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David Jilk on Nietzsche's Sequel to Stoicism (Episode 20)
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“We realized that Nietzsche’s approach represents a productive and healthy sequel to Stoicism, particularly for the disruptive entrepreneur.”
Investor, entrepreneur, and researcher Dave Jilk joins Caleb to talk about Nietzsche and Entrepreneurship.
With Brad Feld, Dave wrote The Entrepreneur's Weekly Nietzsche. They cover how Nietzsche challenges
In this conversation, Dave shares how Nietzsche challenges us to clarify our values, cultivate faith, and embrace reality.
(00:12) Who Was Nietzsche
(02:57) Why Nietzsche?
(07:00) Silent Killers
(11:54) Staring Into The Abyss
(19:20) Nietzsche and Stoicism
(28:34) Faith
(33:44) Nietzsche in David's Life
(36:39) Nietzsche's Business Ethics
(41:20) Amor Fati
***
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Acceptance vs. Affirmation: Nietzsche and Buddhism
00:00:00
Speaker
So it's become very popular to talk about acceptance. In other words, we face the facts of reality and we accept them even if we don't like them. Nietzsche said, no, don't just accept them, affirm them with a holy yes. It is your life. It is what you're doing. It is part of your becoming, of who you are, and that's that.
00:00:27
Speaker
I did want to add that one thing because I felt like the affirmation notion is a very useful distinction from, say, a more Buddhist kind of approach. I know there's a lot of overlaps with Stoicism and Buddhism where a Buddhist approach is much more oriented toward acceptance.
00:00:47
Speaker
And this is the next step. Like with most things with Nietzsche, he's radical. He wants to go one step further, and maybe it's crazy, maybe it's not. He was, by the way, crazy. Welcome to Stoic Conversations.
Exploring Stoicism with Michael Trombley and Caleb Antaveros
00:01:01
Speaker
In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:01:16
Speaker
In this conversation I speak with David Joke. David is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and researcher. He and the investor Brad Feld are the authors of The Entrepreneur's Weekly Nietzsche, a book for disruptors. We talk about lessons one can gain from thinking with Nietzsche.
00:01:37
Speaker
Nietzsche is a challenging philosopher and someone that forces, or at least should force us to think. David is an excellent person to talk to because he's interested in applying philosophy to our own lives, especially in business. And he has the experience and thoughtfulness that justifies his position. Welcome to Stoa. My name is Caleb Antaveros, and today I am speaking with Dave Joke. And we're going to be talking about Nietzsche. Welcome. Thanks for having me.
Nietzsche's Philosophy and Influence on Entrepreneurship
00:02:08
Speaker
Well, for those who aren't familiar, let's start with the basics of Nietzsche. Who was this character?
00:02:16
Speaker
Well, so the answer to that, the true answer to that is very complicated, and I should definitely preface all of my remarks with I'm not an expert on Nietzsche. I've read a fairly good portion of his works. I've read a lot of other philosophers as well, so I haven't gone deep on a single philosopher. But I studied him enough to write a book that is based on or sprouts from some of his sayings, and so I've spent a lot of time with it.
00:02:41
Speaker
You know, he was an interesting character, always sickly, cantankerous, although by all accounts he was one of the nicest people you'd ever meet. And he was a very lonely sort. I think he spent a lot of time alone. And essentially he ended up with a professorship. I think he was the youngest professor at Basel up to that time.
00:03:00
Speaker
And he was a philologist, which is not a thing that people, I think he would call that a classicist now. He studied the ancient Greeks and including not only philosophy, of course, but literature as well. So he was very into Greek tragedy, et cetera. And interestingly, he didn't get bored with that, but rather found it is a frustrating field because the no new ground is being broken and no one was interested in breaking new ground.
00:03:26
Speaker
So he started writing books that had a very bad uptake. He wrote about his views on art and then kind of dropped out as he got sicker and from his professorship got a retirement and he kept writing and he began philosophizing more with human, all too human.
00:03:43
Speaker
and Daybreak and the books of that era. So he evolved into a philosopher and not of the typical
Revaluation of Values: Nietzsche's Academic Shift
00:03:51
Speaker
sort. If you read a lot of philosophers, analytic philosophers or traditional philosophers, they make arguments.
00:03:58
Speaker
They counter their opponents, they theorize, and he doesn't do any of that. He doesn't try to build a system. He has a bunch of aphorisms lumped together into a book, seemingly at random, although arguably they're not really random, and they do seem to converge on a few scenes.
00:04:17
Speaker
His big project philosophically was, I think, pretty safe to say, because he said it, was to the revaluation of all values. In other words, he wanted to reassess the moral tradition of Europe and figure out where things were headed and where they could head.
