these other much more important things. Being passionate is sexy though. And purposeful is, you know, a narrative that is, is harder to sell. Right. And I think, I think both of those things are tricky. Like, you know, most people, they're not passionate about anything or that, that flame is at a pretty low simmer. And as far as purpose, that's very elusive for most people that are just trying to, you know, make a living and, you know, make good decisions for their kids and, you know, make it to Christmas.

Well, it's like, it's not about, cause they say follow your passion, but really it's about actually finding where your passion and your competency and mark like market demand. It's about finding where those three things overlap. That's how one makes a satisfying living, right? Um, just one of those isn't sufficient. If you're just doing something cause there's money in it, you're going to burn out very quickly. If you're just doing something because you're good at it, you'll probably burn out very quickly. And if you're just doing something because, you know, it, it feels amazing. You're just masturbating essentially, you're going to burn out pretty quickly. Yeah. That's interesting. Like if you're

into playing video games and you're really good at it and you do that at night, like like what do you choose to do when you're not getting paid? Like, I think that's where your focus needs to go. Like what if, if no one's around and you can do whatever you want, like what are you naturally gravitating towards? And then looking at that and saying, where is the underappreciated opportunity? Where, where's the white space as someone like Gary V would say, you know, where are people not looking where I can see this could turn into something? And then being purposeful about it, not being in the embrace of unbridled passion. You're not going to quit your job because you have this epiphany and woke up at 2 in the morning. But like, hey, let me spend the next six months trying to see if I can move this forward to some kind of reasonable goal that's highly achievable in the short term.

I was really passionate about writing and I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't follow my passion into writing as the only thing that I did because I was a kid and I didn't have anything to say and no one would listen to me. I was a kid and I didn't have anything to say and no one would listen to me. So I met authors and I started working for authors and I learned a living that, and I learned skills and I got experiences that eventually after several years, I was able to parlay into writing. And I think it's like, right, you like playing video games. Professional video game player is probably not what that is. Maybe it is for some people, but probably not for you. So it's, you know, maybe it's, you're going to make a video game, or maybe you're going to work in the marketing department at a video game company, or, you know, there's, there's so many things you can do related to that thing. That's going to fuel your passion.

You're going to be exposed to and involved in this industry that you love, but you're also not just hurling yourself against a wall that is never going to come down. Yeah. You made a very interesting choice in your life to that's very grounded and rational, uh, and interesting in that you never wanted your writing to be the sole source of your income, or you never wanted to be dependent upon your writing to make a living because that would cloud, uh, you know, your judgment about what to write, the choices that you would make. And it would turn something that you inherently love into something you might resent at some point or something, right? Yeah, I think so, yeah.

And I've heard other people say this about, like Casey says that about filmmaking. Like, I don't like make films to make a living. about like Casey says that about filmmaking. Like I don't, I don't, I don't like make films to make a living. Like I, I make a living so that I can make films and that's a healthier approach to your creative craft. So you're not reliant upon the thing that you love and that has served you well. I mean, certainly at this point, I'm sure you could, if you wanted to, you could say I'm all in on this, you know? And I might do, I might do that, but it's, it's, it's coming. It's a fundamentally different decision than if I'd made it six years ago or something. Right.

Right. Yeah. I kind of had a different path in that I knew that the only way that I was going to ever be able to stop being a lawyer was if I just said, I have to step into this completely. Because as long as my bar memberships was still active and the phone rang and i didn't trust myself i didn't have healthy enough boundaries around that to be able to say no right yes so the journey of learning when and how to say no create those healthy boundaries has been you know an experience for me and i think it's something you talk about in this book as well yeah and you were you were much older and'd more than paid your dues as a lawyer.

Do you know what I mean? It wasn't like, but it was easy to just bank a retainer check to do something. You know what I mean? And I, and I was like, if I don't cut that loose, like I'm just going to be doing that the rest of my life.

Yeah. No, that was, that was, uh, I'll say one of the silver linings in the American apparel story is that like, I'd gone to leave in 2011 to write a book. Like I wanted to write a book and they were like, well, you know, we're not, we don't really know who we replace you with. Do you want to sort

of stay on? You won't have any day-to-day responsibilities, but like, we'd like you to still be involved and you can come to LA sometimes and work on things. And I was like, sure. I didn't know how I thought that might last six months, you know, and like six or so months in, they were like, they were asking more and more of me. So we, we negotiated some, some boundaries and better compensation, but three years in that still hadn't ended. Right. And I didn't, I would say I, it held me i it held me back not in a huge way but i i would think sometimes like i'm never gonna why it would be very hard to quit like i um nassim he also says he's like the three it's so hard. I also say like one of the hardest things for human beings to do is it's very first world, but to say no to

money. That's so hard with someone's like, I want to pay you to do this. It's, it takes a lot of discipline and confidence to be like, I don't want to accept that, right? Because it feels irresponsible. And so the idea of like quitting something that makes your money to do something that you believe in that you might not fully or clearly see a path from does take a lot of courage. And I didn't, thankfully, I didn't have to have that courage because I mean, actually I did have to have it at some point

because it got, I ended up walking away. I sort of pulled the ripcord on it. But had had that whole event not happened, I don't know when that would have been for me. Yeah. But I've heard you talk about I don't know where this was, but I remember you saying something along the lines of, you know, what it's like to not be able to say no to an opportunity that you kind of know isn't right for you. It's not the right money, all of that. no to an opportunity that you kind of know isn't right for you that's you know not the right money all of that and that that in and of itself is is a reflection of ego and i was confused like i was i don't know that i really understand what you're getting at with that i think it's ego in both senses on the one it's like the i can do i have such it's it's like the this is my ego talking so it's like I have this all under

