Chuck Klosterman: The NFL Explains More About America Than You Think

Few writers understand American culture like Chuck Klosterman, which is why he joins Ryan ahead of the Super Bowl to talk about how football reshaped American culture. In this episode, Chuck and Ryan discuss what football really reveals about American culture, power, and the stories we tell ourselves about expertise and control. Chuck shares his observations, strange historical parallels, and personal stories that connect sports to technology, identity, and how monocultures form and eventually fade.📚 Chuck is the author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, But What If We’re Wrong?, The Nineties, and now his latest book Football. 🏈 Pick up a copy of Football by Chuck Klosterman📱Follow Chuck on X @CKlosterman 🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://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, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of the craziest experiences of my life happened in Phoenix. This would have been either 2019 or maybe February 2020. I don't remember exactly, but I got invited to do a talk at the NFL owners meeting. So that's 32 billionaires, 32 head coaches, 32 GMs, and then all their families. I did this 10 minute talk on Stoic philosophy. It was actually sponsored by TED, like the NFL had TED put on miniature TED Talks at the NFL owners meeting. It was surreal. And it was actually funny. I was talking to Roger Goodell, who is the commissioner of the NFL.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  And he was like, I'm a huge Marcus Aurelius fan, which was just a surreal little experience. And I was thinking about this because I'm heading out to Phoenix. At the end of this month, I'm going to be doing a talk that you can come to and grab those tickets at DailyStoicLive.com. But no, I was thinking about this because my son is playing football now. He plays flag football down in Westlake. And we've been seeing like parents who are like hardcore football parents, like not hardcore hardcore Texas football, but, but certainly like the most animated sports parents that I've seen. And football is just a crazy game. It is nuts. I mean, I love it. I love watching it. I've been to a number of NFL games. I love writing about it.

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  I'll think about it. It's probably my favorite sport. Like football isn't just a sport in America. It's like part of the culture. As the famous example is like of the 100 most watched television events in the last year, like 90 plus of them were football. I mean, the president is talking about who's performing at the Super Bowl halftime show. And in the last election cycle, it was a major death knell that the president didn't feel up to doing a Super Bowl interview, right? I think that kind of tells you everything you know. They were like, oh, if you can't do an interview at the Super Bowl, he can't be president. So that

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  Intersection between football and culture, life, myth, story. Chuck Klosterman is like the best writer in the world at that. He's the author of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, But What If We're Wrong?, which is a book I love, The 90s, which is a book I love. And then his latest book, Football. He's written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and GQ, and Esquire, and ESPN. He's also founder of Grantland, one of the greatest journalism websites of all time. So when I found out one of my favorite writers was writing a book about one of my favorite sports, I was pumped and I was very excited to see if Chuck Klosterman wanted to come back on the podcast. I'm very excited to bring you this interview here during the Super Bowl week. In this episode, Chuck and I are talking about football,

• 3:11Ryan Holiday?

  talking about AI, talking about shared cultural experiences, what the future generations will misunderstand about this moment in time right now. You can follow Chuck on Twitter, at C KLOsterman, and definitely check out his new book, Football. And if you want to listen to his other interview on the podcast, I'll link to that in today's show notes. And I hope to see you in Phoenix at the end of the month. If you're the owner of an NFL team, you probably don't need to come. But everyone else, very much welcome. I'll see you at dailystokelife.com to grab tickets.

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  I think about this thing that you wrote all the time. I think we even talked about it last time, but it's one of my favorite insights of yours. It pertains to football, but it explains, I think, life generally. You were writing a piece about the Cleveland Browns. You were there in the offseason and you're walking around the facility. And as it happens, I think you're profiling Michael Lombardi, who actually introduced all my books to professional football.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, he was there. He was part of the Browns organization at the time. At the time, I was there because they had sort of said, we will allow you to see, sort of, watch the draft, our drafting experience, which did not happen. But that was what the promise was of me showing up. Yeah.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, but what I took out of the piece, which was not the the the main subject of it, but but it was just one of those little insights, which is what I think long form journalism is best at is these like little sort of asides. And anyways, you catch the whole Browns organization basically watching ESPN to see what is happening. Like, you're like, these are the the experts of what they do, and they're just watching football television journalism like the rest of us. And we like to think that there's something more going on behind the scenes, whether it's like in in politics or sports or entertainment or whatever. And then you realize like they're kind of just like the rest of us. And I mean, obviously, today it would be them scrolling Twitter or their

• 5:10Ryan Holiday?

  Instagram feed. But you're just like, you want to think the experts have some super exclusive intelligence that they're getting. And then they're they're kind of just doing the same as the rest of us.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you either sort of imagine that they have some sort of separate elite version of this kind of dialogue or discourse. But you certainly don't think that they are using what I think most people think of is like, just kind of like, the lowest form of discourse, like the most consumer oriented, you know, almost like the creation of narratives and all these things, you know, that that that we sort of see, like, when I watch Talking Head stuff on ESPN, guys talking in a roundtable or on Fox, I know that they're talking about, you know, real things, and they have insight, and they're former players and experts. But I see it more as an entertainment vehicle.

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  That this exists to basically get us from game to game, how to fill up this time. It was a little strange to see these guys to make it, you know, about to make a draft pick, and they're watching these things intently. Now, part of me wonders, are they watching it intently with some aesthetic distance? Like, are they actually watching it for the things about it that are untrue? But I gotta say, it didn't seem like it. Like, they would sort of nod their heads at the parchers supposed to nod the head at. It was like, it was, you know, it was a surprising thing to me, you know?

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like, you wouldn't want a hedge fund manager just watching CNBC all day, because you would think that that's late already. Like, you would expect the newsmaker to be getting their information from somewhere other than the news.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Because typically, in life, If the media is covering something you really understand,

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  A situation happening in your hometown, or maybe a story about you or whatever, you know, it's almost always wrong to some degree. And that's not even a criticism. It's just kind of the imperfection of the thing. That if somebody is trying to explain a technical matter to a real technician, it's going to always seem flawed. And that's what I thought would have been the case with like the GM of an NFL football team. And if they were watching the NFL Network, you know, discuss some offensive lineman from Tennessee or whatever, they would not be going like, well, this is something I gotta care about. This is, I would think they'd be like, these guys just don't get it. Like that thing they're saying about leverage, that's fake. Like, we know that that's just fake or whatever. Maybe not, you know, maybe not.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Maybe there is, maybe there is less of a chasm between the bottom of society and the top society than we think, at least intellectually and ideologically. Maybe that is actually, you know, since we live in a totally mediated culture, maybe that is what sort of connects the top and the bottom. I don't, I don't know.

• 7:58Ryan Holiday?

  There's a phrase for that. It's honestly something more people should understand. I think it's called the Gal amnesia effect. I think Michael Lewis coined it. But you have a decent definition of it in the book. You said, anytime I read an article about a subject I legitimately understand, the article has been at least partially wrong. A reaction that's become increasingly pervasive. Every national story about a localized conflict will seem erroneous to the local population it depicts. Any entry level exposition about a technical problem will seem imprecise to genuine tacticians. And then the, the amnesia effect is the part where then when we read or watch something about something we don't understand, we defer to what we've just been told as if,

• 8:42Ryan Holiday?

  as if the area we have expertise is the exception and not the rule to the insufficient coverage or the tendency towards inaccuracy.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Well, and I think everyone who, who thinks that they have something to offer, whatever that skill is, they kind of see it that the value is the uniqueness of it. That it's coming from them, that it's specific to them. But as soon as then they're kind of confronted. With this kind of consensus collective view, there's a little anxiety that maybe that in order to have my unique idea get across, I first got to show that I understand, you know, what the parameters of the discourse is. Like, I have to show that, like, I understand what everybody else thinks in order to somehow enter my new thing, you know? And it's probably not a bad sort of impulse, because, I mean, if you jump right in with the sort of the the counterintuitive idea, I think it leaves some audience, you know,

• 9:33Speaker 01

  to think like, well, this person doesn't even understand what the playing field is. It's like they're making up a new game or whatever.

