Danica Patrick - Trailblazing Pro Racer On Pushing Limits Everywhere

Ryan speaks with groundbreaking pro racer Danica Patrick about performing under pressure, life as an athlete before and after retirement, and how to take risks in the face of mortality Danica Patrick is a former professional race car driver. As a driver, she set a number of milestones for women in professional racing: first to win an IndyCar series, first to earn pole position in a NASCAR Cup Series, and one of only 14 drivers to have led both the Indianapolis 500 and the Daytona 500. She currently hosts the Pretty Intense podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Danica Patrick: Homepage: http://www.danicapatrick.com/Podcast: http://www.danicapatrick.com/podcastsTwitter: https://twitter.com/DANICAPATRICKInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/danicapatrick/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DanicaPatrickYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DanicaPatrickSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My guest this week is someone I'm really excited to talk to you about because, actually, about two weeks ago, she and I had a really long conversation on her podcast, pretty intense. And I would say it was a pretty intense conversation. And I would say I'm a pretty intense person, as I'm sure you've picked up from my writing and podcasts over the years. So it was awesome to chat. Danica Patrick is one of the all-time greats, one of the pioneers of women in professional racing. She is the most successful woman

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  in the history of American open-wheel racing. Personally, I know next to nothing about NASCAR, or IndyCar racing, or F1, or any of that. But there are these figures, you know, when someone is sort of so good that they transcend their sport. Danica is one of those people. Obviously Lance Armstrong with biking was one of those people. Paul Rabel is one of those people who I had on the podcast recently. Sometimes, like even if you don't know anything about the sport, you recognize greatness, or you recognize a maverick, or you recognize someone who just sort of is breaking new ground in a sport. And certainly, Danica is

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  that. I've seen her stuff everywhere, as have you. But I was really fascinated with her sort of philosophical inclinations. And I think you'll see in this conversation, not only do we go really deep, it's very clear that she's gone very deep and done a lot of work on herself, which of course is the purpose of philosophy, whether it's Stoicism, or Buddhism, or Christianity. The purpose of the Of the work is internal. As Seneca says, the purpose of philosophy is to be a brush that scrubs off our own faults, not the faults of other people. And so it's very clear that, you know, she has spent the time sort of post-racing, and I've got to imagine this has been a lifelong journey, a sort of looking inwards, working on herself. And I think that

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  comes through. There's one thing I wanted to add, a little background in the interview, that I think is interesting. I'm always, I always like when something gives me like a quick bit of perspective, opens my eyes, makes me get something. You know, Plutarch talks about, and I think I quote this in Ego, he talks about how sometimes it's not words that teach you something, it's experience suddenly matching with the words. We live in times where this concept of privilege is talked about all the time, about the sort of intersection of different identities and experiences, and how, you know, sort of not everyone's going through the world as you are. And we don't need to get into any of that, and I promise you what I'm about to say is not political in any way.

• 3:19Ryan Holiday?

  But anyways, I record most of these podcasts using a software called ZenCaster. We don't do video on most of them, just because it's sort of a pain, and there's always bandwidth issues here in Texas. So it's just an audio only, and then you sort of log in, and it records their track, and you record your track. That's just sort of how it works. And so anyways, you know, I had my assistants send the link over to Danica's people, and then she pulled it up. And then she said, hey, I'm here. And I said, hey, great to see you. And she said, so are we doing video, or is this just audio? And I said, oh, oh, it's just audio. She was like, oh, I didn't know. So I just got finished doing my hair and makeup. And it struck me how rude that had been of me, and just how different the

• 4:04Ryan Holiday?

  expectations of men and women are, as far as media goes, as far as walking through the world. And of course, I know this intellectually, but sometimes something just hits you, and you're like, oh, man, right. Like, I was assuming everyone was going through the world is my experience. And by that, I don't just mean as a man, I just mean as a writer, which no one really cares what you look like. And, you know, I sort of, I get up, I take a shower in the morning, and I go to work. And if I have to record a podcast, I have to record a podcast. It's not really, you know, appearances don't matter. Because no one's going to criticize my appearance and I don't have to worry about people reading into my appearance or making snarky comments online about my appearance.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  And go through this with my wife sometimes where it's like, oh, we're going and so I'm ready to go. And then it doesn't, you know, as a man, you forget that different people have different obligations, self-imposed or societally imposed, that we're all carrying different loads, I guess is what I'm saying. And this, this struck me even more so because immediately after finishing the interview, I then had to do a, a video interview with a local news station. And so I went downstairs, got my hair wet from the sink, slightly brushed my hair and went back up. It took me one minute to get ready for an on-camera thing. So anyways, I'm, I'm not trying to shoehorn in Stoicism to a contemporary debate, but,

