Matthew B. Crawford on Practical Philosophy and Shop Class as Soulcraft | This is The Opinion To Care About

On today’s episode of the podcast Ryan talks to author Matthew B. Crawford about his New York Times bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft (which you can pick up at the Painted Porch), why philosophy must be practiced and experienced in actual life rather than in the classroom, our inherent fear of death and how it impacts our day to day existence, and more. Matthew B. Crawford is an American writer and research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is a contributing editor at The New Atlantis, and is also a motorcycle mechanic. He is the author of the instant bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work as well as The World Beyond Your Head and Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. Listen to Rams GM Les Snead’s interview: https://dailystoic.com/les-snead/Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn, Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Matthew B. Crawford: http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/See 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  This is the opinion to care about. The knock against the Los Angeles Rams for seasons now is that they've traded away too many of their first-round draft picks. Monday morning quarterbacks and living-room GMs seem to be convinced that they know better, and so does most of the sports media, who hasn't been afraid to criticize the team's moves, especially after setbacks and losses. Les Snead, the GM of the Rams, who I interviewed on the Daily Stoic Podcast back in August, told us his strategy for ignoring the noise while building his second Super Bowl team in four years. "I've taken a lot of the wisdom from the Stoics,"

• 1:24Ryan Holiday?

  he said. "I intentionally practice Stoicism enough to know, okay, this comment, or this tweet, or this simple take shouldn't disrupt or even ruffle my emotion. I'm also aware that good television requires debate. Someone has to take the side that the Rams are doing cool things, and somebody has to take the side that they're not. Then they banter about it. That's all just noise that is part of being in this business. And if it gets you to doubt what you're doing, your process was probably a little bit flawed."

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  And we should remember what Marcus Aurelius pointed out, that while we all care about ourselves a lot, for some strange reason, we often value other people's opinions of ourselves, of our actions and our choices, more than our own. We cede authority to and accept the premise of arguments from people who have no idea what they're talking about. When you know what you're doing, Les explained, you have to let your competence double as armor against criticism and complaints. It's not that he's egotistical or that he thinks he's better than anyone else who has his kind of job. It's that he knows there was a well-fought-out strategy in place that guided their decisions to trade away those first and second-round picks.

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  In short, the Rams' view is that since drafting in the early rounds is so hit or miss, they'd rather trade for proven players than gamble on the potential of a first-rounder in order to win right now. And with this, he can rest easy and move confidently in the work still in front of him. A stoic knows what they're doing. They don't wing it. They don't react emotionally or do things without thinking about them. They have a process. This is not just a better way to make decisions, it's also a better way to live with those decisions, no matter their outcome, even when they're misunderstood, even when they're doubted. You don't have time to care about what other people think about the things that you know.

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  You can't afford to spare the energy or the effort required to respond because you need every bit of it to get better, to make the next set of important decisions. It's your opinion, your standards, your strategy that you should care about most. Those are the things that are going to help you win right now. And with the Rams in the Super Bowl this weekend, do check out my interview with Les Snead on the Daily Stoic Podcast. You can check that out at the link below. You can also just check it out by going to dailystoic.com/les, L-E-S-dash-snead, S-N-E-A-D.

• 3:59Ryan Holiday?

  I was trying to think about when I read the book Shop Class as Soulcraft. And I don't think it could have been in college because it came out after I left college. But as I grabbed my copy off the shelf, we sell it here on the Painted Porch also. But I grabbed my copy because I had a bunch of notes in it. It had this big sticker on it that said like, "College-used textbook." So I must have bought it like, used on Amazon or something. I don't know, but I got an old copy, or a very worn copy, and then I put some miles on it. Because I just, I loved this book. And I was thinking about interesting people I wanted to have on the podcast. And I just recommended the book to a friend of mine. And I thought, man, I should have Matthew Crawford on. And I reached out and he was excited to come on.

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  Matthew Crawford, he's an American writer, research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He majored in physics and then turned to political philosophy. He has a PhD from the University of Chicago. And on top of all this, he's a motorcycle mechanic. His first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, was an instant bestseller. And then he followed that up with The World Beyond Your Head and Why We Drive Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. I was really looking forward to this conversation. Matthew is someone who has inspired me to think about things I do with my hands, how I structure my life, in a lot of ways. And I'm a big fan, this was an exciting book.

• 5:27Ryan Holiday?

  When I was thinking about books to stock in the Painted Porch, and I was thinking, what I wanted in the philosophy section that wasn't just a bunch of dead old people. This was one of the first books that I thought of because it's a really accessible, practical book. It's what philosophy is supposed to do. It's supposed to change how we think about what we do and make us better at what we do, and hopefully make us better citizens in the world. And that's what we talk about in today's episode. You can go to Matthew's website at MatthewBCrawford.com, or you can pick up his wonderful book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, at the Painted Porch, at thepaintedporch.com, anywhere books are sold. If you want to get a used copy on Amazon, I guess you could do that, too.

