When ‘genius’ becomes a trap, with author Ryan Holiday

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/8bc04ce8f7c57102

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Twenty six.
Great leaders, you know, a Lincoln or something assembles a team of rivals versus a team of yes men.
And these are things that we have a lot of precedent over historically. You think you want freedom of movement and supporters and advocates.
But actually, what you need is to be challenged.
And you need
boundaries and you need limitations.
Ryan Holliday has made it his mission to bring the wisdom of ancient stoic philosophers such as Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius into modern life.
Ryan believed the stoics unlocked the source code for leading a meaningful life.
The four virtues.
We know what courage is, right? Courage is when you brave danger.
But then what danger?
Why?
To whose benefit?
Well now you're dealing with justice.
And then
Where's the line between courage
And recklessness.
Well now you're talking about discipline and temperance. And then how do you know what the right amount is? Well, now we're talking about wisdom.
You gotta have incredible talent at every position.
There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing.
There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. It just seems absolutely nutball. Ten years later and be like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it. Just how you do it.
This
Is masters of scale.
I'm Jeff Berman, your host, and this week on the show.
Author Ryan Holliday. He has introduced millions to stoic philosophy with his daily stoic newsletter.
podcast and best selling books.
Ryan quite brilliantly makes the ancient stoic ideas feel accessible and essential.
To our twenty first century lives.
Here's how he explains stoicism.
in his own videos.
Stoicism, if I had to summarize in one sentence, I would say it's this idea that we don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life. And the stoics say that basically every situation, big ones, small ones, ones you wanted, ones you didn't want, it's all an opportunity to respond with these
Four virtues. Courage, discipline.
Justice and wisdom.
The four virtues are the focus of Ryan's latest book series.
The final installment is out now.
It's called wisdom takes work.
Ryan, welcome to Masters of Scale. Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to have you. I first encountered your work through my friend Michael Bostik, uh, who turned me on to the obstacles the way. Yeah.
And I have to confess I finished the book.
I annotated the living daylights out of it. Oh, thank you. I went to our local bookstore and I went to Marcus Aurelius because I was like, Well, this is like a distillation with these modern examples and it's super accessible. Like what's missing in the translation? I read a lot and I have to say
I couldn't get through it.
Really? Yeah. I really struggled with it.
And so
I'm just curious, but how did you first encounter stoicism and
How did you make sense of it?
Well, it's funny, I had the exact opposite experience. So someone recommended
Meditations and I read it and I I I picked up and I said, This is the greatest thing I've ever read. I just didn't know that that's what philosophy could be. Sort of practical ideas and observations about
Like there's this passage in Meditations where Mark Schwest talks about fighting to be the person that philosophy tried to make him. And I just I don't know if I ever thought philosophy was trying to make you anything except confused. And that's what it is for most people. It's just these
Esoteric questions or riddles or probing so deep that you end up
Going nowhere. Like you're like, wait, so everything's meaningless and nothing matters. I just didn't know that philosophy could be practical and accessible and
Help you live like a good life. And what I've tried to do is is sort of
make that a little bit more
of a bigger target for people.
Ryan discovered the book Meditations by Marcus Aurelius when he was an undergraduate and became obsessed with living by stoic principles.
Soon another writer also had a profound influence on him.
Ryan honed his writing and research skills by working for Robert Green.
The best selling author of books such as The Форті Лазів Пор.
It distills thousands of years of power dynamics into basic tenets.
I met him when I was also in college and
I started working for him doing kinda like online stuff, and he basically showed me how to do
The job.
I didn't necessarily know.
That it was a job that that I could do the j like I think for me
The idea that writers were
People
There's something about
when you meet someone who's actually done
a thing that you've consumed.
That
is very humanizing, I think, and very powerful. This doesn't just come fully formed out of someone's brain. There's a a framework or a system or a process.
And I spent
Almost seven years working for him.
Actually well into writing my first
Maybe my first two books. But he was just, you know, a huge mentor to me. So that wasn't full time, it was a part time No, no, and then and then I worked in Beverly Hills at a talent agency, which was uh another kind of unique weird experience. I was like, I'll just work for anyone doing anything cool.
And I wanna figure out how stuff works. What did you learn about how stuff works from working with rubber cream?
