“I Had 90 Minutes To Live” | Sebastian Junger’s Near-Death Experience (PT. 2)

Facing death rewires your view of the world. Today's guest, bestselling author and legendary war reporter Sebastian Junger, can explain how. In this episode, Sebastian opens up to Ryan about the sudden, freak medical emergency that nearly killed him in minutes and how that moment completely rewired the way he thinks about time, technology, fear, fatherhood, and what actually matters. Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author ofThe Perfect Storm https://www.sebastianjunger.com/the-perfect-storm,Fire https://www.sebastianjunger.com/fire-by-sebastian-junger,A Death In Belmont https://www.sebastianjunger.com/a-death-in-belmont,War https://www.sebastianjunger.com/war-by-sebastian-junger, Tribe https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/tribe-on-homecoming-and-belonging-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=1&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r,https://www.sebastianjunger.com/freedom-by-sebastian-jungerFreedom https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/freedom-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=3&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r andhttps://www.sebastianjunger.com/in-my-time-of-dyingIn My Time Of Dying https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/in-my-time-of-dying-how-i-came-face-to-face-with-the-idea-of-an-afterlife-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=2&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r. As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film"Restrepo" https://www.sebastianjunger.com/films-1, a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He is also the founder and director ofVets Town Hall https://www.sebastianjunger.com/vets2021. Follow Sebastian on Instagram @SebastianJungerOfficial https://www.instagram.com/sebastianjungerofficial/?hl=en and on X @SebastianJunger https://x.com/sebastianjunger?lang=en 📚 Grab signed copies of Sebastian’s books Tribe https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/tribe-on-homecoming-and-belonging-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=1&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r,https://www.sebastianjunger.com/freedom-by-sebastian-jungerFreedom https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/freedom-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=3&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r andhttps://www.sebastianjunger.com/in-my-time-of-dyingIn My Time Of Dying https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/in-my-time-of-dying-how-i-came-face-to-face-with-the-idea-of-an-afterlife-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=2&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=sebastian+junger* 🎥 Watch Sebastian Junger's first episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kApbOu6bXt0 🎟️ Come seeRyan Holiday LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/: https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ Seattle, WA - December 3, 2025 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1830976292379?aff=oddtdtcreatorSan Diego, CA - February 5, 2026 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1527497619499?aff=oddtdtcreatorPhoenix, AZ - February 27, 2026 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1830981698549?aff=oddtdtcreator 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic 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 weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. I am down with my family near the beach. And when I am down here, there's something I always try to do, which is give blood. It was one of my New Year's resolutions a couple of years ago, and it's something I've been consistently doing. And so when I read Sebastian Junger's book, In My Time of Dying, he actually said something just about this. Let me play this little clip for you.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  There's three ways to be a meaningful part of the society. None of them are heroic, but if no one does these things, there is no society. First of all, you need to donate blood. Because if you don't donate blood, you'll get blood if you ever need blood. But you kind of won't deserve it, right? Like, you'll get it, but you kind of don't deserve it. And serve jury duty. Because if you're ever accused of a crime, whether you're guilty or not, you have the right to a jury trial. And you'll get one, but you kind of won't deserve it if you never served. Right? And the final one is vote. And you don't have to vote, but if you don't vote, you kind of deserve what you get.

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  I think about that all the time and I was so excited for him to be able to come on the podcast. He's been remote, I think, twice. We recorded twice remotely during the pandemic. I've really enjoyed our conversations. He actually gave me one of my favorite books, this book, Indian Givers by Jack Weatherford, on one of the remote episodes. He's a fascinating guy. In this episode, Sebastian tells some stories about times he thought he was going to be executed. We talk about memento mori. We talk about, as I played you this little clip, how to be a meaningful member of society. And we also talk some parenting lessons. As I said in the intro to part one, Sebastian Younger is a number one New York Times bestselling

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  author. He wrote famously The Perfect Storm. He wrote Fire, Death in Belmont, War, Tribe, Freedom, and In My Time of Dying. He has won a Peabody and a National Magazine Award. He's been nominated for an Academy Award. He won the grand jury prize at Sundance. He's just had an incredible life as an artist, a thinker, an activist, and a journalist. And you can follow him on Instagram at SebastianYoungerOfficial, on Twitter at SebastianYounger. You can grab signed copies of Sebastian's books, Tribe, Freedom, and In My Time of Dying at the Painted Porch. I was really excited to do this in person. I thought it was great. I think you are really going to like it. And if you didn't catch part one

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  of the podcast, make sure you go back and listen to that. I will also link to our other earlier episodes, because they were two of my favorites that we have ever got to do. In the meantime, let's get into it.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  We were out for our walk two nights ago. It's golden hour. My son's riding his bike. I'm walking, we have this new puppy. I'm walking the puppy. He swings around on his bike and he's, he starts asking, he's eight, there's a weird question. He starts asking me about how like getting the rights to things to make movies about them works. He goes, does Godzilla have a license? And I go, what are you, what? I was like, like a driver's license? He's like, no, like, like, how do people get the rights? Like, how do, how can you make a movie about Godzilla? And it was, I think it was more- Thinking about video games, but anyways, I was telling him, I was like, hey, you know, like, you know, that book I have with the red cover? Like, you know, it got optioned for a movie and I was like walking him through and we're talking is interested in what I do for a change.

