Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren, and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www AdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back Today on March 13th, 2025. I'm excited to welcome Bob Ewing back to the podcast. He came on the podcast one time before a few years ago, and listeners, you should totally check it out. I was so terrified. I don't know if it's noticeable, but Bob used to be my public speaking coach when I first started the podcast and I've gotten so much better because of him. But it's an honor and a special treat to get to talk to him. Not only one time but a second time, and I'm a little less scared this time, but he is a high impact speaker and a high impact guest. He's super inspirational and thoughtful, and you just walk away with your mind blown. So get ready. He is importantly the founder of Ewing School, part of how I learned how to public speak a little bit better, and we're going to be talking a bit more about his Substack while we're here, which is talking big ideas, which is part of what we're going to be talking about. So yeah, check those out, but most importantly, stay tuned. Welcome to the podcast.

Bob Ewing 

Thank you, Juliette. That was a wonderful introduction and I always enjoy hanging out with you. I appreciate you having me back

Juliette Sellgren 

Workshopped about 30 seconds before we started recording.

Bob Ewing 

I love it.

Juliette Sellgren 

First question, there's a different one for you because you've been on before, but this one is, what is the one piece of advice that you would give to your younger self?

Bob Ewing (2:03)

The one piece of advice that I would give to my younger self, you could get off the hamster wheel at any point. What do you mean? I think that we feel like we have to live our lives in a particular way and we feel like we have to do the things that society tells us we have to do. The haircut, the clothes, the I've got to keep achieving. I've got to keep living in the future. Like Oliver Burkeman's book 4,000 Weeks talks about how we're constantly doing telic activities where we have to keep marching forward. I'll be happy when I'll be happy when I get into a good college. I'll be happy when I get that good degree. I'll be happy when I get that job in New York and I'll be happy when I make a million dollars. Do we spend our whole lives living what maybe society wants us to do?

There was this brilliant book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, and this woman who wrote the book did end of Life Care for all different kinds of people, all different kinds of backgrounds and ethnicities and everything. And she realized that people would confide in her before they died and that the regrets of the dying were all the same. And the number one top regret of the dying is I wish I had the courage to live my life on my terms rather than what others expected of me. And that's the lesson that I think is really important for us to learn. Now, of course, if I could get into time machine to go back in time, absolutely 0% would never do it because anything that I would alter, would change where I am today, and I love where I am today, my wife and my baby and everything else. So I would never actually go back in time and give myself advice if I could.

Juliette Sellgren (3:46)

You leave me in a difficult place because now I have about 30 questions. Okay. First, maybe most pressingly, how do you kind of grapple with the last thing you said? I've been thinking about that sort of concept a lot. That everything that you go through- good or bad regret or not, you maybe shouldn't regret it because there comes a point where you learn from it or where you wouldn't be who you are without those things that you say you regret but who made you or that made you exactly who you are and that that's good and unique and important and part of how you can contribute what you do. That's kind of a hard thing to talk about and to think about and to hold because then bad things happen and you're like, well, how do I feel? How do I act? What do I do? Because you're supposed to recognize on the one hand that it's a good thing and then it will be a good and transformative thing, but then you have to feel in the moment in order to get there. And it seems kind of like this infinite regress of kind of having your own hands tied by this thing you've realized, which has set you free from past regret.

Bob Ewing 

Yeah.

Juliette Sellgren 

I've never known what to make of that.

Bob Ewing (5:08)

Yeah, it's a really important idea and it's hard and it takes you down different paths. And so I'll just throw out a few things to maybe think about with it. One is Dan Pink. All of his books are worth reading. His most recent one is called something like The Power of Regret. And he talks about how we love to say “no regrets,” but it's nonsense is that regrets are an extremely useful tool to help us to connect in with the primary engine of progress in our universe. The primary engine of progress in our universe is iterations, right? Naval [?] has this great line where he says Success isn't 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations. This is Charles Darwin's. This is Adam Smith's insight. This is Karl Popper's epistemological insight. It's lots of iterations based on feedback, create biological complexity, create wealth in the marketplace, help us to iterate towards the truth, help engineers to build stuff and help skill development and truth seeking to happen.

And so what regrets do is they give us the opportunity to travel back in time in our mind and say, how could I have done that better? And so whenever you meet someone that's really good at public speaking, for instance, it's not that they're just amazing at public speaking because they popped out that way. It's because they've iterated more, right? I like to say to our clients, never show up to anything unless you're on at least round three. But if you meet someone who's amazing at something, they're on round 50. Tiger Woods is so much better at golf than me because he's logged so many more iterations. He's swung the golf club and then gotten feedback from himself from others, and then iterated and then swung again. And so what regrets do is they allow us to iterate on all of our past actions and interactions.

And so if we can channel that, if we can travel back in time and say, how can I do this thing a little bit better, then that's awesome, right? Second part of what you said is this idea that the obstacles like famous book by Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way. And it's not that the obstacles are good, it's that we always have a choice to make. We can either let them take us down bad paths or transcend them and learn from them and help ourselves and those around us to grow. For example, Dostoevsky is arguably the greatest novelist of all time. The only reason he's Dostoevsky is because he was hauled off to Siberia and put in front of a firing squad and was about to get shot in the head when somehow he got his sentence commuted. And that experience and the pain and the suffering and the horrible things he went through made him Dostoevsky.