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  but my point is, the purpose of the philosophy in the work is not to make you, not to harden your heart, but to open your heart, to open your eyes and help you understand other people's experience. And I feel proud of the fact that as I've studied philosophy, as I've gotten older, as I've done this work, one of the things that it has opened me up to is some of these insights. And so, thank you to today's guest for helping make that possible, even though I'm sure that wasn't what she thought she would teach me in the podcast. Here we go. So anyways, here's my interview with Danica Patrick. It's a long one, almost an hour. Great conversation. You're gonna love it. And I promise, there's a bunch of good stuff in there, especially towards the end. And please check out Danica's

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  stuff on her podcast, Pretty Intense. You can listen to her interview with me. It's a great one. And you can follow her on social media, @DanicaPatrick on both Twitter and Instagram. She's had a bunch of great guests, is a fascinating person, and I think you're gonna like this one. When we were talking last time, you used the word philosophize, which I love because it's not a word you hear very often. And it is a word that is central to Stoic philosophy. They say to philosophize is to learn how to die, meaning essentially that the central question of philosophy is about our mortality, struggling with this scary thing.

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  We touched on it a little bit when you and I were talking, but I wanted to maybe start there, maybe even do the whole episode on mortality, because it's a thing you don't get to talk about very much. You know what I mean?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that it's something that is so, it's just not talked about that much. Mortality is something we all fear a lot. And I remember reading something recently that was talking about how if we didn't die, we would not have any purpose or reason for anything. Like, nothing would be of value. Nothing would be important. Nothing would have urgency. Nothing, because you have all the time in the world. So it's actually what gives you life.

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  And it strikes me too that in your profession, there's obviously an element of danger in all sports. But every time you got in the car and raced around a track at hundreds of miles an hour, there was real danger there.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I mean, that's definitely part of it, for sure. I mean, yeah, what can you say? You're driving 200 miles an hour with concrete walls around you. So it wasn't something that I thought a lot about. It wasn't something that... I thought about it much more after I was done. And in fact, when I went and did the Indy 500 broadcast the year after I was done in 2019, I remember feeling like, thank God, I'm not out there. Like, I remember feeling like this is really crazy and dangerous and anything can happen. And I sort of was able to sort of let the gravity and the danger of it...

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Sort of be felt at a deeper level than I was allowing myself while I was doing it. Because it's, you know, not productive, not smart, not, you know, it's not gonna make me feel better. But it kind of, you know, after I was done, I, I think there was an ability to let it really sink in. And I could feel that, sure feel that.

• 9:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a, like a Hebrew prayer that says, uh, the world is a narrow bridge. The important thing is to not be afraid. I've got to imagine that you can't drive a car 200 miles an hour. If you're simultaneously afraid of driving a car at 200 miles an hour.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  I love visuals, so that's such a great visual to me. And what it, what I'm seeing is that if it's a narrow bridge, when you accept the full gravity of the situation, the bridge gets higher. I probably, I tried to keep my bridge as close to the ground as possible so that I crash instead of die. Which is, you know, funny little analogy.

• 10:04Ryan Holiday?

  No, cuz I was watching, I was watching a YouTube video and it's just titled Danica Patrick crashes. And it's, it's like 13 minutes of you crashing your car. So you, I mean, crashing happens a lot in your sport.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it does, it really does. And I was always, I was very grateful at the end of my career to be able to say that I was able to walk away from just about every accident, pretty, pretty good.

• 10:32Ryan Holiday?

  Wa- was that scary? Like, wha- what do you feel like in one of those moments where, I mean, I've been in a few different car crashes. None of them super serious, but I've never gone into a spin on a turn at 200 miles an hour.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  What are you, you're asking what goes through my mind?

• 10:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, what does that feel like?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Well, usually you get.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  An indication of something, you know, a lot of times, especially if there's a big wreck, you can kind of see stuff start to unfold and come and you can almost feel like a concern come over you a little bit. I mean, you know, not, not every single time, especially if you're alone when it happens, but you know, as you can almost, it's actually if you, if there are other people involved, it's, it's almost like I can feel the energy of the people around me and the anxiety or the concern or the anxiousness or aggression or whatever it is, and you can kind of feel that coming. But the actual accident itself, aside from

• 11:34Speaker 01

  maybe a little bit of preemptive quantum energy I'm feeling, is that, you know, it starts and you think to yourself, oh shit, and then it goes kind of slow and you can kind of, the whole spin or the whole crashing or the whole thing unfolds in a way that allows you time to think, to navigate, to maybe turn away, to maybe, you know, let go of the steering wheel. Time slows down. So, you know, I don't know what, I mean, the whole, the whole theory of time and time and space are irrelevant, I think really

• 12:15Speaker 01

  applies in the situation of crashing because you, when you watch it in real time, it didn't feel like the duration was the experience inside the car.

• 12:27Ryan Holiday?

  It, it, it's weird, like, we, our bodies are pretty good at like, kind of intuitively knowing what to do. I mean, even like in your situation, it's not like evolutionarily we'd have some reason to, to survive a car crash, but your, your training kicks in, but then also your sort of self-preservation instincts kick in. So it's weird too that we feel so much like fear and anxiety about stuff, when really like our body kind of like, in those moments, like takes over and your opinion is like, kind of irrelevant at that point.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, meaning your opinion of what's going on or your opinion, what do you, what do you mean by your?