control I can do an unlimited amount of things I'm superman so there's ego and saying yes to just saying yes to everything and not thinking that there's a cost to doing it to you or to other people and then on the other extreme of that is the insecurity that I think motivates saying yes to a lot of things and that you're thinking, if I don't accept this, I'm I'll never get enough. Like I have to get everything while I can, cause it won't last. Right. This lack, this lack mentality. Yeah. But that comes from a place of insecurity and fear and, and maybe perhaps ego is a mask of that, but okay. That's what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. And then I, I mean, I've just found in, I've realized that for me, the D it perhaps ego is a mask of that but okay that's what you're saying yeah yeah and then i i mean

i've just found and i've realized that for me that it requires more discipline to say no than to say yes right i think it's your relationship to that decision because you could say no like out of ego like oh i'm worth 10 times. How dare you? Or it could be like, I trust in myself and know that even though it's scary to say no to this opportunity, that something else will come along and probably something better. Yeah. Like in a quiet, confident kind of way. Yeah. I'm just more talking about my personal life. Like I might've told this story before. I might've talked to you about it, but like I hurt my foot a couple of months ago. Like I kicked a chair and I broke my toe and like I run every day.

That's who I am. You kicked the chair on purpose? No, a total accident. I forgot to put it in on the table. I walked by and I kicked it. And it was like impossible for me to take a day off. Like it hurt so bad the first day that I couldn't run. And then that day I felt so uncomfortable.

I was like, I could last 24 hours without doing it. So there's also that ego and that just needing to thinking that you're defined by doing things rather than it's like, no, I'm someone who runs every day and I'm proud of that, but I can't do it right now for reasons that are outside my control. And that says nothing about me as a person. I struggle with that. You're forced to slow down and stop. And that's, that's perhaps the most frightening thing of all for somebody who is very much in their ego, because if you have to stop and then you're forced to look at yourself in the mirror, then it's terrifying.

What might be reflected back to you? And I think that's really like for somebody who is struck, who has enough self-awareness to understand that they're struggling with this, that, that their ego does get out of control and it doesn't serve them to compel yourself to stop and to, you know, put yourself on the mat and do yoga and do meditation and commit to that as a doing, even though that's kind of an undoing, right. Um, I think is the, is the journey towards untangling that. Not like there's this, there's this great story that Russell Simmons always tells that, you know, he got super into yoga and meditation and all of that. And he's, you know, baller, you know, deal maker and all of that. And he had this moment of

like terror. He's like, if I, if I keep, like he knew he needed it and then he knew it was helping him and he was drawn to it and it was improving his life. And yet he couldn't let go of this story that the more he did this, the more he was taking his eye off the ball. And he was like, if I keep doing this, I'm going to lose all my money. Right. This is crazy because you start to have a greater appreciation for what's important. And that may come at the cost of being a tyrannical boss or all these unhealthy behaviors. The upshot is that he ultimately became more wealthy and profitable, but he developed a healthier approach to his business. So it's the dismantling of the ego and finding that more balanced approach, that healthier approach to what you're doing. Letting go of that fear that that unhealthy behavior pattern, that character defect is actually what's fueling your success.

There's a story around that. And if you can dismantle that, step into a healthier version, you might find that you ultimately are not only more successful, you ultimately are not only more successful, but less attached to the outcomes and therefore, you know, more apt to be able to handle the failures and the regressions to the mean. Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean, one of the things I was talking about in the book is like, just because you're not an egomaniac doesn't mean you don't have a problem with ego. So like you tend to find it's like okay maybe you were a tyrannical boss or you thought you're better than you you had some superficial problems with ego um which i i certainly did and i i feel like i dealt with them pretty early and well and then

what you find is there's always it finds somewhere else to manifest itself and so it's this continual process and the way with addicts too where it's this continual process and the way with addicts too where it's like you quit drinking and then you realize you have a problem with eating and then that manifests itself in your sex life and it's like if it was just as simple as stop doing this one thing that would be nice but that's not how it is it's much more complicated than that and you have to knock it down a couple different times and do work in different places. And it's a lifetime process. It's a work that you can do, yeah, for the rest of your life, really, if you want to really, you know, if you commit to it.

But it's a couple, I mean, it's like you got to hit it a couple big times in your life because it can just move from one place to another. Like I find like a lot of people will be like, Oh, I'm like, I find that there's, there's that certain they're humble people, but they're very proud of how humble they are. That's the way it manifests itself. Most obvious, right? It's like, Oh, I'm not that loud, you know, uh, big swing dick type. So I, I not like that, but really they're just, it's like, um, uh uh they're just the wallflower judging everyone else yes which is its own form of ego definitely there's definitely itself and and that's sort of a stepchild to the you know kind of humble brag like like retweeting some article about you that makes you look really great and saying that you're humbled by it you know it's like yeah that's just false humility that's not real humility right so where not real humility. Right. So where do you, where do you, uh, have, where do you create the divining

line between ego and self-assuredness or confidence? Well, I think it's a midpoint, like Aristotle has this golden mean, and he's saying, you know, that a virtue is between two vices. So I think it's right there I think it's weirdly right there in the middle. It's between that I hate myself and I'm a god. It's based on your inherent worth as a human being and an objective understanding of your capacities and your assets as a, as a unique individual. Do you know what I mean? It's like every human being has certain dignity and, and, and, and

worth, and you can't deprive yourself of that, right? Like everyone deserves to live and, and is entitled to these certain inalienable rights. And then also, Hey, I know that I'm a fast learner or I know that I, I might not be the smartest person, but I can outwork anyone. You know, it's, so it's, it's, it's, you got to combine those two things. That's where you find confidence. Hey, I like, I'm more confident writing what will be my fifth book because I've written four and I know that I'm capable of yeah experience definitely fuels it but there's also that person you know that we all knew growing up you're just like that guy just looks like he's got it figured out like not in an egotistical way but like he just he carries

himself with a certain level of assuredness that he knows that if he works hard and applies himself that he's going to be able to you know move in the direction of life that he wants to move in yeah you know as opposed to the flip side of that which is the person who's got a rain cloud over their head and everything's going to be a disaster. No matter what they do, it's all going to be shit. Right. Right. And some of that is just bred into upbringing and, you know, nature and nurture. Yeah. Ideally every person would have two well-adjusted parents that would, you know, but that's not the case. So what are the strategies towards developing a healthy sense of confidence and humility at the behest of, you know, at the forsaking of ego?

