Shaka Smart, Buzz Williams, Manu Ginóbili, Pau Gasol, Dominique Dawes, and Danica Patrick On Sports and Stoicism

Today’s episode features clips from some of the best interviews about sports in 2020. Ryan talks to Shaka Smart, Buzz Williams, Manu Ginóbili, Pau Gasol, Dominique Dawes, and Danica Patrick about finding balance between greatness and happiness, what it takes to become elite, the philosophical principles behind sports, and much more. This episode is brought to you by GiveWell, the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. GiveWell’s team of researchers works countless hours to determine which charities make the most effective dollar-for-dollar contributions to the causes they support. Since 2010, GiveWell has helped over 50,000 donors donate over 500 million dollars to the most effective charities, leading to over 75,000 lives saved and millions more improved. Visit GiveWell.org/stoic and your first donation will be matched up to 100 dollars. This episode is also brought to you by Blinkist, the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. Today’s episode is also brought to you by Thuma. Thuma has spent thousands of hours making the perfect platform bed frame, called The Bed. The Bed by Thuma is super supportive of your mattress, breathes well, and is built to naturally minimize noise. Thuma ships your bed frame right to your door, and it takes five minutes to assemble, no tools required. Visit Thuma.co/stoic to get free shipping on your order of The Bed today. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think,

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think one of the coolest things about the ancient Stoics is how modern a lot of their metaphors are. When I had Michelle Waterson on the podcast, we were talking about how Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius's writings are filled with wrestling analogies and hunting metaphors and all these things, just as if they were living today. I mean, we're not quite talking about the NFL, but they understood the power of sport.

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  And they saw sports as more than just a diversionary activity. In fact, they sort of didn't like that element of it. And they saw it not just as a metaphor, but as a training ground for virtue. So the Stoics were active. Chrysippus, who I talk about in Lives of the Stoics, was a really great sprinter. And Cleanthes, we know, was a boxer. So there is this longstanding link between Stoicism and sports. That's why I think it's cool that my books and through my books and other books, Stoicism has made its way through professional sports. And one of my privileges over the last year or so has been to be able to interview lots of great coaches and athletes about their practice and how they apply Stoicism to what

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  they do. And I think, again, the reason I'm interested in athletics is not...

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  Just because it's entertaining, but I think elite performance is elite performance is elite performance, which I've said. And so in today's sort of special bonusy best of episode, you're going to hear me talk to UT basketball coach Shaka Smart about focusing on your one thing about priority, finding balance. We talked to Buzz Williams, the head basketball coach at Texas A&M, ostensibly rivals, but two great guys who I've gotten to know and who are both close with the great George Raveling, who you listened to in our other best of episode. We talked to Pau Gasol, who, as I was just reading and I shot him a text about, he's, he's trying to make it back in the NBA. So,

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  you know, just the idea of trying to climb back, trying to fight your way back through an injury recovery, that's or post-traumatic growth. I mean, he's not just talking about stoicism to make him better on the court. I mean, he's having to use stoicism to get to a position where he could be on the court. And I think that's really inspiring. And obviously, we wish him all the best. And then Manu Ginobili, another Texan. We talk about balancing your ambition, your drive and your competitiveness with happiness. How can you actually be happy and try to achieve greatness? That's the tricky thing. And then we talked to Danica Patrick, one of the great race car drivers of our time, and the role

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  that sort of ego and fame and, and all the attention that goes along with being really great at something, watching other people win, you know, envy, all the, all the tricky emotions that sports and greatness can bring up in us. So this is a great episode. We will have a whole bunch more sports related interviews going forward. It's always fun. Anyways, here's me talking to UT basketball coach Shaka Smart.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, when you say one thing a day, that doesn't sound like much, but then when you multiply it out over 82 years, that does start to add up. And I think one of the reasons we're probably suspicious of the just do a couple of things well every day strategy is that we're not good at extrapolating out, you know, sort of steady compounding returns. That's why we're bad at saving for our retirement. You know, it's why we're bad at sort of planning and anticipating things. I guess what I'm saying is what I'm noticing and happier with is that I'm doing, my to do lists are shorter, but the things are more important and I'm giving more time to them. And I'm not doing a lot of inessential things that maybe because I

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  could do them before I felt obligated to do them.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Well, Ryan, as my wife Maya reminds me, the root of the word priority is singular. So when priority was first talked about, it was

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  It was a singular word, the one thing. And what we've done in modern times is turned it into priorities. But then all of a sudden it turns into eight, 10, 15 things. And that

• 5:28Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  beats the purpose.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's brilliant. And I don't know if you know Gary Keller and Jay Papazon, who are both here in Austin. Gary Keller is the founder of Keller Williams Realty. They wrote a really good book a few years ago called The One Thing. It's so, it's so hard, though. I imagine like even the athletes that you see, like by definition, they are multi hyphenates. They're not allowed to be just athletes. They have to be student athletes. And, and then of course, they're, they're men and citizens and friends. And so we, yeah, we have all these competing priorities or we have all these competing obligations. And I think it's really easy to fill up your to do list and not ask yourself like, what's the most important thing I have to do today?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  What's your most important thing, Ryan?

• 6:18Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, professionally, my most important thing is like I have to do writing and similar to the thing with George Raveling, if I can write a little bit every day, that adds up to, you know, finished editable manuscripts at the end. But I sort of say I have three things that are important to me every day, which is my work as a writer, my role as a husband, and then my role as a father. When I think about my goals, I don't have like career goals or life goals. I just want to be good at those three things and I don't want to have any regrets about those three things.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  It must be hard for coaches, though, and I imagine that this is kind of a forced experiment for you and a different lifestyle. Coaches work these insanely long hours. They're gone all the time. You're sort of expected to live and breathe the job. Is this opening your eyes at all? Is it, you know, creating any changes for you, you feel?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think it has created for everyone an opportunity to step back a little bit and just reassess how you spend your time and not even so much about whether you're working or doing something else, but literally exactly how are you doing that? Where are you physically? How are you going about it? Because we've all been forced to adjust in that way during this time. It's interesting. I'm not one that typically works a lot from home. I like to be in the office. So this has been an adjustment for me in a major

• 7:57Speaker 01

  way in that just time wise, you know, I'll find myself maybe working late at night when I never really would have done that before. I wouldn't have been working at midnight. I would have been winding down or, you know, reading or whatever it may be. So again, I think it's like anything else, like we tell our players, it's on us to be intentional on the front end about how we want to handle it. It's definitely been, you know, good for me to just learn what works and what doesn't.