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  I'm sure Matthew would appreciate the slightly more sustainable approach. In theory, it's better for the author if you buy a new copy. Support Matthew's great writing and enjoy this interview with the one and only Matthew Crawford on Shop Class as Soulcraft.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  So I thought I'd go way, way inside baseball to start. I was flipping back through the book. I must have read the book in college because I have the, I have like a used college edition that I don't remember, but I read it many years ago. And as I was going back through, there's this one little section where you talk about some of the, how you got all your tools or how you paid for all of them or something. And then you mention a grant that you got that was originally supposed to be for a book about Plutarch.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  I want to nerd out about this because I would love to read that book. So tell me what that was and let's talk about Plutarch.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Wow. Okay. That's been 20 years, but I'll, I'll try. So yeah, I was at the University of Chicago. I was writing a dissertation, PhD on, on ancient political thought. And Plutarch became intriguing to me because, well, for a number of reasons, but for one thing, he's writing at this time, he's, he's writing around 100 AD, just to put it in perspective. So this is a time when, you know, Rome rules the world, obviously. This is sort of the peak of, of Roman Empire.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  And he is a Greek and the Greek cities have been subdued by Roman rule, which is a little hard for them because they of course, thought of themselves as the real ass kickers of the world, you know, sort of the Athenian empire was the sort of this shining moment that they're clinging to. And Plutarch finds that the whole political psychology of the Greeks is kind of obsolete. They cling to this idea. They tend to engage in a lot of sort of factional fight amongst themselves in these Greek cities.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  And that just invites the Romans to come and put it down brutally. So he's kind of saying, as a subject people, you need to reconsider what courage looks like, what.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  What love looks like, and that's where it got really weird and interesting, and that became the focus of the dissertation.

• 8:57Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting. No, I think what jumped out at me is like, if I was to think of like, what philosopher or writer I might suspect that someone like you would be really into, Plutarch might be at the top of my list. Just, and I don't know what I have to base this on, but I feel like Plutarch was sort of a much more hands-on philosopher, even though he was Greek, it didn't feel like he was, you know, sort of very abstract, he was very practical. I mean, even just the fact that he was interested in the philosophy of like, political life, like philosophy for the actual ruling of an empire, as opposed

• 9:37Ryan Holiday?

  to merely the philosophy of ideas. There always seemed to me to be an immensely practical and down-to-earth grittiness to Plutarch.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  I like that, because it fits with his method, right? About half of his corpus consists of these lives, these biographies that he wrote. So it's a very sort of sociological and sort of phenomenological approach. How do the permanent problems of existence show up within a particular life? And it's, I think it's not merely a pedagogical kind of device. I think, I mean, I've tried to, I guess, emulate him in that sense of treating

• 10:29Speaker 01

  the concrete as sort of the way into the most important questions. Because if, you know, if it doesn't sort of manifest concretely somehow in life, then I guess there's a risk of just kind of going off into some kind of mental masturbation.

• 10:48Ryan Holiday?

  That's right. It's like he's an anthropologist writing philosophy. And he does seem to be, when he's talking about really simple, simple is the wrong, but when he's talking about down to earth, the lives that I think really sing from Plutarch are Cato, when he's talking about the Spartans, you know, he's really interested in this sort of active, real, I mean, they all tended to be guys, but he's interested in, in like the guys guise of philosophy. Maybe, you know, there's no Plutarch's Lives of Socrates. He's interested in Cato or, you know, Leonidas or something like that.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Right. Somehow, it's in, in the active life of public engagement that, I don't know, that we see the man in full, right? And someone has to put their, you know, if they have a claim to wisdom, well, let's, let's see how it plays out in the real world. I think the problem of self-delusion is really, has to be kept front and center for any thinker.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  You can wander into a kind of garden of, you know, self-consistent fantasy. And, you know, to, to bring it into the world of deeds offers a kind of check on your own subjectivity.

• 12:28Ryan Holiday?

  Ultimately, Plutarch has to sort of practice what he preaches in that he's, he's a politician. He's like mayor or governor of sort of some, some province, right? He actually is in a position of leadership as opposed to just a writer about leadership ultimately.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, he was a man of affairs. And, yeah, I don't, you know, you may know more about his actual life than I do. I didn't, I didn't make that a focus. Although it would have, you know, someone should write a life of Plutarch.

• 13:00Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I was hoping you were writing when I saw that.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that would, yeah, it sort of gets at the the figure of the the public intellectual.

• 13:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:12Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think what I liked so much about your book and so much about your writing, and I think that's also what I like about Plutarch, is is the idea that philosophy is not what happens in philosophy class, that actually life is the philosophy class. Or as you're saying, you know, shop class is is where you work on your soul.

• 13:33Ryan Holiday?

  How did you sort of come, I I I imagine you you studied philosophy, how did you come to think of philosophy as something very different than I would say most people or most of your peers do think about it?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think it was just a a kind of set of accidents in a way. I mean, I didn't, I didn't feel very well suited to being a professor. I didn't, it never really appealed to me, but, you know, I just felt this urgent need to read the most important books and to do so with guidance, with teachers, and to have a kind of apprenticeship in thinking.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  But, you know, I I, there's such a glut of PhDs, so there I am trying to get a, you know, a professor job with everybody else, and I never, it wasn't a fully sincere effort on my part to get such a job. So I worked at a think tank for a little bit and hated that, and so that's when I quit to open the bike shop. And that turned out to be, for a while, you know, a pretty good thing. I guess at that point, I felt more like a kind of dissident thinker that are outside the system. And that's a great, I mean, it's it's a precarious position to be in if you're,

• 15:00Speaker 01

  but on the other hand, it's very freeing because you're not, you know, you're not trying to please some tenure committee or peer-reviewed journals or something like that. And to my taste, academic thought has gotten quite constricted. And I guess there's a couple of problems. One is a professionalization.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Which is inherently kind of, you know, policing the boundaries of a discipline. And the other, of course, is the politicization, where it seems like everything has to somehow support the regime, you know, broadly understood.

• 15:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the professionalism of philosophy is interesting to me because so many of the great philosophers in the ancient world, philosophy was the hobby and there was some actual profession through which they were understanding and applying the philosophy, whether they were politicians, or whether they were generals, whether they were, you know, advisors, or diplomats, or whatever. They, it's like they had, philosophy is not supposed to be the job, right? The, you're supposed to have a different job that helps you understand the philosophical ideas.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, a moment ago you used the word anthropological, and I think that's right. I mean, to, you know, to be a knower of human beings requires intercourse with human beings. Yeah.