Well, I think the Stoics talk over and over again, and you mentioned the serenity prayer, about making the critical distinction between the things that are in your control and the things that are outside your control. And I think confidence is best served when it's rooted on the things that either were or are in your control. So it's like, you said that this was my best book. I can be happy with that, right? Not that you said it but like I know as a judge of my own writing that I think it's my best writing that was me like that's me I can control that whether it's my best selling book or not is not something to have confidence in

because I didn't really control that or not right like there I I influenced it obviously and hopefully I did a good job and I got it to a place where maybe it will be that, but you know, I didn't determine what was going on in the election cycle or the, the economic down. There's so many things that determine whether a book will be successful or not, or any project. So it's like, you know, if you're taking, if you're taking your pride in having left nothing on the table versus taking your confidence in being, you know, on the podium, those are one of those eventually has a cost. Yeah. If you, for, for people that are listening, the serenity prayer goes like this, uh, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And when you really kind of break that down and analyze it, it's pretty profound. But you also start to realize when you're really honest how few things you actually have control over. There are very few things. We walk around in this delusional haze that we have far more control over things that are going on than we actually do. And I think to really cultivate that sensibility is a good path towards embracing humility as an antidote to ego.

When you realize like, I can only control my reactions to these things. I can sit down and I can work hard and I can, you know, do my best, you know, when I'm writing or whatever it is I'm doing, how it's received is out of my control. Basically, everything else is, everything is out of my control. I can't control anything. Really, when you think about it, I can't control my wife. I can't control my relationships. I can't control the market. I don't, I certainly don't control the weather or my children or, you know, like when you start to really realize like, oh my God, like you basically only control yourself. I thought I was, and, and all, especially as a lawyer, like you're sort of trained to,

to, um, you know, figure out how to, to create an outcome, like all these machinations. If I do that, you're thinking eight steps ahead. If I do this and I do this, then this guy's going to do that. And then I'm going to get to this place, this plotting mentality, right? Usually it doesn't work out that way. But the illusion of course, is that you're controlling the situation, which of course you are not. Yeah. And, and look, I'm interested in this, in the philosophical sense, in the personal sense, I think you are too. So it's just a recipe for happiness and contentment. But I also realized that most people are pragmatic and they just want to know, like, will this help them?

Like, they're like, look, I get humility makes you a better person, but like, I want to be a billionaire. How does this help me? Well, the reality is. And if I'm humble, I'll never become a billionaire. So it's a non-starter. is, hey, you know, if you make this distinction between what you do control and what you don't control and you focus exclusively, you ignore 90% of the things that you don't control and you focus on the 10% that you do control, that is a massive concentration of resources that creates a mismatch compared to you and most other people. And it's actually an advantage.

Yeah. And it immunizes you from distraction. Yes. Right. And criticism and all these other things that can pull you or influence your decision making in an unhealthy way right the amount of time we throw good money after bad about things that are already done or that couldn't be helped or just a bad roll of the dice or whatever has a cost like there's an

opportunity cost like we did like you're focusing on that instead of your second try you know what i mean it's or in sports it's like you're you're you're yelling at the ref as though that will undo the call that he already did which it won't and by the way if you don't stop you're going to get a technical and it's going to add an additional cost on top of the thing that you're already set up. You're compounding damage. Yeah, exactly. The other big thing in my experience in terms of combating ego and learning how to cultivate more humility is, you know, the antidote really is getting out of yourself and your mind and the chatter and all the bullshit. Right. And the easiest way to do that is to go help somebody else. You know, even if you're just calling up a

friend to see how they're doing or, you know, it doesn't mean you have to go to a soup kitchen, but like if you're, you know, if you can just get out of your own head and your own problem and avail yourself, make yourself a service to somebody else, like in a selfless way, like I'm just showing up for you. Like, let me help you. Like you're having a hard time, whatever it is. It can be a small thing. It could be helping somebody cross the street. It doesn't have to be some grand act. It's probably better if it's not some grandiose thing, because you're going to create an egoistic story around that. But I think that that is real. And, and, and the feeling that you get from that, like when you really are doing it for the right reasons is something that will give you a taste of what it feels like to be in that place of humility. And it's a, it's a powerful feeling

and it's a feeling of, it's hard to put words to it, but it gives your life meaning, you know, and that, and if you're searching for purpose, that is a good way to begin to find what that purpose is. Yeah. And also the, I think one of the, another great way to get to find what that purpose is yeah and also that i think one of the another great way to get out of your own head your own experience is to leave your office or your house and go outside where you are a puny weak you know spec in an incredibly large universe do you know what i mean it's like it's taking the armor off yeah um it doesn't matter right it doesn't matter a hundred years from now it's like is anyone gonna remember anything yeah it's like oh wait i think i'm the center of the universe

actually i don't even matter in the universe in in in a good way and you know what i mean in the sense that like uh the president sitting in theval Office is the most powerful person in the world. He walks through the redwood forest. He's an invisible speck that will be outlasted by a number of trees. You know what I mean? I think it's feeling a reminder of the overwhelming superiority of nature. And how do you reconcile that with somebody like Elon Musk, who has the audacity to believe that we can colonize Mars, you know, like, like those two things, how can they