• 8:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I asked a coach one time, or I think it was a GM or something, and I said, you know, let's say like all the coaches in the NFL unionized and there was some, some rule that set the hours that coaches were allowed to work. So like, let's say some law or regulation passed that like, coaches could only work banker's hours, like nine to five. I was like, my question is, I'd be curious what you thought, would the actual quality of play on the field change at all? Or I don't know if you know what Parkinson's Law is. Parkinson's Law says basically, a task expands to fit the amount of time you give it. So if you have a 20-hour workday, you'll find 20 hours of stuff worth to do. If you have a 10-hour

• 9:09Ryan Holiday?

  workday, you'll get it all done in 10 hours. And I'd be curious, as a coach who, yeah, there is this expectation of the grind, always be doing, you gotta be the first one there and the last one to leave. How much of that do you think is 100% essential? And how much of it is just sort of expectation, obligation, and maybe even a little bit of just like keeping up with the Joneses as far as like, the published habits of other coaches?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  I think there's, there's plenty of that, Ryan. But to be honest, it's, it's really more about quality. So you could work, you know, 100 and some hours a week, and there's, there's always more to do, for sure. I mean, there's always another recruiting call you can make. There's always, at this moment, another Zoom call.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  But that doesn't necessarily add to the quality and the, the impact that you're actually having. You know, like, one of the things that we emphasize as a coaching staff is spending time with players. Someone taught me, you know, along the way that, hey, you need to understand, there's a difference between spending time and actually connecting. And so there can actually be, you know, quote unquote, wasted time, if you will, if you are, you think you're spending time, but it's not meaningful time. It doesn't build connection. So I, I think that's the more important thing for us. There's probably coaches, just like any other line of work, that work about half as much as someone else,

• 10:42Speaker 01

  but that actually get a lot more done. And at the end of the day, at the end of the day, create better results.

• 10:49Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think that's a great parenting lesson. It's something I struggle with. It's like, because being a good dad is important to me, I go like, well, do I need to be at the office? I'll be at home, you know, like I feel obligated to be at home. So I'll go home and I'll sort of pat myself on the back for going home. But then the reality is I'm not actually there. My wife will sometimes go like, hey, you know, you could just be at the office if you're not going to be here, you know, and that strikes me as something you talk a lot about, which is just sort of being where your feet is actually concentrating and being present.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Ryan, it goes back to just the workings of our own minds, which is fascinating. Because, you know, we vacillate between these different modes of thinking, I need to do this, or I need to do that. And then literally, you know, we'll be in one mode and then through the back door, there'll be, you know, the personal mind will say, well, wait a minute, you didn't finish that project yet. And so again, one thing that hopefully all of us can take out of this is just the element of quality that we want to infuse in whatever it is that we're doing. And again, as you and I have talked about this, the number one detriment

• 12:03Speaker 01

  to that quality is task switching. So you're doing one thing, and then all of a sudden, you switch over to the other one because your phone buzzes. And again, the quality is never heightened by that. It's only hurt.

• 12:19Ryan Holiday?

  How do you talk to your players who are basically in the most vicious spot as far as being young, being, you know, hormonal, being technology obsessed? How do you, what do you talk to them about sort of the cost of that switching and how to focus?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Well, the one thing you can't do is bang them over the head with it, because they'll turn you off real quick. And one thing I've learned is These guys, you know, unlike you and I, like, they literally grew up as as young kids with social media. So it's it's a different childhood. It's a different experience. To me, the best thing to do is provide education through, you know, different vehicles that are compelling to the players. And so, for instance, if if we can find an example of something that LeBron James does or did, that is a kind of best practice that that

• 13:17Speaker 01

  would make sense for our guys to follow, whether it's mindfulness, or the way he handles social media during the playoffs, that type of stuff is really compelling for them because of, of course, he's a hero of theirs. Sure. You know, hitting them with with some, you know, academic study that that was done at Stanford or Harvard, that doesn't do nearly as much as as something that's more anecdotal.

• 13:44Ryan Holiday?

  And here's me talking to the head coach of Texas A&M basketball, Buzz Williams.

• 13:50Ryan Holiday?

  My son like refuses to nap in a bed. He will only nap in a stroller or in a car. And so, so, so every day for 45 days in a row now, I've taken him for either a bike ride or a run. And like, today was a run, yesterday was a bike ride. The things I've had to rush back into the house after I finished and write down have, not only have they been inspiring and interesting and creatively fulfilling, but like, on the other side of this, like, I'm gonna sell those ideas and ironically, will pay for, you know, a good chunk of, you know, whatever opportunities I lost because of this. And, and so, yeah,

• 14:31Ryan Holiday?

  I would have told myself before, I'm too busy to drive home in the middle of the day to take my son for a bike ride and then jump in the pool. But it turns out that may actually be the the the smartest thing I could do every day.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that might be the play. How you were going about the game, this is forcing you to think of a different model.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Within the game and

• 14:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know if this is right, Ron. This is another list that I started. I've been trying to ask myself, what if 10 times a day?

• 15:08Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  I'm not saying it's right. Uh, and so I, I, I, it's, it's more of a, a question. I, I want to ask myself, what if 10 different times a day in 10 different scenarios? Similar to what you just said, I'm going to go home and pick up my son. And we're going to go in a, we're going to go somewhere for 45 minutes so he can rest. And then I'm going to come back home and make sure he's squared away with my wife. And then I'm going to go back to my office and I'm going to give an hour and 15 minutes to that. A, a day, you would have never done that prior to this. But what if, when this becomes our new normal?