• 16:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and there's not a faker intercourse than the academic classroom setting, right? Where?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, well, actually, I want to pull back now from, from that thought, because I think at its best, the seminar room can be a pretty magical place. I think you have to have a kind of rare teacher in a rare environment where the students feel that the most urgent matters are at stake, and we, we are creating an environment here of respect and seriousness and.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  And really searching. And I've had, I've had seminars like that and they were really something.

• 17:19Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I, I agree that the classroom is a way to teach. I'm saying that the professor, that can't be their primary lens through which they understand and interact with human beings. Like, so I think when you look at the ancient world, it's, it's the, it's their experiences out in the world that then qualifies a person to speak philosophically, right? So your, your idea of intercourse, like you're, you're running the motorcycle shop, you're dealing with yourself, you're dealing with the machines, you're dealing with the customers. This is giving you a lens through which to understand the world that you then communicate in the book. With a book is academic, if you're teaching a class on shop classes, so crap, that, that would be fine too.

• 18:02Ryan Holiday?

  But it, it, you couldn't have discovered what you discovered in the setting in which you, you know, in the book itself. You had to go out and do something.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think in, in iterated process of

• 18:18Speaker 01

  kind of acting in the world and reflecting upon it and a kind of dialectic is how you kind of close in on some kind of insight. The, the action provides a kind of check on, again, this tendency toward self enclosure and fantasy. But also experience in the world is always ambiguous and requires interpretation and reflection. And that's where other people can become very helpful interlocutors who will help you kind of clarify your own experience by talking it through, considering it from different angles.

• 18:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I, I think about this, like, I have this, this little bookstore here in Texas. I, I had a marketing business for many years. Although I would be writing to a, a large general audience, it was often those individual one-on-one interactions with a troublesome client or with, you know, the fact that I've got to repair the roof on the building or whatever. It, it's like the things that I'm experiencing then allow me to have a sort of a specificity that I can generalize out in the writing. So I've got to imagine as you're working on someone's motorcycle or something, or you're, you're, you're dealing with some issue, that's then informing what you're writing or thinking about.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's all a big mess. Yeah, but you know, you try to make sense of it. I think that's what writing is good for is like taking the big mess of experience and thought and trying to impose a coherence on your life. I mean, if your writing has a, you know, an autobiographical element in it, then it's becomes this attempt to almost create a work of art out of

• 20:10Speaker 01

  out of a life that while you're in it always feels, you know, you're fixated on the future or regrets about the past. And to bring it into view as a kind of whole that makes sense. That's, I guess that's the task of of living altogether.

• 20:33Ryan Holiday?

  Does writing feel like a craft to you? Like, is there something similar to sort of working on machines and then trying to solve the puzzle that is a piece of writing?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  I would say so in this in this sense that, you know, in what I really loved when I quit the think tank job and started the bike shop. You know, think tanks are, they're inherently sort of corrupt because, you know, somebody's paying the bills and they want, you know, you start with conclusions and then come up with the arguments that support them.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Whereas in fixing motorcycles, you know, either the bike starts and it runs right or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, you can't weasel your way out of the fact. You can't sort of interpret it away. So there's a reality principle that you're held responsible to. And writing for me is very much like that. I don't want to merely write, you know, elegantly or something like that or eloquently, but to really get at truth, I guess. I mean, it sounds pretentious maybe to say so, but so it's a very, it's a painful process. I love writing, but it's also just really hard work.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  I mean, I throw away probably 75% of it.

• 21:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I think there's also the the commercial element one might think is corruptive, but is actually, I think, important. So yeah, if the bike doesn't work, the customer doesn't pay you like it, you know, the the system doesn't work. I think there's something I've always found to be a bit alienating and weird about a lot of professional philosophy, or you're reading some book and it's, it's obvious that the the idea of the reader never occurred to the person writing it. You know, they, they sort of comfortably wrote a book, knowing that it would sell 200 copies, right? The idea of like, making something that worked for regular human beings who might want to apply these ideas in their actual life,

• 22:40Ryan Holiday?

  sort of doesn't occur, I think, too often in academia, not just philosophy, in all elements. And so to me, and I think your books are a testament to that, when you can get something that works, that then appeals to people who who don't read books about philosophy, that's like, one of the toughest puzzles there is to, is to crack. I mean, you, you wrote a bestselling book that has the word soulcraft in the title. That's a, that's a pretty tiny target to, to, to hit. That's not easy to do.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you can. So the idea of commercial viability for philosophical writing is an interesting one. I think, I think you're right that if you're getting at something real, one hopes that that will be accessible to a lot of people, and therefore, you know, maybe viable commercially. But then there's this other question that kind of overlays that, and that is, what is valued in the marketplace? And that isn't necessarily line up with, you know, your aspirations as a writer. I mean, there is such a thing

• 23:54Speaker 01

  as, you know, just kind of trying to pander.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  So, uh, yeah, I mean, these, these two things, I think you, you hold intention and you're, uh, you know, it's interesting. I, I feel like I've never dumbed anything down.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  And that's, I guess I'm, I'm proud of that. Also, it just, it doesn't, wouldn't come naturally to me. It'd be painful to give something less than the most, you know, subtle and finesse, uh, and hard, um, account that I can. Uh, but somehow the, the process of clarifying my own thought tends to produce something that, you know, is clear enough, I guess, that, that other people can, can dig it.

• 24:45Ryan Holiday?

  No, that, that, calling that a tension, I think is well said, is probably a little bit like Aristotle's mean, where it's sort of something in between doing it exactly the way you want to do it, and then doing it in a way that is considerate or respectful of where the audience is and, and how that idea can be made accessible and usable for them. I think it was Epicurus who said, "Vain is the word of the philosopher which does not heal the suffering of man." I think you could have a pretty expanded definition of what, what heal or suffering is, but I think the idea is that the, the purpose of the writing, uh, should be to have an impact on actual people's lives.