coexist in a healthy way? Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I mean, it is interesting if you think about it, that so many of the last generation of great explorers were also incredibly religious and often very humble figures. You know what I mean? Even like a Cortez and these folks were like devout Catholics. And I wonder if we are missing some of that. I don't know. I mean, I don't know that much about Elon Musk musk i'm not that interested in space travel but i do think it's interesting these people that want to live forever and what the ego of that always strikes me it like it's it's like i hear that that note rings so dissonantly to me and i it always makes me laugh like they it doesn't seem like their

lives are that great that they need to like double it in length. Do you know what I mean? And the amount of time and energy they spent pursuing this thing instead of hanging out with their children or doing other work, you know what I mean? It seems going on a boat, you know you know like doing doing any number of the lovely things that you can do in life but i think on the tip of you know the religious sensibility and how that applies to you know the great adventures i think i think when you when you have that sense of wonder and you have an appreciation for you know the vastness of consciousness and however you describe it there's place to uh really embrace

this idea that that you know we we think we're so hubristic as a species to believe that we can actually we're actually have the capability to even understand what's going on around us like who said that like you know right are you know chimpanzees, which are what, like 99, 97% human in their genetic makeup, can't comprehend, you know, the first thing about what we believe to be elementary, right? So one little tweak in our DNA could tip us into a place where we would see things completely differently than we do right now. And the idea that we're even capable of understanding what's going on, I think is a function of ego on some level. And I think when you're in that place of wonder, you are in a place of humility. And I think there's a freedom in that,

that gives you space to, you know, explore or create without being peril to the negative aspects of that character trait. Well, and look, fundamentally, capitalism is about saying, I don't care what your motivations are. We're going to harness them for the good of society. So it's like Steve Jobs is a raging egomaniac and it caused him immense amounts of personal and physical pain. But I still use my iPhone, right? Like it's good for, it was good for me. It was good for him in some ways, really bad for him in other ways. So if Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars and feels that he's the man to do it, I might, I might, if I was his friend,

I might have a very different message for him than I would be as a potential beneficiary of this thing. Right. It's almost as if there's a, there's a sense of destiny there. Like it doesn't matter. I'm going to scorch the earth and everybody can hate me and my kids can hate me. But you know, when I die, I'm going to leave behind me this thing and I'm willing to be the martyr and make that sacrifice. Yeah. I don't think it's our job as society to collectively prevent him from being able to do that unless it, you know, it does come in some huge cost or whatever, but it's our job as a society to collectively prevent him from being able to do that unless it, you know, it does come at some huge cost or whatever. But it's like, like, look, if you want to be, if you want to think that making a lot of money, uh, or, or, or building some grand company is going to make you happy at the end, that's you, you're fine to feel that way. And maybe,

you know, we can all reap the benefits of that immense motive power. And we often do. That's why America is what it is. That's why Western civilization is what it is. But that still doesn't mean that it's a great individual choice. But the problem is that we conflate that level of success with happiness. And those things are not necessarily in alignment and most often are, you know, mutually exclusive. So because of the way our culture is crafted and the messaging that we surround ourselves and we're just inundated with, we believe, even if we intellectually understand otherwise, we believe that these are the things that are going to make us happy.

Yeah, right. Yeah. The, the, the weird unexpected cost is the people who are wearing a Steve Jobs turtleneck right now and treating other people the same way because they think it will get them what they want. But people don't really know what they want. No, no. I just mean it's like, look, you're free to be as miserable and awful as you want to be, provided it doesn't negatively affect me. The problem is then the lies those people tell themselves fool other people into following their example. So what would be, to bring it back to the book, what are some of your favorite examples of these historic characters?

Well, I loved George C. Marshall. I thought he was fascinating. He's like your guy. The idea that I got, I was like, this is like your main guy. He was my main guy, and then William Tecumseh Sherman's my other one like you know you compare someone like Sherman to a Napoleon Napoleon thinks he's born to be this brilliant general and Sherman earns it um I find to be fascinating I really liked um I really liked writing about DeLorean Motor Company like I love it's amazing that hasn't been made into a movie because that story is so yeah

that that's a good point i mean i i love when you take the thing the thing that society has held up but based on complete misinformation do you know what i mean so i loved sort of looking at how oh wait the delorean motor car company failed not because it wasn't a good idea and not because the other car companies tried to shut it down or whatever it failed because the guy ruined his bait like he killed his own baby there so he he was really fun to write about um i i liked uh i liked writing about gangas khan i'm fascinated by gangas khan again another person that we had this opinion about which is not totally based on the evidence i'm not saying he's a great person or anything but but but i found him to be fascinating and then um my two favorite chapters in the book were the always love chapter about how you know you carry hate hatred or resentment around as a form which is ego thinking

that that will is a that anger is like a bet is bad fuel and and we and so i was i was looking at orson welles who was basically ruined by william randolph hearst but he sort of never made bitter about it so he he was good and then um i guess my other favorite one was was about kirk hammett and dave mustaine who were the guitarists yeah that's great tell that story really quickly i love that story so k Kirk Hammett was a guitar player. He was in this band called Exodus and he gets chosen to be in Metallica, which is, they were not a big band at the time,

but they were the best thrash metal band in the world. And they were clearly going places. And the first thing he does is he finds a guitar teacher because he doesn't think he's good enough. And the guitar teacher he picks is Joe Satriani, who himself goes on to be one of the best guitar players of all time. Which is a really interesting choice because it's not like he's a heavy metal guitar player. He's in a completely different genre. Right, right. Very inventive, incredible guitar player. He's amazing. But an unlikely choice. Yes. Although he goes on to be in like

Deep Purple and a bunch of other bands so he he knows all kinds of music but he picks a weird guitar teacher you're right and um he takes lessons for like two or three years while he's in while he's recording metallica's first albums he's also taking guitar lessons and i love that um you know even tiger woods has a golf coach right the idea it's not you're never too good to need more instruction. And so. And it goes to who is the MMA coach or teacher that you use? Frank Shamrock.

