The 3 Signs Something Will Bring You Joy | Kate Bowler

We often wait for the perfect conditions to feel joyful, but joy rarely arrives as expected. In today’s episode, Kate Bowler https://www.instagram.com/katecbowler/?hl=en and Ryan discuss three surprising signs that something might bring you real joy and how to become more open to recognizing it. They also talk about the difference between joy and happiness, what the Stoics thought about contentment, and our obsession with optimizing everything. Kate Bowler is a four-time New York Times bestselling author https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=kate+bowler*, award-winning podcast host, and professor of religious history at Duke University. She is the host of the podcast Everything Happens https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/everything-happens-with-kate-bowler/id1341076079, where she has honest conversations about grief, joy, faith, love, and the realities of being human. Grab signed copies of Kate’s books Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/everything-happens-for-a-reason-and-other-lies-ive-loved-signed-by-author?_pos=4&_sid=d6732fd30&_ss=r, No Cure For Being Human (And Other Truths I Needed To Hear) https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/no-cure-for-being-human-and-other-truths-i-need-to-hear-signed-by-author?_pos=1&_sid=d6732fd30&_ss=r, and her latest book Joyful, Anyway https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/joyful-anyway-signed-by-author?_pos=2&_sid=d6732fd30&_ss=r at The Painted Porch https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=kate+bowler* | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=kate+bowler* Follow Kate Bowler: Instagram https://instagram.com/katecbowler/, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf8m7lNdR7YVieU0muCg5cg 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I don't know if joy is a super definable concept. Sort of one of those things like we know it when we see it. I think the problem is a lot of people see it as when everything's going amazing, when, when every problem is solved, when you're doing fun stuff, the relationship's going great, your health is great, the kids are behaving, when everything is calm and simple and wonderful. And there's nothing wrong with any of this, but I don't think that's exactly how the Stoics would define joy.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  Because what we're talking about there is we're talking about pleasure. We're talking about happiness. We're talking about, I don't know, simplicity, maybe just pleasure. And it kind of depend on circumstances. For, for the Stoics, it was like, could you experience joy even when things weren't going your way? Even when you weren't hitting green lights? For the, the Stoics, joy was what we got from working with other human beings, from realizing or tell us our purpose in life. And I want to say they believed we could, we could experience joy anywhere at any time. And Marx realized, remember, joy, happiness, it depends on the quality of our thoughts.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  That's why I think Kate Bowler is so interesting. She's had a, um, a rough go of it the last couple of years. She had this terminal cancer diagnosis where she's somehow still here. And she wrote this book called Joyful Anyway, which I think is, is actually getting to the essence of the Stoic take on it in a really interesting way. It's like, no, no, can you be joyful even when it doesn't make sense to other people? Even when it's really hard? And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. That joy is forced positivity, not joy is pretending that everything's fine, but, but still somehow joy that's deeper and stranger and more durable. We're going to talk about the difference between happiness and joy,

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  whether you could be happy and joyful even while suffering, and some of the overlaps between Stoicism and Christianity. And you're really going to like it. Kate is amazing. Uh, her other book, Everything Happens for Reason is great. So is No Care for Human. And then this new one, Joyful Anyway, is fantastic. Uh, she's a four times New York Times bestselling author. She's won a bunch of awards for her podcast. She's a professor of religious history at Duke. And as I said, at 35, she was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And that experience shaped some of what we're going to talk about today. You can follow her on all platforms, at Kate C. Bowler. Check out her Substack, Everything Happens with Kate Bowler. Check out her podcast. Let's get into it.

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  When we talk about joy, I think those are the kinds of things that people associate with joy. Right? Like smiling, chin up, enthusiasm, energy, excitement.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Choose joy, exclamation mark.

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. But maybe that's not your definition of joy.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't think joy and, and that kind of like aggressive positivity were the same thing. And I kind of thought you probably just climb a ladder of good feelings. And then you get to the top and there's like a super abundance. You're like, oh my gosh, joy. Here we are. But it turns out that happiness and contentedness will experience it psychologically as a sense of ease. It will feel relaxing. It will feel like things are going our way. Happiness is what luck feels like.