• 9:39Ryan Holiday?

  I definitely see this with AI. Anytime I ask AI a question about something I do know quite a bit about, and I'm like, asking it to find something that I just don't want to spend the time getting the specifics on or whatever. Anytime I kind of know the answer it's supposed to give me, I'm always very disappointed with the quality of the answer. I get bit by a jellyfish and I'm like, what should I do? I'm like, well, it says I should do this. So that's obviously what I'm going to do. You know, I'm incredibly deferential when it's well outside my area of expertise and I'm just desperate for any kind of confident answer. But if I were to ask it, like, what the best restaurant in Austin is, I'd be like, this thing doesn't know what the fuck it's talking about.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  What do you make of the synchophantic nature of AI? That this sort of built in tendency it has to always begin with some kind of compliment to sort of insert this idea that your question is especially, you know, trenchant? Well, like, now, do you think that this is, that this is part of the, that the creators of AI were like, well, this is, this is actually what people want? They want to feel as though they're being helped by someone who is subservient that will give them less fear? That it's not like a hal situation where it's like, you know, that this is a situation where, oh, look at this, this AI system is behaving? As though it's lucky to be talking to me. Or am I actually personifying it too much? Like, why do you think that is its normal nature?

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  No, I, I, I do find that annoying and weird and, and I think revealing about what your sort of average human wants. I, I also find it strange where when it's wrong and you're like, hey, that's obviously wrong. What about this or that? And then the quickness with which it goes, oh, you're absolutely right. Here. And so like, there's something not just annoying about its overconfidence in giving you incorrect or insufficient or bullshit answers, but the obsequiousness and the immediacy and the spinelessness with which it will change its mind over and over and over again, until you go, okay, that's good. That's what I wanted. There, there's something revealing about that too, where it knows that what you want

• 11:53Ryan Holiday?

  to do is feel right more than you want it to give you what is right.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Well, and, and the speed complicates it too, though. Because like, well, let's say you had a personal assistant and you had them, you wanted, you need them to look up a bunch of information about state capitals or whatever.

• 12:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  And you're going through the information they gave you by hand and you notice that they got something wrong about, you know, they, Carson City, they didn't say was the capital of Nevada and you told them this. They would be like, oh, you're absolutely right. I, I know this was my job to do this and I made this mistake. It's almost like the AI is doing that instantaneously, right? Like they're finding out that they're wrong, thinking about it, feeling, I don't know, ashamed about it and coming, it, it, it is, it is bizarre. Although I wonder like, are we the only generation of people who are going to have this dissonance? In the same way that like really people our age are the only people who are obsessed with the difference between the pre-internet world and the post-internet world. That we're constantly saying like, oh, you used to have to go do a travel agent or whatever

• 12:55Speaker 01

  if you want, you know, now you don't have to. Like people older than us. Don't really see that, you know, like elderly people, they maybe never really use the internet in a, in a, in a practical, functional, everyday way. People younger than us, it's like, oh, we're the only age, kind of. Like, basically, if you're forty now, up to maybe sixty, like, that's the only window of time where you fully experience both paradigms.

• 13:19Ryan Holiday?

  When I was watching the wildcard games this weekend, there, there's this Microsoft AI commercial where the guy's like, the running back or whatever runs by really fast. And then he goes, oh, and he starts like typing in queries to chat GPT or whatever to, to narrow down, rank them by this, and then do this, and then do this. And like, what strikes me about it is just, no one would do that because no one would trust a thing that, like, imagine if, if Excel, Excel does all sorts of calculations for you, right? And if, if Microsoft Excel was just wrong, like, ten to fifteen percent of the time, and you're like, wait, no, you just added all these cells up incorrectly. And you were like, that's wrong.

• 14:01Ryan Holiday?

  And then Excel was just like, oops, yeah, you're right, let me do it correct this time. Right? Like, the error rate that we're willing to accept with chat GPT is like, or any of the AIs, is so enormous to me. It strikes me as, as like, this crazy thing that no one's talking about. Like, we're like, hey, it's amazing, it can do this stuff, but also, it's like, preposterously laughably wrong, a significant percentage of the time, and you don't know what that time is, but, but by the way, you should lay off your staff and replace it with this thing.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Well, it, but it is, you know, interesting. I do think about like, the early days of Wikipedia.

• 14:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  How like, when I was in a newspaper, the idea in those days, if you would use Wikipedia at all, as any kind of source, it would have been like, you're gonna get fired for that. You know, this, now, it actually seems probably more secure than most sources of information.

• 14:55Ryan Holiday?

  Is that just because everything else has gotten worse?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Well, that's part of it, certainly. But also, I think over time, sort of, these things that are all kind of user generated or whatever, they are gonna improve. I mean, it's very interesting, like, okay, so, I, I'm sure you're familiar with this. This, look, this anthropic lawsuit about books.

• 15:11Ryan Holiday?

  I was just filling out the, the thing the other day, because my agent was like, no, no, I can't do it for you, for you, you have to do it. And now I'm like, I have to fill it out like twenty times.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, just, well, actually, you don't, okay? And also, this is, and this is how I know. Okay, so. I hear about this secondhand. I didn't know anything about this. For people who don't have any idea what this is, Anthropic, which I believe is the search engine, I think that people call Claude. I don't use this one. But so it turns out there's like this class action suit and and you can you can opt into it or you can opt out of it. And what initially I thought was if you opted into it, it meant you were giving them access to your books. As it turns out, they've taken them all already. It's all in the machine. So if you have any works that were used by Anthropic, if you fill out this form, I believe you get like, it's like thirty one hundred dollars per work and then you get half and your publisher gets half.

• 16:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  So, you know, I like you, I had a lot of books on there, right? So the actual amount of money was not insignificant. Okay? So I'm like, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna opt into it. But it was very difficult to do with all these things. Until I asked ChatGPT how to do it. And it made it incredibly easy. It did a lot of the things for me. I I mean, it was the first time that I ever used one of these things in a way that was actually practical. Because I don't, you know, I I in every other situation I've ever been in professionally, what like to me, ChatGPT is good for like, you put a sentence in and go like, is it grammatically correct? It's good for stuff like that, you know?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  But but this was the first time it actually gave me how to like, take all of the works and make it into one file and present it all at once.

• 16:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And then it checked it all for me and said it can look up to see if to make sure it was received. It was like, so this thing that I'm technically suing, right? I'm suing the idea of this system, which has already taken all of my work. That cow is out of the barn or whatever you want to see it, but it's out. So it's like, well, you get this little money now. In a way, I was almost like, well, what happens if I, I guess if you don't opt in, the only upside is you, there could be a lawsuit that you could opt into later. But they say the settlement will never be this big. I don't know. It's it was it's a strange deal. Really, like, it was a real collision that like of modernity. Like this thing that everybody sort of said was going to happen, all of a sudden it was like, it already happened, that already happened, you know, it's like.

• 17:42Ryan Holiday?

  As soon as I have to start filling out like complex forms, I start to immediately go, wait now, how much am I getting paid for this? Because I might just not do it.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, because then suddenly you're weighing it against time, right?

• 17:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Like, is the amount of time this is gonna take worth what I'm gonna get back? Like, you've noticed what I get back, you know?

• 18:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and then what are the chances that I'll actually get it back at all? And then I start to start making excuses. And I was like, you know what? This seems like a task I should give to someone else. And so now that I know I can give it to ChatGPT, that's nice to know.

• 18:28Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it's funny, obviously, you talk about this at the beginning of the book. Like, you know, the thing that people want to compare football to is, you know, the Roman Colosseum Gladiator games. But I remember I was in Istanbul, maybe seven or eight years ago, and the Hippodrome there, there's a racetrack in the middle of Istanbul, which was at one point known as Constantinople. And I'm reading this sort of exhibit about it. And I didn't know how big chariot racing was in the ancient world. That like chariot racing was like, after the sort of rise and fall of the gladiatorial games, chariot racing becomes sort of the main sport of the Roman Empire.