• 25:28Ryan Holiday?

  And that is easier said than done.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you, you mentioned suffering. Um, so, right, there's a kind of therapeutic, impulse, I think, in a lot of Stoic thought and, um, and some of the other schools, um, sort of that were around the same time, the, the Cynics and the Epicureans.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  And it's funny, we're living at a time right now where I think the idea of, you know, Sort of fragile selves in need of therapy has become so prevalent, it's really, I think, distorted our view of ourselves as being

• 26:18Speaker 01

  kind of of a very little capacity to endure adversity.

• 26:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, resilient, we don't seem to be a particularly resilient population at the moment. It's very fragile and

• 26:33Ryan Holiday?

  very averse to anything challenging or uncomfortable.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that's,

• 26:40Speaker 01

  you know, one thing I've written about is what I call safetyism. There's this weird dynamic wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining biscapiers. And I think, so there's a kind of strange feedback loop there, and I think one way to to try to understand it is that it, that dynamic gears into a whole set of material interests, right? We have the helping professions who are determined to make us think of ourselves as, you know, in need of

• 27:20Speaker 01

  of help and is fragile. And then there's the whole therapeutic state that's

• 27:26Speaker 01

  you know, think about the whole COVID regime where we've had this extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. That seems like a consummation of this longer trend of kind of giving up our own judgment to to experts and sort of giving up on the idea that we can determine what's appropriate risk for ourselves.

• 27:55Ryan Holiday?

  But don't you think part of that is because one cannot determine, in something like a pandemic, it's very difficult to separate one's personal risk tolerance with the consequences of those decisions on other people.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. It's a collective action problem because it's contagious. Very much so. And right, none of us are epidemiologists. So there's necessarily a certain amount of deference that's incumbent on us. But what's so extraordinary is we've seen how the apparatus of science has been bent toward purposes that don't, at times, seem flatly anti-scientific. And it's this phenomena where science, you know, with a capital S, has been pressed into duty as authority.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  And if you think about it, you know, science as a mode of inquiry is almost, you know, the whole idea of authority is anathema to it. It's a sort of freedom of the mind. So it's like, science has to become something more like a religion in order to serve the function that we've assigned it.

• 29:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day. I wonder how much of this is a result of different entities abdicating their duty, thus forcing other entities into inappropriate roles. So like, the reason the judiciary is so political is because the legislatures have ceased to do their jobs, right? Or the reason that companies, like a corporate culture, is now politicized and companies are woke, or whatever you want to call it, is because the employees in those companies are frustrated that they can't affect political change through the ordinary means, right?

• 29:56Ryan Holiday?

  And so I wonder when the legislatures, or the president, or also just like basic human beings abdicate their responsibilities or obligations to each other, it forces that energy to go to inappropriate places. And I wonder if really a lot of the trouble we're having is because nobody is doing their job. And then inappropriate entities are stepping up and trying to fill that breach.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we've seen a fairly wide-ranging transfer of sovereignty from democratic decision-making to technocratic bodies that operate really quite insulated from the pressures of democratic politics.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  And this actually relates to the theme, so my most recent book is titled Why We Drive. And it, you know, it, like the first two books, it's about individual agency. So the polemical hook that I opened with is the prospect of driverless cars. And, you know, human beings are actually pretty good at driving.

• 31:09Ryan Holiday?

  Pretty impressive considering it's not like something we evolved to do. It's kind of magical.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and there's actually some great cognitive science on our capacity to mutually predict one another's behavior as this kind of evolved capacity of our brains. And it's kind of scaffolded by social norms that help us predict one another's behavior. And if you're ever in an intersection in Rome or Bombay and you see, you know, these unrated intersections where, you know, there's no lines, there's no lights, there's no curbs, there's no nothing. And you've got buses and, you know, doggies and cars and bicycles and pedestrians all just kind of finding their way through. It's actually, it can be beautiful to behold.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  You're witnessing the human capacity for an improvisational cooperation. And I, but when this, you know, when one of these tech guys

• 32:15Speaker 01

  looks at that, he's horrified because it looks chaotic, it looks messy. There was this episode where an experimental self-driving car by Google came to an intersection, it was a four-way stop.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  And so it came to a full stop and waited for the other cars to do the same before proceeding. So it's following the rules. But of course, that's not what people do. You know, they kind of roll up on the intersection, see what the situation is, maybe roll through. There's ambiguous cases of right of way. So what do we do? We make eye contact, maybe someone gives a little nod or waves the other person through. But the Google car just got paralyzed and it sort of melted down. And what was interesting was that the guy in charge of the experiment said that what he had learned from this is that human beings need to be less idiotic.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Now, of course, what he meant by that is we need to behave more like robots, be rule followers. And completely invisible to him was this distinctly human form of intelligence. And I think, you know, the ambition to do away with the necessity of that kind of intelligence is politically significant. Tocqueville, when he went around America, was very impressed with the observation that it's in these sort of everyday practical activities requiring cooperation

• 33:52Speaker 01

  that the democratic character is formed, the ability to work things out among ourselves.

• 33:59Ryan Holiday?

