Can a Billionaire Be a Stoic? | Robert Rosenkranz (PT. 1)

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1:52Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

2:37Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So how rich was Seneca, right? We know he's wealthy. He's supposedly the second richest man in Rome. I just was giving a talk at J.P. Morgan Chase a couple of weeks ago, and I was explaining to them that Seneca was such a powerful financial force inside the Roman Empire that when he calls in some loans to the Roman colony in Britain, it causes so much unrest. It so upends their economy that it leads to what's called the Boudicca Rebellion, which sets in motion over time, eventually, the independence of Britain as its own sort of nation.

3:29That's like one of the earliest sort of British stories is Boudicca Rebellion. So Seneca is not just wealthy, but he is like in the mix. He is like a J.P. Morgan Chase rich. He is a Elon Musk rich. Now, even then, even back then, people thought this made him a hypocrite. They contrast, you know, his talking about practicing poverty, his talk about discipline, his talk about moderation, his talk about virtue with his enormous wealth. Some of this is from sort of sour grapes critics. Some of it is just from people who didn't like Seneca. But there is a kernel of truth to that. There's something not exactly right about Seneca in many ways, right?

4:20Not just that he has lots of money, but how he gets his money. He gets it largely in the service of Nero, although he comes also from a wealthy family. I guess what I'm meaning to say is that the debate about stoicism and money or philosophy and whether it was incongruent with money. This is like as old a discussion as there possibly could be. Even back to Diogenes and Plato, Diogenes sort of eschews all worldly things, like in this sort of transgressive punk fashion. And he walks into Plato's fancy house one day and starts stomping on the carpets. And he goes, I trample on Plato's vanity. And Plato points out that this itself, this scorning of wealth and any kind of material niceties is itself a kind of vanity.

5:12So again, this goes way, way back. That's why I thought it was so fascinating when I got an email about this book called The Stoic Capitalist, Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious. Now, look, anyone could write a book about stoicism and money, and I'm sure there are some academics out there that have. But the guy that wrote this, Robert Rosenkranz, is a self-made billionaire. He's one of the pioneers of private equity, hedge funds, insurance. He's also, like an ancient Roman, a patron of the arts and medicine. He's been a sort of quiet donor and the champion of civil discourse and free speech.

5:53He launched this acclaimed NPR program called Open to Debate. He did this thing called the Impetus Grants, which is designed to extend human health spans and done a bunch of other interesting things, all of which is to say he's got skin in the game of the debate. He's not writing about wealth and philosophy from some academic perch, but as a person who as a capitalist has made more than he could spend in many lifetimes. And so I thought he would be fascinating to talk to. The idea of the book is actually really interesting and quite good. And I think you will like it, especially if you are an exceptionally ambitious person.

6:37If you are interested in exploring this idea of wealth and stoicism, the thing we put together called The Wealthy Stoic, A Daily Stoic Guide to Being Rich, Happy, and Free, is all about personal finance and wealth building and how to think about money. But again, not how to just accumulate lots of it, but how to be wealthy, whether you have a lot or a little. And there are plenty of people who have a little and feel quite wealthy and plenty of people who have a lot and feel quite poor, as Seneca himself noted. A lot of Seneca's criticism of wealth, you have to understand, are probably directed at himself first and foremost.

7:12He says, slavery lurks beneath marble and gold. What do you think he's talking about? He must have been talking about his own sense of being less free than he would like to be. I really enjoyed this interview. You know, they don't always go this long. So we're splitting this one up into two. And I think that's a sign that I enjoyed the conversation. And I found Robert to be very fascinating. And I think that you will too. You can grab the Stoic Capitalist, Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious. And you can check out the Wealthy Stoic. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Or if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, you get it.

7:45and all the day of Stoke Courses for free.

7:51Is there anything better than one of those like doorstopper of a biographies of like a great historical figure? You seem like someone who likes those books. I do. I mean, it was critical for me as a kid because it gave me the role models that I absolutely did not have at home. Yeah. And when you dig into like the full life of someone, both what makes them great and their sort of tragic flaws. That's what I'm fascinated by. Yeah. Well, I mean, I was reading these biographies, like I say in the book as sort of how to do it manuals for success in life. You know, how do you get to be powerful and famous?

