Robert Greene: 99% of People Are Sleepwalking Through Life. Here's How to Wake Up.

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0:45Ryan Holiday: My favorite thing about shopping about Wayfair is the reviews. You know, you buy stuff online sometimes and then you get it and it's way smaller than it looked or it's garbage. You know, you want to see real photos from real people so you know what you're actually buying. When refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need. Head to Wayfair.com to shop all things home. W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. We're so locked into this 21st century way of thinking. It's like a prison and it's getting narrow and narrow and narrow. This is how you're supposed to think.

1:17This is what reality is. We walk around and we're kind of asleep. We have the same little circle of thoughts going round and round in our head. Our grievances, our envy, our comparing what other people have. We're not awake. And so the sublime is all around you. And it's just a matter of waking up to it and getting out of the trance that you're in. The original concept of the book, I was going to travel to the Amazon. I was going to visit chimpanzees in the wilds of Africa. I was going to swim with dolphins. I was going to cross Tierra del Huego.

1:50I had gone through a near-death experience. I came very close to dying, and I felt it deeply in my body. And that first moment of coming back to life was ecstatic. I was laughing at everything. The nurses in the hospital thought something was wrong with me. Everything was funny. Everything was magical. I looked out the window. I was like, oh, my god. So the Sublime is a process of just simply.

2:21Ryan Holiday: This book wasn't just seven years of work. It was totally different kind of work for you, right? You had to write it by hand. You had to do some dictating. You had to also re-imagine how you write because of the mobility stuff, right? Yeah. You know, Ryan, I can't even begin to explain the madness of what it was like, because it won't even make sense to you or other people. But I would write in a notebook, right, my notes, and then I would write a story or a first draft of a story in the notebook. And then I'd have to go take a second notebook and rewrite the first story looking at it like this word by word and editing it like that, right?

3:07And then go back to the first notebook and edit the second version into a third version looking at it word by word by word by word literally copying it and changing things and then doing that a fourth time in the next notebook and post-it stamp things to edit on a paragraph because i didn't want to have to rewrite the whole thing again it was insane and i could go back and i couldn't figure out where things were located they were in notebooks i couldn't find them it was such a mess and i'd struggle through then finally i'd figure it out and then I would get to something where it was like something that a human being could read and it would make sense because my first drafts were terrible.

3:47I would dictate it into the computer, still wasn't good. I would print it out and then by hand I would edit on the paper and then I would edit on a second piece of paper going back and then finally it was done and then I would dictate it into the computer and then I would have to edit it with one hand, you know?

4:08Ryan Holiday: And you were planning, I remember you saying you were going to go visit all these places, because you talk about the historical sublime and the place of it, and you didn't get to do some of that, right? You had to explore them in other ways. Well, the original concept of the book 20 years ago, so after the strategies of war, I had actually, my agent, I were actually going to be doing the sublime, and I had researchers lining things up, and then I got derailed by the 50 Cent Project, and things just kind of spiraled after that, Yeah. I was going to travel the Amazon. I was going to visit chimpanzees in the wilds of Africa.

4:41I was going to swim with dolphins. I was going to cross Tierra del Fuego. And I would have all these sublime moments and I would write about them. What a great book that would be. And here I couldn't walk out my front door three feet, right? So how am I going to write a book on the sublime? time. Well, I had to like just calm everything down and I had to, because I had gone through a near-death experience. It wasn't the classical near-death experience with visions and all these things, but I came very close to dying. And I felt it deeply in my body. And that first moment of coming back to life was ecstatic.

5:21I was, Ana can tell you, I was laughing at everything. The nurses in the hospital thought something was wrong with me. Everything was funny. Everything was magical. I looked out the windows. Oh my God. I had to get that back. I had to struggle. I had to feel the sublime just in looking at glass in a window and going, what is glass? What is a window? A window is a strange thing. It's like, it's a metaphor for something. What is a door? What is my cat doing here? What are these insects crawling along the ground? What is a computer? Why is it so weird? I had to think about everything in this lens of the sublime because I was so weak.