The guy who wrote Elon Musk's biography, Walter Isaacson, he says, I can never build rockets to the moon because I'm happy and I have a really good relationship with my dad. And so there is this idea that's so true for myself. I went through a divorce that was really hard. It was the hardest thing I ever went through before marrying Mary Rose. And I realized that so much of my ability to connect with people has stemmed from that, right? I would never wish the pain and the suffering and the humiliation and the shame and all those things that you feel when you go through a divorce. I would never wish those on anybody. And yet if I didn't have those experiences, it would have hindered my ability to connect with the people that I coach and the people that I interact with in a very real way. And if I didn't go through those experiences, I wouldn't have my Mary Rose, I wouldn't have the Ewing school, I wouldn't have my wife, I wouldn't have, all of the most important things in my life would not have existed had I not gone through that experience.

Juliette Sellgren (9:00)

This is something that I've been thinking about a lot. It seems as though dialogue, conversation, kind of the eyes of the world. I mean, obviously people are concerned with and care about their individual lives. They're not little things. I would argue as a classical liberal and as myself that the little things in life are kind of the biggest things, whether that's little good things, the little rituals you have, or it's the bad things that you could say, okay, well someone in a far off country, is it fear of getting murdered? Well, you're not. So you should be grateful for that, right? And part of it is you can be grateful for that and you should be aware of that, but it is the little you should be concerned with the little things in your life, good or bad, I guess is maybe the way to put it.

And for better or for worse, we're kind of programmed that way. And yet everyone today, and I don't know, maybe this has always been the case, but I'm only alive today. They seem so concerned with the bigger picture and the progress and the goodness of life and everyone feeling good and happy and great. And while I think that that's all well and fine and important, we all want the best for humanity, the best for the people who follow us to make the most of the world we've been given and to improve it. There's almost this difficulty of, well, if regret and learning lessons and facing hardship is good, and yet I wouldn't want to wish that on, not even my enemy, much less someone that I care about, I guess how do we put in perspective the fact that hardship and struggle, as bad as it is for ourselves, we can realize that it's a good thing and that it has important outcomes for who we become in our lives and what we can contribute. And yet when we look at the national stage, the international stage where people are talking about doing things that are good and making progress in all of this, that the narratives kind of seem to conflict a little bit and I don't really know what to make of that.

Bob Ewing 

Well, tell me a little bit more about that. What's the actual paradox or the challenge?

Juliette Sellgren (11:29)

A lot of people I talk to, no matter what they believe about a million different things. They seem to understand in a personal way, in an individual, at an individual level, that this hardship in, I mean the regret, the iterations, all of that, that it's important no matter where they are on this journey of learning that and understanding that, it seems as though a lot of people that I interact with, and maybe I'm just lucky, are aware of this. And in a way, even when you don't want to face hardship, you're grateful for what the outcome will be. And yet if you look at what people talk about on social media or in politics or whatever, and we look at the world, everyone socially and in the bigger picture sense, in the societal realm, they seem concerned with getting everything perfect the first time that everything needs to be just right, that we need to be happy or content or something like that. And while I do think that, and I intensely believe that happiness and growth and prosperity are really important, it's kind of hard to reconcile and put together. I guess what I would think becomes kind of an emergent order of how do you become happy well through individual trial and error.

And that's kind of how growth happens. That's how innovation happens, as you were saying. But it seems as though even if individuals are aware of that, when we talk in terms of society, that's not at all a part of the conversation and there's not an acknowledgement of that, and there's kind of a disconnect. How do we get from how you live your personal life to how society changes and improves and just is?

Bob Ewing (13:28)

Yeah, wow. There's a lot there that we could go down. Let me flag one piece and then pause. One of the great philosophers of the 20th century was a guy named Richard Rorty, and when he was a little boy, he figured out the meaning of life. And he even wrote something the effect of, I knew that the point of being human and the way to live as a meaningful purposeful human is to spend your life fighting for social justice. His parents were dedicated followers of Leon Trotsky, the famous Russian who embraced us the concept of permanent revolution. And when Richard Rorty was this little kid, he's like nine years old, Trotsky got assassinated, and one of his key people, his key secretaries went into hiding in Richard Rorty's house. And so his parents were really involved in this stuff. And then a close friend of their parents was this other big socialist named Carlo Treska, and he got gunned down just walking down the street in Manhattan.

And so both of these guys, Trotsky and Treska, they dedicated their lives. They gave their lives to fighting for the cause, right? And Rorty says, I know this is correct. I know this is correct. And as a kid, he knew it was correct, but then he found himself loving, wandering around in the woods and picking wild orchids, and that was his favorite thing to do. And then he'd feel guilty about it because he's like, what does picking wild orchids have to do with advancing social justice and permanent revolution? And that he wrote this essay that's one of the classic essays of philosophy, the 20th century called Trotsky and the Wild Orchids, and it examines the tension you're talking about. We have this pressure to keep working on projects to keep advancing the ball, this guilt of any sort of leisure, this kind of pressure to conform.