00:04:35
Speaker
And so that was probably his main thing. But he talked about a lot of stuff, European culture, you know, he had some interesting epistemological insights, et cetera. And he had many, many insights in social psychology and psychology, which is where our book comes from is more that than the kind of world.
Entrepreneurship: Insights from David Joke's Book
00:04:53
Speaker
So you, along with Brad Feld, wrote the Entrepreneurs' Weekly, Nietzsche. And the question I suppose is always, you know, why go back to Nietzsche now?
00:05:03
Speaker
Yeah. So the impetus for the book was went the other direction. I was reading Nietzsche and I was an entrepreneur at the time and running a business, a startup, and it was my first one. And so I was reading Nietzsche and noticed a few comments that he made here and there that seemed rather pertinent to entrepreneurship. It's like, in fact, we have a story that I was with Brad in his ski house and we were hanging out and both sitting lying there reading.
00:05:30
Speaker
And I read a little passage to him and I said, doesn't this sound like entrepreneurs? And he said, sure. And I said, well, that's Nietzsche. And that was kind of what I date the origin of the book to. And so it went the other direction. It wasn't what philosopher should I use to talk about entrepreneurship. It was, hmm.
00:05:47
Speaker
I wonder if there's something here. And I think as we started grabbing quotes and writing about them, we found that there was enough content there to convey something interesting. Brad and I had different goals. My goal was I was
00:06:03
Speaker
large moving toward mentoring and coaching entrepreneurs from being an entrepreneur. And he is always looking for new and different angles on helping entrepreneurs. And so we've been friends for a long time, and so we decided to try to do this book. The other thing that happened with Nietzsche though, and I think this is important to mention, I'm sure we could have done with it with any deep philosopher, but certainly Nietzsche has a reputation for being kind of
00:06:26
Speaker
complex and deep and that the thoughts that it requires heavy thought to understand, et cetera. And that's certainly a reputation. I don't think that's completely wrong. And one of the things we wanted to do with the book was encourage entrepreneurs not just to live in their day to day firefighting reactive mode, but rather to think hard about things.
00:06:48
Speaker
And what better philosopher can you get to make people or kind of incent people to think hard about what they're doing? And so that was also part of it was that somewhat different objective than many entrepreneurship books where it's how to or here's the way to do this kind of thing. We wanted to have kind of a different output.
00:07:08
Speaker
So a lot of it was a lot of our essays contradict themselves, contradict other essays. We have stories from entrepreneurs that contradict us. We show the entrepreneurs that wrote anecdotes for the narratives for the book, kind of thinking through the quote on their own. And so that was part of the fun of it. And it's kind of self-illustrative in that way.
00:07:30
Speaker
one notion that I think is, and I don't know all of your, what your audience is, but to the extent they're entrepreneurs or people in business or who are trying to accomplish something on their own. Textors has this notion of mentor whiplash. So the idea is that they give you a lot of mentors, they give you access to a lot of mentors, people who are very experienced in what you're doing. And then you talk to these mentors and they give you contradictory advice.
00:07:55
Speaker
And of course, that doesn't mean that their advice is bad or wrong or that one of them is wrong and one of them is right, but rather the job of someone who's trying to accomplish something and taking input from others is to figure out how to apply all that and how to synthesize it together into the current situation, which is probably novel.
Silent Killers and Substance over Hype in Business
00:08:15
Speaker
And so again, back to the idea of thinking deeply, it's like you can't really do this stuff without thinking
00:08:21
Speaker
One of the advantages of Nietzsche being hard to summarize or perhaps hard to systematize is that he is a thinker who you are forced to think with in some ways. He has that challenging writing style too, but I think that's always useful to have when such a messy world or when you're involved in a messy project like entrepreneurship.
00:08:43
Speaker
I agree. I mean, I think he did that on purpose. That was not an accident that you have to think with him. He was asking you to do that. It's a fairly clear invitation as you read through the stuff.
00:08:57
Speaker
Yeah, so you go through a number of passages in the book and I thought it would be useful to go through a number of those here as well and get a sense of what some of the main takeaways are or challenges or thoughts that Nietzsche gives us with one of these passages. So I'll just read one out. This is from the chapters of Silent Killers. The greatest events, they are not noisiest but are stillest hours.
00:09:24
Speaker
The world revolves not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values. It revolves inaudibly. So what does that line bring to mind?
00:09:35
Speaker
So this is one of the reasons why Nietzsche is fun, is that obviously there are many ways one could interpret this. And he states explicitly that everything is interpretation, which is controversial thing to say, but in any case, that was the position he typically took. So that's kind of a preface to my own interpretation of this.
00:09:57
Speaker
My interpretation of this is that to really do something meaningful and significant, either for yourself or for the world or both, is that the real work is done in a quiet room by yourself or in a certain amount of solitude.