• 13:06Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, like, we worry, like, what am I gonna do? Is it gonna hurt? I'm afraid. And like, really, then when you actually get in those moments, it's like, you know, people are like, what would I do in a fight? And it's like, your body takes over, like, you're not really even consciously doing anything. And, or, you know, people are afraid of crashing on a bike, but it's like, the, the thing happens so fast, but then your body kind of just takes over and handles what needs to do. You're not consciously doing anything in those moments.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Hmm, and I, and I also think that there's, there's a disconnection from the physical pain or physical, anything that happens to you physically, which is this weird sort of like, uh, mind space I get into. I remember talking to someone who was an osteologist, and the idea of not having to numb someone before you do surgery, and I don't understand why. Have, is this make, this is?

• 14:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  So it really makes you think, makes you wonder about what is truly going on between the body and the mind, and if pain is a real thing, or if it's just a learned sort of subconscious programming that says, we crashed, it hurts. You know, I got cut open, I'm sore, right? As opposed to what's really going on, which is, I don't know, not, I, I don't know, there's, did you say, I just get

• 14:33Ryan Holiday?

  I do.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  around on this idea of like, what is really happening? What is reality?

• 14:38Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's a, it's a great point, because, you know, yeah, people are afraid that something's gonna hurt, right? Like, they're afraid that getting dumped will hurt, they're afraid that, you know, uh, getting punched in the face will hurt, that hearing that someone you love died. And, and all those things do hurt, but when you tend to ask people what they felt in that moment, the answer is like, I didn't feel anything, I felt very calm, I felt nothing. Like, I remember I was a kid, uh, we had this driveway and it was really steep, and I was riding down the driveway, no, no helmet, of course, on my bike, and the front wheel just literally Fell off my bike and so I hit, you know, the entire pavement like really fast, right on the right side of my face. And I remember getting up and going like, I'm fine. And I was not fine.

• 15:21Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like I think I'd broken my eye socket and my lips were all caught on my braces. It was like one of the worst accidents I've ever been in. And it didn't hurt until somebody showed me a mirror. And they said, look at your face. That's actually my younger sister did this. And at that point, it started to become excruciatingly painful. But until I was like, fully aware of what happened, my body was doing a pretty good job protecting me from the pain I was in.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Hmm. Is it the body protecting you? Or is it just a different reality than we comprehend?

• 15:58Ryan Holiday?

  That could be true. I mean, is that what you believe? You believe there's sort of these different realities that we inhibit?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  I do. I think that I think that so many things that we experience and the way that we take in an experience or something happening to us is learned.

• 16:20Ryan Holiday?

  And so we're often just following a pattern of how we think we should respond as opposed to how we need to respond?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Yeah, I think that I think that can be, I think that can be very true. I do think that the body sends you messages through feeling at times, but much more energetic quantum level. You know, like when someone walks into the room and you're like, oh, I get a weird vibe from that guy, you know?

• 16:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  That kind of stuff I think is, is sending us information. But I think a response is maybe something that's more programmed as opposed to, yeah, I don't know. It's a tricky thing. I suppose I think about the nature of reality a lot in my life and what's real and what's not, and how much we create our reality. But

• 17:11Speaker 01

  But yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing to swirl around about.

• 17:15Ryan Holiday?

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

• 17:48Speaker 01

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

• 18:33Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Whatever it is that you're being featured. Or you're promoting something. You're promoting a race that you're doing, or like actors and actresses are promoting, a movie that's coming out, a musician's promoting an album. So you realize that like, there's so much more business behind, I realize that there's so much more business behind things and like, celebrities are kind of created a lot of times as opposed to just, yes, they naturally happen for sure. But, but sort of the promotion and, you know, how much you see them is very much driven by. Uh, lots of other factors and it made me realize that the stuff that we see, the magazines we pick up and whatever, we just think, oh, they're famous. It's like, no, they're being

• 19:19Speaker 01

  made famous. Like, somebody's paying for that, you know? Somebody, somebody's making that happen. And so I think so early on, I realized, because I, I just realized that there, there was a lot of bullshit in there and um, that uh, that there's an agenda behind everything. And so that was kind of the first crack in sort of the matrix of what's real and what's not as far as media goes, because I knew that I was being featured or put in certain positions because of um, things beyond me.

• 19:51Ryan Holiday?

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

• 20:35Ryan Holiday?

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

• 21:11Speaker 01

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

• 21:16Ryan Holiday?

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

• 21:59Ryan Holiday?

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

• 22:06Speaker 01

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

• 22:48Speaker 01

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

• 23:29Ryan Holiday?

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

• 24:09Ryan Holiday?

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

• 24:44Speaker 01

  So true.