The minus plus one idea. Frank Shamrock is saying you need to have someone you're equal to that you train with, someone who's better than you that you train under, and someone who's not as good as you, who you help train. And that it's all of these things that contribute to you becoming great. Right. So in the case of Hammett, Satriani is his plus. Yeah.

Probably his bandmates are his equal, right? Yeah. And maybe he's helping someone else. To complete that circle, he has to then return that favor of service by mentoring somebody else. I didn't think about that. That's great. But so then the twist on that, he goes on, Metallica sells hundreds of millions of albums, becomes one of the best guitar players of all time. And the guitarist who Metallica kicked out for Kirk to be in the band was a guy named Dave Mustaine, who leaves. And have you seen Some Kind of Monster? Yeah. monster yeah like maybe one of the greatest documentaries of all time but you watch you watch that confrontation between dave mustaine and his bandmates and you sorry dave mustaine

goes on he creates megadeth maybe the second best thrash metal band of all time they sell millions of records some people even think megadeth is better than metallica more pure than metallica but you watch him in some kind of monster the band sits down with the guy that they kicked out dave mustaine and when you listen to dave tell the story it's like he ended up living under a bridge somewhere like it's like his life was ruined yeah he suffers from his own resentment yeah for like two decades it just eats at him you know, it's a great example of how that kind of resentment is not a sword to wield on somebody else. It's a self-sacrifice. Like he's the only one who's pained and whose life is being negatively impacted as a result of that emotion.

And it's actually sucking, it's sucking from him the joy of his achievements that he earned. Right. And, and then he's ironically blaming Metallica for the achievements that he earned right and and then he's ironically blaming metallica for the pain that he feels it's this self-pitying loop you could write a whole another book about ego just with rock and roll bands like to me it's it's like in the sense that it's amazing that any movie gets made it's amazing that any rock band can like even survive the their second album because it's such a tricky psychological drama between these groups of people that create something magical between them. And when they reach success, I mean, you talk about this in the book, right? Like the, um,

the disease of me. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, um, the, uh, uh, what's his name? The basketball coach, Pat Riley. Yeah. Pat Riley. And when you're on the rise up and how that the innocence, you know, the innocent climb is replaced by the disease of me. Right. Yeah. And, and the one person I didn't talk about in the book, I just didn't have the time and I didn't know where it fit, but I think Axl Rose is such a great example of sort of toxic ego. On the one hand, it helps them create this ambitious, wonderful band. And then the other, ego on the one hand it helps them create this ambitious wonderful band and then the other it tears that band apart and and he cannot get out of his own way and you know now he's back but who knows where that will go i think i've seen this story how many times is it 30 years later right yeah and a lot of that was clutching on to trying to control every aspect of it

yeah and and what's so funny about from what I know about the story is he finally does like so he basically drives everyone out of the band. So it's just him, which is what he always believed Guns N' Roses was. Right. And so for like 15 years, he works on Chinese democracy and it's not good. He finally he finally ego gets him the thing he always wanted. He drives everyone else away and he finally has the control that he craves and it it lets him down you can't deliver well he had his divine moment of dismantling before he could actually see it right like what is the the was it mike tyson who has that quote in your like if you're not humble humility will be visited upon yes yes which is

a pretty good example of that. Totally. And then you have bands like U2 and Coldplay where they just split all the proceeds evenly, right? Yeah. They remove any argument about parity, at least in the financial arena, by making it completely even.

And I think you can't escape the fact that that's probably a major aspect of why they've been able to survive. It's not about talent and your ability to continually churn out great records as much as it is your ability to continue to get along with each other. Well, what you realize, it's like when you're a nobody, you think that the hard thing is making it right. And then you realize actually that throughout history, lots of people have made it, but very few have lasted for very long. Right. So it you you kind of don't think about those things until it's too late.

And and that's the hardest that's the hardest part, I think. So so you're you're focused on we just got to do we'll do anything. So you're focused on we just got to do, we'll do anything. We just got to get to the top. And then you've sown the seeds of your own destruction because you haven't addressed what these things are going to mean. Or the disease of me is like, well, look, I was fine compromising on all these things when we were a team, but now I want my money. And, you know, I think the New England Patriots are a fascinating example of a team that has always put the team. I think the New England Patriots are a fascinating example of a team that has always put the team. And, you know, with the exception of maybe Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, everyone has to understand they're interchangeable.

And no one's bigger than the organization. It'll be interesting at what point Tom Brady is himself. He's like Bill Belichick has said, everyone is a stakeholder in the team. Some people are bigger stakeholders than others, certainly, but everyone's a stakeholder. And that the organization is more important than any one individual. Right. And I've heard you say in the past, like you didn't want to be the architect of your own demise or be the reason that like whatever, you know, business you find yourself in regresses to the mean,

like that may happen, but you don't want it to be as a result of indulging some character defect. Yeah. But imagine being Tom Brady where the temptation and the opportunity to blow yourself out through ego is almost, you know, it's, it's just,

how are you going to resist that? Like, yeah, he could just go into any number of opportunities to distract him from being a great player or I think it almost takes, it takes, it takes, it's even harder. It takes more energy and more consciousness and more awareness and more diligence and more humility to avoid that. So this, it's almost like it gets harder and harder the more successful you become. Well, there's this line from Muhammad Ali that's in the book,

but I've sort of started to think about it a bit differently. He says, like, it's hard to be as great when you're as humble as I am. And I think he meant, like, that's why I'm not humble, right? But in reality, what you're saying about Tom Brady is, like, actually's it's hard.