And what he says is, the truth of the matter is, and this is what I mentioned earlier, Oliver Burkeman in 4,000 Weeks, he says there's two different distinct ways we can spend our time. And he calls italic and AIC activities. This is Oliver Burkeman and italic activities have this aim, right? We're working towards advancing our vision of improving the world, whether that's Trotsky or open society or whatever it may be. We are practicing to get better. We're doing all of these things. We're sort of slogging, if you will, in personal growth, depends on that. Societal development depends on that, but we could spend our entire lives living them in the future. There's no point that the fire hose of to-dos that's smashing you in the face right now is ever done, right? You could reach inbox zero for an instant, but then it's back, and then there's a thousand other inboxes that you have and projects you have to do.

You never get to the point that the fire hose is turned off. You never get to the point that society has advanced exactly as you want. And if you do, it's for an instant. And then it's back to there are problems. And so the point that Richard Rorty and Oliver Burkeman and other philosophers have said is that the key to a meaningful life is counterintuitively spending as much time as you can doing AIC activities, and those are activities that have no aim. You are present, you are enjoying them as experiences. You're walking through nature, you're paying attention to the pretty flowers. You're spending time with loved ones, you're laughing, you're playing, you're experiencing awe. You are present with yourself, you're present with your loved ones, you're present with the world around you. And life is a balance between filling our time with AIC activities and at the same time making space to advance the aims that we think are most important. I'll pause there.

Juliette Sellgren (17:12)

That's great. So it does feel really counterintuitive. I think what's kind of difficult about this is that it's such a deeply personal kind of realization that, I mean, obviously it's the philosophers who are grappling with this out loud and as their work, but I think it leaves us in a weird position as a society where, and again, I don't know if this is entirely true, because again, I was born today or in time and not another time.

Bob Ewing 

Born today.

Juliette Sellgren (17:51)

No, I wasn't born today, but I might as well be in certain senses, again, similarly to Walter Isaacson, I can't build rockets and I probably will never, but that's okay. I was just not meant to. But there seems to be this focus on fixing everything and fixing the world all the time. And the guilt that you mentioned Rorty was talking about is so there for so many people. And yet you also just look at the fact that no one agrees, and that's kind of natural seeming for human beings. And so then how are you going to progress and fix everything in a kind of deterministic? We're going to sit down in a room, we're going to figure it out, then we're going to do this, and it's going to be perfect the first time. If no one agrees, it doesn't seem possible. And so it is a highly counterintuitive idea and concept that I think is even hard to think about as someone who likes to think about ideas. And so it just fits in among the other many ideas, especially economics is kind of what I'm thinking about the ideas that are super counterintuitive. And yet I think if they were well explained, would alleviate some of this unnecessary guilt and kind of misunderstanding the hamster wheel among other things. And so I don't know. I almost think that explaining counterintuitive ideas is more difficult and yet more crucial than explaining intuitive ideas. And yet it's the harder thing to do. So how do we do that?

Bob Ewing (19:38)

Totally. And I'll push back on one thing you said that we don't agree on anything. I think that that's not true. I think that most people agree on most things, and if you think everyone hates each other and everyone's fighting, then just log off social media for like, oh, we can just go wander around. And if you ask yourself, there was this awesome essay that came out a couple of years ago called The Illusion of Social Decline. It was something like that. And it's like if you ask someone, is the world falling apart? Yes, of course. The last Are people mean to each other? Yes, of course. In the last day, how many people were mean to you? None in the last week. How many people were mean to you? None. You know what I mean? And so there's a cool website called Purple States of America, and you click on it, you say, oh yeah, we're not red and blue.

We're like purple and almost everything, and even pick the most controversial things. Pick trans athletes, DEA, abortion, whatever. If you log into social media, you see the extremes screaming at each other. You think, oh my God, we're hopelessly divided. But then literally go talk to anyone on the planet, talk to a hundred of them and see where they are. And they're basically all going to be purple. Everyone's going to say with abortion, this is complicated. There's some sort of line that exists and there's a difference. A one day old blast assistant and a nine month old baby that's going to be born in a week or whatever, 99 out of those hundred people are going to be purple. Your mom actually flagged an essay from Caitlyn Flanagan and it was like, you have to read this. It's so good. And she gets into this. There's a new Substack called [The] Disagreement, which is super good, and this is it is they bring people in to say, should trans athletes be included in elite women's sports? And if you have someone arguing for someone arguing against, but what they have to do is listen to each other and should that they understand each other. And then you realize that all the most controversial issues happening right now just on this one subset, everyone should read the disagreement. It shows that there's a ton of space for agreement. There's a ton of space to understand each other and to say, here's all the things we agree on and we don't agree on every single thing, but we're not totally polarized. That's the myth of social media.

Juliette Sellgren (21:46)

I agree that it is the myth of social media, but I think the thing that's hard is that where do ideas thrive nowadays? I do see in my life, and it seems so weird that people get so animated and are so in their camp that the other side is awful or that there's this completely unsolvable problem and we're totally screwed, and yet they continue to live their lives in complete contradiction to those statements, which for me is confusing. But it's great because it means that they're wrong, that we're not doomed because people are good and people are nice to each other and people do keep living their lives and keep concerned with the little things. But how as people who work in ideas, I'm sure you're going to have a really great and interesting take on this, especially because the way that you work with ideas is more interpersonal than I think a lot of us, which we can strive to do.

