← The Daily Stoic
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the daily Stoic podcast designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice and wisdom into the real world.
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Elon Musk.
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Elon Musk.
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Elon Musk. Elon Musk. The richest person on the planet, the first trillionaire in human history.
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Elon Musk is responsible for the deaths of anywhere from hundreds of thousands of people to millions of them.
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Musk gets involved with Doge, the conservative estimates that say the cuts to USAID should amount to something like 500,000 excess deaths this year. They have cut 80, 90% of the life saving programming going on overseas. It is a holocaust of starvation and suffering and death.
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Musk has a real talent for bearing all of his most repulsive scandals by creating new ones.
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So much of what Musk deals with is like self inflicted. This guy who was famously good at thinking from first principles, now falls for like conspiracy theories and, and anti Semitism. One of the things I love about reading the Stoics or the Ancients is how they were always taking the lives of great men and women and putting them up for review, right? You hear Seneca talking about Cato, what he did well and where he fell short. You see Plutarch talking about Alexander the Great and Demosthenes and Caesar. They would look at the people who moved history, who changed the world, and look at what they did well and look at where they fell short. Look at their virtues and their vices, right? And they did this not so much to judge, not to feel superior, but in fact to see, to discuss, to make clear what a good life and a bad life looked like. I thought it'd be worth maybe doing that with someone who's actually my neighbor in Bastrop. I'm talking about someone maybe some of you work for or admire. Talking about Elon Musk, who has decamped to Bastrop, where I live. And there's no question Elon Musk is a great man in that sense, right? He has dented the universe. He is a modern figure straight out of the pages of Plutarch. But as Plutarch would remind us, right? Great and good, very different things. That it's possible to be quite successful and not virtuous. Possible to be quite virtuous and not successful. Like I would argue, looking at Elon Musk, it's very clear that all the money in the world can't buy virtue, clearly. But I thought we could look because again, the lives of the greats, of the big figures, the ones we know about, whose, you know, exploits we follow either with admiration or horror. Allow us a way to look at some of these virtues from another angle. And so, like courage, we can start with courage, right? I think it takes an incredible amount of moral courage to start a company, to challenge the status quo, to bet your fortune on an idea that you have, and to do it multiple times. And so I don't think we should discount the courage of entrepreneurs in this way. It matters. We would be in a worse place if people like that didn't do things like that. But I do think it's worth talking about courage in the sense that Aristotle talked about it. He talked about the golden mean. He said the opposite of courage wasn't cowardice. He said courage was actually in the middle between two different vices, cowardice being one, but recklessness, on the other hand, courage is the golden mean between these two. His friends say he's actually a terrible poker player because he just goes all in constantly. And eventually you do that and you blow up, or you're just the luckiest person in the world. So the argument is, is it still moral courage if you're just yoloing all the time, or, you know, you don't think about the consequences because you believe the world is a computer simulation and this is all a game? Again, courage has to be some conception of the risk and the consequences, or else it's not courage on either end, right? Like, if you're not triumphing over that fear, if you don't have any fear, it still might be impressive, but it's not courage. And so I just think, like, you know, that Silicon Valley idea of, like, move fast and break things. It's obviously important, right? You have to be willing to upset the Apple card again, to use another cliche. But it's one thing to do it when you're, you know, experimenting with an app or a social network or something. But it's another to do it when people's lives depend on what you do, when the consequences are borne by people other than you. And so I think it's worth thinking about courage, not just what are you willing to do, but sometimes we're writing checks that other people have to cash, literally, figuratively. So what I know is when I see this person's attitude to risk, I don't go like, I want to jump in a Tesla robo taxi that sounds safe or a Tesla rocket ship, because we see that that relationship with risk is maybe different than it is for most people. And it's probably a dial, right? The dial that Aristotle is talking about is getting it exactly right. Too far in one direction and you're cowardly. Too far in the other direction, you're reckless. Like the Spartans actually punished reckless soldiers who fought too bravely because they endangered the other men. So that's courage. Okay, let's go to discipline. There's no question Elon Musk works very hard, right? Extremely hard, probably harder than everyone in this room. I think what's interesting to me about Elon Musk is you have someone who is so disciplined in one sense, and then emotionally just a complete chaotic, dysfunctional mess in another, right? Like this is a guy who is impulsive, who's erratic. He's never had a thought that he didn't immediately tweet. He's tweeted something like 30,000 times since he joined the app. That's a lot for someone who's so busy. I would say probably more than reasonable. Mark Schmiel has talked about how we always have the power to have no opinion. I think it's fascinating to see powerful and important people who, for all that power, don't have that power. They can't not express that opinion, right? They can't not say the thing that pops in their head, even if it's poorly thought out, even if it might hurt people's feelings, even if it might cause problems for them. And so for all of Elon Musk's success, he lacks that discipline. And look, stoicism, as I said, is about dealing with stress and pressure and crisis and adversity. But so much of what Musk deals with is like self inflicted. And I think if you think Elon Musk is doing really important work, which I do, this is probably the criticism that should land the most, right? There's an opportunity cost to every one of those tweets. There's an opportunity cost to every deposition and trial he has to sit through, to every conflict, to every neg media story, to every person he turns off. There are people who won't buy Teslas, as we were just talking about, even though they'd be good for the environment, because the brand is toxic. And so that's discipline and why it matters. Now let's get to justice. I'm not in any way taking away from what a credible, transformative company Tesla is. It's great for the environment that's changed the world. Everyone should be driving electric cars. It would be better if they did. He employs lots of people. He obviously makes positive difference in their lives. But many, many people are about to become millionaires because of the SpaceX IPO. That's all great. But I think when we think about justice and when we examine this life on a whole, we're gonna have to look at a literal illegal immigrant who came here on an expired student visa from Canada, spreading misinformation about immigrants and advocating for mass deportations. We have to look at the fact that he treats people and employees like garbage. Musk gets involved with Doge, like how are we to square the idealism and the impact and the innovation with Tesla and SpaceX and SolarCity with the conservative estimates that say the cuts to USAID should amount to something like 500,000 excess deaths this year, they think by 2034 and a half million, like literally millions of people. It is a holocaust of starvation and suffering and death that can really be traced back to one person, to a tweet where the richest man in the world tweets. I could have gone to some cool parties today. Instead I fed this government agency into the wood chipper. I would say that the fact that that didn't result in like the immediate expulsion from polite society, that it wasn't condemned universally by all people. Like Elon Musk has talked about how he thinks empathy will be the death of Western civilization.