• 15:52Speaker 02

  What if that hour and 15 minutes becomes a part of what you do? If you wake up in your own bed in Austin each day? An hour and 15 minutes is automatically positioned to that. And what I've been thinking are all of the different what if scenarios? That I've never had time to think about, like people are asking me. Think there's going to be a college football season? And I always say, I will not make that decision. So I'm not sure where that stands. I have a question for you though, since you're asking about college football. Do you think that there will be a college basketball season? What if there's not one? Well, what if there's not one?

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Now it begins, well, if there's not a college basketball season? How would we go about training? How would we go about, uh, our recruiting? And so all of these what if scenarios? Obviously are brought on from what we're all going through. But the what if scenarios, I think, force me to think? How I can be prepared, no matter which way this all unfolds? Because I think on the other side of this, all of the lessons that you've learned, that I've learned and that? Everybody in the country has learned. The, the people that are going to be the most successful, whatever success is to those

• 17:17Speaker 02

  people on the other side are the ones that can pivot, just like a basketball player, that can pivot the quickest. And what you thought was coming home every day to be with your son, to help him nap, you would never do that because you were in a groove at your office doing work. Now that might actually be the right play to get more work done. And I think that I've tried to make myself think in what if scenarios more so than ever before.

• 17:50Ryan Holiday?

  You are a notorious note taker. You, you showed me a binder. You've basically taken notes on every, you still have the notes for every book you've basically ever read. But walk, walk me through that process and, and why you do it and what you feel like you get out of it.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Obviously, my wife knows it. Uh, there would be a couple of people maybe on our staff that know, I, I don't ever, you may be the only person outside my circle of influence that even knows that I do that. Ryan, um.

• 18:18Ryan Holiday?

  I'm sorry for spilling secrets.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  I went to, um, I went to a junior college out of high school, paved my own way my first two years. I went to an NAI school my last two years, uh, in my own small town way. Uh, there were 44 kids in my graduating class. I wanted to be a coach. Uh, I did not know that my career would entail what it has thus far. And I don't mean that egotistically. It, I had a very small paradigm. And, uh, for whatever reason, I've always had an insatiable desire to learn. And, uh, I want to learn from anybody, from everybody. It doesn't

• 19:02Speaker 02

  matter what their business card says. I always think that there's something that everyone knows that could help me. And I struggled, uh, reading as a child. Uh, my worst grades, by far, my, my absolute worst grades, uh, were in any sort of reading, any sort of comprehension. And so, uh, as I began to become a teenager, I would have to write things down. Over and over, almost like it was punishment. Do not say mean things to Ron, period. Write that a hundred times just so I could get it

• 19:42Speaker 02

  in my brain where I could understand. I've taken notes every day of my life since I've been in college. I started college late in my 17th year and I have literally notebook after notebook after notebook. And then as I began to write better, I think I began to read better. And as I began to read better, I think I began to write better. And then as my career began to become some level of what I think most people would call public speaking, I became obsessed with every press conference of any sort.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Every post-game press conference of any coach, college, pro. I remember when TiVo first became the thing. I thought it was the greatest invention ever. I TiVod every press conference and I would study them. I would rewind them. I would write down what they were saying. And then I would, you remember the small dictaphone that you could carry in your pocket? And as I would drive to work, I would try to in different voices, act like the voice of someone asking me a question. And then I would respond in my voice and then I would go back and listen to it. At times, write it down. I read a book a week. I don't read near as much as you do.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  And what I am reading probably is not near the depth of which that you read, but just kind of made it part of my habit. I, I, I think it's a way, not necessarily to skip some steps, but I think from those books, the life experiences and the wisdom that you can learn from books allows you maybe to.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Have more wisdom to understand things at a quicker pace instead of having to live through all of it. And so I've taken notes and journaled, maybe not exactly proper journaling. I think I've gotten better at that, but I have notes from every month of my life over the last 30 years. And I would say, Ryan, I've read a book a week every year for the last, you know, 10 or 15 years. It's just part of my day. And I'm not saying that that's right. I also think that it's part of what I've had to do because I've always felt like I was behind. I think that

• 22:16Speaker 02

  started because I was such a slow reader and processor as a young kid. And so I've always felt behind and I've always had maybe an invisible, I don't want anybody to think that I can't read or that I can't write. My grandfather, who I spent an inordinate amount of time with, my oldest daughter is named after my grandmother. My oldest son is named after my grandfather. My parents were divorced when I was six months old and I spent an inordinate amount of time with my grandfather. He was the typical World War II veteran. He dropped out of school when he was in fifth grade to help his family during the Great Depression. He could not read. He could

• 23:00Speaker 02

  not write. And I think because I was a slow processor, I have just always had maybe an internal drive of I'm behind. I need to read more. I need to write more so that I can be on, as my kids would say, grade level. And so it's just been a part of my, part of my life's journey, particularly as an adult.

• 23:25Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 23:31Ryan Holiday?

  And here's me talking to NBA champion Pau Gasol. A couple of years ago, you wrote that essay, I think it was for the Players Tribune, about why there should be female coaches in basketball. And I know you had a female assistant coach in San Antonio. She's still there, right? Becky Hammond? Again, another sort of tie to Stoicism. For the Stoics, Moustonius Rufus, who was Epictetus's teacher, was, he was like, look, he's like, virtue, courage, justice, wisdom. He's like, these things don't have anything to do with gender. So 2,000 years ago, he was talking about how both men and women should be instructed in philosophy and that really it was silly to think that like, these things, he was

• 24:15Ryan Holiday?

  like, you don't care, he was like, you don't care what gender your dog is or your horse is, like, you care whether it has the goods, right? Whether it can do the job. And so I was just curious, I thought that was a courageous essay to write and also an important one, just this idea that sometimes we let gender and sex and orientation, all these things get wrapped up, it blocks us from what actually matters, which is like, can someone do the job or not?