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  So is there a difference between joy and happiness in your view?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Joy is not at all relaxing. It will feel big and bright. It's less like a feeling of contentedness. And it's in part because while it engages our reward system, it also engages our stress systems, which is so strange that you can be both then joyful and stressed or sad or worried or despairing at the same time. So joy ends up being this much more like enlargening, like capacity holding emotion, because it lets us hold in view things that are actually happening in our real life and hit those big high notes and say, yes, it is so good to be alive.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I thought, I thought the title of the book is interesting, like Joyful Anyway. It made me think of, uh, the Viktor Frankl essay collection that they did a couple of years ago, which is called Yes to Life. And then the subtitle is In Spite of Everything. Like that, that if, if you just think of joy as its own thing, maybe you're missing something. Yeah. Like the idea that, that you're feeling joyful despite, or you're saying yes to life despite all the reasons not to.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe is illustrative of what joy actually is, which is like work. I don't know if that, if you agree, but like, it's not just that it's a choice, but that it is, um, it doesn't just happen because all the conditions are right. Like it is not, or meaningful joy is not a result of luck. Like everything came up your way.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  Meaningful joy is you deciding, like the ancients would talk about, like, could you be happy even as you're being tortured on the rack?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  I knew you were going to say tortured.

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  And, and like, obviously that's an extreme example, although they lived in extreme times. But the, their point was like, if joy was only contingent on the wind being at your back, it wasn't worth that much because it didn't have anything to do with you.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, joy is not good math in that way. Like it doesn't, it's not good things adding up. And then congratulations, you get joy. It is, however, it's two things at one time, which seem contradictory. The first is that it is a gift, like it's a surprise and you can't will it. So you can't actually choose joy. It will surprise you and it will happen to you often at a really weird time. I mean, I think people underestimate just how weird joy is. Like, it's in the shouldn't make sense category. It's not just like, I love chocolate and thank God there's a lot of chocolate here.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  It's like, I was at a funeral and the fourth time the pastor mispronounced my dad's name, I felt this weird hysterical, and you're like, oh my gosh, I could hate myself. That's joy. And the reason why it's so strange is it, it's because it's not just a positive emotion. It gets us in this existential story place. It's a story. It reminds us that it's good for us to be, period. Like it's a, it, it tells us about our own goodness in a situation that doesn't remind us of our own goodness. So sometimes people can have it like watching a rainbow and good for them. But normally it will, it will be in a time in which there's multiple kinds of feelings going on. And the, the reason why we'll then get really like teary or surprised

• 7:16Speaker 01

  is it's contradicting some other fact, like, well, this shouldn't have been. Yeah. I mean, what, and like, it could be sometimes when you look at your kid and you just didn't think that they would ever be in your life. Yeah. And you can watch them light up a part of you. That's like, how did a stranger move into my house? And I gave him a name and now he lives here. I mean, I think, I think the reason why it's a surprise is it comes into a place that we can engineer. However, and this is the only part that you'll like, Ryan, is that you can also cultivate a capacity for joy. You can be someone that it's more and more likely to happen to.

• 7:52Ryan Holiday?

  How do we do that?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  I think it will also be for reasons you will like. And a lot of it is, I mean, I think you have to start with a place of pretty radical acceptance of what is. And this is where the huge bummer-ness of Stoicism and Christianity come together in a sad, do you like your life? No? Too bad. I think a reflection on like our own resentment, our own bitterness, the things that we wish weren't. I think clearing out space in that to say, well, but this is the life we have. So I think, um, I think like a, a meditative reflective place is an amazing place to start if you want to be a more joyful person. It sounds weird to start in the negative part for, I think, a lot of people.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  But I think beginning there makes you realize how calcified some of our pain has become.

• 8:43Ryan Holiday?