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  And, you know, we're on the way back and again, the light's perfect. And I was just like, this is it, man. You did it like you got every, this is the fucking dream. Like, enjoy this thing because it's gonna go away because you're gonna go away. It's gonna go away because they get older. It's gonna go away because they move out. It's, it's gonna go away, right? And so you can wait for the reward, as you said of like, I can't wait for their college graduation or some big moment. Or you can go, no, this is the reward for all that stuff. This is it. And by the way, yesterday was to, you gotta be able to just, the extraordinariness of ordinary is if you can get there, you can get through a lot.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a friend who was, had a very, very serious surgery, open heart surgery and was really struggling to recover from it because it's just a nasty piece of business. And he said, yeah, you know, a friend of his told him he should be grateful. And I'm, he said, I'm struggling with being grateful. And, and I said, you know, with or without surgery, I'm guessing that it's impossible to have a happy life that doesn't involve the practice of gratitude.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Right. And furthermore, I would say that you don't feel grateful because your life is happy. You get a happy life because you practice gratitude.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Right. In all circumstances, right? It's not gratitude doesn't, isn't a function of having a great life and nothing's wrong. And now I'm grateful. That's how you get there.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Is by practicing gratitude.

• 5:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like, it's easy to feel gratitude and love and, and revel in the beauty of life when you're looking at the Grand Canyon. But most of life is not looking at the fucking Grand Canyon. Most of life is like, I'm spending the night in this motel room because my car broke down on this trip. And then actually though, you walk out to the parking lot to get something from the car. And you're struck by the sunlight and the, and you go, this is the Grand Canyon. This is magic. Why are we here? Why are we here? How are we here? This is insane. And, and being able to see the poetry and the beauty and the, in the mundane or even the ugly, that's. The happy life.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Well, I live in New York City in the Lower East Side and there's a particularly ugly stretch of asphalt in New York called the Cross Bronx Expressway. And when you're stuck in traffic on the Cross Bronx, it is a form of hell, right? I mean, I'm sorry, just particularly on a summer day and your AC is broken. It's just hell, right? And, and after I almost died, even that, I would be able to turn it into a sort of like beauty moment, right? And yet I had two thoughts in the sort of apocryphal sort of like stuck in the in traffic on the Cross Bronx on a summer day, right? And one is like, relax, you're traffic too.

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, right.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Right? This isn't a conspiracy to keep you from getting to your whatever on time. You're traffic for the guy behind you.

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  So stop acting like it's being done to you.

• 7:02Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  You're part of it. And secondly, you almost died two years ago.

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Right? And you're complaining that you're alive in traffic? Like, grow up. Like, what kind of baby are you? Are you kidding? Like, how self-indulgent are you? Grow up, mature.

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  I sometimes think, you know, you're in traffic on the 405 or the 110 in LA and it's the worst. And then I go, but every time I see it in a movie, like a drone shot or, or I see it from an airplane at night.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  I go, this is gorgeous. All the light.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Like a Christmas tree, right?

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  And I was like, why am I seeing it as ugly when in another context I see it as, as pretty? You know, it's like, when I see a nature documentary and I see the water buffalo or whatever, like traveling, they're all running into the stream together and up the stream. And they're all part of this enormous river of movement and animals. I go, they're doing what they do, man. This is, and then I'm in traffic and I'm like, modernity sucks, humans are awful. And it's like, it's the same thing. We are a migratory species, doing what we do. We've just intermediated it with these other things, but it is the same thing.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  And, and yeah, and also let's not forget to be grateful for our circumstances, right? So think about the person in the car, if your AC hasn't broken.

• 8:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  You're in, you're in climate-controlled perfection. In your own little bubble.

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  You have music, you know, you're comfortable. You might even have some food and water with you. Like, all the basic human needs and then some are being provided to you. And you're unhappy? Like, tell that to the Apache.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 8:47Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Right? And so that's, that's where modern society has deprived us of just sort of a basic valuing of the things that have always made humans feel safe and content and like they're having a meaningful moment. And, you know, again, not to keep circling back to it, but, you know, the smartphones and social media rip us away from that appreciation of what's actually happening.

• 9:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I was thinking, you know, you described the, the scene, you're, it's a summer day or spring day and, uh, and then you don't know that you're dying, but you're dying. Cause it, it happened over a period of time, right? That you're, you're slowly basically bleeding to death internally.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Quickly. Well, I, I had 90 minutes.

• 9:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. But I'm saying it was happening before you knew it was happening. Right?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yes. I just knew I had a great pain in my abdomen and I couldn't stand up.

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  I, I just mean the clock, like in, in the way that it's true for all of us, the bell was tolling, you just didn't know.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  I didn't know it. I did not know it. No.

• 9:40Ryan Holiday?

  But you make this choice, which is like, I'm going to spend the afternoon with my wife as opposed to, I'm gonna zone out on social media. I'm gonna drive to this, like, I, I think at the end of the day, you want to ask yourself, hey, if this is one of the last choices that I'm making, is this a choice I'm proud of or not?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Well, the choice to stay with my wife was what saved my life.

• 10:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Like, so that afternoon, I was gonna go running. I've been a lifelong runner and we were living in a remote house in the woods in Massachusetts and I would run on these game trails.

• 10:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Uh, behind the house that go for miles. And had I gone running, aneurysm would have ruptured and I would have died trying to crawl home.