8:28And once you are that thing, what do you do? What do you do about public service? What do you do about your kids? What do you do about relationships? Did you want to be powerful and famous as a kid? I had no idea. I mean, I just knew I didn't want to be like my parents. Yes, I felt the same way. But I didn't know if it was necessarily possible to be different than your parents. As a kid, every one of my parents' friends had a job, and most of them were civil servants in some form. So the idea of running your own company or being an artist or, I don't know, doing anything other than having a job, I didn't know if that was...

9:04I knew I didn't want to do that, but I didn't know you really could do that. Or read some biographies. Exactly. Get some good ideas. Yes. That's what a biography does, is it gives you a glimpse into another world or another way of going through the world that chances are is very different than your own. Yeah. In my case, radically different. Well, you know, that's how stoicism is founded. Zeno gets this prophecy as a young man that wisdom comes from talking to the dead. and it's only when he suffers this shipwreck and he loses everything, he washes up in Athens and he ends up in a bookstore that he realizes that that's how you talk to the dead.

9:43Ah, yeah. There's a great line that I liked from Seneca where he says, we can't choose our parents. That's given to us by accident, but we can choose whose children we want to be. And that's sort of the same idea. And then Marcus Aurelius starts off meditations with, you know, the people whose lives he's tried to learn from. Well, yeah. I mean, he loses his father as a young man, but he's given this incredible gift of a stepfather who chooses him and he doesn't have to like Antoninus. He doesn't have to learn anything from this person. And like, historically, they should have hated each other.

10:23Like, they should have been at odds with each other. Why do you say that? Well, first off, I guess you'd call this a regent. how often does the prince plot against the regent? This is like the plot of every Shakespearean play or, you know, sort of medieval story. There should have been an assassination attempt or, I mean, most of the Greek myths are like the prince being sent away, you know, to live as a pauper somewhere. Like the idea that these two who are thrown together by fate, Right. Hadrian chooses Antoninus in return that he has to choose Marcus Aurelius. And that the two get along for two decades and learn from each other and love each other and refer to each other as father and son.

11:06I mean, that's pretty unusual. Even in the business world, how often does the CEO's chosen successor get along with, you know, they hate each other by the end. It definitely has stresses associated with the relationship. Yeah. Well, it starts off well. And then in that limbo period, it tends not to go well. I mean, then, and how often even afterwards do they, I mean, this is the story of Disney right now, right? The CEO chooses a successor and then decides they want to come back or disagree. This is a story of Theodore Roosevelt and his successor. It never works, but it did work in this one case.

11:43It's pretty remarkable. Well, it's sort of that stoic idea. Things change and you have to expect them to change. Yes. I always loved that line from Seneca about how we choose who our parents are going to be. And to me, that's the story of mentorship. We can't choose who they're going to be, but we can choose who we wish they were. Yeah, but we can choose additional parents. And I think there is something in what Seneca is talking about that is kind of a quirk of Roman life, which back then, families would often adopt adult children into the family to take over the business. Seneca's brother is adopted by a family and changes his name, and he's in the Bible.

12:26You know, that also embodies an idea of meritocracy that, you know, to me was like a really central American value. And it's a bit under threat. Yeah. Well, I mean, even we have these emperors and kings, generally terrible system. But Rome has sort of five good ones in a row. And the reason it has five good ones in a row is because they each chose their successor. And then the last one that was terrible, and this is on Marcus Aurelius, is his son, Commodus, who's as bad as Joaquin Phoenix's character portrays him to be or even worse. So yeah, nepotism, family business, it doesn't usually work that well.

13:11So when did you come to the Stoics? Because you're clearly pretty well-versed in them. Well, I got into it really through a relationship I developed with a guy called Baruch Fishman, who's one of the leading thinkers in cognitive behavioral therapy. And he kind of introduced me to the Stoics as the intellectual forebears of cognitive theory. and I started reading the Stoics and I realized that this was my natural mode of thought. This was the way I was reacting as a child to the challenges that I was facing. And I couldn't have articulated it in the same way, but it was my natural response. And, you know, I felt like there were lessons here.

14:06I mean, it gave me a framework for taking a very ambitious life in my own case and seeing a pattern where I could hopefully tell stories that could help other people realize their childhood dreams, just as this mode of thought helped me realize mine.