• 24:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's what I try to kind of portray, right? Kind of talking about, from personal experience in my household, my mom was the one that was a doctor and my dad was a nurse. You could argue that my mom had a higher salary than my dad and was more qualified than my dad. So I kind of, we grew up in that household saying, oh, this is okay, this is normal, you know? So, once I had a chance to write that article or that essay with Players Tribune about Becky, which I obviously knew and I had high respect for, and I've known her for years before I

• 25:25Speaker 03

  got to play with the Spurs, because she played for Russia as an American, Russia, she had a Russian passport in different Olympics, so, and she was always... Yeah, she was always a great player. She was, I ran into her in a couple All-Star Games. She was always great, just a, you know, a great advocate for, for the sport and, you know, classy, classy person. So, um, so once, you know, the, the argument started where she got like an interview for a coaching job or a coaching position, like a head coaching job. Uh, I think it was with the Bucks and there was this, I, well, why she shouldn't, she shouldn't get it or why she should be getting this interview was kind of big news. It's like, well, Beck is a great coach. Uh, and I think at the end of the day, we don't have to look at people

• 26:08Speaker 03

  based on gender. It's by their ability to do their job, you know, to, uh, get the job done or do, or do it better than someone else. So it's not about Becky being a woman or being a man. Uh, it's about Becky being a great coach and, and she has proven and from my experience, I love what I see. So I think that that's, that's what I kind of tried to portray in that article. And I think it had, had a good amount of impact and it opened up a discussion and, and I felt like a lot of people, you know, got people thinking. So, you know, it's absolutely right. So I think this is some of the things that we, we need to start looking, which we already I think do, but and it's going in the right direction as far as measuring people

• 26:51Speaker 03

  based on their abilities and capabilities and their talented talent, not based on anything else.

• 26:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, we, we talked to Michelle Tafoya several years ago. She's the Sunday Night Football On Field reporter. And I, I remember I asked her, you know, is it hard being a, you know, a female journalist in sports? And she was like, it's hard being a journalist in sports. And I, I loved that she was like, she was identifying not as, she, she was identifying as the job, not as a certain identity or gender inside the job. And, and she's really good at her job, you know? And I think I, I just found that to be very powerful.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely, that's why she got it, and that's why she still probably, you know, she has it, because she's really good at what she does. And there's many women, Doris Burke in the NBA has turned out to be one of the main, I think, journalists and now commentators or broadcasters. And everyone has tremendous amount of respect because her career speaks for herself and the quality of what she provides, it's excellent. So you don't look at Doris as a woman, you look at her as an incredible and great broadcaster. So, and you know, so I think that that's kind of the perspective and the view that we should kind of give to society and to people.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Just know that everyone has the same opportunity, you gotta work hard, you gotta prepare to be the best at what you want to accomplish. And you have the same, again, the same opportunities regardless of genre, race, or ethnicity, or even, you know, culture.

• 28:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and I think, I think this is why your essay was good, and also what I feel like are, like for Stoics, the sort of virtue of justice or fairness, is that if you have gotten to where you've gotten, and because you had certain advantages, because both of you, both you and I are male, both you and I are straight, you know, like, so you, we had an easier time of it, it's then important too, that you use your resources or your credibility to make sure people who don't have the same, like, who don't get the same looks as you, you make sure that you stand up for them and you give them opportunities or you vouch for them.

• 29:13Ryan Holiday?

  So I feel like that we have to remember that that's our obligation as people, is to look out for and help move forward people who are super talented but are not getting, who don't have the same wind at their backs as, as maybe you and I do.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  Well, to me, again, it's, as you say, it's everyone's responsibility. Just because you have better opportunities or you're in a more privileged position doesn't mean that you have to overlook or say, "Well, you know, screw you, I'm good." We have to be more aware, we have to, you know, care for our peers, and we have to be fair, as you said. I think to me, just because you have something of a better chance or better privilege, if you will, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't advocate for fairness and equal opportunity and regardless of anything.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Even if that means you potentially losing your job, well, you work harder and prepare better, so your job is safe. And you just utilize that. To me, the higher the competition, the better it will make me. So when I had better competitors, that means I had to work harder, I had to exert myself, I had to take my game to the next level if I wanted to stay at top, if I wanted to survive. And I think that's all, that's good. All those things are good. You don't want to be in a comfortable position where you then start to decline, you know, and start to take things for granted and start to get just complacent. I think it's good for everyone when the competition is high

• 30:58Speaker 03

  and everyone kind of brings the best out of each other.

• 31:01Ryan Holiday?

  I feel like that's a weird thing that gets lost in a lot of the debates about, you know, gender or race or immigration. It's like, I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid of competition. I want it to be an open playing field. Or the fact that, hey, this industry or that industry has been all guys, that might seem like it's good for the guys, but actually, the hidden factor there is that by filling it with sameness or with one sort of perspective on things, all those people are worse off. That America and the world was, has been irreparably harmed, in my opinion, by the discrimination against black people and other races

• 31:44Ryan Holiday?

  because we were depriving ourselves of talent and skill and different perspectives that had everyone gotten a fair shake, everyone would have been improved by that.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I think, I think, I think there's something to enhancing each other. You know, the Yeah. Uh, kind of lifting each other up and pushing each other to be better. Think it's something you can do on your own, but it's also good to, that you kind of encourage others to, to do the same and kind of make it a healthy competition, if you will. You know, that thing that, that's always, that's always good because it brings the best out of each other. The greatest athletes wouldn't have been as great as they were, as they are, if they didn't have high competition. You know, I guess you can say that Roger Federer wouldn't be Roger Federer without Rafael Nadal.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Uh, and now Novak Djokovic or Michael Jordan probably wouldn't have been uh, what he was, maybe without, you know, the Bad Boys and the Pistons pushing them to take it to that next, to that next level. And then Utah Jazz came later, but without teams being, you know, as good as they were, even if they couldn't beat the Bulls in the, in the finals in the nineties. Or, you know, you should go like Messi and Ronaldo. Messi wouldn't be considered one of the best players ever if Ronaldo, Cristiano Ronaldo wasn't there. Like, I think it's, it's great and it, it brings you, it brings you up because you have to, in order to be the best or the best version of yourself and continue to improve and push,

• 33:23Speaker 03

  you, you need that. You need that type of motivation. You know, and that's, you know, that's always great, the rivalries, you know, the Celtics and the Lakers. Now, you go back and forth through the history and it's, it's, it's healthy. It makes, it makes the fans really enjoy that.