• 19:11Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm reading about this event, this is like in 500 AD or something. There's a chariot racing, and basically the chariot racers get, it's like red and green and blue, and the different colors are basically associated with different political factions. And apparently, there's like a chariot race during the reign of Justinian that goes sideways. And maybe there's allegations of cheating, I forget what it is exactly. But like this riot breaks out, and like 30,000 or 40,000 people are killed in a riot during a chariot race in the center of what was then the Roman Empire. And I remember just thinking like, okay, yeah, this would be like if

• 19:51Ryan Holiday?

  if the different divisions in the NFL became associated with Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or whatever. And then during the Super Bowl, A riot breaks out and the end of the story is the emperor is almost forced to abdicate because like his, his chariot faction loses and then he tries to intervene. And, and so there is something about like whatever the dominant sport is in a period of time that, that just becomes absorbed into culture and into the entire sort of political and social system of a country. And it is weird that football has become that. You sort of marvel at that at the book that like you wouldn't think it would be football

• 20:36Ryan Holiday?

  and somehow it is football.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, football has done this in a way that's also so clear. I mean, it is, it's not really a debatable thing. There's no argument in the United States over what sport is most reflective of society or most popular of all these things. Like we understand it. Football is an interesting thing because, you know, it starts in the 19th century and sort of evolves on its own for about 70 or 80 years and then intersects with sort of the rise of television. And that is really what makes this happen. And in terms of the, the sort of the metaphorical and symbolic significance it takes on, the things about society it absorbs, the things about society it reflects, you know? And that, you know, is chance, right?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  You obviously can't, you don't start a sport before the invention of a medium and think like it one day it might work for it. I don't think the inventors of television saw this is a perfect vessel for football. I think they thought that about boxing and horse racing and things like that, you know, baseball. But to me now, and big reason I wanted to do this book is I think if you're thinking about the United States from, you know, the last half of the 20th century and you're trying to understand it through another thing, through an outside idea, like football is probably the best source for that. I don't know if that will be true going into the 21st century, but I think that for the last half of the 20th century, like football was and is this like sort of like kind of

• 22:07Speaker 01

  reflective profound thing, profound in kind of an underrated way.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Like it is just a sport. It is a form of entertainment. It is kind of just a distraction. And yet there is, I think, a deepness to why it became, you know, so central to not just like, you know, American popularity, but like American identity, specifically certain regions of the country where football is, I mean, almost inarguably the most important extension of culture in those places.

• 22:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like the only monoculture left. You make a point in there that I didn't think about, which is like, it makes sense that soccer is the most popular sport in the world because anyone can play soccer anywhere and you can play it in, in a bunch of different conditions that are all close to, you know, what you would see or experience, like watching it professionally or watching it on television or whatever. And then you're like, the, the very small number of people that play football, American football versus how popular it is. That feels like it says something. Like it is weird that the supposedly democratic

• 23:20Ryan Holiday?

  country has as its game and its sort of iconic sport, a fundamentally elitist game in the sense that not that many people play it.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe not elitist, but exclusionary.

• 23:35Ryan Holiday?

  For sure.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And I mean, there are many things about this that seem to contradict what we, what you would expect if, say, you were some alien, you know, thinking about what America wants to think about itself. Okay.

• 23:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  The fact that no team sport is so dictated and is so controlled by things outside of the field itself. You know, the play coming from the press box down to the sideline, sent in by a messenger. Kind of look at the Byzantine code on your wristbands. You know, it's like, it's the most controlled thing. One of the, you know, the popular ideas, I mentioned this often, I mentioned the book, like this, this essay that, that art creator David Hickey once wrote about basketball was that the, the larger ideal was that. Any rules or sort of bylaws of a sport should try to liberate the players. Well, that's what we care about, right? We care about the people on the field. So we want to give them the maximum amount of freedom and kind of creative expression. Football does the opposite.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Football is not made for the individual. It is made for the collective. It is made in this hierarchical, you know, stratified thing where what you're seeing is never accidental. It is the most corporate sport, not just in terms of the extension of how it works in actual business. The construction of the game has many sort of similarities to any kind of highly controlled system is, is, is built. And I think that it kind of shows that this is what people want. Like, we want freedom for ourselves.

• 25:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  We want control for the rest of the world. Like, we want to feel like we have agency, but we're more comfortable, I think, seeing others act without it.

• 25:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, and, and your point about like, what are, what are we going to think about what football says about us 50 years from now, 100 years from now? Just like, what do we think about what the, the, the various sort of cultural obsessions about the Romans and the Greeks says about them? Like, I think, I was in Greece this summer and one of the things that I, I find so interesting is, um, like, the, the Greeks had a bunch of different running sports. But all of their running events, none of them involved them going around in a circle. Like, they had straight sprints and then their distance ones involved, like, running to a line and then running back. It was this, like, sort of, you would do these multiple stadium-length wind sprints, basically.

• 26:05Ryan Holiday?

  And I don't know what it says, but it says something interesting that they weren't just, like, the, the track is circular because they would do chariot events. But people wouldn't run in a circle. What does that say? It's just weird. You know, there's just endlessly fascinating, revealing little quirks that you learn about a society when you study what it watches.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  But here's the deal. When we talk about something like that as a retrospective thing, like, we're looking back. We do exactly what you just did. It's like, what does it mean? It must mean something, right? Yeah. And the only meaning that we can apply are typically meanings that would exist in the present tense. Yeah. Like, it had just never occurred to them this, that they had a very linear way of thinking, that they, somehow they believed the curves, you know, the curves of the track created some kind of, you know, mystical advantage. Like, you know, we always have to think, what was the reason for this? And the fact of the matter is, there probably was a reason for it. There probably, maybe even a real kind of practical explanation.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  But that's not how we want to think about it, because we think of it as history and history want to have meaning. That's a big part of like, sort of, I guess, kind of the conceit of this book, which is that I know that there is going to be a time in the future when football is not the last remnant of the monoculture. It's not the center of like, how American entertainment and, you know, and recreation operates. It's going to be something that is either, I don't think it'll probably be, I don't think it'll be gone in totality, but it will be this niche thing, this minor thing. And then people are going to try to explain why. And I am, I'm not sure exactly what that description will be, but I think it will be wrong and I suspect it will be pejorative.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Because that's usually how we work. We look at something in the past that failed, and we're like, well, it failed because it had a problem. And that problem was endemic to the world it comes from. Sure. So I wanted to do a book that was like, okay, so you read, you know, obviously, it's kind of a, a kind of a gimmick, because I'm trying to sell this book to people who are alive. I'm doing this podcast, right? I'm not doing this podcast for people who have not yet been born. I do not expect people to listen to this podcast in a hundred years and then find this book. Sure. But I do like to think about time in this way. Where like, how can I reflect what the present actually is like for people who will have no way to access it? Like, whatever we think about Roman gladiators, you know, it's a ton

• 28:28Speaker 01

  of knowledge about the, the mechanics of how it worked and all that. But I don't think it's possible for people in this day and age to truly understand what it really felt like, or what the motive was, or what people wanted, or how it was viewed. Like, we assume it was viewed in some way like the way we view football. I guess I can understand that relationship, but I bet it wasn't that way. You know, I always kind of almost concerned is the wrong word. I guess obsessed with this idea of like, I want things to be remembered the way they actually were, not the way we can project the present onto them.

• 29:06Ryan Holiday?