  I was, uh, driving my kids home from school and we have like a long commute and we were stuck in traffic and, uh, my, my six year old was sitting in the backseat and, and I just hear him go, this is wonderful. And I was like, oh, you know, I was looking around, I was like, it is wonderful. We're hanging out, we're listening to music. And then I kind of go, what do you, what do you mean? And he goes, no, no, no, no, this is wonderful. And I go, what are you, I'm like looking in the, you know, what are you talking about? And he's like, we're learning sign language in school. This is wonderful. Like he was just trying to tell me how a certain sign works. And he had no, he had no, he had no thoughts whatsoever about whether this experience we were having was wonderful, but in fact it was. And now I can't stop laughing every time I think of it.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  You're like, I agree existentially.

• 9:28Ryan Holiday?

  But I think that's sort of your point, which is like, it is kind of, it sneaks up on you. And it's not, it's not always the moments that you think are wonderful. Like you think winning a gold medal, or, you know, your retirement ceremony, or, or this long planned vacation. That's going to be the joy.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:44Ryan Holiday?

  And often it's the opposite of that, that you feel it. And at the same time, the ability to understand and perceive that these seemingly ordinary moments are actually wonderful and worthy of joy. And then accepting them and feeling it, that maybe that's where the tension gets resolved.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's like a weird playfulness to being somebody who can recognize that you don't always get the experience that you want in the moment. Like I've seen a million old men retire.

• 10:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Because I'm in academia and I've been at the same university for 20 years. So I've seen the same disappointed look on 20 years worth of old men's faces. And I can tell you that like, people think there's going to be this like summation of their life. And the ability to then like, break your life down into smaller pieces of wonder and surprise. I think it's probably better than imagining you've got this like hero's journey to this one mountaintop called joy.

• 10:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Well, there probably also respect, not just that the ceremony is anticlimactic, but the retirement itself is probably anticlimactic.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  You wanted there is probably dead. It's a horrible way of being like, congratulations on your career. All the people you enjoyed it with are no longer with you.

• 11:02Ryan Holiday?

  And the people who are happy are, and there's a funny scene in Marcus Ruses meditations where he's talking about like, you're going to be on your deathbed. And there are going to be people happy because they want to take your place. Like the people that are feeling good at this ceremony are like, thank God, now the spot is finally opening up.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  A junior faculty member.

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  You were supposed to leave per the actuary tables like a decade and a half ago, and you clung on.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I think that's right. I think that not waiting for joyful moments to be joyful is probably smart. I do think though, there's three little like tells for whether something is likely to make you more joyful. And one of them is, does it make you say, thank you? And there's just like a lot of emphasis, I think overemphasis on gratitude journals. If you look at the studies, they will say that there's a limited benefit to gratitude. Meaning you can write down a couple of things every day that will say, thank you so much for my life. If you start to write down too many things, all you've done is make yourself back into the robot homework optimized self.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  That is much more likely than to make yourself miserable with too much gratitude homework. But, but if you look at moments that just unexpectedly reminded you that, that it might not have been that way.

• 12:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  I've, those are usually a place to pause and then wonder, is there something in my past that actually bubbled up into joy like this? And it will remind you to be hopeful then that something like that is probably going to come visit your doorstep sometime soon. Cause joy is like wonderfully, not cyclical, because you don't get to exactly predict it. But like, you really have to, you have to believe in joy. Like, you have to imagine that you're the kind of person, it's not just for somebody else. You are the kind of person.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, but you deserve it and then you'll get it.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  It's gonna happen too.

• 12:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that, that is the challenge. I think when we talk about happiness though, we're also, I think people think it's like everything going right. Like you were talking about happiness and contentment. And I think those are very different emotions for most people. If your happiness is because everything's going well and amazing and firing on all cylinders, like a lot of things have to go your way to get it. And if your happiness is contentment, it's much more in your grasp. If you have the ability to be content here in this moment with what you have.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Agreed. And if you look at the definition of happiness inside of the health and wellness industry, you're going to get a very intense view of what it takes. For especially like a middle aged lady to have a good life. I'm going to have to have breathing practices. I'm going to have to have rhinoceros sized water bottles. I'm going to have to have my gratitude.

• 13:51Ryan Holiday?

