But given that there's lots of corruption in the world, why play by the rules when other people aren't? What do you mean? Oh, we're talking about justice here. We're talking about doing the right thing. Why

be a good person? Yeah,

there's loads of corruption in the world. Other people don't need to or choose to not play by these rules. They get some advantages, expedite success, avoid failure, do the thing, look cooler, all the rest of it. Why should we play by the rules? Yeah, look, keeping your word is

expensive, giving a shit about how your decisions manifest themselves in the environment or other people. These all add costs to the bottom line, right? The idea of caring about whether your employees get a, make a living wage or not is in some ways like self-destructive, right? Like in a fully capitalist society, it's a bad call. But I think there's, I think you can make two cases for it. The first would be like what John Mackey at Whole Foods would say is that when everyone wins, actually the business does much better. The idea of thinking about expanding your definition of stakeholders actually creates a more sustainable and viable business. And also in a media world, makes it easier to market said business, right? Like, when there's not a lot of transparency or visibility, you can get away with things that I think are increasingly less possible. The Stokes talk about not doing anything that

requires walls or curtains, you know. A full transparency from what you do, what you say, what the public appears to see you as.

And in certain environments, there are walls and curtains. But in a media world, that can go away like that. So the thing you thought you were getting, sure, the sweatshop in China is abysmal, but China's many thousands of miles away and nobody cares. And they don't care until they care, right? Then you find out and this thing that you thought was saving you 12% a year on your margins is evaporated in one singular PR crisis. So

that's the first thing.

That's the first. The second is, well, what kind of person are you? There's a stoic argument, or there's a Christian argument that you treat people well, you don't treat them poorly, because eventually you die and you get judged in heaven. I think that's one argument. I think the other argument is there's a hell on earth that you can live in also, and that's a hell where you have to live in denial of the consequences of your decisions on other people. So the reason not to do it, the reason to be honest, the reason to be decent, the reason to be kind is it sucks to not be those things. It might make you somewhat financially more successful to not be those things. But to what end? What do you do? What do people spend the money on? They spend the money on trying to feel good. And you can just feel good by doing good.

So living with the consequences of your decisions. I love that idea about having to deny the things that you did to yourself.

There's an expression that the things you work on work on you. And so if your business, if your life, if how you've set up what you do is inherently exploitative or merciless or toxic, I think it's very unlikely that that is not worming its way into who you are. The person that you have to be to turn those things off inside you, I think ultimately comes back around. And I'm not just saying that in a karma way. I'm saying that the blind spots that you have to develop, the indifference that you have to develop, sets you up for a kind of catastrophic failure or collapse. You end up making the decision or the decisions that there is a seed of destruction in that. Even

in a less... utilitarian, transactional, literal way. Most of the people listening to this, if they're an hour and 40 minutes into me and you waffling on about bro psychology, bro philosophy, they already think and reflect and ruminate. They consider, they are asking themselves questions like, is this the best that I could be doing in my life? If you think that you are going to be able to do something which really goes against your principles, your honor, whatever code of conduct you want to live by, and not know that you've done it, you're kidding yourself. Like, if you are a thoughtful person, this is Alain de Botton that says, loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind. And the loneliness side, I've got a sort of mixed opinion on which I've changed recently, but certainly there are taxes that you have to pay to atone for a complexity of mind.

And one of them is

that you cannot hide things from yourself in the fog so much anymore. I

think that's right. That, or, or things you have to do to maintain the fog become- Increasingly elaborate and dangerous. Yes, and dangerous in and of themselves. So the kind of oblivion or obliviousness that is required to maintain the fictions is so intense that I think, you know, eventually you end up destroying yourself. What was Marcus Aurelius's

solution to always keeping your word? What do you mean? Well, he was someone who seemed to have a massive amount of transparency between what he did publicly, what he felt privately, and sort of what his intentions were, what he wrote, the way that he behaved. How did the most powerful man in the like fucking known world avoid the temptation of not keeping his word? This

is why the study of history is so important. So Marcus Aurelius has these two role models in his life. And it's helpful to have this. He has the positive role model and the negative role model. So Marcus Aurelius, he has this, he's kind of like the boy in The Emperor Has No Clothes as a young boy. He's in the court of the Emperor Hadrian, and he's just notoriously honest. He had no filter. And Hadrian actually nicknames him like the truest one. It's a play on Marcus's name, which in Latin meant true. And so he's just like the purity and the honesty of this little boy. And Hadrian senses something in him in that. But Hadrian was a degenerate, destructive, sort of everything that you think that having absolute power would do to a person, it does to Hadrian. He gets worse over time. And towards the end, where Marcus lives with him in this palace, this sort of pleasure palace, monument to his greatness, surrounded by sycophants and a secret police. He's haunted by the ghosts of the people that he killed. It's a terrible, sad, destructive end. But Hadrian does one good thing, which is he sees something in Marcus, and he wants him to succeed him, but Marcus is too young. So he chooses his successor, this man Antoninus, who becomes known to us as Antoninus Pius. And why does he choose Antoninus? We're told that he watched secretly one day as Antoninus helped his elderly stepfather up a flight of stairs. Just this moment of goodness, this powerful, influential politician just helping out another human being. He goes, this is the guy. So he anoints Antoninus as his successor on the condition that Marcus has to be Antoninus's successor. So these three people who are not related set in motion this incredible transition of power. And Hadrian probably thought Marcus would, or that Antoninus would live for a few years. He lives for 20 years. So Marcus has this handful of years with Hadrian, the who you don't want to be, how badly it can go. And then he has in Antoninus, everything you would want in a ruler, in a father, in a human being. And so he has these two models of what he wants to be. And I think there's this war in Marcus, this battle, whose vision of him is he going