  It is interesting, though, like we, we assume when there is a monoculture, that it is in fact, an actual monoculture and that there wasn't a divergence of, of opinions at the time. Right? Like, so, so we go, okay, the Romans really liked gladiatorial games. They obviously thought it was okay to, you know, send criminals and whomever in there to, to fight and die. And, and how grotesque and violence this is, violent this is. And then I think it's really interesting, you know, there's this essay that Seneca writes where he's not talking about this at all. And then suddenly he kind of goes into this tangent and he, he's like, why are we doing this? It's so violent and horrible. Like who likes this, you know? And you go like, oh yes, some people thought it was dumb then too, right?

• 29:49Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so there, we always assumed that everyone was on the same page and certainly that they weren't.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Certainly. Yes. And you know, but what I'm saying is the people who are critics of football now in a future world, those people I think are going to be seen as the guideposts because the thing failed, right? And it will seem like, oh, well, you know, they're saying it's, it's barbaric. And it was just, it was like a blood sport or whatever. That must've been what it was. But you know, you just bring up just kind of casually, like lots of interesting things. Like we mentioned the monoculture, right?

• 30:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Okay. So what's something that's a thing a lot of people who study or follow TV know? They know that the last episode of MASH was the most watched show in history and that will never happen again. That it is now absolutely impossible that a show could have that many people watching one episode all at the same time. And yet, what were people saying at the time? They were saying the monoculture was over because cable television had come into play. And suddenly it was possible to get, you know, the New York Times in Seattle. The, the world was becoming this sort of already, these things before the internet exists. We're kind of using these terms. You see, you'll go back and find things where like people use terms like memes and like, and like, you know, the global village and all that stuff.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  So this thing that we now understand to be the apex of the monoculture. I have 53 million people or whatever it was watching this episode of, you know, a Korean War sitcom or whatever. At the time, they already believed the thing that we say about it now was over, that the monoculture to them had been, you know, the 50s. That was a monoculture, you know?

• 31:29Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Or the 20s.

• 31:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's, it's so weird realizing that there was a present moment at every moment in, in history. Like, I just went down this, this weird rabbit hole. Like, did you know there was another Winston Churchill? Like, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was an American writer, a novelist, named Winston Churchill, who was so famous. Like, in 1901, he had like the bestselling book in America. He was so famous that Winston Churchill went by Winston Spencer Churchill for most, like, people don't even know Winston Churchill, the statesman, supported himself as a writer. And there's all these, like, there's this great book called The No More Champagne, where it's like basically a biography of Churchill

• 32:14Ryan Holiday?

  as a writer and as a guy who spent more money than he had. And there's all these, like, things about him complaining about his agent and his publisher, and it's fascinating. But, but like Churchill went by Winston Spencer Churchill, so people wouldn't confuse him with Winston Churchill, the author, who is selling millions and millions of books. And not, and he's just totally forgotten. Like, just nobody knows that he exists.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:40Ryan Holiday?

  Even though he sold millions and millions of books. And if you had asked people in 1906, you know, are people gonna remember who Winston Churchill was? They'd be like, yeah, he's a great novelist. The idea that we would remember him as the guy that saved the world, of Western civilization as a statesman from a different country, would have been like utterly incomprehensible.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Are you a big Churchill guy? Do you know a lot about him?

• 33:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Because there's this one thing I've always wondered about him. I'll tell this anecdote, maybe, maybe you're familiar with it. I had heard that, so, you know, in those, in his era, I was talking about his political era, you know, everybody smoked, right?

• 33:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Everyone was smoking. So he would remove all the ashtrays. From the room and he had figured out a way to sort of not need to ash his cigarette as much and eventually someone else would ask him for an ashtray and he felt this gave him a tactical advantage. What was the advantage? Like, what would that, what would that advantage be?

• 33:38Ryan Holiday?

  Like they would have to ask him for an ashtray?

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yes, and that was, and he saw this as sort of like that it was almost like who blinked first or something. But I've, I've always wondered, I've heard that story more than once, but I've never had an explanation as to what the advantage would be, but I don't really doubt it, right? Obviously, he knew what he was doing, you know? I mean, this is a guy who is drunk all the time and yet saved the world or whatever, you know, it's like, he's an amazing person.

• 34:03Ryan Holiday?

  It's weird. I've, I've read a lot about Churchill and I've never heard that story or if I have, I skipped over it, not, not thinking much about it. You know, the, the other weird one you hear all the time is like, they go like, do you know how much shit there was on the streets of New York City and like the horse era? You know, like I heard that one again the other day.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Chicago especially, they, Chicago, because they called Chicago the city of horses.

• 34:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's just like manure everywhere because there's so many horses and then one day it's just gone. But that's one that it happened in my lifetime, obviously, uh, not as much, but, but just like the idea there was smoke and ashes everywhere all the time. And then just like that, it disappears. And then every once in a while you're in a casino where they let you smoke and you just go, I can't imagine what the world was like when it was like this all the time. I remember on it, we went on a trip as a kid, we were in Arkansas and we stopped at like a Sizzler or something and it was still, there was a smoking section and a non-smoking section. And that's the last one that I remember being like, oh, this is horrible.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  It is amazing how something can change and it's almost like that period just disappeared. Like there were ashtrays in hospital waiting rooms.

• 35:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Like you could smoke in the hospital, you could smoke in the hospital.

• 35:20Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know who Sam Gwynn, S C Gwynn, he wrote Empire of the Summer Moon. He wrote that book, The Perfect Pass about the invention of the forward pass in football.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:29Ryan Holiday?

  He's an amazing writer. He wrote this book called Empire of the Air about like the Hindenburg. It's about like blimps, you know, but they're not called blimps. I'm forgetting what, how to pronounce the actual word. But anyways, he's talking about this one famous one that goes down like the Hindenburg. And there's this whole section in the book about there were smoking rooms on those blimps. Those blimps filled with highly, yes, highly flammable gas. There was a sealed smoking room on those blimps. And like, it's not just like, oh, this, this used to be a thing and we forgot about it. But it's like, no, no, there used to be like legalized insanity. Just like everyone was collectively insane about something. And then we've just

• 36:14Ryan Holiday?

  pretended that it didn't, didn't happen.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Well, although like I, this has come up in a few other podcasts. Have you heard this story about, you know, the San Francisco 49ers have seemingly many more injuries than every other team over the last five years. And now people are wondering, is it because of their practice site is located next to this like electromagnetic site or whatever? It's like it's right next. If you look it up, there's, is it possible in some future world? Or like, do you realize that like people didn't even realize that having like an electrical plant near people was that? But yeah, at the same time, here in the present, like it would be weird. You'd really be a marginalized person. If you were like, I refuse to come within one mile of a, you know, of a

• 37:02Speaker 01

  power plant or a transformer or something. But if it suddenly became obvious that that was like the main factor for a whole laundry list of problems, then we'd be like, people were so crazy. It's like smoking a cigarette on a zeppelin or whatever, you know, but it's not. It's not because we don't have that understanding now. We're always trying to do this. We're always trying to put the understanding of the world we have now onto the past. I mean, I'm not blaming people for doing it. I do it all the time. It's just a. But it's crazy. It's a, you know?

• 37:33Ryan Holiday?

  Well, they bring the smoking thing back to sports. It is crazy when you watch those, you look at those videos or you, you see photos of like athletes smoking during halftime or smoking in the locker room. Because that one isn't, it's not like, oh, you shouldn't smoke because you know, you might get cancer many years from now. Like, they were coughing, like, like, smoking is something where like, the smoker tangibly daily feels the consequences to doing the thing. No one would feel that more directly than an athlete doing a sport with lots of cardio in it. And yet, there they are.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Things get sort of built into your brain and they don't really change. Like I'm looking at you, you're wearing this New Orleans Saints jacket, you know? So when I think of the New Orleans Saints, part of me still reverts back to my first exposure to them, which was the year I really got into football cards and the Saints went 1-15. So my natural impulse, my natural inclination, when I think of the Saints, is to think of, like, part of me says like, oh, that's like the worst, that's like the worst franchise. They've only, now they've won Super Bowl since then, everything has changed. There are, if someone were to say, if I were asked to be, to rank, that, you know,

• 38:53Speaker 01

  all, every franchise in the NFL historically, the greatest, the worst, they would not be at the bottom, for sure. But there's a, a part of my brain that sees that. Like, I guess where they always say like the lizard part or whatever. And I'm like, oh yeah, they had Archie Manning and nothing else. They had Chuck Muncy, but he wasn't good yet because he didn't go to the Chargers. I still think of the first understanding I had of the Saints, you know?