• 24:46Ryan Holiday?

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

• 25:30Ryan Holiday?

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

• 25:36Speaker 01

  No, that's the end.

• 25:38Ryan Holiday?

  It didn't?

• 25:38Speaker 01

  It didn't. I rem- I mean, I, and yes, I was at the track when people died. Couple times. And knew them, obviously, because I was driving in the same race or, you know, I remember the, the, the most vivid one was, it was the beginning of the two thousand six season and we were at Homestead Miami Speedway. And back then, we used to do a morning warm up before the race and so we're all out in the morning warm up and um, somebody had an issue and a car came around and hit him and anyway, this was my teammate and he died and um,

• 26:21Speaker 01

  we no longer did morning warmups after that, but I remember that what I felt was that I was sorry for my family and loved ones that I would have absolutely gone out that day and raced. Like I had no problem with that. And I felt sort of guilty to, I felt um selfish in a way that I didn't feel it on a level that made me concerned for other people. Like that I was selfish enough to say, you know, I could still go out there and, and drive. We uh, as a team, our team owner

• 27:00Speaker 01

  sat my, my other, there was three of us and the other two drivers, myself and another, uh, we didn't race that day. Um, as a sort of respect to him, of course. And I just remember feeling like I would have gone out that day. And so even if I track all the way back to my, probably my, I think it was the first time I flipped a go-kart. I was uh, racing at Charlotte Motor Speedway inside of the big track. So there was a little go-kart track in there. So I was, I was racing go-karts and I was probably. Uh, I was probably like fourteen and I, it was one lap to go and I was lea- and it was,

• 27:40Speaker 01

  I was leading and I went into the first corner of the last lap and it was a road course. Uh, so went left and right and everything, didn't just go in a circle. So I, I got bumped out of the way and two, two guys got by me and I followed them all, you know, caught back up and came around to the very last corner of that lap. And we all spread out wide and went into the last corner and the carts in front of me lifted and I didn't. And so I drove over the back of the go-kart and in fact, the person that I drove over ended up, I mean, he drove Indy cars, he won the Indy 500, he, his name is Sam Hornish.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  And, um, I drove over him and there's pictures of it and everything and then landed on my head, flipped over and, um, my dad came running out and I think he barrel rolled himself. He's like, my legs were not working as fast as my brain. So he got out there, but I remember after that whole accident happened, aside from the fact that I never wore blue race shoes again after that day, because I think that was the first weekend with blue race shoes. Oh, the superstitions. Um, I remember my dad telling me, you're not invincible. Like you can get hurt, this is your, your, this is, you're not bulletproof. And obviously, I don't really remember how I was acting,

• 29:04Speaker 01

  but I was obviously acting in some kind of a way that I was somewhat unaffected or even angry or motivated by it. And so, you know, it's kind of a couple of stories of a long-winded answer of how do I do when there's danger and death and all that around me and, and that's, it, that it, again, it's probably keeping my, keeping my bridge low and not being, not acknowledging the depth of, uh, danger.

• 29:33Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's like some horses have to be prodded and then other horses have to be reined in, right? So some people probably have to work themselves up to do a scary thing. And it may be that your personality, your biology, your experiences, you have to like sort of keep maybe that that drive in check a little bit to get to the same middle ground, which is like not being too afraid, but also not being too fearless.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, I would definitely say that my personality is that of, um, speed. I know it sounds so cliche.

• 30:09Ryan Holiday?

  Or intensity.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  But it's, but it's speed. It's about, um, I'm, I'm, I do everything quickly. So I kind of rush into things. And so, uh, it's, I'm used to working on instinct, intuition, and not on processing and thinking. Um, that's not really the place that I go. So now in my older age, I'm trying to pair feeling with thinking, right? Taking enough, taking enough time to slow down and think about things and then acknowledging how that sits in my body as a feeling. So I feel like in my, in my age, I'm trying to marry the two of them.

• 30:54Ryan Holiday?

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

• 31:02Ryan Holiday?

  Now, I get, I get that for sure. I think especially if you're really good at something, one of the ways you can get away with not having to think or deal with anything uncomfortable or, you know, not in your control is just to go do your thing, you know, like, like for me, like, life is complicated, but writing is very simple. I mean, writing is hard and it's complex in other ways, but it's like, it exists. It's just me and the, it's me and the computer screen, but like calling customer service to get something figured out is actually much harder for me and more stressful than like writing a book. Do you know what I mean? And so I gotta imagine as right, as, as racing goes away, you're forced to feel and

• 31:47Ryan Holiday?

  deal with more things.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Why do you think that is?

• 31:53Ryan Holiday?

  Why is it more difficult?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:55Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think, I think you get, you know, you can get really lopsided, right? It's like if you're only working out one arm all the time, it's going to get really strong. And then the other arm is going to atrophy. So I think, you know, one of the blessings and curses of being good at something, particularly a thing that makes other people money, is that people kind of swoop in and take stuff off your plate. It's like the NBA player that like flies, has to, has to go to the airport after they retire and nobody is like escorting them and booking their ticket. You know what I mean? Like suddenly you're like back to reality.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  So is it just about a familiarity then?