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Right? But instead, we had a little bit of babysitting and I said to my wife, like, look, let's just, let's just take a little time. This was during COVID.

• 10:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  We had a, a six month old and a three year olds and some teenage girls from up the road. It was a rural area and we knew the family and they sort of offered themselves for a few hours. It was like, great. We pay a thousand dollars an hour. Like, how long do you want to stay?

• 10:44Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  And we went off into this cabin that I'd built that is completely off the grid. There's no cell phone service anywhere near this home.

• 10:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  So we're very unconnected and the cabin is completely off the grid, deep in the woods. There's no electricity or anything. It's all, you know, oil lamp, et cetera. And, um, that's where we were, where in mid-sentence, I suddenly felt this pain in my abdomen. The aneurysm had ruptured and I was losing a pint of blood into my abdomen every 10 or 15 minutes. Right? And we lived in, we live an hour from the hospital.

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  It's a math problem, basically.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  It's a math problem.

• 11:17Ryan Holiday?

  How much blood, how much distance is he gonna make it?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had 90 minutes. I, you know, you can lose about six pints of blood before you die.

• 11:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  And I lived an hour from the hospital.

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Right? And I didn't know I was dying, but, you know, I couldn't walk. I mean, blood, my blood pressure had tanked.

• 11:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  I couldn't stand up. I started to go blind, you know, and there's no cell phone service. They can't get the ambulance. And I got to the hospital within, the doctors are probably within 10 minutes of cardiac arrest and death. I mean, it was really, really close.

• 11:49Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  And those are the 10 kinds of 10 minutes that determine our lives and, and, but had I just been my motivated athletic self and gone out for another run in the afternoon, like, it would have killed me.

• 12:03Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I, I mean, even if the math hadn't worked, you still made the right choice.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:07Ryan Holiday?

  But you made the right choice because you chose the thing that you would want to spend your last minutes doing.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's right. That's right. And connect, you know, basically we exist to be connected to the people we love. Like, that's what we are here for. We're social primates. That's why we survive. That sort of love, connection and community affiliation is why we exist. And the more you get of that, the better your life is. And the less you have, the more miserable you are. You know, it's like pretty simple.

• 12:32Ryan Holiday?

  And the, the terrible irony of the thing we choose most of the time, the thing we prioritize most of the time is the opposite of that thing, or it's taking us away from that thing. Or you, you ask, like, I think about this as a parent. It's like, you read these stories, you watch Succession or whatever. It's like, having insane amounts of money destroys the family to, almost to a rule, right? And then you ask people like, what their fantasy is. Like, I hope my company sells for a billion dollars. Like, you're praying for the thing that you know is gonna tear the thing you also say is your most important thing apart. Right? Or I think about this just much more practically as a writer, like, how many people become successful as a writer? And then lose the ability, the time that is, to do the thing that they love doing.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:12Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Because now they're so busy.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:14Ryan Holiday?

  And, yeah, that can't be, the good life can't be success that takes you away from the things that are good.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Right, right. And you have to understand what truly is good.

• 13:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  You know, and if you don't have that right, you'll be like much of modern society, which is discontent and alienated and anxious.

• 13:32Ryan Holiday?

  My favorite part of the book is the thing at the end, the note about giving blood.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Huh, yeah.

• 13:37Ryan Holiday?

  Because I'd read this article about this, like, people that give their kidneys up. Like, you know, where you donate a kidney to a stranger. And I was like, I was talking to my wife. I was like, I want to do that. That sounds like, what an amazing thing to do. And she was like, you're not going to give your kidney? What are you talking about? Like, she was like, you have kids. Don't, she's like, you've never even donated blood. Why don't you start there? And I was like, that, you're totally right. Because I think sometimes we have these fantasies of like, I hope if I ever see someone drowning someday, I'll, I'll jump in and save them. Or, you know, I, I want to become a philanthropist and donate money to save people in a hospital. Or I want to be a soldier and, and win the Medal of Honor. Like, I want to save someone's life. And then actually, there's all these very accessible, easy ways that you could literally be a superhero.

• 14:21Ryan Holiday?

  And we don't fucking do it. So I've, I've donated every time I can for the, this was like two years where I've done it every, everything since. And it's like, it's just one of those, not to brag, I'm just saying, it's like, oh yeah, I was, I was indulging in this fantasy of this future difficult thing that I might do. And meanwhile, there's people that die from lack of blood transfusions every day. And you could fix that.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:44Ryan Holiday?

  By going online and typing in your zip code.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I mean, I, I, my life was saved by a great medical team and by my own sort of basic health and vitality and strong heart. And 10 units of blood from 10 people that I'll never know.

• 14:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Who donated blood and that got me donating blood. And I, um, sometimes people ask me, because of my book Tribe, like, how can, you know, we live in this big, modern society. It's very hard to feel like you're needed, like you're necessary. How can you contribute? Clearly, society will just keep rumbling on without us. So how do we? How do you feel meaningful? Right? And it's actually pretty, you know, in some ways, it's surprisingly easy. I say there's three ways to be a meaningful part of the society. And none of them are heroic, but if no one does these things, there is no society.

• 15:31Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Right? I said, first of all, you need to donate blood. Because if you don't donate blood, you'll get blood if you ever need blood. But you kind of won't deserve it.

• 15:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Right? Like, you'll get it.

• 15:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  But you kind of don't deserve it. And serve jury duty. Because if you're ever accused of a crime, whether you're guilty or not, you have the right to a jury trial.