  I was, I was thinking about what you said about safetyism. I dropped my, my five-year-old off today at, he goes, instead of going to kindergarten, he goes to what's called like outdoor nature school. And it's an outdoor school. There's no desks or chairs and they just, they play, but they, they go on hikes and they learn things, they have lessons. And as I was dropping him off, you know, there was a fire, like in, in the, in the campground, there's a fire, which sort of makes you a little uncomfortable as a parent. The, the teacher's, you know, shaving, kindling with a very sharp knife and then she's setting it down on the thing. There's trees that could fall and cliffs and mud and water. Water and stuff. And there was a part of me that was uncomfortable because as a parent,

• 34:45Ryan Holiday?

  all you want is your kids to be safe all the time. And then the other part of me that was like, this is so amazing and so perfect, such a better actual preparation for the world. And then the other part of me was sort of chuckling at the fact that, you know, sure, there are dangers from the things I just said, but also in the middle of a pandemic, being outside all day instead of being in a small, effectively windowless, poorly ventilated room is also much safer. So it also strikes me that oftentimes in the name of safety, we actually do things that are profoundly unnatural or unsafe. And we just get normalized to them so they don't strike us as odd.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think one problem is that we get fixated on one danger in particular and sort of tunnel vision. And, you know, so by way of comparison, if every hundred yards as you're driving down the road, there was a giant flashing billboard that said, how many traffic deaths there have been this month, well, people would just, you know, just stop driving. And that's kind of, I think, what we've seen in the pandemic. I mean, the whole media and bureaucratic symbiotic sort of ecosystem has fixated on this one thing.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  And we sort of lose sight of the fact that we accept all kinds of risks in daily life that are comparable in their likelihood. So, um, you know, so the lack of a kind of holistic picture of the risks that we are, that we take on just for the sake of living and doing meaningful activities. Yeah, this is for real.

• 36:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the other thing the pandemic has done for me is just to maybe the flip side of what you're just saying is, yeah, we were normalized to a whole bunch of risks that maybe, That looking at afresh give us a different perspective. So for instance, we get very concerned, I don't know, vaping comes out. So someone invents vaping and we're very concerned with all the deaths, you know, or negative health benefits to say vaping, which I'm sure are real and I wouldn't vape and wouldn't want my kids to vape. But, um, you know, if alcohol was invented today, we would be horrified by it, right? So there's all these things that, that we've just become normalized to that have existed for a very long time.

• 37:24Ryan Holiday?

  They're sort of just functions of society that are totally and utterly insane if you, if you had any kind of perspective about them.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's also, you know, there's, there's institutional opportunity in picking out one risk and, you know, and kind of out of context in such a way that it becomes really scary because that, that's what facilitates this kind of transfer of agency. Well, both sort of individual judgment to experts and politically from democratic decision making to technocratic ones. So it's not like all of this is completely innocent. There, there is a political dynamic to it.

• 38:12Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the other thing I think about with COVID, so like, you know, I think the death toll is like 1,200 to 1,500 a day, which is horrifying when you think about it. But that's roughly about how many people or less than like die of heart disease. So all the arguments that you hear about like, hey, um, you know, this is a public health crisis. This affects all of us. Nobody has the right to overrun the hospital system, et cetera. And then you're sort of like, wait, we've become very passively accepting of a rolling public health crisis, the number one cause of death in the United States, heart disease,

• 38:50Ryan Holiday?

  that we've just accepted as being normal and, uh, you know, a byproduct of modern society, which, you know, if we were to focus the amount of energy that we focused on COVID, if, if we... Really address the root causes of that issue would also have a transformative, you know, impact on society and a lot of the same moral arguments that people are making about COVID protocols and public health responses to that could be addressed to other public health crises that are just as important.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, standing behind all of this, I think, is the fact that we modern people have a hard time accepting death, I mean, just the reality of it, right? This is all kind of frantic evasion of this existential fact that we are going to die. But, you know, to say that, of course, is not to be pro-death and to say, you know, don't try to, you know, maximize your health, but it is to kind of point out that these

• 40:04Speaker 01

  risks being, we have very little perspective on them. And I think to live well necessarily involves accepting risk. To try to eliminate risk is to have a kind of half-life. I mean, you mentioned alcohol, I shouldn't, I wouldn't want to live without it.

• 40:29Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's funny, though, like, we are terrified of death and then profoundly unhealthy day to day. And those two things are not just in tension with each other, but very unhealthy or very hypocritical. So it's like, if you're so afraid of risk and so afraid of death, you know, what are you doing, stuffing your face with this junk food that will inevitably kill you prematurely, no doubt. So it's funny how you would think if you were rationally terrified of death, you'd live a very antiseptic, aesthetic, healthy existence, but that's not what most people do. Most people live recklessly with their individual choices

• 41:14Ryan Holiday?

  and then go, someone should take care of this for me.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  So in the most recent book, Why We Drive, I talk about the spirit of play.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Which is very much connected to risk-taking and the tension of not knowing how things are going to come out, you know, in sport. And there's a Dutch historian, Johan Hoysenga, who wrote beautifully about play as the basis of civilization, that it's sort of the origins of social order, playing games, you know, they have some rules. And within those rules, it's a contest for honor. And you can't have play without putting something at stake,

• 42:04Speaker 01

  you know, without risk. And very often, it's a risk of physical harm. And, you know, that spirit of play is what gives rise to culture.

• 42:15Ryan Holiday?

  So what I loved most about your shop classes, Soulcraft book, I guess you're not technically outside because it's, you know, you're in a shop usually. But there does seem to be something special about being outdoors, or at least not in a perfectly sanitized, modern office building. Do you know what I mean?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't, I've had a few office jobs and there was just like something physically, like, I can't do this. I cannot sit here. And I think, you know, there's, a lot of us are simply built that way. And I think there's a lot of kids sitting at school, just bored out of their freaking minds.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Because, you know, the disposition of a scholar is a fairly rare thing. That's not the typical human way. And so the idea that you're going to learn by sitting in a chair and reading a book or looking at a screen is a fairly novel and unusual idea. And so what do we do? Well, we medicate kids with Ritalin so we can get them to sit there to try to make up for the fact that this is a fairly unnatural situation created for ourselves.