00:10:14
Speaker
Now, for Nietzsche to say this, it was self-serving. That's the way he operated. But I think he's contrasting it here, importantly, with kind of a bellowing loudspeaker, a person who's making a stink, a person who is kind of...
00:10:32
Speaker
creating buzz, which is what a lot of our essay in the chapter is about. It's almost a marketing 101 thing that you have to create a lot of buzz around your company if you're funded by venture capitalists.
00:10:47
Speaker
What we want, I think what we want people to think about with respect to this issue in the chapter is not that you shouldn't do any marketing or that you should hide the fact that your company exists, although there are times when that's appropriate, but rather be rational about your promotion of the company.
00:11:05
Speaker
and spend most of your energy focusing on customers, focusing on product, focusing on making it a great company, not a well-known company. And if being a well-known company is part of what you need to do rationally as you assess that, then that's fine. But the temptation of course is to get sucked into
00:11:26
Speaker
the ego gratification, we're famous, we're well known, everybody knows who we are. I go to parties and people know who I am and what I'm doing. And that's a temptation that I think is easy to fall into.
Aligning Success with Stoic Principles
00:11:40
Speaker
And with my not being an expert on Nietzsche or any philosopher, I'm not an expert on Stoicism, but I do know a little bit about it and we can talk more about that later. But I think that that is a highly compatible notion, what I just said with a Stoic attitude, which is that you
00:11:56
Speaker
You pay attention when you're getting good press about how you're reacting to it and whether it's making you want to get more good press because it feels good or because it's bringing in good candidates for jobs or because it's bringing in actual customers or investors. Stay focused on the purpose as opposed to the ego gratification of the way that it feels
00:12:20
Speaker
to get that buzz, to make that noise. And so going back to the Nietzsche, inventors of new values from an entrepreneurship perspective is you're creating something useful for people that they didn't have before, not making yourself famous and thereby causing yourself to make a lot of money and maybe selling a few of it, whether people actually use it or not. Yeah, that's right. From the outside of an employee of several different startups, it sometimes seems to me like
00:12:49
Speaker
there's some level of self-promotion or Twitter where you get a negative signal from certain founders, perhaps. I'm not sure if that's your experience as well. Yeah. Well, some founders like that. And again, you have to be careful. You have to be careful. This is why it's a thinking process, not an out of hand rejection, right? Brad's silent killer is, I believe, Brad's phrase or
00:13:12
Speaker
I already adopted it from somewhere. But he uses that in his thinking about whom to invest in, where if it seems like the entrepreneurs have a focus on the right things, then he likes that. And you can tell pretty quickly what kinds of things people are going to focus on when you meet with them. So I think that's the idea. And again, you have to balance that. You have to have somebody out there kind of
00:13:37
Speaker
speaking from the rooftops about how great the product is or nobody's ever going to know about it. So there has to be, and it's not just a compromise. It's like you got to figure out what the right things are for your business and whatever your market is.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's right.
Moral Integrity and Ethical Challenges in Business
00:13:52
Speaker
Excellent. Well, let's try another one. I think this, if someone has heard of Nietzsche before, they may have heard of this line, but it's always a good one to consider, which is, he who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.
00:14:12
Speaker
Yes, this is a fairly famous one. And the interesting thing is, and maybe it's because I tend not to spend my time with folks who have become monsters, but it's harder for me to find the example in the book. The narrative in the book was from a good friend who had a very successful company and that got bought by, let's just say, some horrible people.
00:14:35
Speaker
And he and his partner did an amazing job of sticking that out and not becoming monsters themselves. But it's a difficult thing. And in doing a little bit of research prior to this discussion, I had to remember reading Admiral Stockdale, one of Admiral Stockdale's essays. The way I thought of it is Stockdale versus Stockholm. So if you're familiar with the Stockholm syndrome,
00:15:04
Speaker
which is when you're taken prisoner from Meyer, it was Patty Hearst, you're taken prisoner and you end up becoming part of the team that has taken you versus Stockdale who kept up his strength throughout eight years of not knowing whether he would ever be released, whether he was gonna live through it and never really sheltered. And I think that what Nietzsche is saying here, it's an interesting connection between the two philosophies because what Nietzsche is saying here is
00:15:34
Speaker
Watch out, this is a real problem. You're going to be tempted to fall in with people who do the wrong things. And that's the risk of Stockholm syndrome versus I think he doesn't really provide an answer here as to how to solve that problem. He's just giving us a warning about it. And Stockdale is probably the quintessential example of how to not fall in with him.