Well, Robert is kinda like a scholar monk. Basically all he does is is wake up every day and work on these books and he works on them for like incredible amounts of time. I think he's six or seven years into the
book that he's working on now, which is not my process, but it was something just amazing about watching someone
work on a thing where progress is going to be measured in in months or years and
the sort of discipline that it takes. And then I think if anyone's read
any of his and my work's the the influence is very clear. What he mostly showed me is that like people learn through stories.
And
that the job of the writer is not just to have the insight or the thing that you want to teach, but to find the best way to illustrate that in a way that's memorable and explanatory to people. So I what I ended up doing in my books is I I would take these stoic teachings, which I think are pretty straightforward, pretty well said.
But instead of going, you know, the Stoics said this or the Stoics said that, I I would go, okay, well, what does that look like? What does it look like when someone takes this idea and tries it in the world? Like what does it look like as a leadership principle or a productivity principle or as a principle in principle? Like what how do you how does that actually work? And so
I learned how to do that with Robert, how to f track those things down, how to find all the interesting parts of it, and then
How to
Write it.
But before Ryan could make the leap to writing about stoic philosophy, and let's be honest, that's a bit of a tough sell to most publishers, especially from a college dropout.
He decided to follow the old adage.
Write what you know.
In his first book, Ryan revealed the secret of marketing he'd learned in his career. It's called Trust Me, I'm Lying.
Confessions of a media manipulator.
I was the director of marketing in American Apparel for a number of years and in an era where American Apparel was
Quite a marketing machine. It's sad these days. I guess there's a documentary about it, but it's sad these days because it used to matter. Yeah, you do these things and it's on your resume and you're like, This will matter forever.
Right, and I worked at MySpace. Yeah. People don't even know that it exists, right? You know? You're like and maybe you come out the other side and eventually it comes back again. But yeah, so I had this marketing career and and my first book was sort of an expose of marketing and public relations, which was uh fun, interesting Dark Man of the Soul for me book that
I knew was always gonna be a transitionary project. Like I wanted to do that book and then I wanted to write about.
This. Why did you want to do that book? It's not that I wanted to do this book. I felt like that was a book that only I could do. Usually you want to write about what you can't not write about. And there was definitely that. I felt like I had seen and experienced and understood.
how the sort of sausage was getting made.
In a way that was not
But and um and so that that's what the intention of that book was. And you know, I was writing about fake news and misinformation and
All the things that have come to sort of define public discourse now.
Probably a tad early. Right. Before it was cool. And before there was necessarily the sort of zeitgeist around it. But I didn't want to write marketing books. I just had a
Book.
That I
wanted to do and then this is what I wanted to write about.
So you could have gone on to write ten more books about
Marketing and communications, you could have gone and written for Vanity Fair, writing features and essays and analysis of what's happening in the world of media and marketing. You said to your publisher, I wanna write a philosophy book. And he said, Well that's gonna sell like gangbusters.
How did you get them there? Your publisher always has an option for your second book. You have to at least run it by them. So they have the right of first refusal. So I knew I wanted to write about stoicism and
They were they told me later that they were just hoping they said we we were hoping
that you would just get this thing out of your system and then go back to doing marketing books. I took
Like a huge pickup. Like
Fifty plus percent between trust me I'm lying and what became the obstacles way. Because I mean, it wasn't so much they were like it's gonna fail. It just seemed like there was a pretty low ceiling on it. And I mean, obviously I thought there was a pretty low ceiling or I wouldn't have accepted the offer.
It's always important that you're clear.
about the story you're telling yourself. Because you can end up telling yourself a story that
Endows your
Pasself with it.
precedents that you didn't have. I just wanted to write this book.
And the advance they offered was more than
One dollar. You know, I was like, Are you kidding? This is a amazing. This is what I want to do. And
I didn't have all these other books in mind. This was just what I was interested in and what I thought would work. And I was directionally right.
But
pretty open ended with my expectations for how it would do.
At this point in your journey, how had you personally implemented stoic philosophy into your day, into your process in the lead up to the obstacles the way?
Well, I certainly thought I was applying it. My wife would probably have disagreed.