• 43:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was, I was reading the safety protocols at this, this gym. And it was like, you know, everyone inside the gym must wear a mask, you know, because of the pandemic. This is a while ago. It's like, except if you're doing the, except if you're doing cardio, like on a treadmill. So the first off, the preposterousness of like, that's like the one thing you would not, that's where you're breathing out the most aerosols. But, but I was, I just remember thinking, you know, you can run outside, right? Like you're aware that you can do this activity outdoors and not just that you can do it outdoors. It's much better outdoors. Like why, like running on a treadmill is terrible or walking on a treadmill is terrible. And so, yeah, it strikes me as we take, we have all these wonderful things, being outside,

• 44:31Ryan Holiday?

  going for a walk, going for a run, you know? And then we find a way to do them in an inferior way indoors.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. There was, um, early in the pandemic, there was a meme going around. I only heard about it, but apparently it was the picture of a Peloton class that was being, you know, so it was on these stationary bikes, but it was being held outdoors, of course, because of the pandemic. And the caption was, you know, something like, they're on the brink of a great insight.

• 45:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Meaning they're going to go, oh, wait a minute.

• 45:07Ryan Holiday?

  We could put wheels on these things.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  We could actually go somewhere.

• 45:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, I mean, that's, that's one of like the great, I, I feel like in a lot of ways, the pandemic was sort of this forced lifestyle experiment. And, you know, working from home instead of a long commute and blah, blah, blah is, I think, a big breakthrough for a lot of people. But it was like, hey, you know, working out of my driveway with a kettlebell is a far superior way of doing it. Whether I'm doing it at night and I'm looking up at the stars like I was last night, or I'm, you know, doing it in the, in the middle of the summer and feeling the sun on me. Um, is this better than, than going into the, some basement of a building in New York City and, uh, you know, uh, getting sweaty with a bunch of random people who, who, by the way, none of us are communicating. We all have headphones. We're all pretending that we're alone. And like, it's just, it's just, I think there's something special about being outside.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  It's like we've, we've trained ourselves into a kind of dependency on like having an official, you know, designated place.

• 46:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  That's kind of pathetic.

• 46:12Ryan Holiday?

  I think it was Nietzsche who said that only ideas had while walking are of any worth. To me, philosophy and walking are impossible to separate.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I like that.

• 46:24Ryan Holiday?

  And then I, I, is, is, uh, when you would work in the garage, is, is it a solitary experience for you? Like, is there something to the solitude of it that's valuable?

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Uh, both valuable and hazardous, I think. Yeah, I ended up just like ranting out loud to myself. And, um, I feel like I should probably, I've, I've had people working with me at times and it's, it's good. Uh, it's, it was good to have other people to check your own thinking off and, you know, come up against problems and get stumped. But, uh, yeah, I'm in there mostly just, uh, you know, ranting at the radio or something like an old fart.

• 47:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think, I think, uh, like getting lost in there, there is something that flow state, the solitary flow state where you forget what time it is, you forget what's happening, you forget everything but the task in front of you. To me, that's like, that's like peak performance as a human being. Do you, do you, do you get that when you're, when you're working? Or is it, is it, you're so?

• 47:35Speaker 01

  It's a fleeting experience. There are times, usually it's, so I do a lot of metal fabrication.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  And it's usually in those, uh, you know, especially if I have something a little bit repetitive, you know, like, you know, set up a jig and drill a whole bunch of the same hole. You know, I wouldn't want to do that all day, every day. But when there is a kind of stretch of time in front of me, where I know just what I'm doing and all set up, you get a certain rhythm and I feel my whole body relax. And those are really nice moments to be relieved of, you know, having to constantly, um, there's a lot of just, it's thinking, uh, working. It was very cognitively

• 48:25Speaker 01

  demanding, but those stretches of time where I can just go a little bit on autopilot are just really nice.

• 48:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's kind of like that Zen idea of chop wood, carry water. You're just sort of doing it. It's a little more complex than chopping wood and carrying water, but just like I find, like fix, uh, when I'm checking or fixing fences on my, on my ranch. It's, it's like a very menial, menial, manual task, but you just sort of get into it because it's so repetitive, like you're saying.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. The idea of rhythm, like bodily rhythm, I've become aware is, is really valuable. And if I sort of step outside and ask myself, what, what would I look like to a, an observer? Do I look relaxed? Do I look? Natural and comfortable in what I'm doing. That's kind of the good sort of check to take. And okay, how can I arrange my my workspace to be more? I don't know, just more zen or something.

• 49:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think that I, to me, that comes back to walking. I think like as a sort of a nomadic species that was meant to cover long distances. I think that rhythm, because I definitely feel tapping, I'm tapping into that when I'm walking. Like if I go for a long walk, I think that's the body sort of getting into that like space where you're you're you're effectively traveling, even if you're staying still.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Somehow what you just said made me think of sometimes when I'm watching like really top musicians, you know, like total masters, the relaxation in their body is like total. It just looks like so effortless. I'm I just recently watched this bass player Edgar Meyer. And, you know, it's this giant instrument. And he's a big guy, but it's almost like it's been incorporated into his body. So those really high notes, you know, way down on the neck that require a lot of pressure. If you've ever tried to play bass, but it just looks like he's barely touching it.

• 50:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's what's so so interesting about music. And I guess a lot of the creative things is is it's it's a cognitive task. But then it's also a physical task like metalworking or something, right? Like you, you, you, there's the physical component of of the mechanics of actually doing it. And then there's also the inspiration and the creativity and the expression. And it's when those two things become perfectly entwined with each other that I think you get the magical stuff.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think it's, you know, first you lay the groundwork with endless hours of practicing scales. There's a kind of submission to the mechanical necessities of that particular instrument. It's a long process of just grinding it out. But that, you know, becomes the foundation for for expression. And once that. You know, just the physical part of it has become second nature than, you know, the piano player is not thinking about his fingers, he's not thinking about the keys. His attention is directed to the sound and the music.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  And so it's like his attention is just passing through his hands, through the instruments, to, to the music. And that's a real shift from what the beginner is doing, which is attending very, you know, very carefully to the clumsy attempts of his hand to produce a sound.