00:15:58
Speaker
And in business, this is a little less dramatic, right? You're not being held prisoner exactly, but I think that there are industries out there, especially when you're trying to disrupt established industries. You're an entrepreneur and you need partners. You can't really do it alone in a well-developed industry. You do need to develop partnerships of various kinds and you start signing agreements with people.
00:16:22
Speaker
And sometimes you find that the way they operate is maybe a little sketchy, maybe considerably worse, maybe it's just downright wrong in your view, or it may even be illegal. And the temptation is, well, we're here to make our stockholders money, so we need to do this too. And you're in the situation. I think it's a lot easier to say, oh, I would never do that.
00:16:48
Speaker
I would never kind of short circuit my moral stature to make a little money. And it's like, well, but it's not just your money, right? You have employees who will lose their jobs if you don't succeed. You have investors who will lose all of their money.
00:17:04
Speaker
You might have all of your friends and family who've invested in your company if you don't just take this little shortcut here and get this deal, which will get your business going. The temptations are, in some cases, incredibly strong. This is what Nietzsche is warning about.
00:17:20
Speaker
What we love about this line and what I think a lot of people like about it is its colorful language. It's a very colorful way to put it. We're not talking about guys in suits who do bad things. We're talking about actual monsters and abysses. So that's the fun of it.
00:17:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's useful to think out one's values and principles and the sorts of tricky situations beforehand, so one isn't with it on the fly in such a stressful business or personal, whatever-have-you situation. I do think it's useful to think them out in advance because that gives you a starting point. I'm not sure that solves the problem in the moment.
00:17:59
Speaker
in all cases because it comes at you and if you're a virtue ethicist, which I believe most stoicism kind of subscribes to that as a general way of thinking, there's a lot of moral particularism in there. It's all about the particular facts and the particular case and the weighing of the different values that you have. And if you get surprised by a situation, you still have to weigh it. The important thing is that you do weigh it.
00:18:25
Speaker
and that you weigh it very hard. And if it feels wrong, you try to think about, well, what all does that mean? Where does that come from? How does that play against the other side of the equation? And what would the slippery slope look like? What would it look like if we continue to operate with just this particular shortcut? So it's a hard problem that deserves a lot of thought.
00:18:48
Speaker
And that doesn't prescribe any particular answers. Our book is unsatisfying in that respect. It doesn't give you the simple answers to these things. It doesn't say never. Never do what goes against your own world. A lot of business is line drawing games. People have points of view about what's okay and what's not. How close to the truth do you need to stay to when you're selling? There are all these issues that have no simple answer.
00:19:17
Speaker
Absolutely. One connection to Stoicism, this line always brings to mind is connection to the life of the Roman philosopher Seneca. Seneca was a philosopher, of course, playwrights, but the big project of his life was essentially tutoring and then serving as an advisor to the emperor Nero, who had some amount of monstrous characteristics. And there's
00:19:42
Speaker
the thorny issue, like whether he should have done that at all or perhaps like other Roman figures at the time that kept his hands clean. And one can always argue that's when he was an advisor, the Roman Empire, whatever it's worth turned out relatively well. But at certain points, he was forced to do things that certainly look not so stoic in the process. So that's the sort of situation that this line brings up to me.
00:20:07
Speaker
Well, and it's not just the... Well, in a situation like that, of course, you're going to be faced with a choice of complying or dying in some cases, right? And so that's pretty hard. In other less, not quite so severe, sir, you can maybe continue to advise, but not participate.
00:20:26
Speaker
And I think that came up recently for some people with our erstwhile president, where they weren't comfortable with his approach in general. And I'm speaking actually of generals who joined the administration, but they felt that their being there would be better than not being there. Our culture today has adopted a guilt by association, a fairly strong guilt by association ethic. And now,
00:20:53
Speaker
one wonders whether you can even try to guide someone who's got some problems in the right direction or be essentially treated as someone who cooperated with them. So these issues are very current, right? They're not. Seneca is a great example in part because he wrote so profoundly and at length about these topics and very similar things happening now. Very true. Very true.
Nietzsche vs. Stoicism: Philosophical Comparisons
00:21:17
Speaker
So how do you generally think about the connection between Nietzsche and Stoicism?
00:21:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna hedge a little bit again simply because I'm an expert in neither, but I'll tell you what I've gathered, and maybe it's interesting to someone. You know, the introduction, so let me start with the introduction to one of the sections of our book. The section is called Free Spirits, and a free spirit is kind of his idea of someone who's kind of doing the right thing. It's his kind of person, and of course he saw himself as a free spirit. He was very, a lot of his philosophy organizes around, you know,
00:21:52
Speaker
him seeing himself as a hero. But in any case, talk a little bit about this in the following way. So there's this section in Thus Spoke Zarathustra called The Three Metamorphoses. And it's near the beginning of the book. And it talks about the three stages that a free spirit must go through to really become that fully fledged free spirit. And the stages are the camel, the lion, and the child.
