On assholes and how to deal with them

Bob’s Substack: thoughts on investing, travel, rock ’n roll, and life in general.

On assholes and how to deal with them

I recently stepped down from my job as Senior Market Correspondent at CNBC. I had been at CNBC for 35 years, an epic run.

I worked at the intersection of two great businesses: television and Wall Street.

I met a lot of brilliant and generous people, many of whom changed my life for the better.

I also met a lot of assholes.

I mean, a lot of assholes.

What is it about these two businesses that bring out so many assholes?

What is an asshole? Assholes are people who think the normal rules of civil society don’t apply to them. They’re people who think their needs and wants are all that matter and don’t give a rat’s ass about other people’s needs or wants. They’re people who use bullying and intimidation to get what they want. They’re people who look for reasons to not get along with people and undermine them, because they believe that is the best way to get ahead. They’re people who view everyone on earth as a tool they can use to get ahead.

Finally, real assholes never apologize. For anything.

Sound like anyone you know?

As for why there seems to be so many assholes in television and on Wall Street, both are very high pressure and competitive places to work. People who work on Wall Street are often motivated by the desire to make shitloads of money, and that greed becomes the essential component of their value system. People who work in television, particularly people who are on-camera, are often motivated by the desire to be famous, which creates its own form of warped mental outlook in the form of narcissism.

Both glorify long hours. Both reward high levels of self-confidence and charisma as part of the package that is needed to really get ahead.

And both have extraordinarily high rates of failure and burnout.

Reptiles I have Known

In my book, Shut Up and Keep Talking: Lessons on Life and Investing from the Floor of the New York Stock Exchange, there are a number of chapters about the profound influence several people I had met had on me. Warren Buffett. Jack Bogle. Art Cashin.

There was a chapter I left out of the book, a chapter I never finished.

A chapter I deleted.

It was titled, “Reptiles I Have Known.”

It was about the nastiest, vilest people I encountered in my 35 years on Wall Street as Senior Markets Correspondent.

People so vile, that you wondered how they got out of bed each morning.

People so nasty, you wondered how they could live with themselves.

I’m not talking about glass half-empty people. I’m not talking about people who have a negative outlook on life.

I’m talking about people who don’t even believe there is a glass. I’m talking about people who would pick up the glass and throw it at you.

Most people look for reasons to get along with people. Most people look for reasons to be decent to each other.

Not these people. These people treat everyone like a competitor, or someone who is looking to take advantage of them or bring them down.

They treat everyone like a potential enemy that needs to be undermined or overthrown if they are going to survive.

These are zero-sum people. These people believe the only way they can win is if someone else loses. The idea of shared success is inconceivable to them.

One particular world-class asshole I knew was a high-ranking official at a famous Wall Street firm. I would speak to him in the course of routine reporting on the stock market. Invariably, he was suspicious and not cooperative. He even sought to block my access to others in the firm.

I was not seeking inside information. I was not trying to get dirt on the sex habits of the CEO. I was making routine inquiries about the markets.

I was doing my job.

Years later, this guy called me. It was the first time he had ever called me.

He said that he was leaving his firm, and wanted to give me his email and phone number. He was surprisingly pleasant, and it was obvious he wanted to keep his relationship with me in case it was useful at his new firm.

This was not an unusual call. People switch jobs all the time and they would call or email me with their new contact info.

My normal procedure is to be kind and solicitous to anyone making this kind of call, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I broke protocol.

“Thanks for calling, I really appreciate it,” I said. “But I’m just curious about something: why were you such an asshole?”

Long silence. “Bob, if you knew what I had to deal with…”

I broke him off. “Let me guess what you had to deal with. You and your colleagues were involved in all sorts of schemes to enrich yourselves. Sometimes you got yourselves into difficult positions. When you got into a difficult position, or your colleagues sought your help to extricate themselves from their difficult positions, you often had a hard time resolving the problem and you and your colleagues got dragged into even deeper bullshit. And you treated every inquiry like it was some kind of investigation, even when it was a routine market call.”

Another long silence. “Something like that.”

“No, very much like that. And did you think none of us were aware of this?”