You know, you look back on your younger self and you're like
What was I think you know, you know, it was a an ambitious
driven, intense person in my mid twenties. So my understanding of the stoicism that I was applying was
Barely in the ballpark. But I think most people when they come to Stoke Philosophy
Especially if they're in
a position remotely similar to mine, which is a young guy trying to make their way in the world. You're probably going to be interested in the sort of emotional regulation and the productivity the
toughness, the resilience, that kind of thing. And that that was what I was mostly taking out of Stoicism. It as a sort of an ethical based philosophy.
designed around virtue and public service was obviously not the most salient parts of the package, but that's something I think that developed over
time not just in the philosophy itself, but I think it sort of slowly, steadily
Dawns on you.
Age, maturation, experience. Do you think that is going through the process of studying and collecting these stories and writing it? Like what I think it's all of that. And I also think there's kind of a a hierarchy of needs. It's like hey, when you get
Some of the basic stuff right.
And then you're even in a position where your decisions matter or have impact, then you're like, Oh wait
Let me think about these other components too. But I I think, you know, at nineteen, when I'm reading Mark's Realists in my college apartment, I'm not lit up by the passages about the common good. You know, I'm like, Oh yeah, you gotta wake up early. You gotta you gotta shrug this the criticism off. And I I don't like look back on that.
with embarrassment or cringe. I d I just think that's probably the most
accessible entry point. And that's the most straightforward of it. And so I I understand this even now. It's like look, if am I going to make
A YouTube video about
Stoicism and you know, it's strong social justice components. I I mean I am, because that's interesting to me, but I understand that when I make one that's like 10 stoic strategies for owning the day, that's gonna reach more people and and that
You can't talk to them about
the social justice side of things until they've heard of it first. Yeah. And so in my works, I've always kind of understood and this is I think coming from the marketing background and what is the most compelling, understandable
articulatable part of it. Let's start there. And then once you're kind of in that funnel, we can talk about the more complicated ideas. Yeah. So what happens when the obstacle is the way comes out?
now, you know, it sold millions of copies and is in all these different languages and has made its way through professional sports and special forces and
Tech and politics.
But like
The first week it came out, it sold s I don't know, three thousand copies. Like it didn't hit a best seller list. It didn't fail, but it it was
Definitely a slow build.
I remember
About a year in
was like some of the first serious coverage, maybe a year and a half in uh the New England Patriots
had won the Super Bowl and and some members of the team had read it. So there was some media coverage. And like
It sold out.
And it it sold out not so much because it
Was like
Media coverage everywhere.
But because they weren't printing that many copies because it was like a year old book that had done okay.
It sold
More copies every year for like ten years in a row. Do you know what happened with the Patriots? Like
Tom Brady or Bill Belchuk, read it and pass it around. Did the crafts like give copies to all the players? Like what what happened? Um I know Mike Lombardi, who was in the front office there, he read it. Uh-huh. And then
He sent me an email.
And I sent him a bunch more copies and then he passed it around. And then uh their season kinda turned around and they won the Super Bowl. I I think those are unrelated variables. I mean causation correlation. Who's to say?
But he was one of the first people in professional sports. There's a guy named Andy McKay, who's a performance coach. I think he was then with the Mariners. That was one there was just a smattering of different people in in different fields that kinda picked it up and then each one
caused like a kind of a little contagion in their own space. Yeah. I mean
The funny thing about Mike Lombardi is so Mike Lombardi passed it around the Patriots and then
I found out about this from a Google alert.
He's the one that gave it to the Seahawks.
after they beat them in the Super Bowl. And now it's a West Coast book. And it's it's kinda going around. It that just happened. And that ha that happened for slowly and steadily over
many years. And it would be like
ESPN would be profiling someone and be like, On the shelf in their office is this. And it was just kind of like
little secret weapon kind of a thing. And then I started giving talks and there was never any moment where it was I mean, it didn't hit a bestseller list until
twenty nineteen. So it would just talk about scaling the impact of your work. Yeah. Because again, like there are a lot of
use the word broadly creators who could keep putting out a book every couple of years and build and build and build and you know that's efficient get paid very well to go do talks. You've scaled across platforms here. So at what at what point did you see that there was an opportunity to scale the reach and impact of your work beyond the books? So
This is right around the time that I wrote.
Daily stoic. So I'd always written online and always had an online audience. But
I found it to be very hard to build an audience around just me as a person. And so when
And it was actually my agent who had the idea for the Daily Stoic.
