Chapter 1: What does it mean for the modern world to hijack our values?
One of the themes that we've been circling the last few weeks is the way that the modern world can hijack our values. This principle was recently articulated by the philosopher C.T. Nguyen in an episode called How Metrics Make Us Miserable.
T told us that he became a philosopher to answer the biggest questions in life, but he discovered in grad school that everyone around him mostly just cared about numbers. The journals were ranked by status, numbers. The university departments were ranked by status, numbers. Individual researchers had their own H scores and other public quantifications of prestige, more numbers.
And this cult of quantification completely took over his life. The internal value of, I want to answer the world's deepest questions, was replaced by the external value of, make number go up. Make number go up. It might as well be the four-word mantra of the modern world.
If you think about it, it's actually somewhat difficult to name any corner of our lives that isn't drenched in external metrics. To take two personal examples, I wear an Oura ring, and I use social media. Oura quantifies how I spend my day. Social media quantifies everything I say. When I talk to the people in the office or at home or at a bar, nobody is scoring the cleverness of my repartee.
But when I move talking from the physical world to the digital world, I move conversation from a realm with no real-time scores to a realm that is nothing but scores. Views on TikTok, likes on Instagram, retweets and likes on Twitter, upvotes on Reddit. These digital conversations take on a different character.
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Chapter 2: How does the concept of 'the machine' affect our pursuits?
We are different. We talk differently on the internet because people on the internet aren't talking just to talk. They are talking to make number go up. What do we call this extraordinary force for bulldozing something inside of us, our values, and replacing it with something outside of us, something synthetic, bureaucratic, inauthentic? Let's call it the machine.
If you become a philosopher to discover the meaning of life, but only work on the papers that you think will end up in journals scored highly by a bureaucracy that you'll never see, that's the machine.
If you're a podcaster who wants to answer the most compelling questions in the world, but you end up just focusing on rage bait political bullshit because that's what all the YouTube fingers are clicking on, that's the machine. What is the opposite of the machine? It's something a little different than success.
It's success plus the ability to hold our values in the face of external systems that are trying to crush them. Today's guest, Brad Stolberg, calls it excellence. And that excellence is the subject of today's show. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Planned English. This episode of Plain English is presented by Audi. We all know that feeling, a change of plans, a new opportunity.
Instead of overthinking, what if you just said yes? With the all-new Audi Q3, the answer is easy. It's made for the yes life, with the power and room to handle whatever pops up. Yes to adventure, yes to right now. Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury. The all-new Audi Q3, made for the yes life. Learn more at AudiUSA.com. Brad Stolberg, welcome to the show.
Derek, it's a pleasure to be here. It's great to see you. So why don't you tell people who do not know you who you are and what you do?
Yeah, I'm Brad, and I wear three primary hats. The first hat that I wear is the Detroit Tigers. I guess I wear four primary hats. A Detroit Tiger fan is the first hat that I wear, actually wearing the hat, start of the season. The second hat I wear is as an author, a writer, where I'm really interesting in exploring applied philosophy and human flourishing.
The, I guess now I'm wearing four because the tiger's hat. The third hat that I wear is a coach. So I work with athletes, physicians, entrepreneurs on their mental skills. And then I'm also on faculty at the University of Michigan where I lecture in their graduate school of public health on leadership and self-coaching.
Your new book is The Way of Excellence, and you're arguing against two cultural forces here. One cultural force you're arguing against is alienation, and the other is pseudo excellence. So let's talk about each of these enemies of your current project. What's alienation?
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Chapter 3: What is the difference between success and excellence?
I won't say lonely, but alone. What you just described, those morning routine TikTok videos, the guy in those videos is always by himself. There is never another person that wakes up in a bed with him. There's never, God forbid, a child
heavens forbid, two children in the house, it's an incredibly time-expensive, performative routine that can only really be done in the absence of other people and certainly in the absence of family. And that's a way in which the audience for this approach you're arguing against is both pseudo excellence and alienated.
There's a way in which this performative approach of success in the world also makes it hard to be around people because it takes so damn long to check all of these stupid boxes. So that's one audience that I imagine is enamored of the pseudo excellence approach.
To what extent is that the audience you had in mind and is there another audience that you think is being suckered by this pseudo excellence approach?
I think you're spot on. That is definitely a primary audience. And it's part of the, it's a strong word, but I'm going to use it, it's part of the grift.
Because if you keep someone alone and feeling alone, then they're going to want to develop a parasocial relationship with you, the influencer, and they're going to have six hours, eight hours a day to watch you stream whatever it is that you're doing instead of doing real things in the real world and pursuing mastery and mattering in relationships. So yes, is the short answer.