• 52:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, although any beginner of music, especially like something like the guitar, the first thing you, you notice or the first thing you feel is the, the calluses developing on your fingers. Cause you're, it's, it's also that physical tat, like you're, you're doing something with your body or your, your fingers that they're not used to doing. And you're putting a stress or doing a damage to them that, that they have to toughen themselves up to be able to, to, I bet like a mechanic's hands and, you know, the, the hands of a, you know, a, a bass player or a guitar player, they'd be, I don't know if they'd be, if you could distinguish the two.

• 52:46Ryan Holiday?

  One might be a little dirtier than the other, but I bet they'd have the same, same toughness to them.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, calluses of, you know, playing a stringed instrument are so particular, like there's a one little spot on those fingertips.

• 52:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Like my hands are just traumatized in every possible way.

• 53:05Ryan Holiday?

  Speaking, speaking of starting something, I think one of the things, I don't remember if you talk about it in the book, but it does seem important. Like being bad at something when you start strikes me as something that we don't talk enough about, right? Like, like the, there is, I think philosophical value in, like not just learning, but like...

• 53:29Ryan Holiday?

  Being comfortable with how uncomfortably bad you are at something at the beginning.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that that gets back to what we were talking about earlier of a kind of cultivated fragility that is so sort of widespread in society. So, yeah, I have two kids and, you know, I I want them to have those experiences of crushing failure and ineptitude.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Because, you know, absent those, you can have a sort of sense of yourself as that doesn't match reality and it becomes a crutch, you know, and then you any experience that where that self-image gets punctured is then really painful. I think you have to experience it early on.

• 54:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, although let me ask you, I didn't know you had kids. Is that was something I was thinking about in the book. Like, I know you talk about people will go like, well, I don't change my own oil because my my time is too valuable, right? And and so they they sort of rationalize not doing these things because the opportunity costs. I definitely get that. I I have some fond memories of like just fixing fences on my ranch. And I was talking to my wife about them a while ago and she was like, you know what I was doing while you were doing that? I was taking care of our infant, you know? Her point being that like I was sort of indulging myself, you know, fixing this stuff, getting back to the land, doing this task. But it's not just that there's an opportunity cost to it.

• 55:05Ryan Holiday?

  There's almost kind of a selfishness to it in a in a life where we only have so much time. So how how do you think about that?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Well, opportunity cost is very real and you can't learn to do everything and get good at it such that you could do it in a reasonable amount of time. So, yeah, you have to pick your battles.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  I guess the sort of extreme on the other side would be

• 55:34Speaker 01

  an ideal of complete un-involvement, which.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  You know, if you can sort of outsource every skilled activity to some technology or to some, you know, guest worker, then I guess that facilitates, right? I mean, it's a kind of this image of freedom, but underneath the freedom is, I think, a sort of lack of self-awareness of your dependence on others, really. Now, of course, the fantasy of total self-reliance is just that, it's a fantasy.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  So you can, yes, you can try to do everything for yourself, but, you know, the metal of those tools was smelted in some foundry and there were miners who dug it out of the earth. So again, you have to kind of widen your field of view to take in your, we are dependent creatures. There was a very good book called Dependent Rational Animals by Alistair McIntyre.

• 56:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and it's probably not honest, right? So we tell ourselves, oh, I don't mow my own lawn because I don't have the time. And then it's like, but did the 30 minutes you save, did you spend that with your kids? Or did you spend that on your phone? Like, what do, what are you, where are you actually spending the time that you're saving? Are you spending it being present? Are you spending it being available? Or are you spending it on more, you know, digital work or more knowledge work? And that probably, if we're being honest, that's where the vast majority of the time-saving goes.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think we're afflicted with a bad conscience about that, a sort of time guilt, because we fuck off so much, right? All of us.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Whether it's on the internet, I mean, people used to complain about novel reading as this kind of feminized, soft waste of a of a life. Now, I think the digital stuff is categorically different because it's designed to maximize time on device, right? The engagement algorithms, I mean, it's addictive by design. So that it gets that gets a little sinister.

• 58:07Ryan Holiday?

  So how have you thought about teaching your kids about some of these ideas as far as sort of getting their hands dirty shop classes, soul craft? How do you? I get how you write about it in a book for adults. How do you? How do you teach it to an eight year old?

• 58:21Speaker 01

  I think just by example. You know, just if something breaks and hey, look at this. I've got some tools here. We can take this thing apart and see what's going on. And, you know, there's not, it's not by argument, but just by, I guess, modeling a presumption that the world is intelligible, that things we depend on can be understood if we take the effort and take it apart. And, I mean, just, just yesterday, so my, my wife had taken our, her car up in the mountains with, with chains on the tires and the chains came loose and took out the

• 59:06Speaker 01

  wheel speed sensors and a brake line. Anyway, she got it towed. The dealer wanted $1,300 to get it back on the road. And I fixed it with $75 worth of parts, you know, and it took about a day, but I, I sort of, I told my daughter, look, if you have tools, that's the best investment you can make.