Me and me mostly, that's who I'm really speaking for. But if we're supposed to log off of social media, where do we do our ideas? Where do we kind of engage with this stuff? Because I look at academics and kind of the work that I'm looking to do, and if you log off of social media, you're writing a white paper which no one is going to read. And so how do you kind of balance this? Well, you shouldn't look at social media if you want to be in touch with the world and not be confused about the world falling apart because it's not true, but then how do you share your ideas? How do you guard against the polarizing and the myth convincing part of social media while also using it for creative and communicative ends?

Bob Ewing (23:56)

There's a great line that says something to the effect of the important technology is absolutely amazing in life changing, and we should always embrace whatever technologies can help us to advance our ends and make our lives better. It's just important that we are controlling the technology and the technology is not controlling us. And that's it. And I'm not saying you shouldn't be on social media or should log off to social media. I was just grad a thought experiment saying, if you feel that the world's hopelessly divided and log off social media for we can interact with actual humans in the real world. And you'll see that it's not Ben Klutsey who's a dear friend, executive director of Mercatus, and a client loves to tell the story about how there's a woman that he knew that was worked up about Trump and all of the stuff happening with MAGA, and she knew her next door neighbor was this kind of MAGA full through MAGA guy, and she was really worried, oh my God, is this guy actually evil and was really worried about this?

And then this big snowstorm came and she got out and she went outside to shovel her driveway and the guy was finishing her driveway. He was just shoveling it to be a good neighbor, having no idea that all these thoughts are going on inside in her head, he's just being himself. And that I think that's closer to reality than what we get on social media, but I'm not saying you shouldn't use it. I'm saying technology is incredible. Technology is why we don't die of toothaches when we're 25 years old. So many of our ancestors said technology is absolutely incredible and makes the world better. Just we want to make sure that we're using it to advance. What's important for us, and this gets to the idea of the root of the word education that I think we lose a lot. The Latin root is educauter.

It means to draw out, not to pound in. And we live in a world that we're constantly getting things pounded. The philosopher, Schopenhauer talked about how you need to make time to read less, and Tolstoy put that into his calendar of wisdom. Even Tolstoy who wrote huge books, it was like make time to read less. Because when we're constantly consuming other people's ideas, we don't create space for our ideas to emerge. One of the reasons that the shower is we have all, I had these cool ideas in the shower. It's literally the only place that we're separating ourselves from glowing rectangles from other people's thoughts like getting smashed in your heads. If we can create what I mean more space for our ideas to emerge, then we can start to live with intention. And so I think the important thing is to say, what are my values?

What are my principles? How do I want to live? And you can't read that in a book. You can't go ask someone else that This is hard, but you have to draw out. The reason writing is so hard is because it's a process of drawing out and when you say, well, what are my principles and what are the stories that are most important for me to believe and to share, and what is the path that I need to take? That's not a question you can ask somebody else. And so we need to create more space for us to draw out that which lies within. We need to create more space to listen to ourselves and that will help us to determine how we use technology and how we interact and the careers and colleagues that we pursue.

Juliette Sellgren (27:16)

So I'm going to turn the tables a little bit. How did you get off the hamster wheel? How did you realize that it was time and where were you, what was happening and how did you get off of it?

Bob Ewing (27:34)

I've never been as successful conventionally as you at the different points in our lives. If you looked at me when I was your age at any point in our lives, I wasn't at your level. So that made it a little bit easier for me because I was never getting into an Ivy League school. I was never competing for that. I was never doing, I never got onto the hardcore hamster wheels, so that was helpful. But I will say that when I was in college, I started getting interested in ideas. I know you were getting interested in ideas much earlier, but in particular, I started reading philosophy and I started reading economics and I started reading ideas in a way and just discovering ideas in a way I had never discovered them before. And that just opened up this entire universe. And I got invited to give a talk at a conference in Columbus, Ohio.

I was going to school in Toledo, and I went to this conference and I walk up to the stage when it's my turn and I get behind the microphone and I'm freaking terrified, and I look out at this crowd and I'm probably the only one under 30, right? There's a lot of gray hairs, and I'm this college kid. I'm like 20 and I look like I'm about 12, and I give this talk and I put so much effort into it, and I give this talk about all these ideas I've been reading about and thinking about, and I finish in days. They loved it. It was this incredible magical, transcendent experience I never had before, just filled with awe and pride and enthusiasm, and it was this magical, transformative moment. And in fact, I did well enough that they nominated me to be the vice chairman of their organization, which was why it's great.

And that experience, the experience of getting on stage and connecting with people on the ideas that resonate with you in a way that will help them, that experience, that feeling of magic. That's the thing that I said, this is it. This is my calling. And so I started a company many years later that said, I want to help people with that. Our public speaking company. I think you'll see if you go to our website and 10 other public speaking websites, it's different in the sense that most public speaking will show the founder or the key people up on stage talking and ours is all about you. You don't see me or Mary Rose anywhere on our website when you first click on it, it's just about you bring your ideas to life and our aesthetic is all about experiencing that magic, right? And so Mitch say how when he was so young, he was shy, he was so shy, he got bullied in school and working with himself, with others, and with me and our company, he got to the point that he gave a talk.