14:35Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Basko County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

15:21We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

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17:37So was it early in life or later in life that you came for the sort of confirmation that stoicism was your sort of mode of thinking? Where are you in life when you go, oh, that's what I've been doing? That was pretty late, actually. That was in the last 15 years or so. Wow. Interesting. Yeah, I do get the sense there's a lot of people who are sort of intuitively stoic or not naturally stoic because that implies they're not consciously doing it. But it is kind of a thing they learn by trial and error. rather than something that in the ancient world you would have been sort of inculcated in and taught from birth.

18:14You sort of figure it out. And then maybe there's something too about the investing world that really either you think this way or you're going to get yourself in trouble. Do you know what I mean? Like the market not caring about you, the market not being in your control, I think does sort of force you to deduce certain stoic lessons if you want to exist and thrive in that world. Yeah, I would agree with that. Although, I mean, for me, it started so much earlier. My early experiences, as I mentioned, were that my mother was a clerk in a drugstore. My father was unemployed. I was totally aware as a six or seven-year-old kid that they were struggling.

19:00They were afraid that their electricity was going to get cut off or their phones were going to get cut off or they couldn't pay the butcher. And, I mean, this was an upsetting thing for a kid. But I had this innate resilience, and I kind of had this idea that, okay, my parents haven't figured out how the world works, and my mother can't deal emotionally with the stresses that she's under. so i've got to figure this out for myself and it's that idea of resilience that idea of self-reliance and that idea of critical thinking yeah because my mother was a communist and the kind of stuff she would say just seemed wrong to me interesting so i kind of took from this sort of set of bad ideas and bad circumstances stuff that was really really useful the idea of critical thinking the idea of self-reliance, the idea of reading biographies.

19:58That was a critical element in my development because, you know, as we said earlier, you can choose who you'd like your parents to be. And if you don't have role models at home, reading biographies and reading them as how to do it manuals for success in life can be transformative for me. Yeah, I just mean, you know, the market isn't good or bad. It just is. And you have to figure out, just like life, like your circumstances aren't, the Stokes would say it weren't actually good or bad. They just were. That's when you were born. That's who your parents were. And you don't control that, but you do control what you make of it, the decisions that you make in response to it, where you go from here.

20:44And I think there is, I just mean from all the different investors and traders I've met over the years, There is something about sometimes the stocks go up, sometimes they go down, sometimes this happens, sometimes that happens. And you just have to figure out what you're going to do because your opinion about it is irrelevant. Whether you like it, whether it's good for your portfolio in the short term or not is irrelevant. It is. Yeah. There's a chapter in the book called Behold the Earthlings. And it deals with the idea of observe the conduct of people in the marketplace. Yeah. You're not judging, oh, this stock is cheap or this asset is rich or you're just looking at how the earthlings are behaving.

21:29Yes. And you're not passing a judgment on it. You're just trying to figure out what they're doing and benefit from trends, get out of the way of things that are going against you, that kind of idea. Yeah, well, the Stokes talk about getting to like Plato's view, like zooming out and seeing it from above, because in the middle of it, it can seem like it's the worst conditions ever, or it can seem like the most exciting lucrative conditions ever. the part of being a good investor, I imagine, is putting aside what everyone else thinks and going to what you think, but then also simultaneously being able to hold in your head, this is what other people think.

22:08And that's why, like the market's not rational either, right? What's that expression about how the market can remain irrational longer than you remain solvent? So just being right also isn't enough. You have to understand other people are wrong. Other people might be in positions of power. This trend might be likely to continue for this amount of time. So the ability to think not just about what you think, but hold in your mind what other people are thinking without letting it change your thinking. Well, the particularly tricky thing about markets is that consensus thinking is by definition wrong at key turning points.

22:49What makes a market top is that everybody is bullish. What makes a market bottom is that everybody is bearish. So you can go along with the crowd and be okay most of the time. But when it really matters, you've got to go against the crowd, be independent. And certain strategies require that. I've always liked that about the Stoics. There's kind of a contrarian streak to that. Yep, absolutely. Like one of the Stoics, Chris Sipp has said, the whole point of being a philosopher is to not be a part of the mob, meaning the rabble, like to not think what everyone else is thinking. And if you are thinking what everyone else is thinking, you're probably not thinking for yourself.