A third long silence. I hung up and never spoke to him again.

This was classic asshole. Rude, dismissive and suspicious when someone asked for something, but solicitous and manipulative when they thought the same someone might be useful.

Still, the minute I hung up on him I regretted getting angry, not because he wasn’t an asshole, but because it wasn't an appropriate response for me.

How to Talk to Assholes

What is the appropriate response to these assholes? I had been struggling with this for decades, in fact as long as I had been trying to put together a coherent belief system.

In other words, my whole adult life.

I was raised a Catholic, but other than a long stint as a Deadhead beginning in the early 1970s (let’s generously call that culture the school of “enlightened hedonism”) the only two organized schools that ever made any sense to me was Stoicism and Buddhism.

Both are primarily concerned with how we should treat each other. In this sense, they are more like ethical belief systems than a religion that addresses our relationship with a deity.

Regardless: both have a lot to say about dealing with assholes.

The Stoics would have immediately noted that the problem was not this asshole, but in my response to the asshole.

Stoicism arose in Greece in the fourth century BC and was one of many schools that tried to answer a basic question: what is the right way to live your life?

The Stoic answer was that the goal of life was happiness, which they equated with living a virtuous life. They were particularly interested in what are known as the Four Cardinal Virtues: wisdom, courage, justice, and self-control (mastering desires and emotions).

A key tenet about attaining happiness was to focus on things you can control, and not worry about things you can’t control. Things you can control include your thoughts and actions. Things you can’t control include other people’s thoughts and actions.

This was a point made by Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from 161-180 AD. He wrote his Meditations, a series of notebooks, mostly while he was on the northern border, defending the Empire against the encroaching Germans.

It was a thankless task, but in between battles he filled his notebooks with thoughts on how to live a more tranquil life, which included this observation: “If something is causing you distress, it’s not the thing itself that’s troubling you, but your judgment about it, and it’s within your power to erase that right now.”

This is a very powerful idea: you cannot change events that happen to you after the fact (like this asshole mistreating me) but you can change the way you think about those events.

So how should I change my thoughts on this asshole? Instead of thinking, “This guy is pissing me off and I’m hanging up,” Marcus Aurelius would argue that you can twist the Rubik’s Cube in your head and look at it a different way.

You can instead think, “This guy is pissing me off, but why should I be pissed off? I can’t control him or the way he thinks, so why should I let him disturb me?“

The Stoics often debated these kinds of issues. They also pointed out that you could be more proactive.

You could try to show the assholes the error of their ways.

For example, I could have attempted to show this asshole why what he was doing was wrong.

In keeping with the Stoic cardinal virtues, I could have told this asshole that he was violating all four of the Cardinal Virtues.

He showed: 1) no wisdom (he didn’t know what was good or bad), 2) no courage (he could not face his fears and recognize his greed and narcissism), 3) no sense of justice (he treated others contemptuously), and 4) no self-control (no mastery of his rapacious desires).

I could have done that when he called, and it would have been a noble but pointless endeavor. Could you see me talking about virtue to that asshole? He would have laughed at me. Why?

Because he’s an asshole! Because he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about wisdom, courage, justice, or self-control.

Back to first principles: control what you can, and don’t worry about what you can’t. I’m not going to convert this guy into a Stoic. I’m not even going to convert him into a decent human being.

He’s a reptile, and all I can control is how I react to him. And I should not have allowed him to get the better of me.

Nero: a world-class asshole

The Stoics had a lot to say about getting pissed off. A hundred years before Marcus Aurelius was fighting the Germans, Lucius Annaeus Seneca was giving advice to Roman Emperors on how to be a good Stoic.

He lived in a time just after the Roman Republic ended (thanks to Julius Caesar) and right after the founding of the Empire under Augustus (27 BC). He was a revered Stoic, playright, and teacher, but he had the misfortune of being assigned to tutor one of the great assholes of all time: Nero.

Nero was an asshole for the ages.

When he became Emperor in 54 AD, Seneca became part of his inner circle.