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The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.
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I would say that our willingness to tolerate and accept that is the death of a moral society. That is what puts the values of Western civilization on the line. Do we actually mean them? Or you know, if someone comes and turns them upside down undoes generations of work and compromise and political progress and we just accept that because we don't want to have people tweeting about us on the Internet or we don't want to piss off the richest person in the world or we don't want to be primaried in an election. Like we are willing to accept that to me, that is the extinction level event that we should be worried about. That's the virus of fear not the woke mind virus. That's the virus of cowardice and complicity that we have to be worried about.
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- [10:17]
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okay, so wisdom. Look, Elon Musk is smart. Of course he is very smart. Saying he's not smart is like saying he's not rich. He is obviously a lot of both. He is probably smarter than me, probably smarter than most of the people in this room. He also does some really stupid things. And those two things are related, right? Ego is the enemy, as I have talked about. You can imagine how if your friends stage an intervention because you want to start a company and then that company becomes the most valuable company in the history of markets. You're not going to listen to criticism that much and people are going to want to tell you things that are good for them, but maybe not always for you. Like you think about the Emperor of Rome. How much honest feedback does the Emperor of Rome have or get? Probably not much. There's a joke from one of Hadrian's advisors who says, you know, the man who controls 50 legions is always correct. The person who writes your paychecks, who controls the stock options, who has the largest megaphone in the world. You know, this is someone that people don't want to cruise. He's like the largest landowner and employer in the county the little rural county that I live in, these are things that people think about. I get it. So obviously, courage comes in here, but I think about it as being bad for him.
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Right.
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The story of the emperor having no clothes is a cautionary tale about what happens when the emperor, or when a leader or when a powerful person does not get told the truth. And so here we have this powerful, smart person becoming very vulnerable, like the guy who used to read Soviet rocket manuals to figure out the aerospace business, is now hearing about the world through tweets and podcasts, which are good as far as they go, but it's not quite the same thing.
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Right.
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He's surrounded by enablers. Mark Shrouss would talk about being stained purple, being dyed purple by the cloak of the emperor. And when people won't give you honest feedback, I think you get the cybertruck. That's what happens. So as I talk about in the wisdom book, I think Elon Musk broke his brain. He was so smart, he broke his brain. He spent too much time on Twitter, and then instead of going like, oh, I gotta go to rehab for this, he bought Twitter and tried to break everyone else's brain. And so this guy who was famously good at thinking from first principles, now falls for conspiracy theories and antisemitism. He's quoted by Walter Isaacson in Isaacson's bio where he says, it's okay to be wrong. Just don't be confident and wrong. Well, here we are. And so, again, the cautionary tale here is that you can be very smart, and in fact, that intelligence is something distinct from wisdom, just as power and success is distinct from virtue. So I don't want to belabor this, but I think here we have a guy who's rich and famous in accomplishment, but by his own admission, he says, if anyone knew what it was like in his head, you would not want to be him. You would not want to trade places. He says, my mind is a storm.
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My mind is a storm. I don't think most people would want to be me. They may think they would want to be me, but they don't. They don't know. They don't understand.
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His brother has talked about how he's addicted to drama. That's the theme of his life. He is constantly fighting with people, constantly in trouble, constantly alternating between extreme highs and extreme lows. He's never at leisure. He can't possibly have enough time to see his enormous family. How would he? And then, because he got politically radicalized, he is complicit in all this horrible stuff that is happening in the world, the corruption and the incompetence. And look, we don't have to get into the Epstein stuff, the thing that looked a lot like a Nazi salute. And we don't have to judge either. We just have to go, hey, there but for the grace of God go all of us, right? If it can happen to someone who is that smart and that hard working and that courageous, it can happen to all of us. That's why the Stoics put up the lives of the greats for review. To see ourselves in them, to see our own tendencies in them. To try to learn from the experiences of others instead of always by our own powerful trial and error. And we can take good things from the lives of these people as well as the things to steer clear from. No one is all good or all bad. But when we look at the life we want to see, hey, what do I take away from. What are the moral lessons? It's not they did this on this date, but what do I take away from that about what a good life looks like? And what are the costs of selfishness and immoderation, risk's sake and ego and hubris? Where do they lead us? They lead us here. And the reason we want to think about what makes for a good life is that we only get one life. We are only here for a very short amount of time. The Stoics would say like a half a year is dead and gone.
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Right?
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Dead and gone. Seneca would say it's wrong to think of death as something in the future. It's something that's happening right now. He says we're dying every minute. We are dying every day. So what we spend our time on, what we work on, who we are, what we are trying to do, this matters. What we are spending our time on is something we are paying for with our lives.