  It's not good business to sell people contentment because they already have it. Like they already have what they need.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  That's right. It's fully a story of optimization with very, like very poorly repackaged social science. With the small incremental benefits.

• 14:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  And, but I think what's really disturbing about it, and this is what Mirislav Wolf calls like the happiness tangle. Is if they offer you a million small correlations between studies that say, you know, stare into your partner's eyes for an extra five minutes. And your, your, your, your marriage will last five years longer. You add a million of those, what you've now convinced people is, oh my gosh, all this happiness homework is going to take eight hours a day alongside my regular workday. And if I do all these things, then I'll hit like ding ding ding. And I think what people find is now we're so overburdened with this frantic sense of this mythical optimal version.

• 14:48Ryan Holiday?

  And the things, the guilt about the things we're not doing and the, the mental load of the things we know we need to be doing.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  That's right. And it'd be wildly expensive and then inconvenient for us to be that optimized. So that kind of happiness, I think is sold especially to women as a form of perfectionism.

• 15:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  And I think everyone's just hoping they'll magically get younger, better, faster, somehow kinder.

• 15:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Or just less angry in traffic.

• 15:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, ideally your, your happiness and joy is, again, this comes back to the Stoics. It should not be dependent on any additional things.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Tell me more about contentment in the Stoic framework. Cause I do think that that's very different than the optimal happiness monster.

• 15:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Uh, you know, it's funny, there's a line in meditations of Marcus Ruses goes, remember very little is needed for a happy life. And it's like, well, it's easy to say when you're the emperor.

• 15:50Ryan Holiday?

  But, but I think his point is that it's, it's not, and all the Stoics are saying that's like, it's not when this happens, or if this happens, or after this happens, then you can have. Like if, if your happiness is dependent on what they would call an external of some kind, whether that's somebody else's approval, or some achievement, or some external condition. Like, you know, when the plague goes away, or when the economy gets back to normal, or when the war ends, you know, now you're not in the driver's seat. And that's like not, not that the whole point is to be in the driver's seat. But then again, if, what good is it if God, fortune, or random luck decides whether

• 16:36Ryan Holiday?

  the math adds up for you to have this thing right now?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:39Ryan Holiday?

  And so I think for the Stoics, the idea was, it's not that you never accepted anything new, or even wanted anything new. It was that if you thought you needed these things, not only were you wrong, but in the needing, you have now created a vulnerability and a, and a weakness in the sense that someone can take it away. Someone is dependent on you getting it or not. And that's, that's what we're trying to avoid. Like I think about it with books, like, do I need, would I like it to be a bestseller? Sure. Would I like it to earn back its advance? I mean, definitely that would be good. But, but if that's what I need for it to happen, for me to feel good about it.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:24Ryan Holiday?

  I've now decided that you, the audience, or you, the publisher, or you, the book critic, you get to decide

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:32Ryan Holiday?

  how this works or not, and that's not a great place to be.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree.

• 17:36Ryan Holiday?

  But again, easier, easier said than done.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  I like thinking about the contingency as, as kind of comforting though. Things being so unpredictable as a starting place is, is kind of a, it's, it's just, I think it's like a, it's a quieter place to start a decision tree.

• 17:54Ryan Holiday?

  Starting by understanding that a bunch of, that it's unpredictable.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:58Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Like uncertainty as a framework is not a modern framework. Well, you and I are both swimming against the current.

• 18:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  When we say that like, people should begin with a healthy appreciation for uncertainty. Cause I think particularly since the seventies, we have imagined the self as a pretty self-making project.

• 18:24Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  That, that doesn't just have it a day, they've got 24 hours and a morning routine and, and like a largely a framework for control.

• 18:33Ryan Holiday?

  With it, that you control your own destiny.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Almost entirely.

• 18:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And, and that if you do all these things, you will get what you want, you know? Not even more often than not, but the vast majority of the time.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 18:48Ryan Holiday?

  And yeah, I think in the ancient world, it was, it was like, you could do everything right and get exiled and get murdered. Or die of a cut on your finger or whatever. And, and so there is a, a humility to that, that I think is missing. And it also, by not having the humility, first off, it deprives you of being able to be pleasantly surprised.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:11Ryan Holiday?