• 15:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yep.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  And you'll get one, but you kind of won't deserve it if you never served.

• 15:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Right?

• 15:56Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  And the final one is vote.

• 15:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And you don't have to vote, but if you don't vote, you kind of deserve what you get.

• 16:03Ryan Holiday?

  It's early voting here in Texas for this little town. And a friend of mine is up for a city council. She's running for reelection, but she lost her first election by two votes. Two votes, you know? And I just think, oh, if my wife and I had been like, eh, that's one person going eh.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:21Ryan Holiday?

  Two votes.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:22Ryan Holiday?

  And yeah, voting is one. I would say, organ donor, another one. It's a box you check on your driver's license.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 16:30Ryan Holiday?

  But yeah, there are all these basic civic contributions that I think the whole country is founded on people feeling obligated to do. And you're in really bad shape when that, not just the obligation fades away, but even the understanding of why it is an obligation.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:49Ryan Holiday?

  You lose something when you can't even remember why you have the tradition in the first place.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  And you know, I mean, people say, okay, well, the only thing, you know, the thing you have to do is pay your taxes.

• 16:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Right? I'm like, no, you don't have to pay your taxes. You can go to jail.

• 17:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  You don't have to pay them. It's still your choice.

• 17:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Right? And one of the things that makes this society different from the sort of like typical small-scale, organic hunter-gatherer society, or sort of rudimentary agricultural society, is the idea that the individual doesn't owe anything.

• 17:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Right? That's an insane idea for most of human history. Where you live, you're Apache, and you don't think you owe something to the Apache? You know, you're an ancient Roman, you're whatever. I mean, pick your flavor, right? And for most of human history, your survival depended on being an integral part of a small group.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  That you owed possibly your life

• 17:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  To, right? And they owed you their lives and that's how it all worked, right? And, and now there's this weird illusion that sort of legally, the individual doesn't owe the society anything. I mean, that's what sort of, you know, our laws as a democracy, prevent the government saying, no, no, no. You know, after we got rid of the draft.

• 18:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Like, no, no, no, you don't owe anything.

• 18:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Right? It's all voluntary, including your taxes, frankly, right? It's all voluntary. But what did not step in is the moral obligation.

• 18:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  And that to me is the real poverty of this society is that there isn't an understa- common understanding of the moral obligation that comes from being so incredibly fortunate that we live in this society, in this nation, in this democracy, that you aren't dying to contribute.

• 18:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Where is that sort of moral obligation? It's disappeared and I don't understand it and it makes people's lives poorer.

• 18:38Ryan Holiday?

  Richard Frankel talked about this. I wrote a piece about it for The Economist a couple of years ago. He says it's fantastic that there is the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. But he said that on the West Coast, ideally, I think you should put it on Angel Island because that was our Ellis Island on the West Coast.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 18:55Ryan Holiday?

  Right? There should be a statue of responsibility. So you have freedom and responsibility.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:01Ryan Holiday?

  And the idea that freedom is, the freedom from responsibility is not true. It's, it's that it makes the responsibility more meaningful because you are choosing to do it. You don't have to, but you are choosing to do it, right? You are assuming the duty. That, that's, that's what that has to be. And I, yeah, I think people, Hyman Rickover, the, the, her father in the nuclear Navy, he would say, when people say, I'm not responsible, they usually mean I'm not legally mandated. And he says, but when you say you're not responsible, you're right because you are irresponsible.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 19:35Ryan Holiday?

  You are saying, I'm an irresponsible person. When you go, you can't make me, I don't have to, says who? And it's like, says who is not being a shitty person says who, right? Like all, there's this scene, I talk about it in my book, Right Thing Right Now, where, where Ralph Ellison is. Speaking at Harvard, he gives some talk and he's sort of wandering around after the dinner. He's had a little drink, he's just, and he wanders through this hall. He ends up in this building and I forget which building it is, but he ends up with this building in Harvard. He looks up and he sees all these names written in it. And he realizes that these are the names of Harvard students who died in the Civil War. To a man, the Union, right?

• 20:15Ryan Holiday?

  And he realizes that these white men who he didn't know died so that he would one day be free. And he says, the debt of that hits him with this beauty and horror at the same time, that we're all indebted. And I, I think, to talk about walking around looking at beauty, you walk around and you go, somebody built this road. Somebody invented this system and they did it through painful trial and error. Somebody invented these norms, they modeled this behavior, they gave up their time, they made this. And you live in the bounty of that creation. It's not perfect, but, but you, you were given an incredible gift. And this is true all over the world, some of us more fortunate than others, but the whole world is the product of the things that other people invested in for us.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:00Ryan Holiday?

  And you can't pay that debt back, but you have to pay it forward.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  And you know, what's interesting is that people intuitively get that when there's a crisis.

• 21:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Right? So, you know, Hurricane Sandy hit New York 10 years ago or so. And there was, you know, a lot of older people stuck on the, you know, 16th floor of a building without any power. Cause power went out from 34th street down, right? And so there were these codrays of people that were literally carrying drinking water up 16 flights of stairs. Now that's a workout to bring water to these people until the lights came back on a week later, right? And, um, you know, every once in a while, someone falls onto the subway tracks with a train coming. Invariably, someone else jumps in there to save them, right? And so there is that, that moral duty is an instinct in all of us.