• 33:42Ryan Holiday?

  And here's me talking to NBA champion Manu Ginobili.

• 33:48Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, you've played with so many of the greatest of all time, whether it's Tim Duncan, you've played with Steve Kerr, you've played with Robert Ori. I mean, obviously, you've played for Popovich. So you've really been around a collection of the people who have won the most in really the history of the game. What do you, when you, when you look at those people up close, like, so the Stoics obviously are fascinated with, you know, an Alexander the Great, or, or, you know, the sort of conquerors of history, and they were, they were so curious about whether, like, whether you could be happy and be sort of ceaselessly driven in that sense, or whether it was possible to be great at

• 34:30Ryan Holiday?

  that level and kind of not be broken in some way. I'm curious about, obviously, your own experience, being one of the greats of all time, and having, you know, accumulated basically more championships than, than 99.9% of people have ever played a basketball. But then also having to see, seeing up close and personal the other people in that league, like, what's your, what's your sense of, of getting to the top of that mountain?

• 35:00Speaker 04

  It's very tough, when, because we are driven by the challenge, right? And to have that challenge, you have to have that type of unsatisfactory, or, unsatisfaction, sorry. You know, we are humans, and humans don't, were not, like, didn't evolve to just be happy and, and chill, and be satisfied with their lives, and they are, you know, it's about, you know, drive and necessity and goals. And I think our competitiveness, and you mentioned most of them, like, you know, Bob, Tim, Steve, Robert, whatever, David Robinson, is like...

• 35:44Speaker 04

  They became so good because of constant drive, but also like, you know, competing with with other people and and I don't think that we were very stoic behaving. I mean, if you see Pop acting after a loss or after a win, you you would tell very quickly that it was not very stoic of him, the way he competed. But, you know, with time, you start improving and maturing, and then you start learning and that there are ways of maintaining some competitiveness and desire, and at the same time, being happy and enjoying the the ride that we always talk about.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  So for, I would say that I played twenty-three years professionally. Eighteen, I was so so driven that and and so goal oriented that unless I won the last of the games, I wasn't happy with myself. And I was remorseful and thinking about the mistakes I made and how I could have been better or how I could have made my teammates better. And then, you know, when you you get older and you start seeing the end of your career,

• 37:10Speaker 04

  you start enjoying other things and wins or losses are not that such a dramatic change. And you become a father and that gets a part of it too. So I I think I was way, way better and way happier. My last three years, when I I I started to to act more like like that, right? Like, you know, win or lose, okay, I gave my best. I I gave everything I had and I tried to.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  Provide my teammates with all the tools and but it just was not enough. It's okay, I'll shake my opponent's hand, I keep going the same way. But I think that a common denominator in most of the highly competitive and successful athletes, Stoicism is not something that is ingrained.

• 38:04Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  And I think it's necessary. I always said when we talked or even on Twitter, I said a couple of times, I think it's necessary to read about that stillness. Your last book was, it gives a few awesome hints just to how to improve the quality of your life during this craziness of athletic career.

• 38:28Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think it's true in writing too. I mean, I think it hit me probably on stillness, but maybe the book before. But I was just sort of like, why am I not having any fun doing this? And if I'm not having fun, then the only reason I'm doing it is to get the thing on the other side, which is the success or having it or the critical reception, which is a very un-Stoic thing, because now you've said that somebody else gets to choose or has power over whether the year and a half of your life that you spent on something was worth it, and that just struck me as totally nuts.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  Great, yeah, I agree. In my case, it was just that somebody else was better than me. So how do you agree that? That I can't enjoy a summer just because somebody else was better than me or I made a mistake or a teammate made a mistake or a ref or whatever.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  It made no sense. But also, as I said before, I started to understand it too late in my career. But it makes no sense when something that you can't

• 39:39Speaker 04

  Really control affects your current state. I mean, it makes no sense. So it really helped me. It helped me to to really because you start maturing and you start to understand it. But once you see it written and that, you know, it's been on on people's minds for thousands of years. I said, yeah, of course. I mean, I live it this way. I'm an NBA player at that at that time. Well, somebody else was an author, as you said, some mother was an intro, and they went through the same thing. So it's amazing. It was very useful for me.

• 40:16Ryan Holiday?

  I remember I was at a Spurs game last season, and the Spurs were down by a ton. And so they were kind of listless and boring and not playing as they should. And I remember, I think R C pointed out that this was going to happen. But anyways, popped through a basically a temper tantrum, got himself ejected from the game. And and then Tim Duncan took over as coach. It was incredible to watch Tim Duncan coach a Spurs game. But I watched this happen. And and the craziest thing about it is like, you might go, oh, you know, that's, you know, the Stoics would say that's a bad use of your emotions. You're not in control

• 40:58Ryan Holiday?

  of yourself. But it was actually, from what I was told, a very sort of deliberate strategy was trying to wake the team up, get them excited. And and the Spurs ended up losing, but only by one point. And and they'd come back and rallied after this had happened. And so I'm very fascinated with these sort of calculated bursts of emotion, which, you know, again, would on its face be not stoic. But if you're doing it deliberately, maybe it is.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Yes, there were many of those. There are other times when you can tell that they are totally honest. The real pain, the real emotion, some others is calculated. And it happens also in a in a video session in which.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  You could see, in this case, Pop, of course, going ballistic on people and getting frustrated. And sometimes you could also see that he's premeditated, that he was looking for a way to push some of the players to avoid complacency, to avoid that sense of satisfaction when you are winning five in a row. So there's a bit of both.

