Wisdom Takes Work: Ryan Holiday on What AI Can’t Teach You

27:38It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at Alcantra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

27:55So I have started many companies. Some did well, some did not do as well. I've also run many companies. I've advised many companies and I've been involved in all aspects of the hiring process, whether sometimes I would have to hire a CEO, but sometimes software developers, sometimes designers, sometimes head of sales or business development. I've been involved in basically every aspect of running a business and hiring is maybe the most important thing you could do when you start a business. So I'm going to give you one piece of advice and it's related to what I'm talking about here. You know, I used to think I was frugal because I would try to find employees as cheaply as possible.

28:34You know, someone young, just starting out, whatever. But what I've learned is you do so much better as a business finding the best person in your field. If you want a head of sales, find the best head of sales. If you want a software developer, hire the best software developer. It ultimately will save you money, but it'll also save you so much time, so much aggravation, so much anxiety. These are all things you need to preserve. It's really important to hire correctly. When you're running a business, your mind is on your business 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That's the problem with being an entrepreneur is you never leave the work at the office.

29:10So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. I have found that a great hiring partner is LinkedIn jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. And I find this is such a great platform to find people for your job because millions of people are on LinkedIn, millions of qualified people. Here's how it works. You post your job. LinkedIn's new feature helps you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people.

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30:17You can post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

30:55and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates at the end of the day. The most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates. And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature that's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free terms and conditions apply i wonder how much wisdom is a talent in the sense that like so i was once talking to eric adams who for better for worse became mayor of new york city and look whether or not he did a good job or a bad job who knows there's been a lot of good mayors of new york and a lot of bad mayors and he saw new york through a difficult time obviously now he's going to be gone this is before he was mayor i was having this conversation with him he was telling me how when he was like 12 or 13 i forget the exact age 13 14 he and his brother got severely beaten by the police and probably you know the implication was some it was there was some racial issue to it and they were both around the same age he and his brother but they both reacted very differently his brother went off to whatever he didn't describe specifically, but up to no good.

32:20And Eric went on to become a very successful leader of Brooklyn. He became also successful. He became a policeman afterwards and became an advocate for getting rid of corruption in the police. So he was very much not liked in the police because he was policeman against all the corruption. Then he became a very successful leader of Brooklyn, then mayor of New York. And how does one person, same background, same upbringing, similar genes. One person goes one way after a horrific event and another person goes another way. And I now argue in your book, Abraham Lincoln, you talk about in this book and many other books, he comes out of the worst conditions.

32:57Many people come out not Abraham Lincoln and he comes out Abraham Lincoln. What's the difference? Well, I think that's a great question is what lesson are you going to learn from this? Right. And I was just thinking about Lincoln, as you said this, there's a version when life kicks the shit out of you, when you come from nothing, it's hard. You're having to fight to survive. The world is indifferent to you. There's a version of Abraham Lincoln's life where he becomes a self-made lawyer, and then he owns a bunch of slaves who work his plantation, and that's the source of his wealth and success.

33:35One of the reasons he was so sympathetic to slavery, he said, was that he had grown up a slave. Like his father had worked him in the fields and beaten him and seen him as an extension of himself. And so you could just as easily, though, see not taking empathy out of that, but as a this is how the world works, right? Somebody, the person who is hazing you at your new job or the school you just started at almost certainly was hazed, right? And so that's often how cycles go. And so the question is like, what lesson are you going to take from this experience, the right one or the wrong one? And I do think oftentimes there is a right one and a wrong one.

34:16And yeah, maybe the sort of swing vote there is wisdom. But then how do you develop it that young? Like, that was why I'm asking, is it a talent to be wise? Well, I think it's a talent. I often think it's a result of the influences that you have, right? And I think one of the reasons that, like, look, maybe you have perfect parents and you're surrounded by all the right people who are able to inject right at the right moment that little bit of wisdom or guidance that you need that helps you go the right way instead of the wrong way. Hopefully you're lucky and that's who you were born with, right?

34:52But if you weren't, now it's kind of a roll of the dice. And I think what happens for someone like Lincoln is he has a bunch of parents other than his father, right? And that is the books that he was eagerly digesting. And people knew that if there was a book within a two-day walk of the Lincoln cabin, Lincoln was going to come and get it and read it. We can trace many of the beliefs that he had down not just to books generally, but to these specific kind of school books that were called readers back then And it would kind of just be like a greatest hits book of quotes and passages from poetry and stories from history.