• 21:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Right? And I think one of the things that people miss about catastrophes and crises, and there is a, there's some like, there's actual literature on this, like the people that missed the blitz in London.

• 21:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  I was in Sarajevo during the Civil War, 1993, during the siege of Sarajevo. People missed the siege of Sarajevo, you imagine.

• 22:02Ryan Holiday?

  They, they have nostalgia for it.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  They have nostalgia for it, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. They know a fifth of the city was killed or wounded.

• 22:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Right? And the rest of them starved for four years and they had nostalgia for it, right? And I think what's going on is that A, it creates a kind of. Collectivism, which replicates our evolutionary past in very satisfying ways, but also gives us the opportunity to act with sort of like, in a kind of sort of moral, with a kind of moral bounty.

• 22:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Right? And we want to be the best version of ourselves. And the tragedy of the modern world in affluent Western society is that the best version of ourselves is almost never needed.

• 22:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  That's the problem.

• 22:44Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and I think there's a special place in hell reserved for the people who, in those moments of collectivism, or the opportunity for it, decide that actually the political power or attention isn't undermining it. You know what I mean? Like, look, COVID was an overreaction in some ways. There was a lot of things that were wrong. Obviously, there's so many ways we should have done it better. But like, like, the lieutenant governor of Texas goes, "It only affects old people. We shouldn't do anything." It's like, what is wrong with you? Like, how, what is wrong with you that you would think that and also think that that's a thing to say, you know? And, and like, there is just that, that, that's a part of human nature, too. There's the kind of the higher self and the lower self. There's a self that's, that says, "How do I run

• 23:29Ryan Holiday?

  away?" And then there's a part of it that says, "How do I run towards it?" And I think you need cultural norms and stories and also individuals with a conscience that, that want to be the people that go towards.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Right. Well, you know, there have been many studies of hunter-gatherer cultures, and there's a, there's a certain amount of data from, you know, rock, rock paintings, thousands, tens of thousands of years old from Africa and all over the world. And some of them show executions of individuals. And the theory is that...

• 24:00Ryan Holiday?

  Deserters?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. I mean, there's sort of two ways of betraying your community.

• 24:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  One is being an abusive leader.

• 24:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Right? And another is by being a, you know, sort of a thief, right?

• 24:12Ryan Holiday?

  A freeloader.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  A freeloader, right? And those are the two things that typically in hunter-gatherer society, which is a marginal business.

• 24:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Are penalized, even with capital punishment. And there's one sort of famous rock painting from Africa, I think. It's, it's ten men with bows and arrows standing around. On one body that has ten arrows sticking out of them.

• 24:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  And it's not a battlefield. They clearly took out an abusive, an abusive leader. And that was the thing that in a small, tight knit group, you can't afford to have.

• 24:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Is one person with a big narcissistic personality who's using his position of authority to benefit himself.

• 24:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  I say he because invariably is male. That's when people get thrown off of cliffs.

• 24:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I don't believe that line where it's every billionaire is a policy failure. But some of them are, you know, and you have to create a culture that is okay. Calling it a spade, a spade. You know what I mean? And there's an enforcement mechanism that says, hey, you got that by plunder, you know, you got that by exploitation. And you might be able to keep it, but you don't get to keep your place in society.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:18Ryan Holiday?

  You know?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. I wrote a book, Freedom, which I see over there next to you on the table.

• 25:23Ryan Holiday?

  And I just couldn't find Tribe. I love Tribe also.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Oh, good. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So freedom is an exploration of, you know, what, why underdog groups prevail?

• 25:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Like, what are the commonalities between successful underdog groups? And I looked at the labor movement 100 years ago in the United States and various insurgencies. And, you know, the, the Apache who, you know, lasted. I mean, the Apache, there were bands of Apache that remained free. Until the, almost the 1890s.

• 25:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Right. And, and so the ultimate sort of very mobile underdog group, right? And so I sort of looked at the common attributes of these successful groups. And one of the most important attributes is self sacrificing leadership.

• 26:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Right. Leaders who are prepared to die for the people they lead.

• 26:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Right?

• 26:13Ryan Holiday?

  Leonidas.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, many, many, right? Leaders throughout history and, and, and the groups that had self-serving leaders.

• 26:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Right. Who are using the group to benefit themselves and weren't willing to suffer.

• 26:39Ryan Holiday?

  I'm writing a lot about or reading a lot about Vietnam now because I'm doing this book and this little line jumped out at me. I'm forgetting whose book it was, but he points out that one South Vietnamese general died in the entire war. I mean, multiple American high ranking officers did, but like the people who we were ostensibly defending their country, it wasn't a real country, right? It was this thing we, it was, it was a colonial remnant that we were propping up and, and our inability to see over and over again that we wanted a, a South Vietnam more than South Vietnam wanted a South Vietnam, or certainly that the leaders of South Vietnam wanted more. And you just go, yeah, if, if

• 27:20Ryan Holiday?

  you don't have a cause that people are actually willing to choose over themselves, you almost certainly don't have a cause worth winning. In this case, nuclear weapons is not sufficient to overcome that deficit.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I looked at the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 and you know, it initially it failed. I mean militarily it was suppressed, but then as it played out a few years later, it ultimately was successful. But the, the leader of the Easter Rising on the streets of Dublin was a guy whose name I forget, a very brave guy, who commanded the sort of Dublin Battalion against the Brits and his aides kept sort of dragging him out of the line of fire on the streets because he was trying to get a look around to see what to do tactically. And they kept dragging him out of the line of fire, saying, sir, like, we need you alive. Like, you can't get yourself killed out. Where are those leaders in America right now? Like, I mean, the political leaders who

• 28:17Speaker 01

  would do the equivalent act of bravery and sort of rejection of their own sort of personal interests?