• 42:14Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  And here's me talking to Olympic gold medalist Dominique Daz.

• 42:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think I read something from Billie Jean King once where she was sort of saying the paradox of being a great athlete, I'd be curious about your experiences, is that precisely the perfectionism, the focus on what could have been better, where you fell short, you know, what went wrong, is what makes you great. It obviously creates a feedback loop where you are getting better, but it also makes it extraordinarily difficult to enjoy or even notice that you are at the peak of your game or that you've accomplished an incredible amount. Like, you're not able to enjoy the peak because all you're focusing on is the next peak or how imperfectly you got there.

• 43:08Speaker 05

  Exactly. Like, what you didn't accomplish. Like, it's never enough. I mean, there was just this great piece on HBO, and it was talking about the mental aspect of the sport of gymnastics, and how many Olympians are just never satisfied. And then when even their career is over, there's that coulda, woulda, shoulda, there's that what's, you know, what's next? Because their identity is wrapped up in being that particular athlete and nothing more, because you sacrifice so much, especially if you did it since your childhood. So it is hard to kind of, I guess, be satisfied, but that's what makes, I think, a lot of athletes so

• 43:51Speaker 05

  great that they have that. Like you mentioned before, that drive, always want to do more and be better.

• 43:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and especially if you came from a place in your childhood where maybe you didn't fully feel enough, or you felt like, hey, you know, it's like when I'm succeeding at this, this is when, you know, I feel my, I feel like my parents are proud of me, or I feel like I'm more accepted. We can pick up all these like super complicated issues that kind of get intertwined with winning, or success, or money, or fame. And then it, I think the saddest, hardest part is you finally get everything that you think you wanted, and it, it didn't do what you hoped. And, and so it's, it's, it's encouraging to me to hear you talk about the family stuff, because that is the one element for me that, that turned out to be even better than I thought.

• 44:41Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, hitting number one was great, but anticlimactic, you know, I've never felt like any experiences with my family were anticlimactic. My wedding was not anticlimactic. You know what I mean?

• 44:55Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, you know, waking up in the middle of the night, hearing a screaming baby at 2:00 a.m., not the most joyful, you know, you know, experience in life, but it's very fulfilling, and I know I'll miss those days. And I really don't miss being at the Olympics. You know, I don't reminisce.

• 45:09Ryan Holiday?

  Really?

• 45:09Speaker 05

  Nope. And I don't reminisce and miss, oh, that feeling that I got in 1996, standing on the podium, which I was very honored to be a part of that, and honored to have such amazing teammates, and, you know, to win a gold medal and make history. But when I dream about, you know, exciting moments and memories in my life, those don't come up. They really don't. It's the time, you know, with my spouse, or, you know, making that commitment to say I do, because I never thought I would get married, coming from a divorced household, and seeing so much heartache and pain there, or, you know, birthing two children naturally, and then birthing twins, you know, like, wow, that was just, you know, a miracle and amazing. But people

• 45:51Speaker 05

  do it all the time. Like, they do it every day. But it was, those are the moments that I really relish, and they make me smile, and they're fulfilling for me. And then the moments today of a young kid walking through my door, smiling, or the story that I've heard of parents that had their kids in gymnastics, they had a negative experience, they were in a very unhealthy environment, too much pressure, a lot of negativity. They get into our classes here, they have a blast and they're smiling and they're, they can't wait to come back. That's fulfilling. Um, I'm not saying that the Olympics didn't, doesn't matter to me, it definitely did. But uh, that's not what, you know, that's not what fulfills me and that's not what makes me whole. And it was a little difficult, I will say, as a young athlete, winning gold, standing on top of the podium and being like,

• 46:36Speaker 05

  oh, this is it? Like, I'm not fulfilled. What just happened here? This is what? And then I, when I reached investing and putting away over a million dollars, I was like, oh, wait, I'm supposed to feel so much better about myself and so great, but I don't. And so it's those moments with your family, it's those moments with your spouse, it's those moments knowing that you've planted an amazing positive seed in a stranger's life. That those are the moments, um, you know, that'll, that fulfill us and that'll last with us for a lifetime.

• 47:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I remember when, when my book hit number one for the first time, I was mowing the lawn. And you know, the text came in, it's like, I still have to finish mowing this lawn. And it, it was this thing, you know, it was like a five year thing in the making and it had been this, and, and I, I expected to feel X and I felt sort of the lack of X. And then, and then when I think about like the best moments of my life, you know, it was like sitting on a porch swing with one of my kids and they say something cute or, you know, it was, it's, it's, it, it's weird how the actual ordinary things are actually what you find to be extraordinary.

• 47:44Ryan Holiday?

  And the extraordinary things, as great as they are, and, and as much as they facilitate, you know, you couldn't have gotten the million dollars without winning the, the Olympics. And you couldn't open the gym without the, but, but it's, it's how little we actually need to be happy. And, and yet we spend, unfortunately, people spend so much of their time, like, so, some people feel that, I, I guess, I'd be curious what you think. So, so they get on the, they get on the, on, on the medal standard, they hit number one and it's anticlimactic. You can kind of go two ways when you experience that. Number one is you go, oh, okay, this is actually isn't it?

• 48:24Ryan Holiday?

  I gotta go find something deeper and more meaningful. And then other people go, oh, it's not one Super Bowl that I needed. It's the most Super Bowls of all time. Then I'll have it.

• 48:35Speaker 05

  Yes, and then it'll be never enough, you know. Um, you know, I've I've done motivational speaking, you know, as you have for a while. And, you know, I've done work with presidents and very known and very powerful, you know, people and and I remember on stage, people asking me, oh, what's like the most exciting thing you've done? And I was like, well, actually, last week, my two dogs, we went on this walk and I saw the. You know, and they were like, are you serious? And I'm like, no, like I'm in the moment during those periods of life that you said, or you know, you say are ordinary. But those are really the extraordinary moments in our life that we need to appreciate. The other day, I'm driving home with my daughter after a very long day at the gym and we were both exhausted.