  But also I got to imagine it's quite painful when things don't go your way because you think you're responsible for that too. Like in baseball, they talk about like, if you, if you think the hitting streak is on you, then the slump is really hard too. Because it's, both of them are, are because of what you're doing.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:31Ryan Holiday?

  As opposed to a statistical reality.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. I do think it puts delight in a different light because then the things that do come our way, I think we should let them light up the room more than they do.

• 19:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Like I, I think in this sort of like blasé, scroll to the next thing, really hope it's a comfortable jumpsuit kind of world. I think it's getting harder and harder for us to be delighted. One of the joy killers is not like, if it's not sadness, the truth is it's very likely to be this flat routine set of expectations in which you're just going to earn your life and you're going to like hyperplan. And then you'll probably use AI agents for the rest. But like, it's really all this stuff in between that like, is supposed to teach us more and more about just how like unusual.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Our particular human alchemy is like, what lights us up isn't just like, what's good for you? Like, we are bizarre. And like, what makes a life is what makes poetry and art and friendship. And so like, what delights me is world's largest objects. Texas has so many, and I'm really excited about it. Like weird foreign junk food. And listening to my dad and my son talk about what Winston Churchill is feeling, which is like, almost every night, I can hear them in the other room. And it like, just like, my heart is somehow goes from zero to full.

• 21:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, being able to enjoy the absurdity of existence is, is a sort of a shortcut to joy. And it is absurd. I mean, it makes no sense that we're here.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 21:17Ryan Holiday?

  That, that any of that, like, it's all, it's all ridiculous.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think if like, modernity wants us to be predictable and certain and efficient. I think the opposite is stuff that is surprising, stuff that is absurd, stuff that is random and delightful. But all of it is supposed to like, bring us back to that, like, beating desire that we all have to like, live beautiful, meaningful, soul-filling lives. And not just be satisfied with the, I think it just feels very like, it's not even page seven. It's like, it's just the like, I mean, I am really worried that the

• 22:02Speaker 01

  modern concept of joy is going to be so diluted with all of our approximations of being entertained.

• 22:09Ryan Holiday?

  You mean, just like, we expect it to be so much that we miss?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  I'm just thinking you and I probably both have a lot of worries about what an endless scroll of social media and like, the attention economy is doing to our capacity to like, to think and enjoy.

• 22:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yeah, probably not unlike, you know, watching endless amounts of pornography dulls you to sort of regular, normal experiences. And yeah, if you step back and you sort of detox, you do, you are able to just sort of be delighted by the absurdity of existence. I was thinking the other day, like, what it must have been like for Europeans to see a kangaroo for the first time? Just like, they just get off the ship and then there's just this thing hopping around and like, what that was? And then, and then I was like, and then what did the, what did the Aboriginal Australians like, think of this person in armor? Like, like, wearing like a, I mean, I think it was a little later, so they probably weren't wearing a full suit of armor.

• 23:07Ryan Holiday?

  But like, just, but yeah, just like when Columbus gets off the ship, let's say, in, in, in the new world. And then it's like, what is this nonsense?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  They thought their beards were so gross.

• 23:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously it's scary and it meant, you know, this horrendous, you know, sort of plague of different diseases were about to come down on everyone. But just like, if you, the first time you saw a knight, like, are you scared? Or you're like, what is this doofus? Like, it's so dumb.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  I do always love it in history when you can see a moment in which they discovered something weird and they're like, oh my gosh, is this our thing?

• 23:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Like, there's an entire period of Portuguese architecture where they discovered pineapples.

• 23:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was just gonna say pineapples is, it blew up, like, they were like, what is this madness?

• 23:51Speaker 01

  This cathedral needs a thousand more pineapples. And they called it Manuelian art.

• 23:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  And they're like, if you look carefully, it's not, it's not like Ivy, it's not anything else. It's just thousands of pineapples. They're like, this cannot be, this cannot be overdone.