00:22:20
Speaker
The camel is a beast of burden essentially and will follows the thou shalt and is able to essentially face any troubles to get the thing done that needs to get done. And the camel does remind me a bit of a stoic view, which is that these obstacles are not going to get in my way. I'm going to figure out how to do this. I'm not going to get wrapped up in complaining about it or worrying too much about my reactions.
00:22:49
Speaker
I have a thing I need to do, I'm going to do it." The second stage is the lion, and the lion has, in response to societies or the world's thou shalt, the lion responds with a holy no, as the way Nietzsche puts it. And the lion is a contrarian who refuses to accept the traditions or the strictures of society or of the
00:23:13
Speaker
of the world. I see some overlap with stoicism there as well. In other words, again, those things won't get in my way. I don't have to do things the way other people did them. I'm going to be rational about it. I'm not going to worry about my feelings being hurt when people don't reject me, et cetera.
00:23:32
Speaker
To a great extent, the camel, to a lesser extent, but still there, the lion, I think there's some overlap. And I'm not really doing it justice in terms of characterizing it, but there's a lot of overlap when I read those passages and I think about what stoicism advises. The child is different. I don't think that stoicism helps with this, at least in my readings. And maybe the folks that are engaged with stoicism have developed new tools or identified them within the
00:24:02
Speaker
the older philosophers, but the child has to be able to create new values. And the way to do that is to start with a beginner brain to kind of let all of that stuff go and start from the beginning. And there has to be a kind of a new, I've said this already, a new beginning. It's play though. It's not work anymore.
00:24:27
Speaker
It's done through kind of a creative will, an instinct, an obsession of things you do just because you want to do them, because they feel right. And some of these things, I think, don't overlap as much as stoicism because the motivational structure of them looks very different. It's not as structured, it's not... You are going with your feelings, you're letting your feelings dictate what you should do and how much you should do it.
00:24:54
Speaker
And because that is what children do, they go with their feelings until they've learned to manage them somewhat. And so I see the stoic as the quintessential adult. A stoic as an adult does not do... It doesn't behave like a middle schooler, which in the working world, you frequently run into people who
00:25:16
Speaker
act like middle schoolers. There's a lot of drama. They're constantly trying to politicize everything. But to really create entirely new values, Nietzsche would say that you need to start more as a child. And I feel like that might be something that would have to work harder on relative to what's available from the ancient Stoics at least.
00:25:37
Speaker
Just following up on that, I think there's at least in a few Stoics, ancient and modern, you have this idea of seeing the world anew or trying to train yourself to see it for the first time, which is similar to a beginner's mind or seeing the world as a child, but you don't really have this idea of generating new values. That's not really a Stoic.
00:25:56
Speaker
picture the stoic saying, you know, we have a nature and our role is to fulfill that nature. You know, you don't need to generate any new values. Maybe you need to figure out personally how that nature expresses itself in your life, but it's different from the Nietzschean project and that it's not as radical, I suppose, in moral entrepreneurship, you could almost say, that Nietzsche might argue for.
00:26:20
Speaker
I seem to remember this now and correct me if this is not what you're saying, but it sounds like stoicism has a sort of essentialism about who you are and what you're kind of destined to do. Is that what you were saying? Yeah, that's right. I think they, like a lot of the ancients thought humans had a nature and we are essentially rational and social animals and that our function, our purpose follows from that thing.
00:26:44
Speaker
Right. So here's what's fascinating is that Nietzsche was basically a determinist. There's some interesting spots where he's not or doesn't seem to be, but in general, he was fairly clear that he was a determinist. And yet, he did not believe, I don't think, in essence. In fact, Nietzsche is usually considered one of the progenitors of existentialism along with Kierkegaard.
00:27:08
Speaker
And his view is become who you are. In other words, you don't discover who you are, you create who you are. And that was an extremely important aspect of his personal philosophy or personal psychology. It crosses these boundaries all the time with nature between psychology and philosophy.
Obsession and Rationality in Entrepreneurship
00:27:28
Speaker
And so this idea that we
00:27:32
Speaker
have to create who we are also comes from inside, which is again, you know, not something we're looking for is figure out what is our purpose here, but we're actually the way, the way you determine your purpose is by creating it directly.
00:27:48
Speaker
And I think we see this in entrepreneurs. One of our chapters is called Obsession, and Nietzsche uses the word passion. And we make a distinction. There's a difference, I think. But obsession doesn't really sound to me like the sort of thing that a stoic would.