So you have to work really hard because it's so in a weird way, it's actually more important. Right. I remember when I was living in New York City, when John F. Kennedy Jr. like failed the bar for like the third time or I think it was a third time, second time, third time. And the New York Post ran an article. It's almost like a pre John Ronson, you know, so you can shamed moment. Like it's like, you know, John, John fails the bar again. It was a picture of him like rollerblading in central park. Like he's supposed to be studying for the bar. And I remember it like as somebody who's, you know, gone to law school and passed the bar. Like I just, I just felt sympathy for him because I'm like, none of you people know what it's like to be supposed to be studying for the bar

and like Daryl Hannah calls you and says, we're going to, let's go to this party. Like, you think you're going to say no to that? Like, who do you think you are, right? You know what I mean? And I'm sure Tom Brady faces similar, you know, sorts of different kinds, but like, you know, that kind of thing where it's like, when you're at that level, the seeds of your

destruction are, are, are, are like sprouting up all around you. Right. It's like, Hey, you know, I can make a million dollars doing this or a million dollars doing that. Or I could go in the weight room as a 40 year old man and feel physical pain for several hours for a game that I'm already the best in the world at. That's why it's so cool. Speaking of, you know, the weight room to like, watch, uh, the rock. Cause he's so like the fact that he, you know, he's like, I go to the weight, you know, I'm in the weight room at four 30, like that guy could do whatever he wants. Right. But

his diligence and his fidelity to showing up for the work and what got him there in the first place and his continuous, you know, um, dedication to that is what's allowing him to stay in that place. Well, and this, it's, it sounds like a cliche, but that's why you have to be in it for the right reasons. So it's like for writing and my small scale experience on what it must be like for those guys. It's like, as soon as you write a book and it sells well, the first thing they, the, for all the opportunities are non writing related,

right? It's like, do you want to come talk to this group? Do you want to consult for this business? You know, do you want to ghost write this other person's book? So all these other opportunities. So if you don't actually love the writing,

like if you were just getting into doing this for some other means, now you have, you know, like dollar sign reasons to not do that unpleasant task. And you have to love it. And they're not necessarily bad reasons. Like, no. It'd be perfectly fine for you. It's not like you're in your ego because you said yes to an opportunity that arose because of the fruits of your labor right but you have to you have to love if you want to be great at the thing you're doing tom brady has to love football more than the other things and he has to be able to understand that whatever the short-term validation of those things being a little bit

more famous or you, being on this magazine or whatever, it, it's costing him the thing that he loves. Right. That's the, I mean, I go through that all the time myself. Right. So, so the answer is usually, I mean the right, like Seth Godin talks about this, right? Like you either do the full rate thing or you do it for free cause you love it. Like when those opportunities come around, like you either jump on it because you know, instinctively right away, that's the right thing to do. And it doesn't matter whether they're paying you or not. Or it's like, Hey, it's a, it's a, it's a big payday thing, but you don't do the thing

in the middle. And this is something that like, I have a hard time with, like I struggle with this a lot. Yeah, no, me, me, me too. Um, it's like, i've tried to think about that with my my business where it's like we came up with these sort of two rules which is like one it's either creative work that we're proud of doing or it is financially lucrative in such a way that it supports our other creative work.

So it's, so it's like, I'm working on some other, somebody else's project. It's either because I deeply believe in that project. I want to be involved or it's because what I will take from it gives me freedom to pursue my own creative projects without concern or worry. Right. And so that work brass check is the name of the company, right? Like you ghostwrite and help out other authors, you know, realize their projects,

right? And you authors, brands, uh, public figures. I tend to find that like books are one way to tell, I, to tell stories or to spread ideas.

There are other ways. And I'm best at books, but I'm pretty good at the other stuff too. And the other stuff being marketing. Yeah. And you do that for brands as well. But I could have a company that has an office and 20 or so employees and we're responding to RFPs all the time and we're doing that, but that would suck up all the time in my life. And not just time, cause you can make

time, but it's the energy and the space in your head, I think is where it would be. Yeah. Well, it goes back to healthy boundaries, right? taking on just enough so that it keeps you intrigued and interested but not so much that it overwhelms you and distracts you from what you really want to be doing yeah right exactly i think we did it all right how do you feel i feel good anything else you want to talk about no you know what i want you know what i want to ask you about all right this this happened too late for it to end up in your book. Okay. But I'm interested in your perspective on what happened with Gawker. Oh. Because you've written so extensively about Gawker and your opinions and your feelings

about this institution are well known. So for people who don't know, Gawker is a media site that basically thinks that they're the arbiter of sort of public judgment and condemnation of all public individuals. They have sort of very low editorial standards. One of their slogans is publishing rumors is the best way to get to the truth. So it's a, it's a, it's often a very entertaining site, but I think it's culturally a force of immense negativity and some cases evil. And so Peter Thiel, who is one of the investors in Facebook and one of the founders of PayPal, uh, about eight years ago, Gawker outed him as gay. Um, he was, uh, he was, uh, he is gay, but he was private about it as was his choice and he sort of realized i don't like that someone would do that and he he set out to fund the lawsuits against gawker

that would eventually end in their bankruptcy and gawker ran a surreptitiously recorded sex tape of Hulk Hogan. So Hulk Hogan had sex with, it's going to be complicated, a friend's wife. But that friend was in an open relationship. So it was not an affair. He just had sex with a woman. And somebody filmed that. And then Gawker ran that video. Gawker didn't do the filming, but they ran this unauthorized, non-consent generated sex tape. And Hulk Hogan sued them.