• 39:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I, my first one is I remember I got a book out of my school library and there was a picture on the front of that kicker, whose name I'm forgetting, who, who didn't have the front of his foot.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:29Ryan Holiday?

  Tom Dempsey, yes, he broke the NFL record with half a foot, yes. Yeah. And, and I just was like, what is this? This is insanity. Like, how do I not know about this? And that, that's what took me down the, the rabbit hole.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  It's strange, in a way, he had half a foot, but it was a huge advantage.

• 39:47Ryan Holiday?

  I know.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Because they they allowed him to wear a shoe that had a steel plate at where the toes would be. So he was actually like hammering the ball with almost a literal hammer with his foot. You know, so so it's always that's always a weird thing that for many years was, I believe, was a 63 yard field goal. That was is no longer the record, but it was for a long time. It was certainly in into the 90s, I think maybe a guy from Denver tied it at that point. But there was always that, you know, it was always a sort of a like a profile in courage. You're like, you know, like this guy with half a foot is the kick the longest field goal. That's like, well, yes, also, he did have the advantage of kicking the steel, but you know, it's a.

• 40:28Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I almost told that story in my book, The Obstacle is the Way. And it's not like the the record now is like 10 yards further. It's not that much further.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, yeah, it's I think it's a it's not that much. I mean, there is probably a limit to what a kick can be, you know?

• 40:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  And but regardless, it still is an obstacle. I mean, yes, he had this advantage of this shoe that was specially designed for a guy with half a foot. But that also meant at some point in his life, he had half a foot and he was like, I'm going to pursue field goal kicking. I mean, that is an amazing thing, right? I recall the last time we talked, we talked a lot about Iron Maiden, like you're.

• 41:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  So do you like Black Sabbath as well?

• 41:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, sure.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love Black Sabbath and the classic story about Black Sabbath were one of the many ones is that on the last day of of working in the factory, before he became a full time member of a of a band, Tony Iommi is working in the factory, and the tips of his fingers are all cut off, you know? And I was left hand, well, he's he is plays left handed, so it's his right hand that has no fingertips, you know? And he can't, it would seem to be the end of this, right? Like, like his mother made him go to work, even though he was quitting. She was like, you got to finish your last day. And he's like, I'm going to be a musician, like, go your last day. Thing comes down, you know, cuts off his fingertips. He's kind of, you know, obviously depressed and and believes it's over. And someone brings him a record and plays the record for him.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  And I won't remember the name of the artist, somebody else listening to this will know. The guy plays the record and Tony Iommi is like, oh, OK, this is a guy's a pretty good guitar player. Thanks, you know, it's like not the greatest time for me to hear this. And the guy goes, OK, the guy on this record. Has one arm. He only has one arm. And then Tony Army was like, if this guy can play this with one arm, like I can figure out a way to, you know, you know, he starts, so he starts, you know, burning wax to cover his fingertips. So he can press down on the strings and eventually they just, he just builds up the calluses. And the reason Black Sabbath sounds different than every other band who's tried to copy them is probably this. The fact that the guy playing the guitar does not have fingertips.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  But there's another part of this, which is like, there's a guy who pursued playing guitar and became a virtuoso with one arm. What motivates a person to do that? It's like, you would think that if you like, if I lost my arm, I wouldn't give up, right? I wouldn't give up my life. Like I wouldn't be like, I want to do something. But I don't think I would pick a job or a vocation that seems so specifically geared toward the two armed guy. I mean, Norm MacDonald always had a joke about that, about this, about the Petraeus, the sprinter from Australia, who had those like ski things, you know? And, and Norm MacDonald was against this guy. And people were like, oh, why? Because you believe he murdered his wife, which was always in the news?

• 43:19Speaker 01

  And he was like, no, no, it's that he shouldn't be a sprinter if he, if he doesn't have, I mean, that, you know, it should be like, you should have to be a biped or whatever to be a sprinter, you know? And now he's joking, of course, but there is something funny about that. The idea that like, I'm going to try to do something that seems so geared against the natural proclivities of my body, you know?

• 43:39Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's also weird that like, we as a society, like your point about like, okay, he has a steel plate in his shoe. And that might give him this small, you know, statistical advantage in one sense. And then our, our sense of fairness is so binary. And obviously you could, you could connect this to a bunch of other debates that we have as a society. But we get obsessed over whether there is objectively one bit of advantage here. And totally tune out or refuse to consider all the other disadvantages that person had. And then we're like, see, it's, it's not fair. They should be excluded.

• 44:18Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Like we're like profoundly obsessed with, you know, whether Pistorius's legs give him this slight advantage and not considering like, okay, but, but 99% of the population when they were born without legs, or whether they lost their legs or whatever, would have just not pursued this sport at all. This guy's obviously coming from an enormous disadvantage and the fact that he's even, he's even being considered as an enormous, you know, triumph. Like certainly the game is not rigged in this guy's favor, even if these blades are giving him a slight advantage on the, on the field.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, uh, do you remember like Jim Abbott, the pitcher?

• 44:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Uh, so this is a guy who, who only had one arm, you know, so he, he would tuck his glove underneath his, kind of his stump or whatever, pitch with one hand, then jam his hand into the glove and then he would field with it. If he, the ball came to him, he would then kind of pop the ball up and throw it to first base.

• 45:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Now, this is, so he was an amazing story. When I was a kid, that would be like, like he'd get a weekly reader or whatever. And it's like, look at this guy. He's a one-armed pitcher, you know? You know, he had a few seasons at the end of his career that were really a biz, that in all likelihood, if, if he had been a normal pitcher, maybe he would have been, you're relegated to triple A or double A or something and he wasn't. But it's odd because, you know, I say that and yet those were still some of the most amazing stories and successes anyone could have. Like he's pitching with one arm. It would be like, like somebody asked me who like my favorite drummers are, and I would be like, oh, yeah, John Bonham. And you know, it's like, but like, I should probably say the guy from Def Leppard. He has one arm, right?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Like he literally can't do drum fills. It can't, it's impossible. But yeah, you know, so, but I don't think, I don't think of him in that way. I don't think of him as an elite drummer, even though the thing he's done is the most amazing thing a drummer probably has ever done, to be a one-armed drummer in a band of that magnitude, a hard rock band where drumming is really important. Granted, there was all this technology to help him and all this, but still.

• 46:31Ryan Holiday?

  So you mentioned baseball and that it made me think of something when I was reading the intro of the book because you were talking about like sort of who the book was for and you're sort of setting it up that that maybe you weren't doing yourself any favors by writing it for this group versus that group. I wonder if there's something revealing about football in that there's a lot of great baseball books. There aren't that many football books. Is there something about football that like it's such a televised sport that we don't, we don't read about it, but what, or maybe that's just baseball's sort of was the dominant game in the era when books were more popular, but, but I, I guess there's the blind side.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a cliche about this. There's a cliche about sports books, which is that the best books are like disproportionate to the size of the ball. So it's like, like golf, a lot of, lot of writing about golf. Okay. Baseball, a lot of writing about baseball. Tennis is not, yeah. Football less. Actually now basketball has sort of changed this, that there's that, that the sort of the, the, the meaning of basketball in part because it has like such an ability to discuss things like, you know, race and these things. Basketball has become almost like easy symbolism or easy allegory. But I'll say like my publisher did not want me to do a football book. Like he straight

• 47:56Speaker 01

  up said like football books don't sell. I think the thinking being that, you know, people who love football don't necessarily want to read about it. And people who sort of have like a, I don't know, ideological or intellectual issue with football aren't interested in the sport itself. So it's like hard to find this middle ground, you know? But this is the book I wanted to do. So it's like, I'm always surprised when I talk to other writers. And they tell me, and this happens a lot, I bet you've had this experience with people, that they tell you that their agent or their publishing house kind of convinced them not to do a book they wanted to do.

