BONUS | 7 Books AI Can't Replace

0:00Ryan Holiday: My kids just started school, so my schedule is sideways. Suddenly, I don't have all morning or all afternoon. I got places to be. And if I don't do it early, I'm not going to work out. I'm figuring it out, right? Because the problem is when life gets busy, workouts are usually the first thing to go. So whatever you can do to lower that barrier is great. And with Tonal, you can make sure you are checking workout off your to-do list with their smart and compact strength training system right in your home 24-7. Tonal is the convenience of a full gym and the guidance of a personal trainer anytime at home in one sleek system.

0:36Ryan Holiday: Reduces the mental load, helps you increase the load of what you are lifting. And there's no second guessing your form. It's got real-time coaching. As I said, it literally adds little one-pound increments as you get stronger, so you're always feeling challenged. And right now, Tonal is offering our listeners$200 off your first Tonal purchase with promo code TDS. That's tonal.com. Use promo code TDS for$200 off your purchase. That's tonal.com. Promo code TDS for$200 off. One of the things that keeps you up at night when you own a small business like a bookstore is like, was someone trying to get a hold of us?

1:13Ryan Holiday: Did we miss a delivery? Did we miss a customer? Did we miss someone wanted to put in a bulk order? I mean, you've probably been on the other end of that at some time. You're trying to call, give someone your business and you couldn't get a hold of them. Well, today's episode is brought to you by Quo, for that reason, Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. It is the number one rated business phone system on G2, trusted by over 90 ,000 businesses who rely on it to stay reachable and look professional every day. All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place, so anyone on your team can pick up the conversation, see the full history, and respond fast.

1:48Ryan Holiday: And Quo integrates with the tools your team already uses, HubSpot, Zapier, Claude, whatever. And it helps you save time, stay organized, and spend less effort chasing down information between systems. Because money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo today for free. Plus, you get 25 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash Daily Stoic. Quo.com slash Daily Stoic. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

2:28If you're worried about AI, if you're worried about being replaced, if you're worried about people's brains breaking, these are some books that will help you not just understand the world of AI, but I think actually thrive in it. I think we should start with Austin Kleon's stuff. So first off, this book, Steal Like an Artist, is incredible. AI is of all these influences, takes from everyone, but it doesn't ultimately have like a point of view. It doesn't have anything to say. It is not actually greater than the sum of its parts, but human beings can be. So I think this is a great book on creativity, but then also like the point of creative work is not just the product, it's the process.

3:08It's being the person who did the thing. That's what people don't know. Yes, you can have AI write an essay for you. The point is not to have the product. The point is to be the person that did the thing, that learned the thing along the way. And to me, that's a lot of what Show Your Work is about. If you've done this long enough, you understand technological trends come and go. It always feels like this is a pivotal moment. This is a rock bottom moment. Everything's falling apart, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Keep going. Keep doing your work. And then this new one, Don't Call It Art, is really good.

3:35Because again, the point of creativity is to be creative. Robert Caro is maybe the greatest biographer of all time. and his philosophy of turning every page, doing the work. You cannot create the Lyndon Johnson series or the Power Broker with AI. There's too many connections, too much synthesis, too much human interaction. The interviews he went, he went and he lived in the hill country. There's this German word, Fingerspezengifu, which means a fingertip feel. You have to do the work to create great work. You have to be connected to the work to do great work. I'm not saying that there aren't ways AI can help you.

4:09I'll give you a good recommendation on that. But ultimately, Robert Caro's stuff on doing the work is absolutely essential. I like daily rituals. That's another good one. And then the notebook. Again, the history of doing it on paper, doing the work is really, really important. This is written by the Pope, Bob from Chicago, if you will. This is his encyclical about AI. If you've heard about it in the news, maybe you think he's anti or opposed to AI. That's not actually what he's talking about. He's talking about technology in a way that I don't think we talk about it enough. which is the moral implications of the technologies.

4:44He has this device between like, are we building a tower of Babel or a Nehemiah wall, which is both references that I hadn't totally understood. This is a great book, everyone should read this. I'm not actually anti-AI, I use it for things we talk about in our staff meetings. How can we be more effective? How can it make us more efficient? What can it help us do that we're not capable of doing? I like Ethan Mullet's book, Co-Intelligence, which is about how do you use machines, not to replace tasks, but to make you better at tasks. right he talks about ai being about as good as your worst human so is ai better than my editor no but is it better than a bad editor that i can work with again and again and again at two in the morning sure it can help teach you things point you to things help you find obvious things that maybe would have been inefficient to have a human do so i think this book is good two books the one thing and then i don't think it's here but average is over by tyler cowan i think one of the things AI is going to do is make middling or average results and performance much less valuable.

5:43So what I think you want to be thinking about is what are the things that only you as a human being can do? That's what you want to focus on. That's what you want to specialize in. That's where you want to stand out. The humanity of it is going to be really important. So I think the one thing and average is over is really good. Okay. I would also recommend Rene DiResta's book, invisible rulers. AI is really good at stuff. It's also really good at making shit up. It hallucinates all the time, gives you bullshit. If you don't have a good bullshit detector, you're going to be in trouble. This is, I think, a book that will help you spot slot, help you spot spam, help you spot influence campaigns.

6:23You're going to need a good bullshit detector. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is also really important because you are just inherently susceptible to bullshit. You have cognitive biases, you have vulnerabilities, And if you don't have any kind of self-awareness, if you can't be critical, you're going to have trouble. I guess I would also then probably give you the Stoics in this regard, right? Epictetus, first and foremost, Epictetus is talking about putting every impression, every thought, every opinion to the test. The rationality of Stoicism, I think, is going to be particularly important in this era.

6:58And I think everyone should read it. And then I guess what I would say is any book is a good recommendation in a world of AI. because people are not reading, people are having AI do summaries for them. Anytime you are sitting down, disconnected from a screen, thinking deeply about an idea, thinking deeply about a timeless idea, you are keeping your brain going, you are developing your critical thinking skills, you are setting yourself apart from people that are not doing that work. If you want more book recommendations, I send these out in my reading list newsletter, which I've sent out every month for 15 years, and you can sign up at ryanholiday.net slash reading list.

7:35Thank you.