The idea of of being like a a page a day sort of entry point into stoicism. I was familiar with the sort of page a day books and and known a couple of them had done well. He had published um
The Daily Drucker when he was an an editor at Harper Collins. But
What I immediately recognized about the idea of a of a page a day book was what happens when you get to the end of the book.
And could you just keep that going as an email every day? Kind of been the solution to my
problem of like
How do you kinda keep this conversation going? And so the the Daily Stoic, which we launched in
twenty sixteen.
was
the idea that like stoicism is this thing that you should be reading and engaging with. So it started as an email list and and I'd already had an email list so we were able to, you know, sort of drive some but I think it started at, you know, with maybe 10,000 people in twenty sixteen and now
We'll go into twenty twenty six with easily um a million people getting it every day. And um from the email, you know, was like, okay, we started hearing from people and they were like, Well, I just don't like reading this every day. Can I listen to it? And then so then I started doing the audio and that became the podcast. And then
Social media. The the idea being that like
My preferred medium to learn about things is books. That's what I like to do.
But that I'm probably in the minority.
Just ahead more with Ryan Holliday on why being smart doesn't always mean being wise.
Hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely.
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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more.
on our YouTube channel.
Tells but Nubick.
So twenty nineteen I had this idea for the series on the stoic virtues. Courage
And discipline, then justice. And then the the fourth and final one is wisdom.
I've never done any books that were related to the other books.
And it's been
Interesting because
Zeno who's the founder of Stoicism would talk about how
the virtues are distinct yet inseparable from each other. And nothing quite illustrates that
To you
like having to write four distinct books that are
hopelessly and exasperatingly interrelated with each other. So it's been this kind of interesting challenge. It's like you're writing courage and all you're thinking about is this first book and then you realize, shit.
I locked in a story that I would like to be in the third book in this series, which I had hadn't even conceptualized yet. Interesting. So you hadn't mapped out here are the four books, here's how I'm gonna structure this. You're you're we're gonna pull them apart in time together. I did as much as I was able to
obviously I knew what the four books would be and I knew what order they would go in, and I knew vaguely what each of them was.
But it's not until you're writing
Some point you're on the third one and you go
You know it would go perfectly right here.
That thing on page twenty six of the first book.
Which is now permanently stuck there. But that's the point is that we know what courage is, right? Courage is when you brave danger. But then what danger? Why?
To whose benefit?
Well now you're dealing with justice. And then
How much courage? Like where's the line between courage
And recklessness.
Well now you're talking about discipline and temperance. Well, how do you know what the right amount is? Well, now we're talking about wisdom, right? Or how do you know
What
Is
Good and bad, right and wrong. Now we're talking about wisdom. So all the virtues are fascinatingly interwoven with each other. So the the wisdom book is the final one. And what I've been saying is
You know, no one's born with wisdom, but all the virtues are born from it. Like it's the one that defines the other virtues. When you launch a book like this into the world, what is success for you?
I remember on my first book
It's funny how quickly it goes from a dream.
Like I just wanna I wanna work for myself or I wanna like write a book. And then you're like
I wanted to sell for a billion dollars, right? Like all you wanted was to not have a job, and now you're comparing yourself to the most successful people of all time. All I wanted to do was write a book, and then it immediately became but if it doesn't hit a bestseller list, like what was the point? And so I think I was mostly concerned on my first book was how does it sell?
Does it hit the list? What are people saying about it? And with the irony being that this is those three things are like the opposite of stoic philosophy because not a single one of them is in your control. Uh you talk about Elon here. Why why Elon in a book about wisdom. Well, Elon is one of the smartest people on the planet.
Right. It's like to say that Elon Musk is not smart, which some people have started to say, it's like saying he's not rich. Like it's just it's a fact. You know? He is a a genius in many, many ways.
He is also I think a great example of how a very smart person can break their brain. And
I think he's a cautionary tale. I I mean, look, I tend to try to write about people who are dead for a reason, which is that one, they can't sue you, and two
were less partisan about it. I think for someone like Elon
Who is so brilliant.
What he
Presents us.
Is
A warning about what happens.
I'm fascinated by the journey.
From
The guy reading Soviet rocket manuals to figure out
The SpaceX business.
To the guy who spends all of his time tweeting and what happens to a person when your inputs degrade.