6:00I couldn't go out and have an experience. I couldn't hike. I couldn't swim. I couldn't do anything. You have no idea how frustrating that was. Like looking through the opposite side of his telescope, I had to see everything in detail and see what was exciting and sublime about everything in my office or later in my backyard when I was well enough to even go into my backyard. So it was, um, it was when I finally finished the book, I couldn't believe that I had made it. I just literally couldn't believe I had made it. I was like those men who had run the 26 miles to Athens, you know, it was just insane.

6:42It was insane that I actually made it to the finishing line.

6:45Ryan Holiday: Well, it's, it's beautiful. And the, every bit of that struggle and effort is it's in here and you can feel it and uh everyone should read it you know uh they were asking me about like what i think the sublime is is you know that i have many ways of kind of explaining it to the layman because people will say i had a sublime breakfast or you know but that music was sublime you know the word is overused yes so i have a different way of looking at it, one of the ways is that we walk around and we're kind of asleep. We were talking about this earlier. We don't notice anything. We take everything for granted.

7:26We have the same little circle of thoughts going round and round in our head, our grievances, our envy, our comparing what other people have. And we're not awake. And so outside that interior bubble is this world that is strange, that is weird, that has these other qualities that are not what you think they are, right? And so the sublime is all around you, and it's just a matter of waking up to it and getting out of the trance that you're in. You, the reader, you people out there, you're in a trance. You're like sleepwalking. I walked in the city streets. Half the people are like this walking down the street.

8:08They're out in hiking Griffith Park. they're like this with their earphones that's the walk of a you're a sleepwalker you're not alive you're not looking you're not noticing you have to wake up you have to throw your phone away so the sublime is a process of just simply waking up to ordinary reality it's all around you and so the book is structured around these 12 kind of windows to the sublime or i call them doors thresholds, because the word sublime means up to the threshold. It's up to the threshold of a door, which was literally the door of death. Sublimin, limin meaning the liminal, the threshold.

8:47You're going up to the threshold of this experience of this other world outside of your daily reality, like animals, like childhood, like paganism, like history, like death, like the daemon. I don't know if we ever get a chance to talk about the daemon. and you're peering through that and you're seeing this other reality that's beyond the sleep that you're in right now, the trance that you're in.

9:10Ryan Holiday: I had a weird experience the other day that I feel like is a sublime experience. Okay, tell me about it. And I'd be curious where you think it fits in to what you've been talking about. So I was in Minneapolis and I just landed, I was gonna do a talk that night and I was walking by the Guthrie Theater there, right on the water. Yeah. And there was this restaurant and it was an indigenous restaurant run by this very well-known chef. And so I was like, oh, that sounds good. I'll go there. I had to eat. And so I walk in, I'm looking at the menu and it's delicious. I ordered a bison bone marrow. It brought this huge, but I was reading because I brought a book with me.

9:47Bison bone marrow soup?

9:48Ryan Holiday: No, no. Like just chunks of bison bone, like cut open and you know, you scoop it with a spoon and you could put it on these like tortillas. It was incredible. So the food was just amazing. But I was reading Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Yeah, that's a great book. And it was this sort of flood of all these things because the book opens in Rome and we'd just gotten back from Rome. And then, you know, it's talking about the Mississippi. It's talking about Native Americans. It's talking about, you know, this sort of frontier. And I just like you're reading this book that was written like, you know, well over 100 years ago.

10:24Ryan Holiday: About a thing 100 years before that. Yeah. the food and the music and the moment all sort of like do you ever have an experience where you're reading something and you're just kind of just like the transcendent beauty and all the context it just like overwhelms you and i was just like what is happening it was like a it was like a drug or something yeah i mean i've i've had moments like that before um i remember i was in Moscow for a book tour, they had like stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from us because we never got paid royalties. So their idea of a book tour was to kind of bribe me.

11:03So they did all these incredible things for me and they took me to a Siberian sauna. And this guy is like beating me with palm leaves and dumping me in cold water tubs. They were literally casks. Yeah. And he was dumping me in cold water and then beating me with them and putting me in a hot room, you know, a sauna and sweating. I was like, I was like high as a kite. Yeah. And then they took me upstairs to a Siberian restaurant, like your indigenous restaurant where you're eating like raw reindeer meat, you know, and it was all sort of organized to make you feel like you were in Siberia. It had the sounds of the Siberia in the restaurant.