• 59:34Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's interesting. And I think also, like, the internet, these digital devices, they are also a tool, right? So you can use YouTube to fuck off all day and watch nonsense. There's also, I, this kid works for me, he does like sort of handyman tasks with all my different projects. And he doesn't know how to do anything, but he teaches himself how to do it from YouTube videos. I'm like, hey, can you fix this thing? Or hey, I want you to build this for me. You know, he doesn't have any formal training in these things, but he has the tool, which is his phone, that is, you know, an infinitely vast library of instructions on how to do stuff.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a huge fan of YouTube instructional videos. And, you know, in addition to YouTube, you have these technical forums that grow up devoted to some very particular things. So I'm an air-cooled Volkswagen enthusiast. I'm just finishing a car I've spent 10 years building. And you go on these forums, and, you know, people are going really deep into stuff. And they're also pushing the state of the art. I mean, we're getting 10 times the horsepower out of these engines that they were designed to make. And that's, it's a kind of folk engineering, as I call it, where it's, you know, because of this community

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  sharing knowledge and sort of pushing each other further competitively out of a kind of, well, it's that spirit of play, really. You know, it's the honor, I guess, of reaching certain, whatever, horsepower numbers or something. But it's, the end result is just an extraordinary progress in knowledge. And these communities, one thing I like about them is they cultivate a deep cognitive ownership of your car.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Like all the way down that stands in real contrast to the passivity and dependence of consumer culture.

• 1:01:42Ryan Holiday?

  It's also humbling. I get this experience reading books too. There's a James Baldwin quote where he says, you know, you think your pain is so special and unique and then you read, you know, you realize like, hey, other people are going through it. I always find it hilarious. Your car is doing something weird or, you know, this, your house is making some weird noise or whatever it is and you Google it and it's like, not just one person has had this exact problem, but thousands of people have had the exact problem in the exact same way. And by the way, here is the three step solution to that thing.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes you, you go from feeling totally alone and miserable to, yeah, you sort of, oh, there's, there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of people out there going through the same thing.

• 1:02:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. We're all very separate dealing with the exact same problems.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Ryan Holiday?

  And Google unites us.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is a nice moment. I hadn't thought about that. Where you, you feel, I don't know, it's sort of, you feel almost a friendship with these people.

• 1:02:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Total strangers, simply because you're dealing with same technical challenge and diagnostic obscurities and scratching your head and beating your head against the wall. And here are some people helping out others. It's great.

• 1:03:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And I think it's like, it's an important reminder to be like, this is also true for pretty much every other emotional or physical issue too. It's not just people who both have all wheel drive Audis that are, that are, that are dealing with, with the same problems. It's also people who have been dumped or cheated on or mugged or, you know, any of the terrible things that happen in life. People are quietly struggling with that too. And if we would talk about it or we would ask for help in the way that Googling is effectively asking for help, we'd, we'd be able to help each other too.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that experience of community has become, you know, is, is, I think is fairly elusive in real life.

• 1:03:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  So we seek it out online, that the facilities for, well, that's not the right word. The occasions for um working together with other people are diminished. Yeah, there's this famous book, you probably heard about Bowling Alone, that documented the atrophy of voluntary associations. You know, things like volunteer firefighting crews and, you know, trade unions and mutual aid societies. And of course, church um congregations. So we're, we tend to be quite isolated, uh, you know, each person in his, in his house with his family and a TV or an internet connection.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  So that can be very atomizing and isolating.

• 1:04:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, facilities actually probably is the right word, right? Because, you know, in a prior, previous life, you'd be asking that question at the V W F hall or the uh, the athletic club that you belong to or, or, you know, the bowling alley, as you said. Uh, tho- those, obviously those connections can't happen at scale at the same way in some sort of local association, uh, some sort of union membership or whatever. But there did used to be those physical locations and I, I mean, especially in California is where I grew up, is like, some of those buildings that those clubs or, you know, those um, those Mason halls are like incredible, right?

• 1:05:19Ryan Holiday?

  Or the, the, those, those old buildings that people would, would had to build so they could have a place to go together, you know? It's far more meaningful and will have far more longevity than whatever group you you set up on Facebook.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  One thing I I really missed from the beginning of the pandemic was my bar, you know, a pub where I, you know, you'd see the same people every every day, five o'clock.

• 1:05:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  There's something about just the embodied presence, you know, sort of seeing regularly the same people. And they're not people you would have chosen, right? It's just some random collection based on proximity. You know, we live in the same neighborhood. And so it's an unchosen association. And but you.

• 1:06:14Ryan Holiday?

  But there's a serendipity to that.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Serendipity is, I like that word.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, sort of, you you just sort of throwing yourself into the world and exposing yourself to a kind of chance.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  But, you know, the just the the vagaries of whatever happens to be near you.

• 1:06:36Ryan Holiday?

  No, I love that. I mean, even the fact that we're having to record this remotely instead of the same room. There's something, there is something lost in in the atomization of of how we do this stuff.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like, yeah, so it's both. It's a, it's a kind of, it's all very mediated and kind of distant. But then, of course, the scale and the this kind of infinite. You know, you can connect to just about anybody. But I I think also exploding that horizon of, you know, what is possible and what is therefore relevant to me comes with a cost because anything sort of merely local and contingent and just happens to be here where I am maybe starts to look less appealing simply because I haven't chosen it. So we get into this mentality of of choosing.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  And you know, you're always wondering, what could I have chosen that would be better? Because it's so infinite.

• 1:07:38Ryan Holiday?

  No, what's that, that word, affluenza? But you have the, the, the disease of abundance, right? The disease of choice. This is true on dating apps. It's true on Zillow, you know, because you can see an infinite amount of better things. It makes it very hard to be content with what you have.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:58Ryan Holiday?

  So. Well, uh, this was amazing. I love the stuff and I'm so glad we got to connect. And I think this is a, uh, perennial, uh, amazing book, which as I'm flipping through, I can, uh, talk about physical. I can see the food that I, I must've been eating some rice when I read this book, uh, 10, 10 or so years ago, uh, but, but I loved it and it was, uh, it was an honor to talk.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it was a real pleasure talking with you, Ryan.

• 1:08:26Ryan 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 an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.