• 49:17Speaker 05

  And we see a double rainbow that she points out and she's screaming and so giddy and so excited. You know, and just kind of like, that's a moment that I'll never forget. And, you know, just recognizing, you know, her, you know, reaction to that and how exciting. And then we started talking about a beach trip we had, goodness, I guess it was a couple of years ago, where we saw a double rainbow then and she remembered, I was like, how does she remember that? It was years ago. Um, but it's those little moments and appreciating those that truly are gifts. And they are those, they are the extraordinary moments in our life that we will hold on to. But many of us see them as ordinary. We don't appreciate them, we don't recognize the beauty in them.

• 49:59Speaker 05

  And so we always think we've got to be on top of that podium. We've got to win not just one Super Bowl, like you said, but multiple Super Bowls. And that's what I'm going to be fulfilled. And I truly think everything that will fulfill us in life, it's right in front of us. Just many of us choose not to see it. And I went through life many years not seeing it. And it is my husband that kind of opened my eyes to the fact that it's truly those simple, simple, simple moments in life that are truly gifts for all of us.

• 50:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I just love how timeless that idea is too. I mean, you go back to the Stoics and you know, Marcus Aurelius is the emperor of Rome and he's, he's like, what is this? He's like, so I have like a fancier cloak than other people. Like this doesn't change anything, you know, or, you know, 500 years ago, Blaise Pascal said, "All of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone." And, and you're like, oh yeah, if I could just be here like with this, whether, yeah, whether it's cleaning up the gym in the morning, or, you know, I, I bet, I love that experience of getting somewhere early, you're turning the lights on, you know, and, and you, they're flickering up, you know, like when I get into my office in the morning and, and just, I'm, I'm the first one there, there's no one there, it's quiet, and I get to dig into this thing I

• 51:11Ryan Holiday?

  love. Like, to me, that's way more satisfying than, you know, uh, you know, a chunk of a royalty check, or, you know, a, a profile in a newspaper or something. It, it's, it's weirdly being able to, to sort of tap into the sort of humanness of it, I think that's the most wonderful.

• 51:30Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. That's, yeah, very true. I mean, I guess, you know, as we are both, you know, very accomplished individuals, I know many people listen and be like, well, of course they feel that way because they've accomplished certain things or whatever, don't have certain life struggles or challenges, they think. But I will say, the happiest people that I know in life are the people that have very little. You know, it's about their relationships, it's about the simple things in life, and they are living a much less stress-filled life than many of us ever could.

• 52:01Ryan Holiday?

  Here's me talking to one of the great race car drivers of our time, Danica Patrick.

• 52:08Ryan Holiday?

  You've lived a very surreal reality, right? Like you're one of the youngest, most successful race car drivers in history. You broke all these barriers, you're known all over the world. Do you think, I, I wonder, part of it too, and I think you see this with artists, is because they live such a sort of untraditional life, it, it helps them see, you know, like the, the quirks in the matrix, so to speak, like because your reality is so weird, you, you kind of, it helps you question reality everywhere?

• 52:41Speaker 06

  Yes, that's actually really insightful. I, I think that's true. And my example of that... In a really, in a really silly, silly example, as most of the time breaking theories open comes in really silly ways to me. Uh, but the one that comes to mind for that is that doing, like, let's say you get popular, you go on a TV show, you go do an interview, you're in a magazine, you're on the cover, whatever it may be, you realize that it's driven by eh, eh, either a sponsor that is perhaps buying ads.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 53:26Speaker 06

  Whatever it is that you're being featured, uh, or you're promoting something, you're promoting a race that you're doing, or like actors and actresses are promoting a movie that's coming out, um, a musician's promoting an album. So you realize that like, there's so much more, uh, business behind, I realize that there's so much more business behind things and like, uh, celebrities are kind of created a lot of times as opposed to just, yes, they naturally happen for sure, but, um, but sort of the promotion and, you know, how much you see them is very much driven by, uh, lots of other factors. And it made me realize that the stuff that we see, the magazines we pick up and whatever, we just think, oh, they're famous.

• 54:10Speaker 06

  It's like, no, they're being made famous, like, somebody's paying for that, you know? Somebody, somebody's making that happen. And so I think so early on, I realized, cause I, I just realized that there, there was a lot of bullshit in there and, um, that, uh, that there's an agenda behind everything. And so that was kind of the first crack in sort of the matrix of what's real and what's not as far as media goes, because I knew that I was being featured or put in certain positions because of, um, things beyond me.

• 54:44Ryan Holiday?

  This is, I think, a very, very stoic idea. And what I, as I've become successful in my career, I think I've appreciated it more in meditations. Like Marcus Aurelius, when he's writing meditations, is the most famous man in the world. There's literally a cult of the emperor that's worshiping him as a god. There's statues all over him. Wherever he goes, there's parades. And he writes in meditations all the time. You can tell he's trying to sort of sober himself. And like, one of my favorite scenes, he's like, clearly at this banquet being thrown in his honor. And he sort of breaks it down. He's like, you know, this is a, this is a dead pig, and you know, this is a dead bird, and this wine is fermented grapes. And he, like, only the emperor was supposed to wear a purple cloak.

• 55:29Ryan Holiday?

  And so, he's talking about how his purple cloak is exactly the same as everyone else's cloak. It's just dyed with shellfish blood. And then he goes through and talks about how the purple dye is created. And I think he's doing what you're talking about, which is, if, if you don't, if you peek behind the curtain, that can have two, it should have the effect of making you realize that what's going on back there is not as special as you think it is. And if you don't have that reaction, then being on the cover of the magazine is gonna fuel your ego and your self-importance probably in an unhealthy way.

• 56:04Speaker 06

  Hmm. That is the next question that I was gonna ask, was what are the repercussions of that?