• 48:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  That they'd say like, well, it's not commercial, or it's like, they're like, this has been tried before and it's failed. And it's like, you cannot think that way. I mean, it's like, like, cause you have to work, you know, for a book, you work on it for a year, and then it takes another year before it comes out. So in a way, you're like, kind of living with this thing for two years. Like, it has to be something you want to do, even if nobody else wants it. I mean, that is the most important thing. It's gotta be something you want to do, you know?

• 49:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, no, I, I, I mean, I think there's two separate issues there. I just think it's, it's like, there's something about how television centric football is, that it's not lost on me that it's, it's not a literary sport either. But baseball, which is kind of boring to watch on TV and great to watch in person, is somehow the more literary of the sports.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  But so is boxing.

• 49:25Ryan Holiday?

  That's true. Yes, right.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  So it's like, the thing about football, the thing you're mentioning is something I hadn't really thought about. I mean, I've thought a lot about, obviously, this book, about football's relationship to television. I didn't think about this, though. The idea that by being so married to television, and that, you know, one of the things, like, kind of the aphorisms, I guess, used in this book, is that, like, you know, football is a completely mediated event, even when there's no media involved. But now the experience of watching a football game live with no cameras is still understood by the consumer as it would be seen on television. It is possible that because, you know, this, this kind of interlocking idea of this entertainment medium

• 50:11Speaker 01

  and this game just sort of became the same thing. And so dominant that, you know, the, the hundred most popular broadcasts in the year 2023, like 93, were NFL games, and then three or four more were college football games. I mean, that's just a crazy statistic. It would make, it makes no sense in any other society. There's just nothing like this, right? Maybe that does overwrite the possibility to write about it.

• 50:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Like, in, in a sense, it's like, um, in the same way, it's, you know, it's like, uh, if you're doing, uh, you know, film criticism, you're usually talking about the ideas, and you're sort of also talking about the plot of the film. But you don't want to talk about the plot of the film too much for two reasons. One, you don't want to give it away, but also it doesn't really work. And a description of a story will either of a film particularly, because it's only like two hours, is either going to seem like weirdly rudimentary or too complicated to really get. Like, the visual part of film is a hard thing to write about. Only the best film writers are really good at it. Football, I guess, in the same way, because of the visual experience of television is

• 51:18Speaker 01

  so pervasive and dominant in the mind of every consumer, it is difficult to describe. Like, describing a football play, and I do it a few times in this book, always seems awkward.

• 51:30Ryan Holiday?

  Well, there's too many characters. There's too, like, boxing, baseball, obviously has a decent amount of guys on the field, but, but the action is, is so distributed in football, it's very hard to describe. And it almost goes against our natural instincts. Like, I thought it was revealing, there was an interview, it might have been on their podcast, where, where Taylor Swift was talking about how she thought that the Kelsey brothers had faced off against each other. Like, she didn't, it didn't occur to her that they weren't, would have never been on the field at the same time. And, and you're like, oh, yeah, because that's not how you would design it if you were thinking

• 52:08Ryan Holiday?

  about designing it for being at, like, like, the idea that the best players are not, like, that the two leaders of the teams are not on the field at the same time is not how you would guess the biggest game in America is, is designed.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  There are so many things about football that if you described to someone who had no idea about it, it would seem not just confusing, but like, almost straight up bad. Like, if you like this thing that you said, like, you could say, like, okay, so, the best player in the league might not touch the ball the entire season. It would be very easy for that to happen.

• 52:50Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. The fact, and I just talked about in the book, but you know, it's like, so like the Wall Street Journal in 2011 did this kind of study where they found that in a three hour broadcast of an NFL game, there are 11 minutes of action. And this is often described as like, it's used by people who are trying to convince you that football is not interesting or whatever.

• 53:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  And as it turns out, I think 11 minutes within a three hour window is actually perfect. But in a pitch meeting, it would make no sense.

• 53:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Like if I was saying like, hey, I came up with this new board game. Takes about three hours to play. However, you only make 11 moves during the game. Most of the time, you know, it's like, nobody would be like, it would be like, you know, like, like risk without moves or whatever, you know?

• 53:34Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. Yeah. And they actually do some riffing on it on that, on that Nate Bargatze SNL skit, the George Washington one, where it's like, okay, it's, it's football, but you don't use your feet. So, oh, so there's no kicking? Well, there's some kicking. And then it's like, and it's kind of worth this many points. And then sometimes it's worth this many. The only thing more confusing than American football is Australian football. And I, I had the experience. I went to one of their games and they were explaining it to me. And I was like, what are you talking about? This is like, you took the most complicated and nonsensical game and you made it much more complicated and nonsensical is kind of perfect. But it was weird to be a, like a foreigner watching a football game and going, oh, this

• 54:19Ryan Holiday?

  is, this is what people who are not Americans think when you talk to them about the Dallas Cowboys or whatever.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think another sport is cricket.

• 54:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Like when the first time, like someone tells you like, well, a cricket game, it might take two days. It might take two days. It's like, why, why would it take two days? Like what's going, what's happening? And it's like, well, it's. Not much is actually happening, but it, you know, it seems very confusing, but in some ways that is the charm of these things. I mean, what I think that like, sometimes, you know, it's like, uh, in the book, Bright likes big city, you know, which is nobody thinks about anymore, but

• 54:54Ryan Holiday?

  I think about it all the time because there's no, there's almost no other good novels in the second person.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Okay. In that sense, Jay McInerney kind of ruined it for us, right? No one can do a second person novel now, even all these years later, if I wrote a novel in the second person, Jay McInerney, we mentioned every single, you know, so he like, he was like, he, that, that alone is the brilliance of that movie. He's like, I'm doing this. But there's a scene in the book where the guy walks into a bar and like, he asks, you know, there's a sports, I can't remember what the sport is even, but it might be like hockey because he says like, what quarter is it? And the guy's like, it's the second period. And this, cause this character knows nothing about sports. And he says like, my whole life I've been cut out of the world's largest fraternity. And I do sometimes think about, but I mean, this is kind of a gendered thing, like of guys who

• 55:43Speaker 01

  don't follow sports at all. I can't imagine what it must be like to go to a lot of the functions like I go to as a father. Like if we go to some event, some school event and it's some, you know, the kids are doing whatever they're doing. The wives are usually talking and the guys are talking and the likelihood that we are talking about our kids or sports is about 98%.

• 56:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like I think there was a time when people would have talked about politics, but that's very touchy now. People are very nervous about that now. I live in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of the weird things about this is people don't like to talk about their jobs. Like I, when I was in New York, if someone started talking to you, like you met them, first thing they'd ask is what do you do? Here they might be like, what kind of mountain bike do you own? Or some fucking bizarre thing, you know?

• 56:30Ryan Holiday?

  Cause there's a chance you might not have a job, right?

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:33Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yes.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Well, also this, oh, here, there's this, I say this is crazy. Now, this is something that before I moved here, I wouldn't have said, that sounds positive, but now it seems crazy. This real emphasis on do not let your job define you in any way. Never give the sense that what you do is some, you know, it's like, well, actually, what I do. Is my identity, but regardless, what I'm saying is for these dads, right? We're sitting around talking about sports and now gambling, that also always comes up. And there's always some people just hanging out there. And, and in my mind, I think, oh, they're kind of quiet, maybe they're shy. But then another part of me is like, they just don't care about Auburn and Alabama.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Like, they must think we're insane, sitting here talking about whether or not the line on an Alabama Auburn game is too high. That's like, oh, it's eight and a half, you gotta take them. You know, it's a bizarre thing, you know? And I don't even gamble, I don't gamble, but I'm constantly talking to guys about betting lines in football, because it is just part of being a middle-aged dude now, that's what you discuss, you know? And, and luckily, my entire life prepared me to do that, because I've been thinking about football constantly for forty or forty-five years.