35:34Like a bunch of Lincoln's beliefs can be traced back to like very specific books that we know he read as a kid in his log cabin. And so, I mean, I think obviously I learned some stuff from my parents. But one of the reasons that I think I went the right way when different juncture points in my life is that I'd been exposed to these great ideas in books, like some of the wisest men and women that had ever lived, some of the most impressive people that ever lived. I was able to access their wisdom and perspective at a very early age. And so when I had experiences or pivot points in my life, I wasn't just trusting my own gut and I wasn't just relying on my dad or my mom's advice, but I was able to think about what Lincoln had done and all these other people.

36:23That is really what the power of books allow us to do, to have more than one life of experience to draw from. So now, and I don't know what the stats are, if people are reading more every year than the year before, it almost doesn't matter to me because I sort of feel like people are probably reading less. Now, maybe the stats are people are reading more books, but they might, I don't know, maybe they're romance novels. It just seems to me like it's natural if you have ai and and non-stop inundation of text from from twitter and other places you would read less books so what's going to happen to the next generation which are they not going to have the opportunity to read about lincoln and i already noticed this by the way that young people have much less knowledge of the history of the areas even areas that they love than people our age.

37:14No, I think about this with my kids because I get it. It's like I'm trying to tell them some story from history. It's just not as interesting as a Mr. Beast video. That video, in the same way that broccoli is just not as good as some genetically engineered for taste bag of Doritos. This is not a fair fight. And so, yeah, I think that's a huge problem. At the same time, you think about it historically, books have stood up pretty well over 3 ,000-ish years. So I think things come and go from ways. That is one thing you have a sense of in history, is just how many moments everyone was despairing over the loss of this or that.

37:59And when you zoom out long enough, things stay relatively stable, or there's some new equilibrium that gets reached. So I just try to think about like with my kids, at least there's like, you know, like audio books are a thing that we couldn't listen to in the car when I was a kid because like it didn't exist, you know? And then later in my early adulthood, it was hugely inconvenient because if you wanted to listen to a 300 page book, it was like 12 CDs or something. And now it's just like, I can just pull it up on my phone. Or I can do voice-to-text articles that I want them to hear. So I just try to actively counteract whatever this sort of impulse of culture is.

38:48And then try to use the new technologies, whether we're talking about AI or whatever, and go, okay, how do we use this to increase? Like if we just read a book, we just talked about something, and now we have questions. Let's get in a debate or a discussion with ChatGPT about it and see if we agree with their take or not. And then I'm also teaching them how to use the tools at the same time. Yeah, it's interesting because at the same time, the evidence might suggest to them that the tools we have available, like the Mr. V's video versus reading about Lincoln, are better for them. Because guess what?

39:26In almost every era of life, the new generation is better and smarter than us. Yeah. If you look at any TikTok video, they obviously play musical instruments far better than any. So many kids play the piano better than the best pianists of the 20th century ever could have possibly imagined. Like somehow or other, they are getting wisdom from the tools in front of them, even if it's not the wisdom the way we might have gotten it. Like they're getting knowledge, wisdom, skills that far surpass us. Just seems to me. Yeah, and what I try to do is like, okay, so you just watch this Mr. Beast video where he travels here.

40:05Like, let's go there. You know, like whenever my kids are expressing an interest in something instead of judging it or shutting it down, I want to go towards that. Because to me, not only is that a source of connection, but again, I want to teach them this meta skill of like curiosity is the beginning of a conversation or it's the beginning of a process and you don't know where it's going to end up, but it could change your life. Well, that leads into my next thing, which is that let's say you're listening to this podcast or video or however you listen to this. Everybody thinks they're wise. I think I'm wise.

40:41You think you're wise. We all think we're wise. But setting that aside for a second, how can we practice wisdom, whether you're five years old or 95 years old? How can I myself practice having more wisdom? Well, you know, just to go to what we were just talking about, but it just occurred to me, I was driving my boys to school this morning and my son goes, I want to listen to a podcast about the history of Disneyland. Now that's like not something I'm interested in at all, but I was like, fuck yeah, dude, you know, like let's figure this out. And not only are we listening to it, but we're critiquing the podcast of the, you know, it's like, who's making a, whatever the first one I pull up on Spotify is not necessarily going to be of the highest quality.