11:45And I had just been reading that story of Der Su 'usala. You know that story? I talk about it in the sublime of this trapper, this indigenous trapper in Siberia. He meets this Russian explorer and they have this relationship in the Russian explorer. Kurosawa did an amazing movie about this book, but he realizes that this indigenous hunter is absolute genius when it comes to the environment. He knows everything. So the confluence of feeling incredibly high from this sauna, this weird Siberian restaurant, this food, and this book that I had been reading, it all seemed to come together like it was fate or something.

12:31I ended up using it in the Sublime book because I remembered it so well.

12:35Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I think music can get you to a sublime place. I don't want to say easily, but there's something I think very powerful and primal about music. Like a few notes can touch you in a very deep place musically. but I feel as a writer but also as someone who loves literature that it's harder to do with literature like the sheer skill and mastery it takes to transport someone in sentences or pages especially to a thing that you don't know anything about that's why I think I was so struck by Death Comes for the Archbishop like it should be a boring book like nothing happens like this guy I read it when I was in my 20s I hardly remember but I remember It's just about a priest being assigned to the Southwest.

13:22Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And it's not like a Cormac McCarthy novel where it's just like one disturbing, violent encounter after another. It's kind of cerebral and slow and spiritual. And just when you read writing that so perfectly nails whatever it's communicating and you get lost and immersed in it, it's just it's a magical thing. Yeah. I mean, I'm in this process where I'm rereading books that had a very big influence on me in my 20s. I don't know really why. I was rereading a novel by Dostoevsky, he's probably my favorite novelist. And it's about these nihilists in Russia who end up turning into like what would turn into the Russian Revolution.

14:07And it so perfectly captures the moment. so I have this thing in in the sublime book is a word that kept coming to me and I was going to use it in the book but I never did and the word was just there and I felt like I would read a book and I was there I would read about history and I was there I was actually experiencing what people were experiencing or biography and I was there or a great novel I'm inside it I'm there And so it's a confluence of a great writer, but it's also your spirit that you have to bring into it. And you have to, I talked about that in one of my chapters about how you approach literature.

14:48I had a story in there from Franz Kafka, a very unknown story called The Burrow, where it's just from the point of view of a mole in a burrow. Yeah. And his anxiety, and you're reading it, and like, mole. By the end of the story, 80 pages long, you feel like you are the mole in this burrow. It's so intense. Like he's about, there's some beast trying to get into his burrow that he's made so comfortable. You feel like you've become this mole that's so afraid of everything, like how we're all so fearful and anxious in our little spaces. and it's his masterful writing, but you have to like get over the sense of this is ridiculous.

15:31I am not a mole. You have to just, your spirit has to enter into the, what this person, the magic that this person is weaving. So you were able with Willa Cather to kind of enter into that world. And that's what made this a sublime moment. A reader who's just reading it and just seeing facts. And it's about New Mexico. It has nothing to do with my life. Oh my God, it's not relevant. because so many people, they read books, they see films, and it all has to be a narcissistic reflection of their own tastes and desires. Right. What is a priest dying in 1830? It makes it have to do with my life here now with all of my problems in social media.

16:08You got to get out of your little petty world and enter into other worlds. And that's what makes a literature or anything sublime.

16:14Ryan Holiday: Isn't that the whole point of reading too? It's like reading is a form of magic. It's time travel. It allows you to sort of spirit hop into different lives, into different moments, into places you would never actually want to go. And I mean, the founding of Stoicism is built around this prophecy that Zeno gets from the Oracle at Delphi, who says that the good life is having conversations with the dead. And that's what reading is, that you can embody a priest in New Mexico in the 1830s, or you can embody a mole, or you can embody, you know, great historical writing and great fiction allow you to transport yourself to a different time and place.