One of the first talks I worked with him on round one, he was speaking in abstractions and looking down, we iterated enough that by the time he got on stage, he delivered a talk that got a standing ovation that made people cry, that made people hug him, and that he got several job offers. And so it's like he experienced that magic, right? One other anecdote, or Christina Martin who worked with, who came in at a much higher level than Ben came in at, but still the chief excellence. I worked with her on a Supreme Court case. She was arguing called Tyler v Hennepin County, a landmark Supreme Court case. She has a thousand world-class attorneys helping her with every aspect of the case, and I worked with her to make sure she was as polished and confident and comfortable as possible. And right before she went on stage, I talked to her two days before and she says, I don't feel nervous at all.

I'm excited. She goes, she argues the case and her mom went to the argument and afterwards, her mom's in the bathroom and a woman comes up to her mom. No idea. Of course the woman has no idea who she's talking to, but that she's talking to Christina's mom, right? But the woman says to Christina's mom, she says, I work here and I see cases all the time, and I've never seen someone argue a case as well as that woman just argued, right? When the ruling came back, Christina won nine to zero. As divided as we think the Supreme Court cases or the Supreme Court is, she won every single justice and substantively advanced good law in the world, literally made the world better with the caliber of her legal argument in the caliber of her communication skills, that feeling of magic, we can bottle it and apply it in a way that makes ourselves and others in the world around us better.

Juliette Sellgren (32:22)

It seems like kind of a scary thing. The idea that your calling, which is phenomenal and you've helped so many people, is public speaking and communicating and connecting in this way, but for those of us, for people who don't excel at that and that's not their calling and they don't want to iterate and don't want to, I mean not don't want to, but maybe are afraid to or really just don't excel at it, it is a skill that is so necessary no matter what your calling is, because it's an essential part of connecting and communicating, which sounds repetitive. I'm thinking of the word community. How do you even build community or make change or influence or whatever word you want to use? You must communicate effectively. And so the fact that with your calling, you've chosen to help other people get better at bottling the magic say and figuring out how to spread their ideas and their callings through yours. I don't know if you'd agree with the way I put that, but that's how I'm putting it.

Bob Ewing (33:41)

I would put it this way. I would say that you, Juliette, you listen or listening to Juliette, your professional success will be determined in large part by how well people understand you, by how well people like you, by how well people trust you, by how well people listen to you, by how well people think you listen to them by how well you connect with them. Every single one of those are teachable skills that are connected to communication. Your ability to effectively connect with people will determine to a large extent how effective you are in life. And so whether this is something that's fun or something that's not fun is irrelevant. It's a skill that's essential for human flourishing,

Juliette Sellgren (34:34)

And that sounds terrifying, but even the story of you realizing that it's something that moves you and that then you can help and have the capacity to share that with other people so that what moves them and drives them can be effective with other people. I mean, it's a success story. I want to say it's a market success story, but that's only part of it. Yeah, economics is everything.

Bob Ewing 

Well, okay, so let's talk about that for a second, right?

Juliette Sellgren 

Okay.

Bob Ewing (35:15)

Economics is everything. Let's kind of bring this together, right?

Joseph Henrich, the great scientist, right? Joseph Henrich wrote a classic book called The Secret of Our Success, and he says that the secret of our success, the secret of human beings, the reason that we're the ones who've taken over the world we're the ones who built cities and skyscrapers. The secret of our success is our ability to cooperate and connect on a large scale. There is no other species that can do this. There's no other ape that can encounter a strange ape and not want to fight it. And in the sea, you have fish and swim together, but not with different tribes. Insects cooperate super well within their hives, but they don't cooperate across hives. Human beings alone are the only species that's able to connect across tribes to connect throughout our entire species. That's the secret to our success, is we cooperate better. We connect better than any other species, and so we share our ideas, and so they compound and they mix and match together in what Karl Popper called World Three, and then we can tap into that world three so we can benefit from the skills and the tools of other human beings all across the globe and all throughout time, and that creates this collective brain that we use to solve problems and to build a better world.

And that's amazing. That's why it's not that any one of us is super smart, but it's collectively we're brilliant and we're accumulating our knowledge rapidly. And so that's why human beings can build electrons. Masters and quantum computers and telescopes appear back to dawn of creation, and that's why we alone eradicated smallpox and mapped genomes and traveled to the bottom of the ocean and harness nuclear energy and walked in the moon and do all of these incredible things. It's because of our ability to work together to connect. And so Adam Smith wrote two books. One of them is on transactional relationships and one is on unconditional relationships. They're both incredible and lead to transformational growth, and it's not that we should say, I should only have unconditional relationships or I should only have transactional relationships, but that all relationships matter, and our ability to effectively communicate makes all of those relationships better.

Juliette Sellgren (37:29)

I think this is kind of reminding me of what you were even saying at the very, very beginning of this, which is that we need to get off the hamster wheel, but why? Because contentment and success like actual success, even being able to define what success means comes from getting off the wheel, and that just doesn't seem super evident in the same way that it feels as though we should be super binary, which I think is what's so compelling about the narrative surrounding polarization, or let's take communism or capitalism, one or the other and not something maybe in the middle, or for example, I guess what you were just saying about the Adam Smith and the relationships, why can't we have more than one? You don't need to be all the way on one extreme. You don't need to pick one and not the other. It's just where, at what time and to what function. So I mean, you did a great job of just explaining how that has propelled all of humanity in the world forward, but how do we talk about how the individual level of this getting off the hamster wheel, very simple, goes from being an individual thing to then a communal, societal thing where we have all of this growth and submarines and the genome and everything that humanity has accomplished not on our own, and not due to there being no hamster wheel at all. How do we put all of these things together?