And
Also what happens to a person when they start to believe that they are
A genius. It's not good. It's not good for you or other people. And so he's a man who has stood over the world like a colossus. And I think it behooves us to look at both the auditory things that you can take from it, but then not to shy away from what are the obvious.
And
I saw this at American Apparel too, Dove being a sort of controversial genius. But what happens when you don't take care of yourself, when you don't sleep, when
You surround yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear.
And also I think this is a timeless thing for entrepreneurs and leaders.
You can imagine.
Napoleon as he is uh
Considering the invasion of Russia.
When
You have done impossible things over and over and over again.
And
People have told you it's not going to work.
What lesson do you take from that?
That is, I think, a timeless thing.
Apparently they
Some of Elon Musk's friends staged
Okay.
Alcoholics Anonymous style intervention when he was considering dumping all of his money into SpaceX. So
When that happens to you
And then you're thinking about buying Twitter or whatever.
How can you listen?
Mm-hmm.
The point is not to judge or to
Dunk on anyone. It's to go, Okay, well
In your own life, in my own life, when you have beaten the odds or done the impossible, or just gotten to a place where you're the decider.
Yeah.
Blow it all up.
Yeah, it's also I mean one of the benefits of
Experience and wisdom is pattern recognition. But the problem is if you're relying on patterns that were established in different contexts, different time, different era.
you know, that pattern recognition may be actually a negative. Right. And set aside the hubris and the surrounding yourself with sycophants. There's even just the most basic, oh, I'm in my fifties, I'm a CEO, oh, I've seen this movie before. I know how this ends. Like we got to do this, not that. And you got 20 something sort of like
hailed man, like you're wrong. Yes. And they're really tuned in what's happening. And and so I guess the question is like balancing that pattern recognition experience with the
curiosity and the open mindedness to listen to those twenty somethings and say, well, actually maybe you're right to say more. Well it's also like the job of the writer and social commentators is to also recognize patterns. And it's like
Guy gets very rich and then becomes more and more reactionary and conservative as he gets older. That's about the oldest pattern that's ever existed, too. But yeah, you you have to be able to
Have new inputs coming in.
And then also understand what you're good at. And and yeah, the um domain expertise, sometimes it's transferable and sometimes it's not. And knowing the limitations of those, I think he's a great example of what happens of why companies have boards of directors and why
great leaders, you know, a Lincoln or something assembles a team of rivals versus a team of yes men. And again, these are things that we have a lot of precedent over historically. You think you want freedom of movement and supporters and advocates, but actually what you need is to be challenged.
And you need boundaries and you need limitations. Oh, you want to raid the finances of this company to dump it into this company to dump it into this like some of the things we've developed in this country and and in the sort of global financial system about
conflicts of interest, about disclosures, about just even the rule of law, like hey, you
Started to acquire a company.
And you needed to disclose that's technology too. Technology is not just computer chips. It's also, hey, when we allow people to do X, Y, or Z.
It's not good for them, even if they want it. Yeah. And what we're also just looking at from I think in the whole kind of tech space is what happens when
People are more or less unfettered. They control their information environment. They are essentially uh beyond legal or financial repercussions. And
I think even and I wrote a a book about Peter Thiel who I really admire. I think one of the things that is a force that's acting on some of these guys, and you're probably in some of these chats or been at some of these dinners.
They become these kind of like gurus.
And so you go to these dinners
Or you're in these groups.
They say some dumb shit and everyone is just like
Oh yeah, that's so sm like it's like this pontification and this performance.
And
They just don't hear
Anyone push back.
And then then they write it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and everyone laughs because those people aren't on the payroll and don't want anything from them. And they're kind of surprised. And so what's happening, honestly, is I think some of the faculties are degrading when you're an outsider and you're really having to
Get all your arguments right and your
constantly being challenged and just everything's tight and good. That's different than the
You know, I'm on this podcast where they're just grateful to have me and then I'm talking to these kids who want a job or these founders who want my money, or you know, this board of directors who I appointed. They're just th I don't think they're being challenged in a way that
One my favorite stories in in the book there's this famous meeting that Martin Luther King is is having
You know, at the end of it, he pulls Andrew Young aside.