23:30Yeah, I couldn't agree more. How do you manage your emotions, which, you know, Stoics make sound really simple, but it's probably not easy when there's millions or billions of dollars on the line. I mean, you talk about you started your company putting your entire net worth into it. So that's not easy to be like, you win some, you lose some. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down. No, that was a real commitment. You know, there's a chapter in the book that is about when to go all in. Yeah. And it's sort of, it's my story of how I applied the stoic virtue of using rationality to overcome fear, basically.

24:09So in this episode, which was a key turning point in my life, I was starting my own business. I had a gentleman who was putting up the money that I needed to get started. And the conventional way to do it was that the person running the money, or in this case, running the firm, would get 20 % of the profits and have no investment. And he pushed back against that. And I said, okay, I'll put up 100 % of my liquid net worth, which was about$400 ,000. I was 35 years old. That$400 ,000 in those days was the equivalent of about$4 million today. So substantial amount of money. And I said I'd put it all at risk.

24:55And not only would I put it all at risk, but I'd put it at risk in a leveraged way so that I wanted 50 % of the profits, but I would absorb 50 % of the losses. So if he's down 10%, I'm wiped out. And that was the most courageous business decision I've ever made. But it was a triumph of rationality. How so? It seems fundamentally irrational. Well, because if you look at the odds, it looked to me, I felt based on my experience as a pioneer in leveraged buyouts, that there was maybe one chance in three that we could make$100 million out of this original$4 million stake that he was putting up. Again, multiply it by 10 for today's purchasing power.

25:41So I thought there was a one chance in three of that. And by going from a 20 % share, if it worked out, to a 50 % share, that had a mathematical value of an extra$10 million. I thought there was one third chance that I could lose everything. But that had a mathematical value of$167 ,000. So I was looking at$167 ,000 loss versus a$10 million gain. That's the rational calculation. And the rationality trumped the fear in my case. And another thing that the Stoics teach is that if you're afraid of an outcome, it helps to assert rational control. If you think about what's really the worst that can happen?

26:30So, yeah, the worst that could happen in my case, I would have lost all of my liquid assets. But I had some illiquid positions that I thought would eventually turn into cash. I thought I could replace, get back the kind of job or junior partnership that I had at a comparable firm or even return to Oppenheimer, which was where I was leaving. So it didn't seem that bad. By really trying to imagine realistically what the bad outcome looked like, they're not so terrible. I didn't catastrophize. I didn't say, oh my God, I'd be homeless. Oh my God, I'd be destitute. Oh my God, I'd be in my parents' position of not being able to pay the electric bill.

27:11Yeah, we sort of lump all of our fears into this kind of vague dread that we associate almost with death or something. And so we go, I can't do it because the worst case scenario is unthinkable. But the worst case scenario is really just unthinkable because we haven't really thought about it. And then you think about it and you go, yeah, I could just get it, get my job back. I remember when I dropped out of college, I remember as I was thinking about doing it, it's like, if this doesn't work out, I'm going to end up under a bridge somewhere, you know? And someone who was older was like, you know, you can just go back at any time.

27:44Like he was like, he was telling me, he was like, I spent a year of college in the hospital. Like he got some sickness. He's like, so it took me five years to graduate from college. And he's like, it's not once ever come up with anyone. You know, we don't think about the worst case scenario. And so it's unthinkable to us. And then we're not able to balance it out against, as I think you did in this case, the also the rational upside. And we've evolved as a species to prefer the certain win over the possibility of a larger payoff. And particularly if that larger payoff involves taking some risks that you can avoid.

28:25What is that? It's expected return or expected? With the calculation where you go, hey, if there's a 10 % chance of making$100 million, I should spend$10 million to try to get that. Like how investors think about that is really interesting. And obviously the Stoics didn't have the market as we understand it now. So they weren't really doing those math equations. But that math equation is always interesting to me because it's a way to add some rationality to an unpredictable thing, I guess. Well, there's also, I mean, there's a lot of complicated thinking around, even if the odds are in your favor, how big do I bet?