Bob Ewing (39:21)

Yeah, that's a good question. That's a big question I think that Robert Greene has written on this, right? He's the guy that wrote 48 Laws of Power, and he wrote Mastery and the Laws of Human Nature, and he has a daily reader where he smashes all these ideas together, and he basically says that in his belief system, you have embedded into you some sort of a calling and your job is to figure it out. And you can't do that by going and reading other books and using social media and having conversations. You need to dig in. You may have read rookie's letters to a young poet, and this is the same thing where he says that you have to figure out what lies within you, and that requires carving out space. Oliver Sacks, or before he died, one of the all time great writers of the 20th century, the last thing that he wrote was called Sabbath, and I think that it's worth reading and rereading and rereading. It's in a little book called Gratitude that that was published after he died, and there's four little essays in it. Actually, I think I got this for you many years ago.

Juliette Sellgren 

I read it. I based a science project off of it, and I'm writing it down. I do need to reread it because I guarantee that maybe one ounce of it stuck.

Bob Ewing (40:49)

Yeah, I go back and reread it regularly, but there was four essays. The first one was this piece he wrote in the New York Times, right when he realized he was going to die, and he used the same title that David Hume used for his autobiography. Hume realized he was about to die. He wrote an autobiography in one day. I think it's called My Own Self, but it is steeped in wisdom. The last essay in there, and you could read all these essays in less than an hour, but the book's called Gratitude. Everyone should get it put on your bookshelf and read it regularly. But the last one is called Sabbath and Sacks grew up before World War ii, his first 10 years or so, it was before World War II. He grew up in this very Jewish community in the UK, and it got decimated during World War II, and then he was gay and he couldn't connect as he came of age in adolescence, that disconnected him as well.

But all of these things caused him a disconnect from the community of his childhood. And then as an old man, he reflecting on his life and he realizes, oh my God, there is so much wisdom in the Sabbath, and whether you're Jewish or Christian or Muslim or atheist or libertarian or vegetarian or whatever you are, it doesn't matter. It's like he was a secular Jew. He was not religious at all, but he was like, gosh, this Sabbath, the Sabbath is so important. And this ties in with the idea of AIC activities. When I carve out a day to create space, to be present, come to know myself, to come to know others, to come, to know the world around me and just be there. And so I think that what would be really useful for all of us is that we channeled a little bit more of that, a little bit more of the transcendentalist philosopher Emerson, the American philosopher, who would say, get out of the bucket. The analogy, like the crabs in the bucket, if you put a bunch of crabs in a bucket, none of the crabs will escape because every crab, as soon as one tries to escape the other crabs pull it down.

Juliette Sellgren 

And that’s kind of what we do.

Bob Ewing (42:30)

You may have read The Gossip Trap by Eric Cole that won the Astro Codex 10 essay contest a couple years ago. It's like absolutely outstanding. That's a whole side thing. But the basic thesis is that the original government for humans for most of our history was gossip. It gossip keeps us from escaping the bucket. Anyone who's weird, anyone who's unusual, anyone who's carving their own path gets pulled back in. And so that's kind of what social media is. Unleashing is that sort of original government of gossip and shame and controlling people through pulling them back into the bucket. And Emerson's whole philosophy, whole philosophy of Transcendentalism is like escape the bucket, get off the hamster wheel and just go live your life and create space to understand yourself. And then his student, his handyman was a guy named Thoreau and Thoreau, went and became big Emersonian philosopher and lived,

Juliette Sellgren 

He was his handyman.

Bob Ewing (43:22)

He started as this handyman. So Thoreau was an Emersonian transcendentalist philosopher who said, I'm going to go sit by a lake and just come to know myself, and we don't have to do that to that extreme, and we have to temper this because you can't be a hundred percent. That's like the path to madness, because then I could just be avoiding all sort of social cues and all sort of tearing up all these Chesterton fences and all of these things that are in place to make society function. But channeling a little bit more Emerson, I think is what we're asking is what the world needs right now is get off the hamster wheel, come to know yourself, live your life in your own terms. Have the courage to live the life that you want, not the life that others expect of you.

Juliette Sellgren (44:09)

I think that's so true, especially because if you had to ask me, which no one is asking to characterize what the dominant narrative is and what the dominant demand really is among my generation, but even just generally today, I feel like it's a lot of look at me mixed for me, love me, pay attention to me, which is human true. But I think it comes at kind of a cost because I mean, first it's maybe a reflection of the fact that people, I don't know themselves and don't really love themselves, but they haven't really given themselves a chance. I mean, if you're so preoccupied in saying that, even me, who I haven't spent a ton of time on social media, but I'm easing myself into it, it just seems very clear that people nowadays feel so compelled because I think it's so easy. The cost is so low to demand that of others that that's what we do. I mean, even I do that, who doesn't? Children from their littlest age do that? 

Bob Ewing (45:24)

It is natural. This is a key insight. This is a key insight in Theory of Moral Sentiments, where Smith says that it's true that nature designed us to be self-centered. He didn't say self, but he said self-centered, and that we spend more time thinking about ourselves than anyone else. That's just how we're built. And then the whole point of moral sentiments is to say, how do we acknowledge that truth and transcend it to live a fulfilling, meaningful, love-filled life where we're not caught on the hamster wheels of what he called fortune and fame, right? It's funny because so many people think of Adam Smith is the wealthy nations guy, and he, he says, don't be bound by fortune. Don't be bound by fame. Be bound by your virtue. Be bound by your character, whatever you want it to be. He said, the key to meaningful life is to be loved and lovely, and it gets into what that means.