00:28:04
Speaker
want going on. In other words, you might have a desire to do something or drive to do something, but being obsessed with it is kind of being out of control, right? And this is what Nietzsche was suggesting, I think, was you need to be at least a little out of control. He would go further than that. That would be more what I would say, I think. He would say you need to die for it if that's what it takes. You need to pursue it beyond all reason if this is what is driving you.
00:28:31
Speaker
And this is an interesting question that I've faced myself as an entrepreneur and I see a lot of people face it. You know, there are entrepreneurs who, this is who they are. It does sort of feel like their essence, right? That they're obsessed with this thing and they can't help themselves.
00:28:47
Speaker
And then there are entrepreneurs who are rational and are constantly making the quote, right choice. And they're not willing to take undue chances. And a lot of times they're not the ones who are successful because they shut it down too soon or whatever. Many of those obsessed entrepreneurs, I call it run the business against the wall. They don't shut it down cleanly. They don't recognize when it's time to give it up. They hit the accelerator again.
00:29:17
Speaker
And instead of hitting the wall at 60 miles an hour, they hit it at 90. And it just creates an enormous mess. And this happens a lot. I might say, what's the better way to do it? You look out into the world and all different kinds of businesses succeed and most of them fail. But I do think that a lot of successful entrepreneurs have
00:29:34
Speaker
kind of pushed it beyond the bounds of reason in terms of their approach. So I think this is a question for every entrepreneur to really think hard about is what is my motivational structure? Am I going to be that rational decision maker at all times? Or am I going to make this happen no matter what?
00:29:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think this question of obsession and how that could fit in a life, I think, depending on who you are. But certainly, I think people like Nietzsche or Ayn Rand would give some amount of precedence to obsession being a part of people's lives who they admire at any rates. There might be a place for it for many stoic lives, but I think
00:30:11
Speaker
Stoic philosophy, you know, let me think about, you know, what are my roles? What if my roles is, if you're an entrepreneur, an artist, that's one of them. But you also have all these other roles, you are your family member, and those might come into conflict, you know, it's going to be another other moral quandary to some extent. And
00:30:28
Speaker
Well, they almost always commit the conflict. Yeah, no need for might. Well, here's another passage that I think might be good to go over. It's from the chapter of faith. It goes as follows. One man had great works, but his comrade had great faith in these works. They were inseparable, but obviously the former was entirely dependent.
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah. And so with the word faith, if you've read some Nietzsche, you know that he's probably not talking about religious faith. But I do think that he was a fan of kind of a
00:31:04
Speaker
quasi-religious spirit in terms of one's enthusiasms and confidence and way of going about the world. The idea here is, I translate this for the purpose of our discussion into confidence
00:31:22
Speaker
but with a bit of a zealous attitude. So it's not merely quiet confidence, but also in intensity that maybe goes beyond the bounds of reason. I've, in fact, literally does. I have confidence in myself, even though I've never done this before. Maybe because I've done other things before and taken them on, taken on new things and succeeded, but maybe because I just
00:31:46
Speaker
kind of believe in myself. And this is very much a William James thing, right? Believing in contributes to making them true in some cases, certain kinds of cases, right? And so when you have a business, an entrepreneurial business, it's not uncommon at all to have kind of partners who sit back and sit in their cave and do the work and build the thing and others who are out there promoting it. That's a pretty common split.
00:32:12
Speaker
And the combination of those two things, obviously the split I'm making here is that the person in the back room has the great works and the comrade is the outward facing person who doesn't really have any control over what's done.
00:32:27
Speaker
but has great faith in that person or in the team that they're going to produce great things and goes out there and sells it and makes sure the world knows about it in appropriate ways, whatever that is for that business, and is willing to kind of put his or her name on the line.
00:32:45
Speaker
and reputation on the line to offer that to people. But it's not just that. It's also that that faith and confidence flows back to those people doing that work. And that's super important as well, which is somebody believes in what I'm doing. It's not just me. That really makes me feel like I want to put
00:33:04
Speaker
the extra work in to make this successful. And it's impressive to see when this is done well how motivating it can be for a team of nerds or whatever. I was in software companies, so that's what I know. But your team of developers to be believed in.
00:33:22
Speaker
to have the senior management of the company believe in what they're doing and have faith in them and in products that they're building, that can be extremely motivating and make them work ever harder versus an environment of mistrust or kind of not feeling like the team is quite up to the task and tracking the whip, et cetera.
00:33:41
Speaker
I will add also that this line particularly resonated because Brad and I early in our careers were actually business partners and he was the, I was the great works and he was the great face and the relationship worked. We certainly had our differences about various things, but the relationship in that respect worked terrifically, right? It was really a
00:34:05
Speaker
an amazing thing. And I recognize, you know, during and after that, the dependency, right? That we as rational people like to think it's the person doing the work and building the thing that does everything, but the dependency really kind of goes the other way. And so that's where I go with that aphorism.