• 28:24Ryan Holiday?

  But it's actually in their financial self-interest to do it. Like, like you will lose your congress seat, but then you would become a lobbyist or a lawyer where you would actually make more money and be more admired. You are worried about being tweeted at.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it's, and this, yeah, and this has been going on long.

• 28:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Before the internet, right? So, but it's power. It's like they want, they want power. And really, the only reason to want power is, I mean, really, the only moral reason to want power is so that.

• 28:48Ryan Holiday?

  But I don't even think it's power because at some level, if they had power, they would like, well, I think it's fascinating of the political moment we're in, where it's like, these people desperately don't want to lose their job in Congress or the Senate. As they are actively surrendering the prerogative, the power that congressmen and senators have, which is the past laws, they don't do. I think it's it's even more bit. I think they're just afraid of something other than the status quo. They currently have a job. They know where they go to work. They know people address them as congressman or Congresswoman, and they are afraid on what's on the other side. So if they take a stand, they go, hey, I'm going to vote against this thing, or I'm going to speak out against this. I will have to figure out what I'm going to do next. Because they're not actually worried about like, physical safety for the most part. It's actually something more relatable from like,

• 29:32Ryan Holiday?

  people go, why don't these people risk their job? And do you know, do? And it's like, well, have you ever risked your job for anything in your fucking life? Even though you hate said job? And and so that's that's a very human thing of just like, I I won't do my obligation because I'm worried about losing the status quo.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Right. Well, also, I think it's extremely hard and extremely painful to experience peer condemnation.

• 29:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, to be sent out of the tribe. That's what they're afraid of.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  So you have the irony of Mitch McConnell.

• 30:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  So full disclosure, I'm a Democrat. I did not vote for Donald Trump, etc., right? And I think the country keeps waiting for the Republican Congress to, I'm saying this as a Democrat, waiting for the Republican Congress to sort of create some boundaries for Donald Trump to keep, you know, whatever the Democratic order is safe. But so you have the irony of Mitch McConnell saying that Donald Trump is unfit morally and intellectually unfit to be president.

• 30:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yep.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  And then he voted for him.

• 30:28Ryan Holiday?

  And prevented him from being made unfit, ineligible for office. As if there is a Adam Kinzinger sat in that chair a couple of months ago. And he said, he's the problem is everyone thinks there's a super Congress. Right? And he's like, we're Congress. Like, like Mitch McConnell is like, acting like there's some other speaker of the or as majority leader who's going to do the make the hard decision. It's like, it's you, it's your responsibility.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  But even if you don't step up to that, which you should, right? But even if you don't, what? I was really wondering about this about Mitch. Like, what went into the decision to voluntarily say, I am going to vote for him? Like, what went into that? And I'm guessing what went into it. Is he's spent his entire life in a conservative environment, social environment, right? And saying, I'm not going to vote for him. Even if he thinks Trump doesn't deserve the presidency again, saying, I'm not going to vote for him, puts him outside of the social world that he's been in his whole life. And that's psychologically unbearable.

• 31:31Ryan Holiday?

  Totally. And I think the proof of that is now that he's not running for reelection and he's out of it, he's vote, he voted against the most egregious of the nominees.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:39Ryan Holiday?

  So he already knows he's, he's retiring from the tribe. So now he's

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:43Ryan Holiday?

  Voting

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:44Ryan Holiday?

  What he actually thinks.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:46Ryan Holiday?

  And it's like, hey, you know, when you should have done that? When we were paying you to do that.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 31:51Ryan Holiday?

  You know, we were paying you to not do what the mob wants. We were paying you to represent their interests, to, to faithfully execute certain law.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:59Ryan Holiday?

  I, I think going back, I, there's something, I'm jealous of it, but it's a not, it's a jealousy we can all address. When someone's like, there, there is an immense, there's a responsibility, but there's an immense luxury in having a profession where you swear an oath. Or you have a set of standards or ethics that are clear, like a doctor or a lawyer. I remember I was, read someone and they were like, I'm a pilot. So like, I can say, I can't go out tonight because I'm flying tomorrow. Like the clarity of like, I can't drink the night before I fly. It's against my ethics and the standards of my profession. So professions that have that, there's a clarity to it. Not everyone respects it, but there's a clarity to it. And I do think you can give that to yourself. Like as a writer, you decide, hey, these are, there are obviously some stand, but we're not all part of an association.

• 32:44Ryan Holiday?