But the core of that is to say, I'm going to acknowledge my nature is to be self-centered, and I'm going to do the best I can to transcend that. Steven Covey, who wrote one of the most popular books in history, [The] Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he said the single most important principle of human relations that he discovered, he and his team and the role decades of research was this seek first to understand, then to be understood. And that's it, right? That's it. We live in a world where we've gone from turning our cameras out to turning our cameras in. We're doing the opposite of what Covey and Smith and the stoic philosophers and basically every religion and philosophy has suggested, which is to make more space to think of others and to connect with others. This is why before we started recording, I had said to you as the number one core piece of advice that I would give to anyone to say, I want to instantly elevate my communication, whether it's a keynote speech or the conversation you're going to have next, is what would it look like if you three Xed your audience focused?

And if you do that, you will instantly elevate every single conversation you have.

Juliette Sellgren (47:25)

I think I get it way more than I did the first time you said it after having this conversation. I mean, I got it, but there's something about this conversation that has brought more understanding and more, not just patience, but I'm trying to think of the word to laxness is not really the right word either, but that's the only other thing that comes to mind.

Bob Ewing (47:46)

Dale Carnegie, the great public speaking coach, the great American public speaking coach, he has this fun analogy where he says, he says, imagine you're off fishing and he's trying to catch fish, and you're sitting on the pier. And he says, when I do this, I love to eat berries and cream because I freaking love berries and cream, but when I try to catch the fish, I use worms and flies. Why is that? No fisherman tries to catch fish with berries and cream or french fries or pizza, every single fisherman. Now, as you catch fish with stuff that fish is interested in, not stuff you're interested in, we walk through life talking to people about what we're interested in. For some reason, we treat humans so much different than we treat fish. We try to catch humans by talking about what interests us rather than what interests them.

And so if we can just flip that, if we can see first to understand if we can be audience focused. I was telling you when Mary Rose and I had lunch with Tyler Cowen a little while back in DC, he was talking about how he gives talks all over the world, like a hundred or 200, some crazy amount of talks every year. And he says before every one of them, he just pops into an AI LLM and just says, Hey, how can I be a little more audience focused? I don't think he words it that way, but he says, okay, I'm going to talk to Stanford, the Stanford Econ department or whatever it is. Here's an audience I'm talking to. Here's the subject that I'm supposed to be talking to 'em about. What are some things that they're thinking about now? What are some things they're worried about right now they're excited about right now?

What's happening at Stanford right now that I should know about? Whatever? But he uses LLM in just a minute or two to really help him to figure how can I be more audience focused? And this applies to conversations with our partners, with our romantic partners, our business partners, our friends, our colleagues, the person line at the grocery store. If we can say who are they? What are they interested in, what are they yearning for? What are they thinking about and worrying about right now, and how can I just sort of meet them there and maybe create a little bit of value for them? That flip rather than, Hey, look at me, look at me, look at me. I'm saying, Hey, I see you. The ability to be seen, to really feel seen, that is absolutely transformational, and that's the key to effective communication is when you walk away, like Adam Smith would say, when you walk away from every single interaction, ideally, is mutually beneficial. It's positive. Some, we both walk away having learned something, and you want to go into conversations saying, it's not about me. It's about creating value for them. That's transformation.

Juliette Sellgren (50:19)

I was wondering about why it is that we do that with humans and not with other people or not other people with other living creatures or even not living creatures. You're never thinking the rock is thinking about me. I mean, neither Dwayne the Rock Johnson nor a rock are thinking about you.

Bob Ewing 

No. I think some people do think that rocks have consciousness, this whole thing can panpsychism, but

Yeah, I get your point, and I think, I'm sorry, I interrupted you. Go on. No, no, no, no, no. Go ahead. It's because we're not playing status games with the book. Will Storr wrote this fantastic book called The Status Game, and it's so beautifully written. Every sentence is quotable, but the essence of the book that we all know is that humans are products of natural selection. We're primates that are obsessed with belonging to tribes and having status within those tribes. And that has incredible explanatory power is that we're all playing these status games. And one of the important things in life, and why I'm saying get off the hamster wheels, because you want to be achieving status on your terms. You want to be climbing the ladder that you choose, not the ladder that society chooses for you. And so much of our life is spent playing these status games where we're just trying to say, Hey, look at me.

Look at me. Look at me. Look, I'm part of this tribe and I status within this tribe. And we don't do that with rocks and plants and dogs because they're not playing the status game with us. But every safety and we interact with, we subconsciously or consciously think I'm in a status game with them, and I have this weird, Milton Friedman said, 80% of the world's problems will be solved if we realize that life's not a zero sum game. It's a positive sum game. And natural selection tells us that life is a zero sum game, and I need to have status over the people that I'm interacting with. And if we can counterintuitively realize that life is a positive sum game where everybody wins by creating value for each other, all Adam Smith, and we're all instantly elevated, but it's counterintuitive and it requires effort.

Juliette Sellgren 

It is really counterintuitive, and I think all good things in life are counterintuitive other than maybe berries and cream, not super counter.