00:34:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think Seneca has some advice on friendship, which is essentially you should always, if you have a friend, fully trust them initially. Another way to put that was just put your faith in them completely. If they're going to be your friend, that's the way you'd want to treat your friends after all, and to be wary of an attitude of mistrust or having people prove that you ought to trust them before you put your faith in them. I believe I've seen that, I've seen that scene that I've seen, really liked it, and it corresponds to a piece that I
00:34:56
Speaker
read a while back on trust. And the piece I read made an interesting point, I think, that adds to that, which is if you don't trust people, then you never learn how to tell whom you should not trust. In other words, using Seneca's approach of trust, you over time will get
00:35:22
Speaker
You know, some people will betray your trust, right? But you won't ever get better at it unless you
00:35:30
Speaker
go ahead and let yourself trust to some degree beyond what is justified because you won't ever get the experience. You'll just keep going on not trusting anyone. Yeah, that's a great point. So do you have any examples from your life where you have applied or seen some of these thoughts from each other that you want to share that you haven't already?
00:35:56
Speaker
You know, most of these, most of the chapters in the book are kind of connect to experiences that I've had or that Brad's had or, you know, many of the experiences that Brad had, we've worked together in various capacities for a long time. So many, many of the experiences that Brad had, I've, you know, been either a part of or known the stories for a long time. So they're very familiar and integrated into my own.
00:36:20
Speaker
experience and thinking. So in some ways, the question that you're asking as well is that's what the book is. But I do actually tell one story, but one of the stories, entrepreneur anecdotes in the book is actually mine. And that was a difficult one for me to write because my
00:36:39
Speaker
My last company that I started, a company called Standing Cloud, we were able to sell it, although it was not, you know, that was the other options were not great options, let's just say. And I really struggled with some leadership, some aspects of the leadership situation there, because I found that I was frustrated with the performance of the team. I wasn't really sure how to correct it. And what I realized at some point was that I was being dishonest with myself as well.
00:37:08
Speaker
about how I felt about what I was doing. And so the quote has to do with kind of, and now I'm going to forget the exact line, but it has to do with, you can't really inspire others if you're not treating them with gratitude and kindness. And no, it wasn't kindness. It was, I think it had more to do with honesty.
00:37:31
Speaker
And I was not living up to that. And then I ponder in the narrative, I ponder what I could have done differently and I don't have a good answer. In other words, it wasn't clear that just changing the
00:37:46
Speaker
fixing the direct problems would have really fixed the bigger problem, which is that we still weren't getting the kind of productivity that we needed. So being more forthright with everyone would not necessarily have fixed it. So the line from Nietzsche is, a man of genius is unbearable unless he possessed at least two things besides, gratitude and purity.
00:38:08
Speaker
And so the purity was not, gratitude was I was not really, I was frustrated with people as opposed to grateful for what they were doing. And the purity was, I was not that enthusiastic myself because things had not been going well. And so I had to figure out what the right leadership style was in that case. And there were some things I could have fixed about myself, but they might not have fixed the problem anyway.
00:38:32
Speaker
In any case, it was a thoughtful wise going through that. Yeah, thanks. That's useful. So one question I had, another question, which is maybe a challenging one, I'm not sure, is how do you think Nietzsche might think of some of the current changes or trends in business ethics? So maybe a pointed way of asking this would be something like, do you think Nietzsche would think servant leadership is slave morality?
00:39:00
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's a good question.
Modern Business Ethics Through Nietzsche's Lens
00:39:04
Speaker
It's real important to recognize that Nietzsche said things, he was not a fan of business people in general. He thought commercial activity was kind of dirty and like a lot of academics do. And I think also though, it was not an era, there was invention
00:39:23
Speaker
back then. But then the people commercializing them were probably not the inventors in many cases. And so the people he would have seen as being interesting and heroes and creators would be the inventors of this, you know, the devices of the Industrial Revolution or not the John Rockefeller's who figured out how to
00:39:43
Speaker
put all the companies together to avoid the legal constraints and this and that. And so, servant leadership is a really interesting one because it has become kind of a very popular approach. That's certainly not his view of the creator in a quiet room. It's more of an interactional approach, which
00:40:11
Speaker
I don't know that it really was his forte. He was never involved in an organization or anything like that. He didn't get on that well with the professors, even at his university, et cetera. So I will say though that, and this comes as a surprise to a lot of people, that gratitude was a very important element of Nietzsche's philosophy.
00:40:33
Speaker
And the idea that you express that gratitude to others and that you have that attitude was pretty important. And I do see that as an important part of servant leadership, which is that you're...