• 32:35Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I think that's, I think that's part of it, but I also think it's like, you but it's, it's basically like, like, and I've, I've struggled with this, I've written about it, but like work and activity are just as addictive as sex or drugs or alcohol or any other, or, or, you know, eating. We, we can cope with inner pain or anguish or feelings of inadequacy or whatever your issue is, you can cope with them by doing anything that rewards you with endorphins. And so, you know, like if I'm not careful, work can consume my life and, and then I don't have to deal with any of my shit. So I've got to imagine that retiring forces, like retiring, especially, you know, like

• 33:19Ryan Holiday?

  what's interesting for me about athletes is how young, you know, like, it's like you're, you're done and you're, you're good, you know, like, and obviously you're still going to do other stuff and you have your podcast and, and you do TV and whatever, but I just mean like it no longer is your life exclusively dedicated to one thing. I got to imagine a bunch of stuff comes up.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Emotionally, you mean?

• 33:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, emotionally, personally, just, yeah, like all of a sudden, things that you've been putting off are now there and either you make yourself busy so you don't have to deal with them or you decide to deal with them.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  I agree. I mean, to me, it's just because I haven't practiced them. Like I'm not, you know, you've probably practiced writing a lot.

• 34:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  You don't, you don't practice calling customer service. Nobody really likes doing that. So, um, so we don't, you know, I, I think that what, so yeah, when I was racing, it was very automatic, very, and you know, dare I say, it wasn't easy. It was always very, it was, it was easy to do and hard to be really good at. I don't know if that resonates, but Sure. You know, there's a, there's a pu- there's sort of like a push that has to happen to keep on excelling. But just doing the job itself was easy, like driving was easy. But I practiced a lot. And so I guess, you know, when you step away or have more time outside

• 34:47Speaker 01

  of whatever it is that you did a lot, you're having to kind of go through the growing pains. And so, you know, I think that, I, I mean, stuff that pops up emotionally, I think is really just, I think it's aside from a, a new activity or a new discipline. Uh, I think that's just a matter of wanting, growing as a human being and expanding and wanting more for yourself. And, um, and so again, just kind of like learning a new activity, you have to learn how to feel. And you have to learn how to cope with emotions and you have to learn how to communicate and learn,

• 35:29Speaker 01

  learn how to not project and learn how to uh, discover your triggers. And there's a lot of learning that goes on because it's not something that, you know, it's, it's, you want more, you want more peace, you want more joy, you want more happiness. And so you have to kind of uh, disarm some of those things that block you from it. And so that's just like a separate learning, but I think that, I think that it's, it's similar in its nature that it's hard because, and you kind of don't want to do it either because we just kind of tend to like to do things that we're really good at and that are easy. Um, because I have this theory that human nature is to do the minimum.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Um, but everyone's minimum is different. So if you've come from a family that's like really hard and pushes you and like your minimum's pretty damn high. But if you come from a family that, you know, like, you know, there's no accountability and you can do whatever you want now in your, you know, maybe it's a wealthy family, your minimum becomes kind of low. So. But, you know, it's, it's what is your minimum? What do you require of yourself? How good do you want to be? How evolved do you want to get? And then that determines just how much challenge there's going to be in getting there.

• 36:44Ryan Holiday?

  To me, that's, that's the critical question because you, you said a couple of times, like you have to, you have to, you have to. I think you can. I would argue most people don't, right? So like there are plenty of athletes, for instance, that retire and then just immediately throw themselves into something else. So they never actually do have to do that. And then like I see every time I finish a book, I'm like, oh, I'm going to take a break. Uh, but I don't, you know, like there, there's certainly a part of, there's a tempting part to just, and this is what I was talking about my stillness book. There's a part that just wants to keep going, going, going. So you don't have to do those uncomfortable things you're talking about.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  What is it that you're avoiding?

• 37:28Ryan Holiday?

  Um, I mean, I think, I think at the end of, at the end of the day, what most of us are avoiding is, is just having to be with ourselves. There's a Blaise Pascal line, it says, uh, all of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. I think like at the core of it, you know, there's pain or fear or uncertainty or questions that we all have about life, about meaning, about, you know, feelings that we have or urges that we have or whatever it is. And, you know, work, work, drugs are a fun way to not have to do with those things.

• 38:09Ryan Holiday?

  And if you can get away with them not being addictive, you know, it can be cool. Um, but work and activity is the most socially accepted way to run from your problems and the, the way that's rewarded the most.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. What's the thing that you're the most proud of yourself for sitting through and getting quiet enough to really deal with?