16:55Ryan Holiday: Well, most definitely. I mean, I just remember thinking about myself and my childhood. You know, I grew up in Los Angeles in kind of a boring neighborhood, you know, what is now Brentwood. And I felt very alienated. Like, it wasn't comfortable to me. It wasn't the world that I felt that, you know, I was a part of. You know, and I had to go to like Hebrew school and learn Hebrew and had nothing to do with my life. And I discovered books and the books just took me into these other worlds. Right. And I became addicted. And I'm talking about eight years old, you know. Yeah. And I started ordering like hundreds of these tiny little paperback books that you could get for like a nickel.

17:38Right. It drove my parents crazy. And I just read and read and read and entered all of these worlds and it saved my life. I wouldn't be here talking to you, Ryan Holiday, if I hadn't gone through that. It enriched, it made me who I am, being able to transport myself out of this narrow little world that I grew up in into something vast. Human history for 50 ,000 years, however, when you want to start it, is this insane story. It's the most amazing, incredible story. Our history, our past, our ancestry. There are millions of these incredible stories out there. And even the most boring ones are interesting because it's the past.

18:15It's people who were different from us. And you have all of this opportunity as a human being. You only have 70, 80 years to live, perhaps. You should be entering all of these worlds because it just makes you human, I believe.

18:30Ryan Holiday: Yeah, we have a poem on the window of the bookstore from Marguerite Ingle, and she says, books are door-shaped. Books are door-shaped? Yeah, this is a door. It's like a portal. A book is a portal into another time and place. Yeah. And what a minuscule percentage of the population walks through those doors. And then there is something special, as you said, about walking through the door multiple times, like how we don't step in the same river twice. Like when you come back to a book and you see the things that struck you before or that are striking you for a new time that you just couldn't have appreciated the first time.

19:07I'll give you an example. I read a book researching for this one about the Aztecs and it was called Aztec Philosophy. And it was about 800 pages thick. And a little bit like the Willa Cather book, there were so many details. It was on the surface quite boring. Yeah. Because he goes into all the little details of how they thought and how they thought in terms of shapes and patterns. And suddenly I start getting it and it's absolutely fascinating. But the point I'm trying to make is it's so completely different from Western thinking, right? Like for the Aztecs, the sun was the center of their universe, right?

19:49And they believed that the sun died and then was born again, so that they were now living in the period of the fifth sun. And so you get caught up into this world that is so alien from your own. And yet it's not that alien because they're human, right? And you can still kind of relate to it. And so I'm absorbing all this information. And I started thinking, I started going out in the world and looking at the sun differently. I'm starting to see kind of the patterns. So my point is, we're so locked into this 21st century way of thinking. It's like a prison. Yeah. And it's getting narrower and narrower and narrower through social media.

20:29This is how you're supposed to think this is what reality is. And books take you out of that little narrow prison that we all live in in the present moment. And they expose you to different ways of thinking, different ways of relating. And it just enriches you and it opens your mind up to all these different...

20:44Ryan Holiday: Have you read Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Covino? No. He wrote these series of essays, like one on each sense, one on sight, one on smell. I remember that, yeah. And one is about, he's touring these like Aztec sites in Mexico or South America or something. And he's basically imagining what it's like to be sacrificed on a pagan altar. Oh, fantastic. And how the person isn't like afraid, but like empowered, like they're enjoying it. And then he's comparing it to like, he has this kind of theory that like, maybe that's why the food was so spicy was because like they were eating the human flesh and they needed to come up with ways to like make it not taste terrible.

21:27Ryan Holiday: And then so, you know, you have Mexican food six months later and some passage from this book flashes in your mind and it changes the experience. And then he has this other essay where it's like, what it's like to be sitting on a throne, like a semi-modern throne of a of an authoritarian ruler who's hearing this tapping from a dungeon below kind of like a sort of Damocles sounds like an amazing book it's incredible and and it's just like I would never have been able to empathize with what it's like to be Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un or you know some king or even Nero and and you're just like how did he do this this is magic.