• 56:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, he, so, my favorite thing is he talks about posthumous fame, which is kind of the thing that I think, like, a lot of people who are successful and ambitious, you're like, I wanna be known, I want, you know, I wanna have this or that. And, you know, you wanna be on a magazine cover, you wanna sell books or something. And then, you know, there's this, you go, but what, what would really, like, are people gonna remember this? And so, we're kind of driven by like, it's not just cool to be famous, you have to be like, famous for all of eternity. Like, that's really impressive. And his point, he just talks about, he's like, you're gonna be dead, so what do you care? And his, his point is like, also, the people who are gonna be alive in the future are gonna be just as annoying as the people who are alive right now.

• 56:52Ryan Holiday?

  It's not really any more special to be famous 200 years after your death as it is to be famous right now.

• 56:59Speaker 06

  That leads me, it's like, taking a turn a little bit, but it's something that I was gonna ask you about when, when I interviewed you, but we didn't get to. And that's that, you know, you're obviously, you know, wise beyond your years. We're talking, you're referencing people that were seemingly wise beyond their years. So I have this idea that civilization or culture is progressing in a linear way towards an expanding consciousness and awareness. But in the whole span of time, there have been people that have come in,

• 57:41Speaker 06

  that have spiked to a very high level beyond where we even are now, that are here to show us the way. And I wonder if you think that's true, you know, whether it be Marcus Aurelius, or Jesus, or yourself, or Alan Watts, or, you know, someone like that, you know, Terrence McKenna, you know, are these people like, do you feel like in all of time, it's not that it's, we're getting, we get delivered these really ancient souls that come here to teach us things?

• 58:22Ryan Holiday?

  I, I do believe that. I mean, certainly, I, I don't believe that I'm on, you know, in that company, but I believe that there, I, I believe in energy, sort of like you're talking about. And it seems like there are, every several generations, there seems to be someone who's kind of tapped into an energy or reached into a place of sort of deeper consciousness that allows them to, you know, do something really magical. And, you know, I, what I, what I'm fascinated with as a Stoics is that Jesus and Seneca are born in the same year, in the same Roman Empire, and are talking about a lot of the same things. So I don't think it only has to be from a religious context. I just think there's...

• 59:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, we do have the ability to sort of have kind of a fleeting impact like that. And I'm like, you know, there's this, it's sort of not trendy to believe now in what they call the great man of history theory, which is that like an individual can change history. But I actually like sort of profoundly believe in that. And I think it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you don't think that a person can make a difference like that, then you're not going to be that person.

• 59:38Speaker 06

  So true.

• 59:39Ryan Holiday?

  I want to go back to the death thing. I'm curious. So obviously it makes sense why when you're getting in the car, you can't be thinking about, you know, I'm going to crash. This is so scary. I could get hurt. But did doing such a dangerous sport in which I'm sure you knew racers who lost their lives or you were at races where that happened, how did that shape your life off the track? Like, did it make you more present? Or did it make you, you know, more reckless? Like, how did you think about like, I got to imagine, like, if you're a police officer or you're in the army, knowing that there is a, that every day, there's a risk that you could get shot or hurt, or firemen, knowing that

• 1:00:23Ryan Holiday?

  risk probably changes, I don't know, like how you are over breakfast in the morning?

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  No, that's the end.

• 1:00:31Ryan Holiday?

  It didn't?

• 1:00:31Speaker 06

  It didn't. I mean, I, and yes, I was at the track when people died a couple of times and knew them, obviously, because I was driving in the same race. Or, you know, I remember the most vivid one was, it was the beginning of the 2006 season, and we were at Homestead, Miami Speedway. And back then, we used to do a morning warm up before the race. And so we were all out in the morning warm up, and somebody had an issue and a car came around and hit him. And anyway, this was my teammate and he died. And we no longer

• 1:01:15Speaker 06

  did morning warm ups after that. But I remember that.

• 1:01:20Speaker 06

  What I felt was that I was sorry for my family and loved ones that I would have absolutely gone out that day and raced. Like, I had no problem with that. And I felt sort of guilty to, I felt selfish in a way that I didn't feel it on a level that made me concerned for other people, like that I was selfish enough to say, you know, I could still go out there and drive. We, as a team, our team owner sat, my other, there was three of us, and the other two drivers, myself and another, we didn't race that day, as a sort

• 1:02:02Speaker 06

  of respect to him, of course. And I just remember feeling like I would have gone out that day. And so even if I track all the way back to my, probably, I think it was the first time I flipped a go-kart. I was racing at Charlotte Motor Speedway inside of the big track, so there was a little go-kart track in there. So I was, I was racing go-karts and I was probably, uh, I was probably like 14. And I, it was one lap to go and I was lead, it was, I was leading, and I went into the first corner of the last lap, and it was a road course. So went left and right and everything, didn't just go in a circle.

• 1:02:44Speaker 06

  So I, I got bumped out of the way and two, two guys got by me and I followed them all, you know, caught back up and came around to the very last corner of that lap. And we all spread out wide and went into the last corner and the carts in front of me lifted and I didn't. So I drove over the back of the go-kart. And in fact, the person that I drove over ended up, I mean, he drove Indy cars, he won the Indy 500, his name is Sam Hornish. And I drove over him and there's pictures of it and everything, and then landed on my head, flipped over. And my dad came running out and I think he barrel rolled himself. He's like,

• 1:03:27Speaker 06

  My legs were not working as fast as my brain. So he got out there, but I remember after that whole accident happened, aside from the fact that I never wore Blue Ray shoes again after that day, because I think that was the first weekend with Blue Ray shoes. Oh, the superstitions. I remember my dad telling me, "You're not invincible. Like, you can get hurt. This is your, your, this is, you're not bulletproof." And obviously, I don't really remember how I was acting, but I was obviously acting in some kind of a way that I was somewhat unaffected, or even angry or motivated by it. And so, you know, it's kind of a couple of stories of a long-winded answer of how

• 1:04:08Speaker 06

  do I do when there's danger and death and all that around me? And that's, that it, again, it's probably keeping my, keeping my bridge low and not being, not acknowledging the depth of danger.

• 1:04:27Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say, we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say, thank you.