41:22So we're not just listening to it and thinking about what we can learn and maybe there's books or whatever, but we're also like, hey, what do we like about this? What do we dislike about this? And so I think understanding that knowledge is this conversation, like that's what they often call philosophy, the great conversation, that it's this sort of thing that goes back, that you're kind of arguing and discussing and debating with Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and Marcus Rius and Seneca, that that's like a big part of it. I like that a lot. But I guess when I tried to build the book around was this idea that there's a handful of just basic skills that if you can pick up, you're going to accumulate wisdom over time.

42:04Asking questions is one. Reading is one. Obviously, travel is a big one. Studying history is a big one. Mentors and apprenticeships, that's a big one. And people might go, oh, that's so basic. Everyone knows that. But I mean, to go to your point about statistics, most people don't read, right? Most people don't have a mentor. Most people stop going to school as soon as they graduate from high school or college. These are like little decisions that if you make and you practice them over the course of a life, you will get very far. And I think this is important. Again, wisdom isn't something you arrive at.

42:42If you start walking towards the horizon, you will never reach it, right? Because it doesn't actually exist. You're never going to touch it. However, you walk for an hour, then you look back behind you, you will have covered a significant amount of ground. You will know, you can objectively see that you are further along than when you started. You're never going to arrive, but you've covered distance. And so if you can pick up these kind of basic practices, and you can do them day in and day out, or week in or week out, you're going to end up somewhere very far from where you started. And by the way, we're all lucky in that we've started much further along than the generation before, and the generation before and the generation before.

43:24Why do you say that? Because we have more books and information we have access to? I just mean, sometimes you read some of the stuff from the ancient philosophers and you go, oh, the reason we think this person's so smart is literally no one had ever thought of this before. But like, we know a little bit. Our baseline of knowledge is high. It's like the standing on shoulders of giants thing. Right. By the way, I love that question your kid asked. Can we listen to a podcast on the history of Disneyland? Because instead of just saying, so obviously he loves Disneyland. You've probably taken him there.

43:57You've had a fun time. But now he wants to know the history of it. And the history of it, by the way, is dark. Walt Disney wants to create this utopia. And it's both dark and playful, but it's got to be fun for kids. And so understanding kind of the deeper philosophies behind the creation of Disneyland. And also there's Disney's both failure and success as a businessman. His first one or two companies ended in bankruptcy, but he had this vision, he had this belief in animation and so on. Like that story is an intricate, complicated, nuanced story with a lot of questions about the philosophy and so on.

44:36So this is a great topic, by the way. Yeah. It's like, look, when you read history or biography, you pick up a biography of Walt Disney. You're learning about this man, but you're also learning about the psychology of that man. You're learning about the era that he lived in. You're learning about all the people that intersected his life. You're learning about business. You're learning about art. You're learning about management. That's the other thing I would say. I don't talk about this in the book, but I do think people don't read enough history and they don't read enough biography. They read too much either contemporary stuff or they read too much secondary stuff and not enough kind of primary deep dives into topics and people that allow them to then go off in all these different directions.

45:24yeah yeah i i agree and i think there's one great benefit of youtube which is that if you're not a reader there's all sorts of analysis and synopses of different periods in history like i'm probably never going to read a book about world war one i have no interest in it but i also realized recently i have no clue what world war one was i have no clue you probably have read books about it and you know i have no clue why what world one was fought over you think of world war ii you can come up with various stories okay it was fought over to stop the holocaust from happening it was fought over because hitler was evil and was going to take over all europe and japan was going to take over all of asia so we were fighting this fascism i have no clue i have no story or narrative at all about world war one so i'm not going to read a book because i'm just not interested.

46:14But I would watch an hour-long video or even a 20-minute video just to get a sense of it and try to understand a little bit more. So there's other things now too. No, of course. You can go watch video of soldiers in World War I. That's incredible. The access that we now have to things, just basically every book that's ever been published is available. like every video that's ever been shot is available. And that's a pretty incredible gift. I mean, the curse is that it's impossible to make your way through all of it. But I just think as a general policy, when you have that sort of flicker of interest, do you have the skills to satiate it, right?