• 24:07Ryan Holiday?

  Or, or in sort of the Middle Ages, and then even into the Renaissance, you had these painters painting animals that they only heard descriptions of from like, Pliny or whatever. So, or, or it's like, they had one taxidermied rhinoceros, you know, that the Pope owned or something. And, and like, the way they would do taxidermy then would like, now they build a frame of the animal and they put the skin over it. But they, they would just like, stuff it with stuff. So they'd just be all like, poofed out. And you just think like, you know, like Michelangelo just didn't know what this thing looked like. Cause he was looking at like, a bad copy of a copy of a copy. And so like, some of the paintings are just like, preposterously bad. But, but like, they were clearly lit up by it. Like, they thought it was cool.

• 24:51Ryan Holiday?

  And then, and then we get this extra experience now of like, imagining their childlike wonder at something like, like, even Shakespeare repeats it. You know, the Romans at one point catch some chameleons. I don't know where chameleons are from. But like, because they couldn't slow down and watch, they didn't understand how the chameleon was eating.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:12Ryan Holiday?

  And so like, Shakespeare repeats it, but Pliny guesses that they, it's just sucking in nutrients from the air. It, it doesn't understand the tongue is going out and catching the fly so fast that you can't see it. And so, you know, like, they, they're just making stuff up the way a six-year-old would make stuff up about how, like, how all this stuff works. And, you know, obviously they were also just sort of plundering and raping the earth at the same time. But there is a childlike joyfulness to the like, just trying to figure out this absurdity of existence.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  I think maybe if we feel then that the world is already discovered, or if anything worth knowing is now already in our phone, like, I do think it sounds like these are, these will like prohibit that feeling of, of like, a weakness.

• 25:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  To the world.

• 26:00Ryan Holiday?

  Know-it-all-ism, or like, that's not really how it worked. Like, there's this interview with Ridley Scott, where they were talking about the second Gladiator movie, which I'm sure you didn't see. But, um,

• 26:08Speaker 01

  I did see.

• 26:10Ryan Holiday?

  But, but they were like, you know, uh, they didn't really have sharks in the Colosseum. And he was like, you don't fucking know this? He was like, he gets really mad. He was like, he was like, they filled the Colosseum with water and they had naval battles. You think it would have been so hard for them to catch sharks? Like, but what I loved about it is he's like 80 and he's like, he's still like, part of what makes him a great filmmaker is that he clearly still lives in a fantasy world. Like, this is like an argument that a 10-year-old would have.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  I love this argument. That's really funny. I like sudden umbrage.

• 26:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, there's of all the-

• 26:49Speaker 01

  It's just like zero to 60 rage.

• 26:52Ryan Holiday?

  But, but also the contrast of like, like, why is this journalist think their job is to, like, the whole thing is made up? Like, it's, it's also, none of these people are real. This is, this is a fantasy. This is historical fantasy. And you're like, it couldn't have gone like that. It's like, he also couldn't have been stabbed all these times and not died. It's all made up. And so, yeah, there is this kind of tendency to want to puncture every myth and legend and story as if that's the point of wisdom.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. I was reading, um, A History of the Color Blue the other day. And I didn't realize, I mean, I just, I don't, I didn't think enough about how paint works.

• 27:31Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  To know that they couldn't make every color of paint until synthetic paints were invented. And now it just, which is really wild. Like, so in all kinds of places, they just couldn't have blue. Cause there was only a couple of things that could make the blue color. And I, I liked thinking about it. And I liked thinking about how now we imagine we can paint our worlds in every single invented color that we might forget.

• 27:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  That each one at some point was like, a miracle and had to be named, well, this is Egyptian blue. And this is lapis blue. And this is like-

• 28:04Ryan Holiday?

  So-and-so had a really cool shade of orange and people went like ape shit about it.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. I like, I think that's partly why in a world of, I'd like that, of know-it-all-ism and everything's already been done. And like, the flatness of, of expecting everything and yet still feeling hungry.

• 28:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  I think the more and more surprised we can be by the world again, I think we're going to find it to be a pretty hilarious place.