And a jury awarded them about $140 million, which bankrupted Gawker. And it turned out Peter Thiel was the one who funded this lawsuit. So I think it's awesome. My short answer is I think it's awesome. My short answer is I think it's awesome. I think I'm not someone who's personally motivated by revenge, but I love the count of Montecristo-esque commitment to the revenge. Right. He's determined no matter what that he was going to bring this organization down for the betterment of society. Yeah.

He calls it one of the better philanthropic philanthropic things he's ever done. But through the lens of ego and this book that you just written, there's so many interesting threads to pull. I mean, you could, you could look at Peter Thiel and say, well, that was an act of ego that was generated out of resentment. Like he, and justifiable resentment, like justifiable anger, or, you know what I mean? Like he had a good reason for doing that, but it still comes from a place of him being unable on a personal development level to like, let it go and move on. Yes.

So he saw Gawker as a singular bully that if shut down would have an overall positive impact in the world. But he came to that not as a bystander, but as someone who felt personally wrong. So there's a Marcus Aurelius quote. He says, you know, the best revenge is to not be like that. That's typically how I like to get revenge, you know, revenge. But I, I, I do agree. It's not, I don't think it's the healthiest thing in the world, but. Well, it also depends on what his emotional relationship was to it. He could just say, well, I'm going to do this. And he doesn't think about't think if he just writes a check you know what i mean but if he's grinding

every day and obsessed with you know gawker yes that's a different situation then he's in the dave mustaine category right right and i'm not sure that he was i don't know but um and then the flip side being gawker itself as a as an unbridled expression of ego in that it could think that it could continually get away with doing the idea that you could write the idea that your actions do not have consequences, that you can write about powerful people and say untrue, unfair,

ridiculous things. And that at some point those chickens don't come home to roost is, is it's ego, but it's mostly arrogance and stupidity yeah and and um you can you can read some articles about it you can watch the deposition the editor of gawker who ran this story gave perhaps the worst deposition in the history like there's the larry flint deposition during the hustler trial have you seen that one yeah were you like a long time ago he takes a booger out of his nose and he eats it have you seen this and the other lawyer goes let the record stipulate that larry flint has taken a booger out

of his nose and eaten it um but this is the word so in this deposition the the editor um he goes is there any um is there any sex tape from a celebrity that would not be newsworthy and he looks at the camera he knows he's being filmed and he says uh i guess a child and and the guy goes the lawyer goes how old would this child have to be for you not to run it and he goes four oh my god and so like the entire hundred million dollar lawsuit essentially hinges on that. And then later he also asked them, did you think about Hulk Hogan at all? Did you think about the impact this would have on the people you were writing about when you wrote it? And he just looked at me, he goes, that's not my job.

And so it's the arrogance that, hey, I've actually had some exchanges with AJ before. He wrote something about one of my clients. He goes, hey, this is all professional wrestling. That's what he said to me. And it's like, it's not professional wrestling. This has a real impact on real people. And you cannot dehumanize them just because there's money in it for you. What is the impact of the decline of Gawker had on this industry?

Like, what are the, what are the seismic waves? It hasn't really happened yet. Like nothing has happened yet. They still exist. But a lot of media people were worried about a chilling effect. But I think the smart analysis I've seen has shown that not only is this a singular institution,

this is a singular case with very little precedent. And so I'm not that worried about it why doesn't why doesn't it carry any precedent um because websites don't normally run surreptitiously recorded sex tapes of but you can extrapolate from that you know non-consensual video or you know any number of things that would fall into the category of, but I think like there has, there is obviously some line as to what is private and what is personal or sorry, what is private and what is public. Right. And I would say you having consenting sex in your own bedroom is, is probably that line. You know, if he had recorded, for instance, if he'd recorded the sex tape himself and then it leaked, that might be a totally different discussion. But this is recorded without his knowledge.

So I think that was a big part of it. And then the reality is most sites, almost no other media outlet does anything like this. So they're not exactly in the, no other media outlet ran this story. But they're sort of setting the tempo for what is okay. And that's why this is a good thing. And when you see the views and you understand the economics of how that business works when it's driven by the number of impressions, then the other sites, the BuzzFeeds, et cetera, you name it,

are going to fall. The main possible impact is, okay, here you have someone, like Peter Thiel's plan, as I understand it, was I'm going to sue them every chance that I get until eventually they're bankrupt. What happened was that he ended up suing them in this lawsuit that they had gotten so overreached on that they lost. Another reflection of ego. Yes, totally. Like, I don't think he, I think his strategy was I'm going to grind them into bankruptcy, which is one thing. But what, what makes this special is that he ended up being right.

Like this lawsuit, like this filtered through a judge and a jury and an appeals court. And so they, society spoke, you know, not the, the crushing burden of legal debt spoke. So I do think there's some nice... He got a decisive blow versus maybe doing something manipulative into forcing someone into bankruptcy by just filing frivolous lawsuits. Rather than inundating them with paper, It all exploded in one kind of bright light. Which is why it's like if you're going to go out and do stuff like that, you're going to be like Ocker, you have to have intense internal discipline and control so you don't

make fatal errors that your enemies can exploit. But do you think that this has moved the needle in terms of what's acceptable and not? I mean, I feel like there's so much momentum behind this kind of, you know, irresponsible journalism and schadenfreude and, you know, all of that, that it's almost impossible to stem the tide. That's probably, I mean, I mean, we've certainly passed a point of no return but maybe we can at least draw a line a new line somewhere and maybe that line is not sex tapes or you know before that gawker had a married man had been arranging he was the cfo of a public of a private company um was arranging a rendezvous with a gay prostitute and that gay prostitute attempted to extort him and gawker ran the extorters information as a story so basically like text messages yeah

but but their sole source was the person attempting the extortion right right so and and the the response from the public was overwhelmingly like, that's where the line is. It's like the only story rockers ever retracted. It'll be interesting to see how it evolves. Yeah. I mean, it couldn't, it couldn't happen to worse people. Right.