• 57:46Ryan Holiday?

  It's so funny, I've been trying to get my kids to like football since basically they were born, and it's not worked. I have two boys. And they just came home from school one day this year, and they're, they like football, because some kid at school likes the Eagles, and now, now they like football. And it was before bed, you know, a couple of weeks ago, and my son was like, can I watch my iPad before bed? And we're like, no, you know, you don't do that, it's time to go to bed. He's like, can I watch something on your phone? No, and he's like, hey, wait, i- isn't it Monday? Can I watch the Monday night football? And I go, yeah. And so I go and I get the laptop and watching it a little bit, and then he goes, I just figured it out. And I go, what? And he's like, football is an excuse to watch TV.

• 58:27Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm like, you got it, dude, you figured it out, you cracked the code. Like, that's what it is, it's, it's just a thing to watch on TV.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  I mean, saying this makes me sound like I'm ninety. But this thing you described, I think was also a key to kind of the all-encompassing nature of football during the last half of the twentieth century, which was that, you know, when I grew up, and a lot of people like me, most people like me, there was one television in the house, it was in the living room. And, you know, it was usually, it was controlled by your parents, often your dad. And if there was ever a football game on, that's what was, we were watching. Like, it didn't, it had no, and they knew what the teams or the investment, there was nothing that we were gonna watch instead of football if it was on. So like, I'm the seventh kid in my family, even my sisters, who don't care about football really at all.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  They understand the culture and the kind of mechanics of football much better than like most people I meet now, just because it was this shared sort of experience. If your son had, if you'd been raising your son in the eighties, those first three steps of can I watch the iPad or can I look at? Yeah. That wouldn't have been there. It'd be like, can I stay up? Yeah, well, okay, Howard Cosell is on. Yeah, so and you would you just sit there and watch it, you know? I do think that part of, you know, you always hear these stories now that are just completely, and they're probably exaggerated, but they're mystifying to me in some ways where people are like, I can't go home at Thanksgiving. I politically disagree with my parents and my uncles or whatever, like, I can't do that.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Like, I'm cutting my family off or whatever. And or people will be like, I feel very isolated. It's like, I don't really have a social. You see these statistics where it's like men averaging less than one friend. You know, it's like all these, the academic male loneliness. I too wonder how much of that is a manifestation of the end of the completely shared monoculture of the living room. Where there used to be stuff that we all watched the same shows. It's just that if you're, if you're watching anything, this is what you're watching. And now that would never be the case. There are many situations where me, my wife and our two kids are all watching separate things simultaneously. You know, saying it's hard to get your kids to watch football.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  You know, I think every guy kind of, every person maybe who likes football kind of wishes that their kid did too. It's this very difficult sport to get your kid into because it doesn't have a natural kind of engagement. There's so many rules. You know, sometimes I'm watching the red zone and my son comes down and it's like, I don't know if he understands it's like it's going from game to game because he's never thought of these things. It's not, and I don't, and I'm totally comfortable with my kid not caring about football, not playing football. I in no way would ever want to enforce. The things that I like onto my kids, I just think that's just the worst thing you do. But I always think to myself, you know, there was a period in my life in my twenties. I didn't really have anything to talk to my dad about, you know?

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  But we did still talk about like, who was Notre Dame recruiting? You know, did the North Dakota State Bison win the previous weekend? It really did allow us to sort of have this surrogate relationship until I got old enough to recognize it's like, oh man, my dad's gonna die. And this is, these are important, you know, it's like, things change. I hate the idea that like, that there could be a period where that's harder to find with my kids. Like maybe it'll be film, or maybe it'll be music, it'll be something else. I'm not gonna let this happen. And football's not the only way, but man, that was an easy way to have it happen. You could, you know, I had an expert level knowledge of football when I was like nine or 10. Because I would read and memorize every statistic in the sporting news.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  I would watch the NFL Today, I would watch the, anytime there were, everything in Sports Illustrated, if it was about a sport I liked, I read. I consumed every aspect of this. So even as a nine-year-old kid, I remember, you know, like, older people at our house, relatives or whatever. And I could talk to them about these games in a way that, you know, that they think, I think they thought was cute, but it was also completely normal. It was like two adults talking. It was the only adult conversation I was having in a way. And that's just, it's, it's hard to do that with like Magic the Gathering, you know? It's like, it's hard to do that, you know?

• 1:02:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, you, and you will talk to a kid about football in a way that you wouldn't talk to them about politics or something. There's an equal equality under the game kind of thing. Like you'll allow, you're allowed to have opinions about it as a nine-year-old in the way that you're not about other monoculture things.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  And it's like, I mean, it really is like a simulation or a simulacrum. It's like the stakes are lower and yet the same way you're talking about the same things you would be talking about. Like if you're talking about, oh, um, you know, oh, oh, you know, should Mike Tomlin be forced out or whatever? Or like, you know, it's, is, uh, is there some kind of, you know, stylistic problem with Lamar Jackson or whatever? These are in many ways like kind of complex nuanced things.

• 1:03:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  But in sports, you don't, the nuance can sort of be. Not ignored, but it can be the underlying part of it. The top part is just the conversation, you know? In politics, that is, it's harder to do. I mean, it's, it happens in politics. If you're talking about what's going on politically, in some ways, you're talking about these fundamental ideas like about, you know, what is democracy really? Does, you know, what is fascism really? We're all these young, but it's, you're right. It's, it's harder, you know? And it's less interesting to them.

• 1:04:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, no, it was my, I'm, I'm so glad it, it, it happened. And now it's like, now we have something to watch and sort of, that's not, you know, uh, brain rot on YouTube. So I'll, I'll take it.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, now it's weird because some people heard that and they think that they just, that you meant, oh, YouTube rots your brain. There actually is this thing called Italian brain rot. Maybe every parent knows that. But like, you know, it's like anybody who doesn't, they hear that term and they're like, oh, it's just like, that must be the term they use now to describe like, kind of useless frivolous information. No, it's actually these creatures with Italian names that do nothing. I mean, that, and you know, the whole, I just find this stuff really interesting. Like the whole six, seven and all these things. They all, so much of like kid culture now is based in a kind of absurdism.

• 1:04:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  That I do think is reflective of something more than just kids are weird, you know? Cause there's always been aspects of that. Kids have always been into kind of absurd things. I mean, people will be like, oh yeah, they used to have pet rocks or whatever. But this is different where it seems as though the absurdism is the complete meaning of it.

• 1:05:10Ryan Holiday?

  Don't you think that's because the kids are contributing to the culture for the first time? Like in the sense, like if you, I feel like what kids used to be into, even relatively recently, you know, it's like, hey, kids like Paw Patrol because presented between these choices of shows, they seem to like Paw Patrol more than these other shows. Now they're like, the kids are actually talking to each other or have much more control over the, the remote and the, the kids are, it's not just a, a one-way relationship. Like the kids are driving the memes in a way that they weren't before.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I think you're right about that for sure. They're also like, these ideas are allowed to sort of flourish in these silos of youth. Where, you know, if, say, in the past or whatever, it's like if, if I'm watching Facts of Life or whatever. And for some reason, Tootie and Natalie are always going six, seven, six, seven. Like, I could see like someone older in the house being like, this is stupid. Like, we're gonna change to Magnum or whatever. Like, you know, it's like, we're not gonna watch this. Whereas now they're able to like, like, the whole thing with the Minecraft movie is a great example of this. Where it's like, people were seemingly surprised that these kids were going to this Minecraft movie. And like, there were all these innocuous things that made them just go ballistic.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  But it's like, they were able to build that world in private. And then suddenly it spills into the world at large, and it's just confusing. And, you know, young people have always been confusing the old people. But, you know, but what also is interesting is that we're also now expected to understand this more than our parents or our grandparents were.