Who is one of his most trusted advisors and he goes
Dude, what
You didn't do your job in the meeting. And he goes, What are you talking about? He's like, I was just he was like, You know we're maniacs. All of us are true believers. He's like, We need you to
Point out when what we're talking about is crazy. Basically calling out one of his subordinates for not disagreeing and being uh the devil's advocate enough in these meetings. And you go, Oh, yeah, that's how you don't plunge off of a cliff. You don't pick the wrong confrontation or give the wrong speech. And if you're not cultivating that in your life,
I think you you get sloppy and entitled. How do you cultivate that in your life?
Well, I try not to spend a lot of time
Around
People who like do what I do or I I try I try to spend a lot of time around around like regular
regular people living a regular life where you're sort of
advantages aren't baked in, you know? I think my wife holds me pretty accountable and so do my kids. But I think I don't know if if you notice this too, like
Podcasting as a medium.
is very enticing for sloppy thinking also because it's not like being grilled by a journalist.
It's mostly non adversarial and
Same with most public speaking, like you were invited. They want you there. And so how do you make sure that you're not
hearing what you want to hear. And I mean that's a challenge I think about. Yeah. But what you have to be careful of is that you don't
Just kinda fall in love with the sound of your own voice. Yeah. I mean it's interesting. The note about podcasting, and I can certainly see that. One of the privileges of getting to do this show is, you know, like
I could just sit with smarters and people who've done incredible things, but it's not
hagiography. It's not, you know, like sure people've really done the work. They can really explain how they did it. Yeah. Um and the ones who haven't
Kinda can't. Yeah. And you you know pretty quickly with and you know, disproportionately we get to sit with those who have and are. Yeah. But I take the point. I can see how it becomes self reinforcing. Well, it's like it's not good to sit and just talk into a microphone like three hours a day.
Every day of the week. I think it can melt your brain. Just like it's not good to tweet all day and it's not good to, you know, how is it staying difficult?
one of the things I like about writing is that
It is really
and hard. And it doesn't matter how long you've done it or how well you have done it, you're starting
Fresh each time.
And so that's one of the ways that I do it. Like it it would be easier for me to just do
this stuff and to not do the main thing, which is hard. And I've I've found a lot of my peers like
They're just like, I don't think I'm ever gonna do another book.'Cause it's like why? Why would you do it? You you made, you know, life changing money. Athletes love playing and then they also look forward to the
Day of not having to play. I do try to stay in the the craft of the thing because I think it's good that it's kicking your ass constantly. If it's not a book of yours, and it's not a book by one of the stoics.
What's the book that we should all go read?
The book I've been recommending to people the most
Is this biography?
Of Montaigne, who's a character in the wisdom book by Stefan Zwag. Stefan Zwag was a great novelist in the early 1900s. He's fleeing from the Nazis and he ends up in in Brazil and he discovers the works of Montaigne and he writes this kind of it's like the last thing that he did. It's this book about a man turning away from the
Chaos and violence and
Dysfunction of the world.
Writing about a guy.
Montaigne being uh the the French philosopher
who is doing the same thing in the middle of the reformation and the counter reformation. And so it's like
one guy trying to stay true and good as the world is imploding.
being written about by a guy doing the same thing. I found it to be immensely beautiful and moving.
In this moment.
And there's a line in the book he says the job is to remain human in a time of inhumanity. How do you not
become hard? How do you not become closed off? How do you not become entitled? How do you
push away ego, that that's kind of the job. And and what's amazing about Montaigne as a thinker is that he he wasn't one of those philosophers that uh
Hold us.
A bunch of things that he knew for certain. And what he mostly did was ask a lot of questions. His famous one is um
Is uh he's playing with his cat and then he goes, Wait am I
playing with the cat or is the cat playing with me? Most of his things are these kind of open ended observations and and and he was also very influenced by the Stokes. But this is this little book that I've loved and uh I've read probably three times in the last
Five years or so. It's
One of my all time favorites. We'll link to it in the show notes. Please. Brian, thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me.

It's striking to think about how we have more information at our fingertips than ever before in human history.
Yet wisdom is still so scarce.
Ryan Holiday's books will certainly help you get
Many steps closer.
His latest is wisdom takes work.
We'll put a link in the show notes.
I'm Jeff Berman.
Thank you for listening.
Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro, our senior producer is Trisha Bobida, Associate Producer is Masha Makatanina, Senior Talent Executive is Stephanie Stern.
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