  There's not a union for most of us. But the decision to go like, here's, here's, I respect this thing enough not to cheat it. And, and that the meaning that you get from deciding to apprentice yourself and belong to a kind of a guild is, I think, something a lot of people are missing because they go, I'm just an insurance salesman or I'm just a whatever. And then because you've said what you do isn't meaningful and you don't apply constraints and restraints to it, it doesn't feel meaningful. And your life feels empty and sad.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and you know, there, the sort of warrior societies of many hunter gatherer groups are very powerful examples of that. And you know, the central ethos of it is you join a warrior society. Your life is ours, right? Like, you owe your life to this group. I looked at, in my book Freedom, I looked at a, you know, speaking of warrior societies, I looked at a gang in Chicago in the 1960s. It was a black gang in a very poor part of Chicago, a very violent part of Chicago. And they were formed, they were formed to give themselves protection against other gangs that were around them, right? And they were called the vice lords. They were called the vice lords, not because they indulged in vices, which of course they did, why wouldn't they, right?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  The idea was that once we have, once you're part of this group, we have you like a vice, like you're a part, and they meant that in a good way. Like, you are part of something completely solid. And there was one rule. There was only one standard for being in the vice lords, right? And the standard was if another vice lord is in danger, you run towards him and help. And if you don't, you're not a vice lord.

• 34:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  This very, very simple standard, right? You don't matter. What matters is everyone else. And if we all act that way, we're all safer.

• 34:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Right? In this super dangerous environment that they were in. And the punishment for cowardice, basically, the punishment for cowardice, you know, the British army was executing people for cowardice through World War I. So, you know, this is a sort of common practice. Many of the Native American tribes did as well with their own warriors, who were cowards. They didn't even commit murder to punish cowardice. They just, okay, you think you're, you're okay on your own?

• 34:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, enjoy.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they put them in a car, and they drive them into the center of the territory of the rival gang, and they just say, get out.

• 35:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  You think you're all right on your own? All right, go for it.

• 35:08Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  It's all yours, right?

• 35:09Ryan Holiday?

  You need that. And if your life feels empty or sad, I would urge you to sort of sit down and like, list out your value. Like, come up with some values or principles, some professional standards that you're going to observe and watch how quickly.

• 35:26Ryan Holiday?

  Your life meaning descends from that. The person who says, here's what I'll do. Here's what I won't do. Here's what I believe. Here's what's important to me. And it's more important to me, by the way, than money or fame, or I don't care if people criticize me for that thing. There's an incredible power and freedom and empowerment in, in doing that. And, and I think that's how we create meaning and purpose in life.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Well, you know, try to answer these two questions and they're hard questions to answer. What would I die for?

• 35:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Right? And what do I owe my community?

• 35:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  And my community, it could be the nation. It could be your neighborhood, whatever you want it to be. But what do you owe that you don't have to give?

• 36:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  But you feel you, morally you owe it and you will give it voluntarily. What is it that you owe?

• 36:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Right? And what would you die for? I, you know, without second thought, I'd die for my family to protect my family. But what else is, are there more things, you know? And that, and that's a really, um, you know, I mean, for most of human history, individuals would die for their community because without the community, they died anyway. Right? We now live in a safe enough affluent enough society that we don't need our communities to survive. So that's, that, that amazing sense of belonging that comes with the knowledge that you would die for this group, to defend this group of people. That has disappeared from most people's lives.

• 36:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Like what's an idea if they put you in front of something and said, we need you to disavow this? Would you, would you go, no, I won't. Here I stand, I can do no other.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:55Ryan Holiday?

  Just the incredible meaning and comfort that you get in something like that, even in very scary destabilizing situations.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Right. That's right.

• 37:05Ryan Holiday?

  Last question, very different direction. The last time we talked, you told me you think strollers and cribs and all these things are a giant scam and that you basically don't have any kid gear that you're like, and I'm, I'm just curious how that's holding up for you and if you still think that.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Oh no, we don't have anything. No, I mean, neither did the Kung. Right? I mean, strollers and all that stuff, you know, are really only work when there's pavement, you know, and, and an even surface to roll along. And, and really any healthy adult, and some adults aren't healthy and that's, you know, a different conversation, but any healthy adult should be able to carry a six month old or really even a six year old. Right? I mean, they're not that heavy, right?

• 37:44Ryan Holiday?

  You can put them on our shoulders.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Right? So, and the, the way I sort of think about it is that the innermost core human bond. Is parent-child.

• 37:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  It's not even parent-to-parent, although that's very, very powerful.

• 37:57Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  But it's parent-child, mother-child, father-child, particularly mother-child.

• 38:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Right? Because nursing and all that and birth, of course. And so what does, you know, and I'm all for capitalism, right? Capitalism has brought enormous good to the world.

• 38:10Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Right? Along with a few complications, but enormous good. Right? And so I'm all for it. But what does capitalism do? Capitalism needs to monetize things. Right? So what does capitalism do when confronted with this completely self-sufficient core human bond? How do you capitalize? How do you monetize the mother-infant bond? The parent-child bond? How do you monetize? It doesn't need anything.

• 38:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Right? It's the way you do it is you separate the parent and the child at different stages of development. Separate the parent and the child. You know, you don't need to nurse. You can give them milk formula. Right? You don't, we can, here's a bottle, here's milk formula. You actually don't need, you know, when I was growing up in the 60s, when I was a kid, you know, the idea was that breast milk was actually bad for you.

• 38:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, right.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Insane. Right?

• 38:57Ryan Holiday?

  To be fair, some people can't. Like some, some couples have trouble or women have trouble.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 39:01Ryan Holiday?

  The invention makes sense. But yeah, the, the idea of like, how do we stop you from doing the thing that most people should probably be doing?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Right. And I'm all for medical solutions to medical, of course, I'm not saying that. But the message was, oh, no, this is actually undesirable to breastfeed. You don't want to do this.

• 39:16Ryan Holiday?