• 38:34Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I think over the, I think having kids forced me to do a lot of those things, like realizing I was like very closed off emotionally, you know, realizing that I had sort of a lot of pain from my childhood that I had, you know, sort of that maybe my, you know, my relationship with my parents wasn't the way that I thought it was, that there was, you know, and, and one of the, I think, you know, I, I, I'm fascinated by sort of some inner child work. Like, how do you, how do you really go? Because I feel like a lot of us are sort of stuck at a certain age. And for some of us, that age is five, and some of us, that age is 15, or whatever it is. But whatever, whenever something happened to you, you can kind of get stuck in that age, where that's like

• 39:18Ryan Holiday?

  the, the maturity you get to. And so I think one of the things that having kids does is sort of this perpetual reminder of it, is that it's like, I don't really remember what it was like to be four, but the, and I don't spend a lot of time with four-year-olds. But now that I have a four-year-old, you're like, oh, I was like this? And knowing what I know about my parents, or knowing what I know about where I grew up, or, you know, whatever it is, you kind of, you kind of are re-experiencing your childhood. And so I think the last few years, I've, I've been trying to wrestle with just like, all of those issues. And it's been painful and hard, but I think ultimately good. And it, I think if you do

• 40:00Ryan Holiday?

  the work, it makes you better at what you do professionally. There's a great Judd Apatow quote, where he talks about realizing that the movie studio was not his parents, and that he could just interact with them as like, work partners. He didn't have to like, project all his childhood issues at the studio executive. It was trying to tell him that the movie was too long. So I have a lot of that.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  I agree. This is stuff that I've been dealing with. This is kind of, you're encompassing the last like, four months of my life, no, six months of my life, I'd say, unpacking what happened to me in childhood. And this sounds so aggressive. As a parent, I'm sure, like, I know I offended my parents because I addressed a lot of these things this summer with them. And so when you say the word trauma, it's like such a- They feel so attacked and uh but it's it's more about just like like you said being stuck at an age, trauma is just recognizing that there was an event that happened that was a big enough deal that you created an emotional feeling as a result of it and you got stuck

• 41:07Speaker 01

  there. So that sort of uh situation when it comes up in a new form, new people, new players, when it happens, you go right back to the age that it happened, the original feeling, and you're stuck there, whatever age that is. So I guess depending on how somebody acts in a situation, how they uh respond, how they're triggered, will probably give you somewhat of an indication of their trauma age. Um and and of course, we have, you know, more than one trauma. It's not like you just get one. I mean, wouldn't that be great if we only had one trauma to deal with?

• 41:44Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  But you know, you can definitely kind of identify a little bit of like, wow, they acted like a toddler. And you're like, well, it probably happened when they were four, you know?

• 41:54Ryan Holiday?

  Totally, totally. And I think it's also, I think a lot of people go like, well, I wasn't abused, you know, I wasn't an orphan, you know, like, nothing, like, nothing, like, just because your life wasn't an episode of the TV show Intervention, you know, doesn't mean that you didn't experience, that you got everything you needed and you're a perfectly well-adjusted adult human being.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  And in some ways, I think that it's, okay, now, I wouldn't want this for myself. I'm grateful for my life and I have great parents. But in some ways, I've thought about this and that if you have an identifiable trauma, like a really big one, not just like an emotional trauma, meaning something happened that you remember and get triggered from, but like a real, like, big one, big, big one would be, uh, you know, abuse or rape or alcoholism or, you know, uh, you know, being adopted or

• 42:50Speaker 01

  It's like it takes a lot longer to unpack it because you think everything's okay. You don't think that there's a problem. So there's the only blessing to the bigger things that happen to someone in their life is that they recognize very quickly, hopefully, that you need to deal with it. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you go, well, I had a really shitty childhood. I wouldn't say that. I didn't have a shitty childhood. I had a great childhood, but it doesn't mean there weren't things that happened that are not holding me back now. And so I've thought about that a lot and that, you know, the only little blessing in the big stuff

• 43:30Speaker 01

  is that you know to address it a lot sooner and it perhaps becomes a proactive thing as opposed to a reactive thing where, you know, maybe you have to have quite a pattern established for you to recognize, hmm, I think I might need to deal with this. I keep the common denominator.

• 43:53Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think that's right. Yeah. Like when you have something that sort of rises to the level of objective or externally, you know, recognizable, it becomes clear like, yeah, look, you should go to therapy because your dad was an alcoholic, or you should go to therapy because, you know, you lost your leg in an accident and that was very traumatic. But if it can be almost more disorienting for everything to sort of seem normal and good on the surface, and then there's actually these other things that are happening or that you don't understand. And then you can kind of, your mind convinces you everything is normal and good and you don't

• 44:35Ryan Holiday?

  realize that, hey, actually, you picked up some bad habits or bad patterns, or you made, you know, some bad assumptions about the world. And then now, as you get older or more successful, these kind of scripts that you have aren't working.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  So I'm going to share what kind of came through for me today between my meditation and sort of my active, physical, emotional, verbal, like, because there's a lot of, you make a lot of noises and things like that and getting energy moving. Um, so what came through today is that, uh, is that, you know, I've been trying to kind of break away from being able to be, to be able to be more detached and to be more of an observer and to, you know, sort of,