29:03You know, if I said, okay, you can go to Las Vegas and just special day for you. The roulette table is going to pay, instead of 30 to one, it's going to pay 100 to one. The odds are in your favor, big time. Would you bet your whole net worth on it? Hell no, I would think. Yeah, probably not. But how big a bet should you make? Yes. And it's a question to some degree of how many chances you're going to get. You know, if you think you're going to have 100 chances to make this bet, you might do it very differently than if you think you only have one chance in a lifetime. Yeah. And for me, I felt like I was literally dealing with a chance of a lifetime when I started my firm.

29:47I mean, the firm, the point of the firm was really to buy operating businesses in a leveraged way. So put up as little money as we can, borrow as much as we could. And the chance of, I mean, that was an unusual confluence of circumstances where you could buy companies at reasonable prices and get banks or insurance companies to lend you 90%. Yeah. That was not likely to last. Yeah. I mean, either the prices were going to go up or the availability of financing was going to go down. Yeah. But this was a really unusual confluence of circumstances. A moment in time. A moment in time. And I was influenced by the Shakespeare quote from, again, Julius Caesar.

30:31There's a tide in the affairs of men which have taken at the flood leads on to fortune. And I kind of believed that. I thought this was my tide and I better ride it as far and fast as I could. Well, it's funny because you're riding it as far as fast as you can. But there's also something stoic about you're going to do something. You're going to take this bet. I think most people just sort of trust like intuition or gut. And I think what great investors do is they slow things down and they stop. They think not just, hey, should I make this bet? But as you said, mathematically, how big of a bet should I make?

31:04And that ability to kind of challenge your doubts or your fears or your like, obviously, at some level, we all have intuition that's good, but not letting that make you either do something too risky or not risky enough is really interesting. Like the sort of stopping down, hey, I'm going to really look at the odds here. And then once I know the odds, I want to look at what I'm comfortable doing, what's okay to do, what has the most upside, the least downside, that kind of calculation. Again, the Stoics don't explicitly talk about that, but I think that is kind of the idea is to slow it down and really think about it, to put every impression to the test.

31:45There's a line from Epictetus too, where he talks about how if you train enough in the philosophy, you should become like a money changer. And he talked about how in the old days, like they had, you know, coins made of precious metals, but there were counterfeiters then too. And they would try to dilute the metal inside the coin or they'd melt it down and steal some of it. And he said, a great money changer can bang a coin on the table and know from the sound of it alone, whether it's pure or not, whether it's been diluted or not. To me, that's what intuition was really allowing us to do is to sort of, we have these thoughts, we have these opinions, there's this conventional wisdom, and you have the ability to know whether that's true or not, whether that requires further examination or not.

32:28And it's in those things where everyone thinks this, and you actually sense there's something not right about it, or you sense there's more here, that there is the opportunity of a lifetime here. Developing that kind of intuition to know when to delve into something or really get to the bottom of it. I like that. But intuition sort of implies that it's a kind of an inbred quality. To me, it's more the habit of critical thinking, of not absorbing beliefs just because it's what you read in the Times, or it's not just because it's what your parents are telling you, or not just it's the consensus of your friends.

33:04But subjecting almost everything you hear to kind of critical thought. Yeah. And to me, that is like so central and was kind of why I started Open to Debate as a philanthropic initiative was the idea that our world needed something like this, needed a place where people could talk about contentious issues in a civil way, where an audience could listen to both sides because it's something that you rarely get. And by listening to both sides and listening respectively and thinking about the facts, you're both coming to better conclusions about contentious issues, but you're also exercising a part of your mind that is incredibly important.

34:01we just took our kids to an outdoor performance the nutcracker they had a snow cone and then uh they went insane in the car ride home and one of the things i try to remind myself when that's happening is that i don't control my kids behavior especially when they're too far gone like that but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

34:37Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

35:19And daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

35:33Intuition is based on experience, having been exposed to lots of things like this before. Like someone gave me a report the other day, they were pulling some data. I was like, pulled this thing. And they're like, okay, there was a thousand or something. And I was like, no, there's not. And they were like, how do you know? I was like, I just know that's bullshit. I don't know what the actual number is, but I'm telling you there's some problem with how that segment was pulled. I know that it's higher. I don't know why I know, but, and so they went back and of course it was higher. And it's just because I pulled many versions of similar reports before.