46:59Like I know, because I know you, I know there's a bunch of things that you've been vaguely interested in that you went and figured it out. you know, stand-up comedy, chess. You're like, oh, I'm interested in that. I want to know more. I want to give it a try. Like, it's easy to take for granted knowing how to do that. And then you meet people and you realize they don't even know where or how to start with something like that. And this is where the doing versus reading is really important. You could read 24 hours a day about stand-up comedy and watch every stand-up comedian and you'll become proficient in the way that an academic becomes proficient.

47:38But so you could argue, well, this comedian is different and this comedian has this point of view and these techniques are being used. You could say all these things, but doing something is really, really hard. Doing something hard is because it's painful. You have to have, I feel like there's an element of pain in wisdom because in order to avoid that pain, you got to do it again and again and again welcoming the pain and then somehow getting to the other side of it, which is, you know, I'm not just stand up comedy is actually the weirdest thing to say, oh, I experienced pain over humor, but whether it's becoming a success in business, whether it's writing a book, as you know, writing a book is a painful experience.

48:22You have to do something very unnatural. You have to sit down for a year or more and type, use the skill called typing, which didn't even exist 100 years ago. After the first half a million years of our species' existence, there was no such thing as typing. And it's painful. Nobody likes doing it. But you have to do it in order to really get the nuances and the subtleties, which I guess is part of the wisdom. Well, the subtitle of the book is Learn, Apply, Repeat, because I think these things are related. So you read about something. I was actually just reading this essay that David McCullough, the biographer, wrote.

48:56And he was talking about how he learned And the night that Truman became president, the night that FDR died, he's meeting with some senators and he gets this message that, you know, he's needed at the White House. They don't tell him, you know, what it is. And he has to go get his hat from his office and then head over to the White House. And he famously doesn't know why he's being called, but he feels like it's important and he just starts running. And so they know the exact way he ran to his office and then to the White House. Right. Right. And so McCullough doesn't just hear about this. He actually puts out a request to the Senate archive or something, and they allow him to retrace the steps where Truman goes.

49:39And he runs it. And he was talking about what he learned actually doing it. He was like, for instance, there's a lot more steps than I would have thought, like stairs. And he's like, it made me understand that Truman was in better shape than I would have guessed. Right. And you're like, oh, okay. So he had this little bit of knowledge and then he had to apply it. He had to go take it into the physical world. And what happened when he did that was he learned another bit of knowledge that informed what he wrote about. And then you could say that he probably also took from this, oh, it's not just enough to hear something.

50:18You have to go physically experience it where you can because it informs the writing. And then, you know, this getting meta on top of meta, I'm in the middle of this biography I'm writing. I'm like, oh shit, now I have to go physically do a lot more things than I was planning on physically doing for this book. But I think McCullough is probably right here. And there's going to be things that I can't learn from books that I'm going to have to go see firsthand. Well, and this is something, you know, I read Bob Carroll's autobiography on your recommendation, actually. It was one of the books you most recommended.

50:58The LBJ series? No, not the LBJ series. His memoir about writing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That, for me, is his best book, actually. Of course. Like, I love the LBJ books. I love The Power Broker. But seeing his experiences writing The Power Broker and writing that. So in the book Working, he describes how he moved to LBJ's. He moved to Johnsonville. Yeah. Yeah. Which was like the tiniest town in the world. Everyone was like a cousin of each other. And then there's him in there. And through that, he gained so much knowledge about LBJ by doing. And again, it came from your recommendation. I wouldn't have known about the book otherwise.

51:35That book was such a great book about writing and about studying history and studying people. I really loved it. But you're going to have to do this when you write about Stockdale. What are you going to do? I know. No, I am. I've already done some of this stuff. But yeah, you're going to have to physically go and do the stuff. And it would be nice if there was a shortcut. And there are some things that can make it better. But for the most part, there's no substitute for doing the hard thing. And I think that's why we know who McCullough and Bob Caro and Walter Isaacson, another historian, that's why we know who they are.

52:10Because they've done this. They've written these books that have stood out among all the other books. There's tons of books about LBJ. tons of books about Truman, but these historians have stood out in some way because of these extra things. I'm just realizing now as I talk to you about it. So that's the way to stand out because no one else is going to run up and down the steps that Truman ran. They're just going to sit at home and ask AI, give me a bio of Truman. I'm going to rewrite it as a biography. Yes. No, no, that's exactly right. I think some of this stuff isn't explicit. He doesn't actually tell you that he did it, but you can feel it in the writing that there's just a level of authenticity and realism to it that I don't think you can get any other way, not accurately at least.