• 45:28Speaker 01

  find this middle ground for myself that isn't so, uh, aggressive or like I have this sort of, I can sense people's truth in a way and I can, I don't know where it comes from. So sometimes I kind of stab them in the heart with truth, even though it's with love, like, and, but it comes in a really, really, um, a drum, like an aggressive way. And, you know, being able to get to more of that softer, balanced heart space of love, but yet still being able to hold truth. And what came through was that, like, that I am this sort of like,

• 46:08Speaker 01

  you know, lovely, sort of wonderful being who has been wrapped in this purposeful, as in it's served a purpose, package that's got me a lot in life. Like it's gotten me a lot in life to be so aggressive and so strong and so down the barrel and, and so the fact that I can do that means I can take that. You know, we don't usually deliver more than we can accept. Uh, so I was like, today I realized, I'm like, oh my God, it's not that it, it like, it's just that I'm evolving and it doesn't serve me anymore. And so

• 46:52Speaker 01

  maybe we don't look at these traumas because look, like people have written beautiful music from trauma. People have, you know, written great books from trauma. And so instead of looking at maybe all the things that have happened and gone, oh, we need to get rid of that. And that's horrible. And I just want to be healed and maybe looking at it of like, just like, evolving and, and like, uh, and just growing and getting past, like just becoming a new version of yourself that serves where you are now, whether it be emotionally or frequency wise, or just something that you want, because that's what I felt today is I was like,

• 47:33Speaker 01

  I think that part of me that was built that way based on my family and based on my situation and based on my job and all of those things that conditioned me in this way that I'm just not happy with anymore and and I'm grateful for the the things that it gave me. So I guess it's this idea that maybe, you know, instead of thinking that we need to get, you know, we need to heal these traumas. Yes, well, it's not really, it's that, yes, it's healed, but it's acknowledging them and saying thank you and understanding that they just don't serve anymore and and allowing a new phase to come in that is just something that you want more.

• 48:18Ryan Holiday?

  There's a great book you might like called Lincoln's Melancholy, and it's all about Abraham Lincoln's sort of lifelong struggle with depression and and how it's it's sort of along the lines of what you're talking about. It's depression isn't this thing that you win against. It's not like a fight. It just, he sort of realizes ultimately that this was giving him a perspective and the pain of it and the struggle with it through his life was actually sort of shaping him into being the person that he had to be at this very essential moment in world history. And so I think, like, yeah, you can fight against all these things and be angry and bitter that, you know, it's so and so's fault

• 49:03Ryan Holiday?

  or that if this had happened otherwise, but that doesn't give you anything to move forward with. I think you have to go like, hey, this is like, you know, my therapist said this to me one time. And like, look, this is the hand you were dealt. Like, you got to play it, you know, and you got to figure out what you're going to do about it. That doesn't mean you have to be stuck that way forever, but you do have to sort of figure out how you're going to work with it.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  My therapist told me the one, the thing that hit really hard because it it it proved to me a count it what I, let me say what she said first. She said, they don't hold any keys for you. And so before she said that, I kept thinking like, we need to work through this together. We're gonna talk about this. They're gonna, they're gonna say sorry for things. They're gonna acknowledge, they're gonna inform me, we're gonna, we're gonna do this together in a way. And she goes, they don't hold any keys for you. And I was like, whoa, and I got kind of emotional and I was like, that's a lot to handle because that means that I am accountable, fully accountable.

• 50:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, sure.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  And that's, I think, the biggest, I would say, probably the biggest reason why we don't, why

• 50:21Speaker 01

  we tend to sort of not be able to let go of things is because we can't recognize our true and complete accountability to get past them because it's really hard. It's like really hard to understand how to unpack and like acknowledge even the like nuances of it and how it shows up in your life. And so accountability is, uh, is to me what it screamed and I was like, whoa. And again, that goes back to almost where we started with this whole diatribe of, of, of thoughts is that with that accountability is like, you know, it's what we start, it's what we started talking about in the beginning.

• 51:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, look, you can be angry that you're mortal and you could be angry that you, that life is shorter. You know, that people die and that you lose people and all of that, but it doesn't change it. And so, yeah, you, there's a great Cheryl Strayed line where she's like, it's not your fault, but it is your problem. And I try to think about a lot of these things that way, too, like it, it is indifferent to your opinion about it. So you better figure out a good way to, to come to terms with it.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's so true. It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility.

• 51:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, and the, and the only way you get through life is by taking responsibility for stuff.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  What's the hardest thing that you feel like you've had to take responsibility for?