Bob Ewing (52:23)

Push back on that. I would say actually once you, I hope that one day you get married, I hope that one day you have kids because all of the anxieties and imposter syndrome and existential dread, it just freaking disappears when you reproduce, right? Life is a status game and life is about survival and reproduction, and if you ever had a near death experience and Oh my God, I'm alive, you viscerally feel that thrill, right? Oh my God, I'm alive. I appreciate life. When you actually reproduce, you're like, oh my God, this is it. Right? Sturgill Simpson's amazing musician has this great line where it's called Welcome to Earth. It's about the birth of his first son, and he says, wish I'd done this 10 years ago. How could I know? How could I know? The answer was so easy, and that's true. It's just like, have a kid. Most of your problems go away. New problems arise, but they're not the existential dread. What is the of life? The meaning of life is to reproduce and be loved and be lovely like Adam Smith said, right? And it's just like, it's very simple.

Juliette Sellgren (53:27)

So this is kind of what it is very simple, but it's almost hidden from us, even though it's in front of us. It's like the scene and the unseen. We see it, but we don't even, the unseen is contained within what we see, and so it is, I don't know. I mean, you've basically gone and created another human who values you more highly than most of the people that you're around, otherwise, yeah.

Bob Ewing 

I think that the most important thing in life is just to fill your home with unconditional love and that's it.

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah, it's funny. I mean, it is so simple, and yet…

Bob Ewing 

It's simple, but it's not easy. It's hard.

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah. Well, it's even hard to accept that it could be so easy or so simple. Not easy. It's simple.

Bob Ewing (54:20)

Simple worth the most important things in life, but it's true. The most important things in life are things that you cannot purchase and nobody can give them to you. You have to earn them. It gets back to this idea of education's about drawing out that which lies within, right? A home filled with love, you have to build that a peaceful mind. You have to build that a fit body. You have to build that deep, meaningful relationships. You have to build that a job that becomes a career that becomes a calling. You have to build that, right? The key to a good life is you go out and build it, and you figure out the ladder you're supposed to be on, and you climb that You don't take the one that you're given. You go find the one and you build the one that is right for you, and then you go build it. But the good life is one that you build in core to It is deep, meaningful, fulfilling relationships.

Juliette Sellgren (55:06)

Bob Ewing, very inspirational, full of wisdom and successful in your personal terms, but also hamster wheel terms. I think the world probably regards you ChatGPT, I asked regards you as quite successful, so thank you for taking the time to come on the podcast. I have one question for you, something that I've been wondering about for a while because you're so well read and have introduced me to some of the most moving authors that I've read, which is just great. I'm so lucky for that, so thank you for that and so much more. But what is one thing that you are currently working on to improve yourself or your skills?

Bob Ewing (55:53)

Oh, okay, so I've got this theory and I haven't tested it, but I would love if one of your listeners could run this experiment, and my thesis is that somatic experiences are essential to success, and so what I mean by that is physical experiences, somatic, right? It's like of the body. So here's an experiment I would love to run. I would love to get a thousand people and run them through six month cohorts. 500 are in cohort A, 500 are in cohort B. In cohort, in both A and B cohorts. All a thousand people do the exact same public speaking training. We record three minute videos of them at the very beginning. We've recorded three minute videos of 'em. At the very end, we have a team of outside experts that grade their beginning and ending videos to see how much progress they make, and we give them world-class public speaking training. We build their confidence, we build their clarity, we build their compelling, persuasive capabilities, and so they just crush, right? My thesis is that if you do the exact same things for cohort A, cohort B, but the only different is with cohort B, you also have them do 10,000 kettlebell swings and a thousand kettlebells Turkish get ups a day, I think are the two greatest. No, no, no, over the six month period.

Juliette Sellgren 

Oh, awesome.

Bob Ewing (57:04)

Over the six month period, you do like a hundred swings a day, four days a week, you do 10 get ups a day, four days, week, and you run that for about six months. You get to about 10,000 swings, about a thousand Turkish get ups. I think those are the two greatest exercises. You blend them together, they're yin and yang. They're absolutely, they will change. Your body will physically transform to be super strong, and as a result of that, I think your mind will transform to be super strong. And so my thesis is if you run cohort A and cohort B, there are the exact same for everything except cohort B is doing mastering kettlebell swings and Turkish jets. My thesis is that the delta for cohort B will be larger, that they'll make more progress as public speakers by becoming badass, by becoming strong physically and mentally strong.

That's my thesis, and I would love to test that. That's something I'm thinking about in my own life. As soon as I had a baby seven months ago, I stopped going to the gym because I have a baby, and so I started using kettlebells instead of dumbbells and barbells, and I absolutely loved them. I think I'm never going back. I had Olympic rings in the backyard and kettlebells and go out in the sun and exercise with no shoes, no shirt, just in the sun, and just do kettle bells and Olympic ring stuff. And I think that it's transformative. Getting strong physically helps you to get strong mentally, and then it's like you're playing life. Every game is you're on third base. You're starting off further ahead because you're physically and mentally strong. And so that's my thesis is that we should embed more somatic experiences into the different things that we're doing, and we should focus on physical and mental strength as a way to make everything in life that we're working on easier.

Juliette Sellgren 

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to The Great Antidote Podcast means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.