00:40:48
Speaker
you're recognizing that you're not doing it at all. You're just helping to lead everyone. And so they're really doing the work. So maybe turning that on its head, you could say that that certain leader is one who recognizes the true creators within a business, within an organization.
00:41:06
Speaker
and appreciates them. And maybe that servant leader is someone who has faith, going back to the faith line, right? That servant leader is the comrade who has faith in those who produce the great works and understands that role, that is to make sure that they can do the creating that they need to do.
00:41:27
Speaker
Okay, I've managed to twist it all so that it sounds like Nietzsche would agree with that. On the other hand, this is one of the areas where Ayn Rand kind of borrowed some Nietzsche and was inspired by it, is this idea of the individual hero business leader. This is a business where all the inventions and all the leadership
00:41:49
Speaker
and all the management and all the deals come from this one leader at the head of it. And Nietzsche certainly saw the world in terms of heroes. That's who he was most interested in. And that's not many of the authors of our narratives in our book.
00:42:04
Speaker
where there was some kind of individualistic or hero notion going on, they really wanted to emphasize that they didn't see themselves as heroes. And I'm like, that's a mistake. Entrepreneurship is hard. Maybe you don't want to brag about it, but you really should see yourself that way because it really is a heroic thing to put up with all the nonsense that you have to put up with.
00:42:26
Speaker
whether it's entrepreneurship or in leading any kind of an organization. And so in that respect, Nietzsche's, you know, he would probably see it as kind of a camel roll, right? You're the guy or gal who does what the other people need so that they can be the heroes, so.
00:42:43
Speaker
I don't know. At the end of the day, these are not really the things that he was worried about. And again, I think I said at the beginning that we focused on his psychology and social psychology insights in the book. Most of what he wrote about was his moral view of society, which was a very different kind of thing. And I don't think is even at the level of individual organizations, but rather as a broader kind of issue.
00:43:11
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. Well, is there anything else you'd like to
Amor Fati and Eternal Recurrence: Embracing Reality
00:43:16
Speaker
share? One area that's worth just mentioning quickly is just notion of a more fatigue, which is a love of one's fate. And this goes back to determinism. And I think this bit is very compatible with stoicism. Correct me if I'm wrong. I just thought I was just thinking about this in the context of this discussion. But the idea of not just
00:43:41
Speaker
So, it's become very popular to talk about acceptance. In other words, we face the facts of reality and we accept them even if we don't like them. Nietzsche said, no, don't just accept them, affirm them with a holy yes. Say, okay, we lost that customer.
00:44:04
Speaker
Yes. That's part of our fate. And we're going to go forward and get new customers or whatever. And importantly, when I talk to people about this notion, a lot of them are like, oh, you mean find the silver lining? Like, oh, well, I lost that customer, but it taught me how to do this. It's like, no.
00:44:22
Speaker
Now you affirm the state that happened, the thing that happened or the thing that's happening as it goes and just for itself. And I think that's very compatible with the idea of really of instosism, really facing the brute shocks of reality as they come at you, as they are, and dealing with them as they come. And being glad about that, not just because you will learn from them, you will find ways to turn it
00:44:49
Speaker
to positive, you will find ways to get past it. But that's not why you're glad. You're glad just because it is your life. It is what you're doing. It is part of your becoming, of who you are, and that's that. And so I did want to add that one thing because I felt like the affirmation notion is a very useful distinction from, say, a more Buddhist
00:45:10
Speaker
kind of approach. I know there's a lot of overlaps with Stoicism and Buddhism, where Buddhist approach is much more oriented toward acceptance. And this is kind of a next step. Like with most things with Nietzsche, he's radical. He wants to go one step further, and maybe it's crazy, maybe it's not. He was, by the way, crazy.
00:45:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's a great thing to mention. It does have, of course, I think, Warner Stokes used that phrase a more fatigue, important to embrace reality and not just do that in a matter of acceptance, but perhaps willing acceptance and also thinking about making the decisions or having the thoughts that you want to embrace to the extent that you can, that you can shape reality. I think Nietzsche has that idea.
00:45:53
Speaker
as well, right? Trying to be the sort of person where you'd be happy living the life over and over and over again. It's at least one understanding of his notion of eternal recurrence. That's right, the eternal recurrence. And there's lots of debate, of course, as to whether he meant that metaphysically or just as a thought experiment. But I think it serves the most value as a thought experiment. It's like if you
00:46:16
Speaker
if you had to live this life over and over again, like you just said. First of all, on a prospective basis, what would I do now if I had to do this over and over again? But also looking back and it's like, I'm going to live that over and over again. I should just be glad about it. That was my life. In the past, that was my life. And I'm glad about it. Very good. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks a lot, Caleb.