Not that Hulk Hogan is great either. I mean, on the other side of that same tape is a bunch of racist remarks from him, which I actually think should be public. I don't see it. Um, I don't see it evolving towards a healthy place. No, but media culture has never been particularly healthy. Do you know what I mean? Like no one it's like, Oh, let's go back to the, you know, the 1870s. It wasn't great then either. Right. It's never been good. Right. What are you working on now?

I'm doing a daily devotional on stoicism that comes out. And then hopefully... So that's like a practical open up to the day and here's a thought. Yeah. A page a day. That's cool. Yeah, I'm excited about that. And so that's coming out this fall right

yeah that's i've just got the pdf it's waiting for me at my house and do you know where the next project is going to be beyond that not really um you have that look in your eye like you kind of know i mean i'm sorry i've started to think about i've started to think about what i want the next book to be but i don't I don't have a good enough sense on it that I can communicate what it is to. How about this? What are you reading right now? I am on the third leg of a 3,000 page series on Winston Churchill that I'm really excited about. It's an investment. Yeah. And then I'm reading, I have an early copy of Mark Manson's book, uh, the subtle art of not giving a fuck, which is pretty good. He's a great writer. You should check his stuff out. Um, Mark

Manson. Um, what else am I reading? I've been reading a bunch of parenting books. Do you read, uh, multiple books at the same time? No, I just have, I have like like i'll have like the next two or three scheduled and do you do audiobooks at all or no no all reading all reading i listen to podcasts and then i read books ryan holiday it's a pleasure thanks for having me honor man yeah i absolutely love the new book everybody should check it out it is it is really great and it's it's easy and quick read too it's only what is it 220 pages or something yeah it's really great man i'm super happy for you and proud of you and i appreciate you coming over and sharing your message so if you're digging on ryan uh he's easy to find on the internet at ryan holiday on twitter and facebook uh ryanholiday.net, correct? Mm-hmm.

And you write for The Observer, Thought Catalog, so just Google him. You'll find it, right? Yeah. And are you doing more speaking engagements, like if people want to come out and see you read? Yeah, I don't have anything scheduled,

but I do do a fair amount. I try to post on my website or Twitter when I have them. All right. Yeah. Good, man. Thank you. Thank you.

Peace. Bye. or Twitter when I have them. All right. Yeah. Good, man. Thank you. Thank you. Peace. Bye, guys. I couldn't feel any worse. I don't know about you guys, but I could talk to Ryan all day. In fact, I think I could start a separate podcast where all I do is talk to Ryan. In any event, hope you guys enjoyed it. Please make a point of checking out his new book,

Ego is the Enemy. It really is fantastic. You can read it or you can listen to it. Ryan reads the audiobook version himself. And make it extra awesome by using the Amazon banner ad at wishworld.com to make that purchase. As always, doesn't cost you anything extra, but Amazon throws us some loose commission change in our direction. It's just an easy, free way to support that purchase. As always, it doesn't cost you anything extra, but Amazon throws us some loose commission change in our direction. It's just an easy, free way to support the show. So thank you, everyone, who has made a habit out of using it.

Mad love. As always, please make a point of checking out the show notes for this episode. I've got tons of links and resources related to today's conversation to take your edification beyond the earbuds. My colleague, Chris Swan Swan puts a lot of effort into helping me compile these

and it takes a lot of time and there's really good stuff there. So please check it out. Again, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter. In addition to weekly podcast updates, you'll get exclusive access to Roll Call. What is Roll Call? Roll Call is a short email blast every Thursday.

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Go to richroll.com for signed copies of Finding Ultra and The Plant Power Way. We also have cool Plant Power t-shirts, all kinds of cool swag and merch to take your allegiance to the Plant Power revolution to the next level. Also, mad love for everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production. He's doing a great job. Sean Patterson for graphics.

Chris Swan for production assistance. And of course, again, on helping me compile all the show notes. He's doing a great job. Sean Patterson for graphics, Chris Swan for production assistance. And of course, again, on helping me compile all the show notes. He does an amazing job. Theme music by Annalema. Thanks for all the support, you guys. I love you. And I've got a final thought for you. Look, today's conversation was all about ego. We all have ego in some form or another. And I think we all intellectually know that when ego gets in the way, it can derail us. If this is a new concept for you, then hopefully my conversation with Ryan helped shed a little light on just how nefarious the unchecked ego can be at every phase of life. So this week, I want you to make a point of being hyper-conscious about how your own ego flares up in daily life, to notice or identify it around situations that transpire throughout your day,

perhaps a conflict at work, a resentment, someone else's success, whatever it may be. And before you react or respond to the situation, I want you to do a little inventory around it. And by that, I mean get out a journal, not your computer, a journal, pen and paper. And I want you to write down a brief log line of the situation. For example, Joe got the promotion that should have been mine, whatever it is. And below that, I want you to write down

what your ego is telling you, that that promotion should have been yours, that you deserve it, not him. The other guy's lazy, whatever it is. Then I want you to write down what'll happen if you act on your ego. Like if you actually follow through on what your ego wants you to do, like play it all the way out to its conclusion and identify exactly what transpires through an objective lens, like who gets hurt, who is harmed, and how are you or the

other person harmed. Then I want you to write down below that what will happen if you take the contrary action. For example, congratulating Joe, saying good job man, that was awesome, I feel happy for you. Then I want you to sit for 24 hours before you do anything. I want you to ponder and ruminate on your inventory. Then I want you to take the action in contradiction to the voice of ego and see what happens. Does that make sense? That was a little wordy,

but I think you get my drift. In any event, I hope that's helpful. See you guys soon. Peace. Plants. Thank you.