The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. In this profound and essential Brief, we distill the single most important and often-overlooked principle from Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Our hosts quickly explain why the ultimate victory is the one that is won before the battle even begins, through superior positioning, strategy, and psychological advantage. You will learn why the most brilliant general—and the most brilliant business strategist—is the one who makes their victory look easy and inevitable. In just a few minutes, you’ll have a powerful, counter-intuitive principle to guide your thinking about competition and success.

We begin our multi-part series on Sun Tzu's ancient classic, The Art of War, by focusing on its first and most important principle: the crucial role of calculation and preparation before any conflict begins. Our hosts do a deep dive into the five fundamental factors that Sun Tzu argues must be assessed: The Way, Heaven, Earth, Command, and Discipline. The conversation explores how these ancient concepts can be translated into a modern business context, from understanding your company's moral purpose (The Way) to analyzing the competitive landscape (Earth). This is a lesson in the timeless wisdom of doing your homework before you ever make a strategic move.

What is the most useful model for understanding human economic behavior? This episode stages a foundational Debate between two opposing views of human nature. One host, channeling the ideas of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, argues for the model of the rational actor. They contend that while not perfect, a model of people as rational agents pursuing their own self-interest is the most powerful and predictive tool for understanding markets and economies. The other host, drawing on the research of Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow, argues that this model is fundamentally flawed. They believe that a model based on the predictable irrationality of human psychology provides a much more accurate and useful picture of how people actually behave.