52:57Yeah. So that's interesting. So what made you decide Stockdale? Well, to go to the point about growing and trying hard things, my books are all different from each other, but especially these last four that I just did being part of a series, there was a formula and a style that I've gotten really good at and really comfortable with. And so I was just thinking, what's something I've never done before that I could try that even if I fail at, I will grow as a writer and as a person for having done. And I already, you know, I'm about maybe 30 % done with the first draft right now. I could quit right now and the project would be a huge success.

53:42Not like, it's not publishable, but like, I have gotten much better. I've learned a bunch of stuff. I've had to figure out a bunch of stuff. I've changed my process. I've had to read hundreds and hundreds of letters. I've never had to, I don't use letters in my books. On my book about Peter Thiel, I had to figure out how to digest a bunch of legal documents. Well, this is the first one where I've had to do interview transcripts. I've had to do my own interviews. and then I've had to process lots of sort of, we had to go through the archives. A bunch of his archives are at Stanford. And so we've just gone through hundreds, if not thousands of pages of letters and orders and all these things.

54:23So I struggled with how to make sense of it all and the depth that like this book, it's just gonna be longer and harder and different than anything I've done before. And so I'm having to challenge myself and I'm just genuinely loving it. yeah like when i think of you i think of like your biggest mentor obviously has been robert green author of 48 laws of power mastery seduction all these all these great brilliant books and a lot of your books have not the exact format i would say he's very different in some ways but a similar format where you have this theme and then historical stories and examples that ride through that theme and and also you've co-written books like your recent book with george raveling like just like Robert Greene with 50 Cent.

55:08So you've co-written books with others, but this is the first book. If you're writing this biography of Stockdale, I don't think Robert Greene has written a history or a biography of someone. No, and I'm having to find new mentors, right? Because obviously Robert's a great writer. He's taught me a lot. And if I had questions, he would be very helpful. There are things that I want to know how to do that he's not the right person for me to ask. And so not only am I sort of having to ask lots of questions to other people, I'm even looking for like a new, a different kind of editor. My editors at the imprint that I'm at, they don't specialize in this kind of book either.

55:48And so I'm having to kind of adjust my team and my sort of board of advisors, if you will, to be better suited for the type of thing I'm building here. Yeah, that's interesting. So what are you doing? Who's your mentors in this now? Well, I've been slowly interviewing. I interviewed Ron Chernow a couple months ago. I'm doing a thing with Doris Kearns Goodwin in California in February. I got to ask her some questions. I'm just asking questions from people. I'm obviously reading all of their books. And then I'm in the middle right now of vetting different. I'm bringing on an additional kind of editor or coach, as I was saying.

56:29I could figure it out on my own or I could try to get away with not having one. I want to bring on someone who's worked with a bunch of writers that I would say are a caliber above me so I can aspire to get where they are. Right now, I think you have the ideal life. You're living a couple of miles outside of Austin. You've got a bookstore. When I visited, there was a lot of people there. like it's a popular bookstore, even though it's like 30 miles outside of Austin, you do your podcast there. Then you've been, you've written these last, what is it now? Like eight books, nine, more than that, because you have kind of the summary books too.

57:09You have like 10 books or more on stoicism. And obviously you've achieved a lot of success as a writer. Would you say the success you've had as a writer is more or less than the ancillary success that came from writing about stoicism. So you asked to speak at a lot of places. You're probably a consultant for a lot of places. Which has actually generated more money? That's a good question. I don't know. Books have sold very well, something like 10 million copies now in 30 or something languages. So I could probably just live on that. I mean, I could definitely just live on the royalties at this point.

57:45But I kind of think about the books as being the entry point into the universe. and at the same time also funding other people to discover the work. So, you know, that's what we do on social media. That's what we do on the podcast. That's what we do on YouTube. So I kind of just think about it as this like universe of stuff. So my main thing is I like writing, like writing books. But to go to your point earlier, I understand that most of the population doesn't wake up and go, I want to read a bunch of books today, right? Like it just doesn't fit well in their life. And so I try to translate what I do into these other mediums just in the same way that the books get translated into other languages.