First, Nero had his mother killed (he believed she was plotting against him). Then he poisoned his stepbrother (a competitor). Then he executed his first wife (because he wanted to marry his second wife). Then he killed the second wife (he supposedly kicked her while she was pregnant). Then there were the Christians he had executed, blaming them for the Great Fire in Rome in 64 AD.

You can guess where this is going: it didn’t end well for Seneca. Nero became increasingly unstable, and eventually his inner circle convinced him that Seneca was engaged in a plot to kill him.

Nero ordered Seneca to kill himself.

He did it in the way noble Romans had always done it: he slit his wrists. When that didn’t work, he drank poison. When even that didn’t work, he was taken into a hot bath, where the steam suffocated him.

This guy was one tough son of a bitch.

Seneca, according to the historian Tacitus, was not angry with Nero, who even then was known for his cruelty. He reminded his friends and wife that now, in the hour of his death, was the time to reaffirm his Stoic principles.

Which included avoiding anger and retribution. Several years earlier, he had written a short book, On Anger, where he said: “The man who does not get angry remains undisturbed by harm, while the one who gets angry has been moved by it.”

The Buddha also had thoughts on dealing with assholes

Buddhism has a slightly different approach to this, but the effect is similar. Thoughts have no external reality; a thought is not like a chair, it only exists in your head. Because it has no external reality, you can change the way you relate to your thoughts. You can take a negative emotion and change the way you relate to it.

So I cannot change what happened to me (that asshole treated me like shit for years) but I can change the way I thought about what happened, and how I responded to him.

The emphasis is on controlling your thoughts. In the Dhammapada, one of the foundational texts of Buddhism, the Buddha says, “Beware of the anger of the mind. Master your thoughts.”

Am I an asshole?

The Stoics urged everyone interested in practicing their philosophy to first examine their own behavior.

Marcus Aurelius advises that the best thing you can do is not to become an asshole yourself: "The best form of defense is not to become like one's enemy."

So, am I an asshole?

I like to think not, but who knows? For a more objective opinion, I turned to Suzanne, my wife, my best friend and my constant companion for the past 45 years.

Honey, am I an asshole?

Why are you asking that?

Because I’m writing an essay on dealing with assholes and I just want to know.

Oh. No, you’re not an asshole.

Why do you say that?

You just semi-retired from CNBC. You had, like, a quarter-million hits on your X feed when you posted the farewell sendoff they gave you with David and Carl and Sara.

Yeah. That was amazing.

Did you read any of the comments? They fell into two buckets: you were a good reporter and I learned a lot listening to you, and you came across as a decent and honest guy.

Yeah. It made me feel really good. It’s the kind of stuff you want on your tombstone.: “He was a good reporter, and a decent human being.”

Right. That’s not an asshole. That’s the opposite of an asshole.

So I’m pretty good, right?

You’re very good. You’re not an asshole. Occasionally, you let your anxieties and your nervous energy get the better of you and you act like a dick, but you’re not an asshole.

There's a difference?

Big difference.

You're not being metaphorical?

What does that even mean? Assholes are permanently mean and selfish. Dicks can be rude, but they’re not always like that. They’re just clueless sometimes.

Wow. I never thought of a dick that way.

Gross, honey.

So being an asshole is a full-time condition, whereas being a dick is like being a part-time asshole?

This is really getting weird, honey.

So if you had to be one or the other, it’s better to be a dick than an asshole, right?

It's better to be a decent human being, which you are.

But if I only had the choice of one or the other…

Now you're being a dick.

Coming soon: Drinking on Wall Street: A Primer

References

Marcus Aurelius. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Basic Books, 2021. The quote on distress is from Notebook 8 (47). The quote, "The best form of defense is not to become like one's enemy," is from Notebook 6 (6).

Seneca. On Anger. Translated by John Coleman. Petra Minuscula, 2023. The quote is from Book III (XXV).

Tacitus. The Annals of Imperial Rome. Translated by Michael Grant. Penguin Books, Revised Edition. The section on the suicide of Seneca is on page 376.

The Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha. Translation by Thomas Byrom. Vintage Books, 2012. The quote is from 17 (Anger).

William B. Irvine. A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. Oxford Press, 2009.