• 1:06:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Like, you know, the very first book I wrote, Farter Rock City, I talk about this sort of, I'll like, one time, how is like, my dad was at the kitchen table with my whole family. And he was talking about our neighbor's cattle, okay? Our neighbor had many different breeds of cattle. He had some Herefords, he had some dairy cattle. He had like, oh, it was weird. He had like, no one did this, right? And my dad was, was talking about seeing this, this small herd of, of like disparate cattle. And he was like, what a motley crew that is, or whatever. And everybody at the table starts chuckling, laughing, like, ha, ha, ha, and they're all looking at me. And my dad's like, you know, what, what? You know, now, some people would hear that story, I think, and be like, oh, see, that's sad.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  It was like this thing that I loved as a sixth grader or whatever, you know, my dad had, like, I didn't feel that way. I was like, this proves my dad has never been in my bedroom.

• 1:07:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Because I had, I had a motley crew bumper sticker over my bed. I had a motley crew poster. I had, it's like, he obviously had never snooped in my room. He never looked around. Like, I felt really, it was almost a secure thing. To me, it was like, it showed that he had absolutely no, now I'm crying, I'm the seventh kid. So my dad was a lot older than the typical father. Now it it's almost impossible to imagine that happening. Like I mentioned, Magic the Gathering, like I never played that game in my life until my kid got into it. Now I play it most days. So now I have this and I have this understanding of the game and all these things like and what's good about it, the problems with it. It's just real interesting because, you know, they always say as a parent, you can't be a friend.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  You need to be a parent, but the way modern parenting works, it's very difficult not to be friends with them. Because you're sharing all these things. My kids like to listen to the top forty station, so I know all those songs. Like, that wasn't how it was for me or anyone I knew growing up. I didn't know one person who was like, oh, yeah, um, I'm gonna go see Dokken with my mom. Like that that would never happen. That would have never happened, you know?

• 1:08:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it it it's weird. It's also weird, like, I wouldn't, like, when I was a kid, Pokemon was not cool, right? And it's weird that it's not just it wasn't cool, it was for losers. And now it's for everyone. It's weird, like, it's it's weird that it's still around, let alone it doesn't have any uncool or cool. It's just a thing. Well, you're not a loser for liking Pokemon. Lots of people like Pokemon, but it's weird for me when my kids are taught, I have to, I have to remember like, oh, I don't need to remember what I used to think about Pokemon. We can just talk about Pokemon.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  I mean, Dungeons and Dragons is a great example of this. The fact that like, so when my kid got into Dungeons and Dragons, I was like, well, this is kind of interesting. He must be sort of in that part of the

• 1:09:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Part of the social group. That's not what it is. It's like, it doesn't seem to have even a relationship to gender anymore. Or or or the idea that if you play sports, you wouldn't play Dungeons and Dragons. That is gone in a weird small, like, this happens in a big way in like the world we live in, but also in a small world, I guess, with children, which is that inevitably the counterculture always becomes the culture. In a weird way, for you growing up, Pokemon was your kid version of the counterculture. It was for people who did not like the other things kids liked, who felt alienated by the normal things, right? So they got into that. That happens in music. This happens in film. This happens in literature. It's always this way that the thing that is marginalized,

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  if it touches people in a deep way, those are the people seemingly who enforce the ideas about culture later because it means something different to them. They're getting involved in something like, this is why like the vast majority in the nineties and early 2000s of music critics and rock critics had all come from a punk background. I was completely out like seen as very odd that I did not that that that all the people I worked with at Spin and knew at the other magazines at the Village Voice, they were all fundamentally people who had been into punk rock. And then they so they were the they were the underground culture. And now they dominate sort of the over culture. That that's just how it seems to work.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  And and and it does in some ways sort of detract from the meaning of anything that's commercially successful. Because in all likelihood, like the idea of like what Taylor Swift right now sort of creates musically is so popular. It nothing has really been that popular since Michael Jackson. It may not, though, have sort of the influence that logic would dictate. Like logically, that should be by far the most influential music of the future, and it probably will not be in the same way that Michael Jackson's Thriller, while having influence, is not as influential as some of the things around it that seemed significantly less significant at the time.

• 1:11:51Ryan Holiday?

  I actually thought of you the other day. Did you have you seen this documentary? It's on YouTube. It's like a 20 minute thing. It's by that that comedian, Rob Shear. I think that's who did it. I'm embarrassed if I'm saying his name wrong. Anyways, it's called Taylor Swift Dads. And he just interviews different dads that are waiting in the parking lot at SoFi Stadium while their daughters are inside watching Taylor Swift. And it's a it's a very lovely, sweet, little, like 20 minute YouTube video. And it talks about a lot of the things that we're talking about. Like some of the dads are like, I have no idea what's happening. I don't even know why I'm here. And then other Ones, they know all of it and they're they're really supportive. And then there's some dads. It's like they couldn't afford tickets, so they're just sitting outside listening with their daughters in the parking lot to.

• 1:12:34Ryan Holiday?

  What mostly struck me about it, having watched a bunch of sort of documentaries about music from, you know, the sixties and seventies and eighties is like, there used to be a lot of that. There were lots of bands doing stadium tours. There were lots of bands. Obviously, Taylor Swift is singular, but there would have been lots of things that people used to line up for. When they would come out at the record store at midnight or whatever, and that's gone.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Well, here's what this might might that might not be totally true. And I know I know it feels that way for sure. But I am consistently surprised to find to hear about some artist. And I'm like, they played two nights at Madison Square Garden.

• 1:13:16Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  They played the Hollywood Bowl. It's like, you know, but the thing is because we have stripped away that record store part.

• 1:13:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  There's no longer MTV and radio doesn't exist in the same way. And everything is, you don't see sort of the the outsized part of it. That leads you to believe, well, of course, when they tour, it's going to be a big deal. What has happened now in music is that the only way to make money is touring.

• 1:13:39Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  So like, you know, a band like, you know, Geeks or something. I remember a couple of months ago, I I can't remember what the name of the band is now, but they had sold out of like four nights at the Bowery Ballroom in New York and they have no record.

• 1:13:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Like, there's already this following of it that's sort of, I think, built online or whatever. And so it is, it feel, it definitely feels like we have lost that, the idea of like, oh, you know, Blue Orson Cult is playing, you know, in Anaheim or whatever. And it's a sold, you know, their their tour is sold out. Even though Blue Orson Cult at the time is maybe the 14th most popular hard rock band or whatever, they're still that big.

• 1:14:15Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  That that it doesn't feel like that happens now. Not everything is like a mystery to anybody who's outside of the world.

• 1:14:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  Like, you know, the thing you say about Taylor Swift, it is, what I have found with my kids is that they love it if I have knowledge about what they're into, but they dislike it if I have opinions. Like, they like that I know like who Chapel Rowan is. And I know her backstory and I know her songs. But if I was like, in a way, you know, if I, anytime I start actually giving an opinion about what I think about this, it's like that's when they start using the cringe now is the word they use. It's like they appreciate my ability to keep up and be informed about this. They do not appreciate any actual idea I have about it.

• 1:15:01Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think that's because knowledge signifies interest in something that they're interested in.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:15:08Ryan Holiday?

  And opinions implies judgment. And so they want the first part and not the last part. Even if the opinion is positive, they're like, no, no, no, no, no. I, I just want, I just want you to recognize this is important to me. I don't actually care what it means to you.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:15:27Ryan Holiday?

  Totally. No, this is, uh, this has been awesome. Well, I thought the book was fascinating and, uh, I always love reading everything you do. So, uh, I'm, I'm glad we got to chat again.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate you having me on.

• 1:15:41Ryan 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.