  Marjoram is better than butter.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:18Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the, the, how do we create the more complicated solution to a problem that you didn't really have?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 39:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  And then likewise, you know, the, the sort of holding, I mean, we're social primates. Every mammal on the planet sleeps with its young. Every single mammal, except Americans.

• 39:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Right? And what do you, but what do you do? If you don't sleep, they're very, very vulnerable. And of course, they don't know that they're safe because, because they're in a little crib in a different room. They have no idea that they're safe. All they know is that their safety comes from the proximity of, of an adult.

• 39:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Right? So they cry, so you have to sleep train them, et cetera. So basically, as you separate the parent and the child. The industry can come in and sell you.

• 39:58Ryan Holiday?

  The stuff, the gear.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  The gear that takes the place of the parent.

• 40:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Right? The parent's arms, the family bed, the stroller. I mean, I, you know, I, I wore a, I think it's called a Bjorn, like a child carrier. Wonderful. I mean, one of the great things about it is that the two little beating heart, I mean, my heart and the child's heart, you know, they, they self-regulate, right? I mean, you start to sort of beat in sync.

• 40:21Ryan Holiday?

  I think about how lucky we are generationally that men are allowed to do that.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:26Ryan Holiday?

  Like, basically, every other generation of men up until relatively recently didn't do that. I mean, putting aside, I don't know exactly how native people see it, but modern, like, Western civilization, they were like, you're not involved.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:40Ryan Holiday?

  And then thus depriving you of things like that.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  And depriving the child.

• 40:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, so a three-month-old can't see very far. You put them in a stroller.

• 40:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  I mean, first of all, they're light as a feather. Like, why wouldn't you carry them? But you put them in a stroller, they can't see more than a foot, which is the distance from the eyeball to the nipple, right? And so they don't even know where they are.

• 40:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Right? And it's like, why would you pay more money to not do something that's common to all mammals?

• 41:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And clearly good for everybody. Like, why would you pay more money to go to that show? Like, sorry. And, you know, now it's like, oh, so you need a video monitor because they're in another room? Like, what society is wealthy enough to have, for every child to have its own room?

• 41:21Ryan Holiday?

  How big does your teepee have to be?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Oh, exactly. Right? And so when people, I get a lot of pushback from people about this, particularly liberal people who are sort of, I feel like in this weird new, we were talking about this as a new era of liberal thought, is that it's sort of anti-evolution and sort of anti-nature. And so I get a lot of pushback from my sort of liberal friends about co-sleeping and all this stuff that we did, that we do. And I said, listen, if you went backpacking with your kids in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana to just pick a name out of a hat, right, with your, you know, six-year-old and your four-year-old, I don't think you'd have them in a separate tent.

• 42:01Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  They'd be in your tent. They'd be right next to you because they would be scared and you would be worried.

• 42:06Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Right? So.

• 42:09Ryan Holiday?

  You wouldn't do it and then set up a baby monitor so you could watch what's happening in that tent?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  No, no, right? So why do it in your apartment? Like, I mean, I understand there's reasons not to if you so choose, but don't tell me it's unhealthy.

• 42:20Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Right? Sorry, it's not unhealthy and you would do exactly the same thing if you're in the wilderness, which is essentially a primeval human environment, right? Filled with dangers and it's dark and, you know, et cetera. And, you know, I'm a, you know, long time runner and there was a movement about 10 years ago, sort of barefoot running, which was a really interesting way of thinking about the human body. And basically the argument was, look, if you take your shoes off and run barefoot across some pavement, you will land on your midfoot.

• 42:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  You will not land on your heel. Your body would just won't do it. Like, it hurts too much.

• 42:50Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  So that clearly is the natural running gate. And so when you wear shoes that are highly cushioned, that allow you to land on the heel, you're actually allowing your body to do something that's bad for it.

• 43:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Well, likewise with all the technology we have. So, yes, short, I mean, that was a long answer to your very simple question.

• 43:08Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, no, I think it's fascinating.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  We don't have any of that stuff. We never had a stroller. We never had a nothing. And, you know, we sleep with the girls and they have little bunk beds that they use occasionally when they're feeling adventurous and they'll slowly migrate over there, I suppose. And it's all very animal and human and connected and physical and lovely.

• 43:25Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's beautiful. And look, someday soon enough, they'll sleep somewhere else and you would kill for that to happen again.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  And you know, when my wife and I get out of bed early, I mean, they go to bed with us at, you know, 9:30 or 10 or whatever, nine o'clock. Right? So they don't get up early because they're sleeping, they're sleeping normal human hours. My wife and I sort of creep out of bed at 6:00 AM. So we sleep on the floor and a pad on the floor, like a big, huge pad on the floor. That's where we all sleep. And so my wife and I will creep out of bed at six in the morning and the girls, because they, they, you know, they're just, in their sleep, they press up against anything that's human, which means it's either me or my wife, right? And so when we creep out of bed, in their sleep, they sort of migrate towards each other.

• 44:06Ryan Holiday?

  That's so cute. Yeah, sure.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  And they wake up, you know.

• 44:09Ryan Holiday?

  They're getting a bond too.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yes. In each other's arms. I mean, literally, they're like, holding each other. These are sisters, right? So, I mean, tell me, tell me there's something unhealthy there. Like, give me a break.

• 44:20Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's beautiful. You want to go check out some books?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  I'd love to, yeah.

• 44:28Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.