That's a longer answer. I think there's another group, which is we often talk about the manosphere in young men. I think this happens with women as well. It's just a slightly different shade of color. And with women, you get big wellness. So this started out with goop and crystal healing and all of these other things that are supposed to bring you success and happiness.
And then you also see this notion of the trad wife or the traditional wife. whose life is just so in order and your job is to be a homemaker and to essentially serve your family. And in all of this, and it's being sold as like, that's what it means to be an excellent woman. But the women that are doing this, one, they have full-time jobs, which is making trad wife content.
And two, the people that they're appealing to that have the time and energy to watch them are inherently somewhat lonely because they're watching trad wives streaming their entire life all day. So it's this vicious cycle.
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Chapter 4: What are the cultural forces of alienation and pseudo excellence?
And Ray Allen said that the morning after winning that championship was one of the most disorienting, confusing mornings in his life because he still didn't feel fulfilled. He didn't feel content. That is the arrival fallacy. So we have to do this kind of Jedi mind trip where we can want to achieve and we can want to win and we can give our all to winning while at the same time...
like assuaging ourself of the expectation that winning is going to fulfill us in finding meaning and joy and satisfaction on the climb. And that to me is what the pursuit of excellence is all about. This is not one of those books, and this is not a case to say you should not strive. You should not try to win. You should strive. You should try to win.
This just says that if you think winning is going to seal the deal and make your life, you are rudely mistaken.
Yeah, you're reminding me. My favorite poem of all time is Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses. And most people who know that poem know the final iambic pentameter line of Ulysses, which is this king. It's a brilliant poem where essentially Tennyson is imagining the experience of Odysseus or Ulysses after he returns home, after he's a winner. from the story of the Odyssey.
And the whole idea is he is bored as hell. He is so bored and cannot wait to get back on the open sea because that's what life was all about. And most people know the poem from the very last stanza, which is to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield, which is this rapturous call for successful principles. But the best line of the poem is,
is in the middle of the poem where they say, all experience is an arc where through gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and forever as we move. Everything that we do inevitably serves as a frame for the things we haven't done. That is the arrival fallacy.
There's no getting around the fact that everything that you do will eventually become not the thing that you're reaching for, but the thing that frames everything you reach for starting now. And I love that idea that in a poem that's basically about an old crotchety man, you still have Tennyson, like the late 19th century,
just essentially putting his fingers so beautifully on this idea that whether you're the most successful person in the world, the Ray Allens, the Kevin Garnetzer, Kevin Durant's of the world, the people who have won and have famously not been made immediately and forever happy by their winning, or someone who doesn't succeed, Experience shapes attitudes, and it always will.
And you have to maybe remember that. Remember that the peak of the mountain is so, so tiny, and the second you succeed, you're going to be back to a climb. But that's okay. You should still try to climb.
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Chapter 5: How do flow and 'shitty flow' impact our lives?
I mean, that's how I think about fitness. I mean, you could like compete at a powerlifting meet and deadlift a certain amount of weight and no one can denigrate that. But that goes away very quickly, no different than you can write a book, but if you never write again, your ability to write is going to go away. What about obsession? What role does obsession play? Yeah, so it's interesting.
There's a more clinical definition of obsession, and then there's a colloquial definition of obsession. So the clinical definition, I'll start there, essentially says that it is very similar to addiction, where you do the thing despite negative consequences, And it becomes also like a compulsion. So even if you don't want to do it, you do it.
So a true example of obsession would be that you are training to get better at basketball, and even though you're overtraining to the point where you're getting injured, you keep training. That is like obsessive passion, is what the researchers call it. It's associated with bad outcomes.
That is in contrast to harmonious passion, where you still care deeply, you do the thing all the time, but you control it, it doesn't control you. So, in a clinical sense, obsession's bad. Now, more colloquially, when we talk about being obsessed with something, I think being obsessed with something is good to a point.
And that point is you don't want your entire identity or your entire self-worth to ever fuse with what you're doing because that makes you very fragile.
So the way that I think about excellence in obsession is you want to be a little bit crazy and a little bit obsessed, but you don't want to go over that edge where now this is the sole thing that you identify with because then you're going to take unacceptable risk. You might cheat, you might engage in fraud, so on and so forth.
You write, the things you work on work on you.
What does that mean? That means that if you are pursuing excellence in this values-driven way, when you are aspiring toward a goal, that goal is also shaping your character. So yes, I might want to deadlift 550 pounds. That is like a big mountain that I want to climb. Very Sisyphean task. And I might think that I'm doing all these things to work on the goal.
So I'm going to the gym, I'm doing my secondary lift, so on and so forth. But deadlifting 550 pounds is also working on me. It's teaching me about setbacks, about resilience, about facing my fears, about staying curious, about the power of coaching and community and on and on and on.
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