36:05And so I have a vague sense of the parameters where it probably should be. Now, one time out of 10, maybe it'll turn out that I'm actually incorrect and that is correct. But that sense of, I think, being good at sussing out things that are obviously incorrect, things that don't add up, or being able to spot bullshit, these are really good skills. Yes. And I think they're going to be especially important in an age of artificial intelligence, where I think people are thinking like these large language learning models are going to be the magic. And actually, they're just going to dilute everyone in more information and more data.

36:43And some of it's going to be good and some of it's not going to be good. And if you're not able to sift through what's good and not good, true or not true, you're just going to get eaten alive. Like you already have, like, you know what I mean? People who are susceptible to bullshit are going to be victimized, misled, overwhelmed. And yeah, developing that ability to see through things to me is a really important trait. That's the definition of critical thinking. Yep. I'm kind of a relentless techno optimist. Yeah. I'm really excited about what AI can do for human productivity. Oh, I am too. I'm just saying that it'll be great for people who know how to work with tools and know how to add human wisdom and critical thinking on top of it.

37:30And people who think that it's just going to do stuff for them and they don't have to think about this anymore, you're going to get in a lot of trouble. Yeah. You know? I mean, even like in the world of writing, like it can do a pretty good job writing stuff, but it can't do a great job. And so the ability to go from good to great, that's the skill. So if you're average, I think these things are going to be hard for you. I'm going to share with you after the program something that I think you'll get a kick out of. Okay. Which is I fed into ChatGPT the entire manuscript of this book. Nothing else, just the manuscript.

38:05And I said, write a review of this book in the style of the Wall Street Journal was uncannily good. Were you doing that in the feedback phase or are you doing it just to see what it would look like? No, the book was done. I mean, I was just playing around with AI. Yeah, yeah. No, I think the ability to use tools is our, that's the superpower of humans. You could have done that while the manuscript was still being written. Yeah. And then anticipated criticisms and then address them in the book. Like to me, that's what it's going to be usable for. I mean, AI wasn't even quite at its stage then, but yes, that would have been very helpful.

38:45Are you going to do that in your next book? So my next book opens with this story from Seneca, where Seneca talks about this wealthy Roman who wanted to be seen as very smart. And so instead of doing the work, you know, reading a bunch of books, getting teachers, whatever, he purchases this group of very educated slaves. Each one a master of the Odyssey, another a master of the poetry plays. And then he would just have these servants whisper in his ear whenever he needed to like answer a question or entertaining guests at a dinner party. And, you know, he thinks he's getting away with it. I'm sure you've met people who have done the equivalent that, you know, you make a bunch of money and then you want to impress people at parties and you want to be cultured and smart.

39:31And so he thinks he's getting away with it until one of his friends comes up to him and says, this is a wonderful party. You know, have you thought about becoming a wrestler? and he says, a wrestler? I'm an old man. And he says, oh, but your slaves are so young. And Seneca's lesson from this story is that no one becomes wise without doing a lot of work, that it's hard, it's difficult. And if you think there's a shortcut, if you think there's a secret, if you think there's a hack, if you think there's this tool, this AI thing is gonna magically make you amazing at something, you're not just fooling yourself, you're fooling yourself in a way that people have fooled themselves for thousands of years.

40:11Yeah, no, I totally agree. There's a chapter in the book called Get Rich Slowly. Yeah. And it really, I mean, I think you can get rich quick if you're lucky, but it's a lot wiser to plan on doing it slowly. Yeah. It's true. There are no shortcuts. There are ways of doing things a lot more efficiently. Yes. One of the stoic principles that really is very important in my life is controlling your time. realizing that time is our most precious resource and using it very, very consciously to live a purposeful life and not just fritter time away. Yeah, there's always things that you can do to be smarter, faster, better.

40:57But if you think you can skip ahead, you're going to get yourself in trouble. Like there's a Zen story about this kid. He goes to this master and he says, how long will it take to be a master? And he says, you know, 10 years. And he goes, okay, well, I'm going to work really hard and really fast. This is my main thing. How long will it take? And he says, 15 years. And he goes, no, no, no, you don't understand. I'm going to be super committed. I'm going to work super hard. I'm going to do this extra fast. How long? And he says, okay, 30 years. You know, if you think you can speed it up or that you can get something for nothing, it's going to take you longer than the person who is just, I think, willing to sit down and do the work and, you know, trust the process as opposed to try to outsmart or outmaneuver the process.