58:28So I kind of think about it as all like feeding into the same place. The nice part about speaking or consulting and other things is that a video is free for everyone. A speech is usually paid for by 0.0001 % of the population. that is, you know, like I spoke to this large company yesterday, this large parent company that is, you know, has, I don't know, let's say 100 ,000 employees. So I spoke to just 30 CEOs inside that parent company, right? And so obviously, they're able to pay a lot of money because, you know, they have billions of dollars in revenue. And that's able for me to fund a lot of the other stuff that I do because it allows me to give away a lot of stuff for free, I guess is what I'm saying.

59:19You don't really separate it out as sources of income. It's all part of the same machine. Yeah, it's the basic marketing funnel, which you know all about. The purpose of all of it is to make more stuff. I remember Casey Neistat said that to me once. He was like, we don't make stuff to make money. We make money to make stuff. That's what an artist does. And that's kind of how I think about it. I love that quote. And that quote is very Casey Neistat. Yes. And like, okay, so what, he's an interesting case is that I don't really hear as much about him now as I did 10 years ago. And obviously everyone's, including my own, like everyone's career arc is different.

59:54What's Casey doing now? He's been on my podcast twice, but not in the past 10 years. I was just in New York doing the launch of Wisdom and we went for a run across the Brooklyn Bridge at like six in the morning. It was lovely. It's interesting that you say you haven't heard from him in a while. I bet if you pulled up like his YouTube feed, you'd be like, wow, these things are doing more views than ever. Which is exactly, I think, the point that we opened with, which is like, it feels like the field is much, much bigger. So it's harder to keep track of everyone. But also the audience is much, much bigger.

1:00:29So you could not be getting the same share of attention, but actually be doing better than you've ever done before. And so I think, as far as I know, is stuff is still crushing. It's great. I watch it when I can. But it's just not, like the internet is not this, small town that it was for a short period of time. Yeah. Well, look, Ryan Holiday, you know, I think this must be like the, at least the 15th or 16th time you've been on the podcast. Cause you, I know you were on the podcast for every single book ever since the beginning. And you've also come on a whole bunch of other times whenever we've just wanted to chat.

1:01:08Basically every time we wanted to have a conversation, I would say, let's just put it on the podcast. We very rarely had a conversation outside of the podcast. Well, I think that's a function of one, you having one of the longest running podcasts that I know about. Two, I've written way too many books. And then three, you've been very good to me and you've invited me on every time. So I appreciate that. But yeah, it's funny. It's like we have these hour, two hour conversations every year or two. And then I don't think we've ever just chatted on the phone. Yeah, we've had dinner once or twice. I think we've gone out a number of times, but yes, podcasts, I don't know about you, but they've replaced a chunk of like, let's grab coffee and catch up.

1:01:50I tend to find that happens over podcasts in a way that's good because you end up having really deep conversations that you might not have had in real life. If at the same time, there's probably personal stuff that doesn't get discussed because it's being recorded that it would be good to talk to people about that I don't probably do enough of. Yeah. Agreed for me as well. And maybe that'll change someday. Maybe we'll have to grab coffee and just like talk about bullshit stuff sometime. Yeah. Well, Ryan, wisdom takes work, learn, apply, repeat another great book in the series. And this is the end of the series of the four virtues.

1:02:30So I'm really looking forward to the Stockdale book. I've been curious about Stockdale, honestly, ever since probably about 1980. I was 12 years old and I read Jimmy Carter's autobiography. I think it was Why Not the Best. And that quote comes from Stockdale. So I've been curious about Stockdale ever since - No, no, that quote is from Admiral Rickover. Ah, my fault completely. But this is something, I mean, I vaguely knew about it, but what I'm writing about, Stockdale and Carter are at the Naval Academy at the same time. They're part of the, they're living in the dorms right next to each other.

1:03:05I didn't know that. So it's this interesting intersection of lives, which I've been fascinated to dive into. So how do I know about Stockdale? I guess he was Ross Perot's running mate, right? That's when he famously was introduced to the American public. Well, I mean, he was famously introduced to the American public as a POW when he won the Medal of Honor. But it was this kind of second act to his career and it went very badly. And I haven't gotten there yet, but it's an interesting wrinkle on this incredible life that then we sort of humiliate him on the public stage instead of venerating him the way that we should have.

1:03:44Well, look, I look forward to hearing more about him after I read the book and have you on the podcast again. Well, as soon as I finish it, I'll let you know. Thanks again, Ryan. Thanks for having me.

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