• 51:50Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, man, that's a good one. I don't know. I don't know. I feel I feel fortunate that I don't have like, you know, it's like, oh, I'm taking responsibility for that person I killed in a drunk driving accident or something, right? Like, I don't, I don't have any like, you know, like horrible truth that I have to accept. But I think, I think you're constantly, I think I'm constantly trying to look back at who I am and decisions I've made and things that I've written and paths that I've gone down and, and sort of going, like, why did I, why did I do that? What was motivating me, you know, is, and is that, I think, you can't, you can't change the stuff that you've done, but you do, you know, provided, you know, provided it's not sort of like criminally

• 52:33Ryan Holiday?

  illegal or something. You can decide to not do it anymore. And you can decide to not be that person anymore. And I think that's, to me, that's the, that's, that's where self-improvement comes from.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  What is your perspective on regret?

• 52:51Ryan Holiday?

  Um, you know, I get that a lot because my first book was this sort of controversial media book and I, you know, I did a bunch of stuff that maybe at the time I thought were, was hilarious and in retrospect, you know, not super proud of. But people will sort of go like, do you regret it? And it's like, I don't regret it. I just disagree with it. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't, I don't sit there and like weep for what I've done because it wasn't really at that level either. But I also, you know, don't see that as a particularly productive emotion. So I'm more, I'm more just, I just grow, I, you know what I mean? I think you just grow from it. And I'm sure you have decisions in your career where like, if you were doing it again, you'd absolutely do it otherwise. And you now make that decision differently going forward. But like,

• 53:35Ryan Holiday?

  I would hope you're not like crippled by what ifs and what could have been.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Well, I, I feel very, very much like you feel about that. Are you, uh, I'm just backing up whatever I'm gonna say. I just am curious.

• 53:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  This first, um, are you, are you someone that I, I just, I have a theory that people tend to either live in the future or live in the past, like the present's what we want, but we either.

• 54:01Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Tend to be someone that sort of future forecasts and, you know, thinks about everything that they want to happen and gets attached to the outcomes, or you're somebody who's, um, pulled back by the past and, you know, sort of the memories paralyze you at times to things because of what you learned from what you were taught by an old memory. And, uh, so are you future or past?

• 54:28Ryan Holiday?

  I would, it's, it's weird. I feel like I love the past, like in that I love history. So I'm like obsessed with the past, but I'm not that interested in my past. So I feel like I am much more a living in the future, but it, but more, I, I do feel like I do a pretty good job, like being very tied to what's happening right now.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. That's very.

• 54:51Ryan Holiday?

  What about you?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  I'm a future person. I'm a future thinker. I'm, I don't, I don't, I don't believe in, I don't have regrets. Like there are things that I, like you said, I wish I'd maybe done differently or like, oh man, that was a bummer. But I also recognize like, you know, sliding doors or the butterfly effect, like everything that's happened in my life has led me to here. So if I changed one little thing, I might not be here right now. And I am happy to be here right now. And so I, I, and I think too, that, you know, we gotta learn lessons along the way. And so, you know, uh, we tend to not learn things the easy way. We tend to learn a lot of things the hard way, um, maybe even everything, cause everybody at the beginning

• 55:34Speaker 01

  kind of sucks at something, right? You don't, you're not that great at it when you suck no matter what it is. So, so I don't, I don't really believe in, I don't really have. I don't wish I could go back in time and change anything. So to me, that means that I don't have regrets. Doesn't mean I don't have disappointments or

• 55:52Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  You know, things like that. But yeah, I'm very much a future forecaster, future thinker, um, which is kind of where I get, um, you know, a little bit more attached to outcomes and, you know, tend to force things because I'm still gripping, like I'm, I'm still like reaching for the future. So I don't want those dreams to die. I, and I'm a very hard worker and I'm very determined and I have a lot of endurance. So I tend to do things, uh, stick with something or someone or a job or anything like that, a little longer maybe than I need to, or I'm not as honest about it as early as I need to be

• 56:33Speaker 01

  because I am sort of determined to make it right.

• 56:41Ryan Holiday?

  No, I to- I totally relate to that. And I think that that's probably a good place to wrap, right? Which is that the point of being present is that it really is all you have, right? So the past is done, but then the future is inherently uncertain. And whether you're racing cars or, you know, just walking down the street or, you know, living in the middle of a pandemic, like something could get you at any moment. And the Stoics talk about that, I think, not to scare you, but to give you the gift of the present moment and the understanding, like, do not waste this regretting or dreaming because like now is now.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  And what gives it meaning is mortality.

• 57:24Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. Yes. Right. No, it would be, uh, I mean, like the curse of Sisyphus is that he has to roll this boulder up and down a hill and forever.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Oh, that sounds awful.

• 57:38Ryan Holiday?

  Well, thank you so much. It was amazing to talk to you, and I'm really excited that we met.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  You're welcome. It was really, really nice to chat. I very much enjoyed talking to you and hearing your perspective. And thank you for all the philosophizing that you shared. And I love to read it and do it with you.

• 57:59Ryan Holiday?

  Amazing.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Thank you for the chance.

• 58:03Ryan Holiday?

  If you like the podcast that we do here, and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.