41:44Now you've got to be, at least what worked for me is being a serious student of anything I was trying to do. Yes. And, you know, just learning from people I met, or if I go into some new business, learning as much as I could about it. The biggest business I built in my lifetime was this company, Delphi Insurance Company, and there's a chapter about that. But I was actively studying who succeeded most in the insurance business and how. And I was actively studying what's the culture of a successful enterprise. And it was a totally different model. I was using the Rand Corporation, where I had defense intellectual place as a model for culture while I was using a very successful insurance company as a model for strategy.

42:34But the point was I was approaching it as a student. Yes. And in my whole life, I think what's worked for me is I approach almost everything I do, that's particularly anything new, as a student. I want to learn. Well, that's where ego gets you in trouble, especially if you have already succeeded at something, is that it makes you think that you know everything or that you're just naturally brilliant. And that makes it hard for you to learn and understand a new domain because you're not coming to it as a student. Like Epictetus' line was, you can't learn that what you think you already know. And so if you go into it and you have a humility and an openness, you can get better and you can take in new information.

43:18But if being a know-it-all is a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that it becomes impossible for you to know anything more, whereas the student can always learn more. There's a bit in Spinoza where he talks about self-esteem and he says rational self-esteem is really the golden mean here. If you overestimate your abilities, you're going to make rash decisions. You'll do heedless things. If you underestimate your ability, you'll demand less of yourself in life. You'll be an underachiever. So it's that if your self-esteem arises from the opinion of others, that's a very fragile basis for it as well.

44:09But if your self-esteem is rational. Like based on evidence. Exactly. that is what you should be striving for. Yeah. I like to say, I don't believe in myself. I have evidence. And that belief in yourself to me is dangerously close to ego or delusion, you know, and this is why it's important to go out and do things like to, to try hard things, to have hobbies, to get out of your comfort zone is, is you're, you're not just developing a competency in whatever you're doing, you're also just developing competency and evidence of your own ability to start at something poorly and end up proficient at it.

44:51And that's probably why when you went all in on your business, it wasn't even so much the math that worked out, but your understanding that even if you did end up destitute, you still had skills and traits and relationships that you could build upon and use. You know what I mean? Like you can lose everything, but they can't take away from you your determination, your creativity, you know, your ability to learn. All these, those are sort of priceless attributes. A little bit of a controversial take here, but I think you might have an interesting take on it. I think Epictetus is the wealthiest of the Stoics.

45:37even though he's literally the poorest. Seneca talked a good game about these things, but at the end of the day, he's Rome's richest man or second richest man. And clearly some level of the desire to live the high life makes him complicit and caught up in Nero's regime. But Epictetus has a self-sufficiency to him. His desires are low enough that he's wealthy and can satisfy his needs, whatever his bank balance is. There's a story about Epictetus. A man breaks into his house and steals his prized possession, this lamp that he has, a silver lamp. And Epictetus says, no, it was on me. You can only lose what you have.

46:30And he goes the next day and he buys an earthenware lamp, like a clay lamp. His point being, you know, the less I have, the less can be stolen from me. And I think, I just think in that way, Seneca was afraid to lose his power and influence and money. And in a way, this costs him his freedom and his dignity. What do you think about that? Well, you probably know Seneca better than I do, but to me, at least what I took from reading Seneca was that, I mean, I was fascinated that he was the richest man by repute in Rome. So, and of course, Marcus Aurelius was emperor when he wrote Meditation. So I love the idea that Stoic philosophy was coming from people who were right at the very top and from the very bottom.

47:20of the society and it was the ideas that really mattered rather than where they were. But it seemed to me that Seneca was sort of saying that wealth could be an asset if it enables you to live a richer and fuller life. Sure. That material abundance can be an element of joy, can open up possibilities for you in life that are absolutely enriching. But it could also be a source of jealousy. It can be a source of fear that you're going to lose what you've got. And it's all in the way we think about it. If we think about material wealth in a positive and constructive way, it can be a very good thing.

48:06But if you think about it again as kind of jealousy, comparing yourself to other people, fear of loss, that it can be a bad thing. So it's, again, it's a stoic idea about it's not the thing in itself, but it's the way we interpret it. Yeah. Seneca has an interesting definition of poverty. He says it's not having too little, it's wanting more. Now, obviously there is such a thing as real poverty, but I imagine you've met some very poor rich people. For sure. Who have an inability to be satisfied. There's never enough, or they are endlessly comparing themselves to other people. Well, it's also a question of, I mean, my notion, at least of the well-lived life sort of sees money as a, or wealth as a means to an end.