to fulfill? Which one of these heroes is he going to follow? At least from what you've said there, it sounds like maybe Hadrian even had a degree of self awareness about his own flaws and he saw in his successor, the seeds of his successor's success is success. I think so. And maybe

even saw how corrosive and destructive power was, and the idea that you shouldn't get it too early. Why doesn't he just, why does he create this transition plan? Yeah. And, yeah, he sets in motion this plan. And you can see in the beginning of meditation, Marcus is riffing on Antoninus always. There's this, he's trying to live up. He's trying to live up to this model always. I think he's asking himself in many cases, what would Antoninus do here? So when he found himself, he has unlimited power. He can do whatever he wants. But there is this check against him always, which is this sort of person he doesn't want to let down. It's like an ideal. Yeah, this person whose faith and belief he wants to live up to. And I think that this is a deformative influence on Marcus's life. And the Stokes talk about we have to have that in our life. Who is that person or who are those people whose standard we are trying to bear? And that can help us in these moments where, okay, if I make this decision, people are going to hate me, but it's the right decision. I'm going to make this decision. It's bad for me financially, but it's right for my community or for my employees. And when we have these sort of hard, wrenching decisions, what do we have that sort of swings us in the right direction out of just, is this good for me? Can I get away with this? What will the reaction be? To me, that's such a critical part of being this person we want to be. You've read some stuff about John Boyd, right? Yeah,

he's got that quote about to be someone or to do something.

That's a beer to do is his famous speech that he would give to every ambitious, promising young officer. He's basically what's your North Star? Is your North Star to have positive impact, to serve your country, to make people better? Or is your North Star rank, power, influence, money, fame? And these things are in conflict with each other. And the sooner you make that choice, the better. And a lot of us think we can defer making that choice, or we deny that it is a choice. And it's only when you come face to face with some really tough decisions, you realize you can't have both. What

was that story of Marcus Drusus? Oh,

yes, yes, yes. So there's this famous Roman politician. He's powerful and important. He has friends and enemies. And this architect notices his house on Capitoline Hill that is partly visible to passers-by. And he says, hey, you know, for about five talents, which is an extremely large amount of money, and he's basically saying for, I don't know, $500,000 or $5 million, I can make your house totally private. And he says, private? He's like, I'll give you 10 talents. Make it entirely visible. And he's not an exhibitionist. What he's saying is that he doesn't want the walls or curtains that Marx really said we should be wary of, the things that allow us to create a distinction between who we are in public and who we are in private. The things we think we can get away with when no one is looking. And there's a reason, you know, transparency laws aren't just good for the consumer. They're good for the creators and the manufacturers too, because they allow them to not get away with things. Yeah, that they

may be tempted to do. Yes. Well, I mean, you know, would it be nice if we all were the captains of our own soul and never needed external accountability to do a thing and never needed the pressure of others? But we do. This is why accountability buddies and habit-setting challenges are so useful. And I found this with the show when I first started it. Almost everybody is able to be unrigorous and inconsistent with the things that they say. Because like mom isn't talking to girlfriend, isn't talking to boss, isn't talking to football team captain about your view on anything. And you can kind of just sort of flip flop between it. And one of the things that I really loved, I have a prescription that everyone should do a fake podcast with a friend once a week, records for 30 minutes on their phone about an idea. And the reason that I think it's useful is it causes you to be very rigorous with the things that you say. It's good for communication. It's good for other stuff. It's like, hey, I actually need to make sure that what I said last week and what I said this week and what I going to say next week is in line. That doesn't mean that your opinions can't change, but if they do change, you have an anchor that tells you, oh, I don't think that thing anymore. And why? As opposed to just allowing yourself to be blown around

or to say whatever is convenient to the person that's in front of you. Yeah. And to have articulated, hey, I think it's fucked up when people do X. And now later you find yourself in a position to do X, which you didn't have the temptation or the opportunity to do before. And now you've gone on the record, so to speak. And it's a little more real. And I think that's important. There's something about philosophy as something you talk about and do and write about yourself and publish and whatever that I think should keep you, keeps you honest and makes you better in a way that just reading a book or thinking about a thing doesn't quite do. So yeah, there's obviously as a creator, you always want to be worried about hypocrisy, but also like you should be falling short of what you're saying because you should be creating an aspiration or ideal that is hard to live up to.