48:58It's not an end in and of itself. It might enable you to hang out with people that you're going to learn from in politics or learn from in culture. I mean, in my case, one of the most satisfying things that financial success led to was the ability to be philanthropic. Because that seemed to me a fundamental idea of the well-lived life. But I took from my biographical role models like Carnegie and Rockefeller, the idea that philanthropy was not just writing a check. It was trying to build the institutions or create the institutions that you thought the society needed. Well, that's a hugely satisfying thing to do, but you need money to do it.

49:43Can wealth become an end to itself for some people? Like the things you own end up owning you. Seneca talks about how sometimes slavery lurks beneath marble and gold. You know, you have these expensive things and then you're worried about losing them. People buy a multimillion dollar house and then spend millions more renovating it and decorating it and showing off. Like how easily does the wealth become almost a full-time job for people? Well, I mean, it can definitely be that. And, you know, I think wealth should be a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. And one of the lessons that I took, I mean, when I was reading all these biographies, I mean, a lot of these people, like when I think of Carnegie Rockefeller, Joe Kennedy, those were three that I talk about in the biography section, they were called robber barons.

50:39And to me, I mean, again, applying critical thinking, I thought of them as kind of heroes. They built great American industry, not Kennedy so much, but Rockefeller and Carnegie. But they also established what I thought was a great American tradition of philanthropy and this kind of active philanthropy, not just giving to poor people, but creating institutions in a society. And that gave them an opportunity to use their talents and their abilities for the greater good. And it's a basic stoic precept of Marcus Aurelius that, you know, we should act for the benefit of society. And to me, these guys were exemplars of doing that.

51:23So wealth is not a goal. Wealth is a tool that can help you achieve a well-lived life if you're being conscious. Marcus Reelius, obviously a very wealthy man, you know, he talks about one of the things he learned from his mother, which I always thought was interesting. He says, my mother, her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to not do wrong, but to not conceive of it. And the simple way she lived, not in the least like the rich. But then he says he sort of gives his definition of wealth at the end where he thanks the gods for the sort of breaks that he gets in life.

51:59And it would be different, you know, inheriting an enormous fortune. It's not like he built a huge business or even ran for office. So I think he had maybe a greater sense than some people do today of the role that fortune had played in the fortune that he had, right? Which I think is great. Sometimes people are born on third base and then congratulate themselves for hitting a home run, as they say. But he says that whenever I felt like helping someone who was short of money or otherwise in need, that I never had to be told that I had no resources to do it with. And I was never put in that position of having to take something from someone else.

52:38I just think that's a great definition of wealth, to be able to be self-sufficient and not need to rely on the resources of others. So you're not a burden to anyone. And at the same time, to be free to help as many people as you see fit because you have an excess of resources yourself. That, to me, is a great way to think about it. You also made an interesting distinction between people who inherit wealth and people who create wealth. Yeah. And it's just a fact that I thought was kind of interesting that the philanthropists in America who've given more than a billion dollars away all made their money themselves.

53:18People with inherited wealth, they sort of feel, well, this is given to me and I have sort of an obligation to give it to my children. They're a steward of this fortune. You could think of them as stewards. You could think of that or they could think of it as sort of I have something that I don't quite deserve. But people who've built fortunes by building businesses, I think, have contributed in a very meaningful way to society. They don't have to give anything back, quote unquote. Right. Because they pay a lot of people's salaries and yeah. To build a successful business, you have to contribute something to society.

53:58But you also feel like you've earned the money and that you can do with it what you think is right. It doesn't come with a burden of, you know, my parents gave me this and therefore I have to give my children that. Yeah. And there's probably also hopefully an understanding that they made this. they can keep making money. Like an entrepreneur or an investor is maybe hopefully less, has less of a worldview that thinks there's a finite amount or that it's a set amount. I mean, like Warren Buffett has obviously given billions of dollars away, but his sort of net worth seems to remain stubbornly around the same number because he's so good at what he does.

54:46And he made these decisions a long time ago that continue to pay off. For sure. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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