22:11Ryan Holiday: This is a superpower. And you're in that world. And even if just a tiny bit of that residue stays with you, it makes the rest of your life less ordinary. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's a fantastic book. I have to get a copy. I wish you had told me that when I was researching this. I read it two months ago. I read it two months ago. But then probably the reason it struck me is because I had read your book not long before that. Like that's what's so powerful about reading is it's not just the book, but it's how the books stack up and in what order you read them. And had I done them in the other order, maybe I would have.

22:51Ryan Holiday: Sometimes I read, especially Samantha just recommended this book to me. And I was like, I'm actually having trouble with it. So many of the sentences are good. I have to stop. Like I can't just read this mindlessly. It's called the Emerald Mile. And it's about these people who are trying to set the record rafting through the Grand Canyon at the fastest speed that it's ever done. And again, there's these passages where he's just sort of waxing philosophically on like how the Grand Canyon was formed. And you would like this because it connected, I thought, of your book to Coronado's expedition. I think it's Coronado.

23:28Ryan Holiday: One of the Spanish conquistadors sees the Grand Canyon and they know that they see it and they basically write nothing of it. He writes about like we discovered jackrabbits and all these sort of banal observations. And then they say nothing about the Grand Canyon. Why? The author's theory was that they literally just could not comprehend it. Like imagine it's the 1500s. You can't comprehend something being millions of years old. They don't even have like the perspective to understand how big it is. And basically it just goes right over their head. Or maybe they were just so overwhelmed they couldn't even begin to describe it or they wanted to keep it a secret.

24:07I don't know.

24:08Ryan Holiday: It goes to your point, which is that you can lead a horse to a sublime experience, but you can't make them drink it in. Right. Well, you know, the point of my book is you're absolutely surrounded by it. You're just drenched in it just to think about who we are in the space of the cosmos, how life evolved, how humans evolved, how the fact that we're conscious. You could take a hundred points that we take for granted that we never think about, right? And they're just mind-blowing. Like, just the fact that we exist, the fact that our bodies repair themselves, they do these things automatically that we never have to think about.

24:43And all the millions of, hundreds of millions of years that went into this evolution, you should be thinking about this all the time. It should make your eyes wide and you should never feel depressed, right? Right. Nabokov said, because he's one of my primary authors for this book, is when he discovered butterflies when he was eight years old and he became obsessed with butterflies and he became a butterfly hunter, became a lepidopter, a scientist studying butterflies. He saw his first butterfly and its wings were kind of like flickering like that. He got so excited. And then he read about how they changed from caterpillars.

25:18And he said, how can anybody ever feel depressed or upset or lonely when there are these creatures all around us? And nobody led a harder life than him, you know, exiled from Russia, his father assassinated, his brother killed in a concentration camp, and yet he kept returning to butterflies. We're literally surrounded by everything that's so immense and vast and awesome. And magic. And like magical. And magical. Just magical and miraculous. Yeah. That we should never feel upset or lonely about it because it's insane. So you have to ask yourself why, and I do that in the introduction, why aren't we like that?

25:59Why aren't we sensitive to this history, to this? I think it's the greatest story ever told about where we came from and where we are right now.

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27:37Ryan Holiday: I just got a new jacket from them. Samantha got one too, like sort of a puffer down jacket. I've been wearing it because we've been traveling a lot. I was over in London, even in Australia, we took the jackets because it was getting spring there but it was still cold on a couple of days and uh it's been great goes right in the suitcase easy to fold up and uh you know ski season being here you can gear up now the way locals do go to stio.com slash stoic for 20 off your order that's stio.com slash stoic stio.com slash stoic designed and tested in Jackson Hole. Yeah, I think it was maybe Aristotle who said both poets and philosophers are engaged in the same task, which is that they are concerned with wonder.

28:28Ryan Holiday: Like, why is this here? What does it mean? How did it come to be? You know, these are questions that if you just scratch just slightly beneath the surface it's sort of awe inspiring or awesome in the in the sort of literal sense like you're just like wow well i i was sort of uh posting on social media as i was doing the book about the sublime and cosmic sublime or something and then this you know a guy a critic or whomever writes and says something but things are just are the way they are they're not great or they're not awesome. They're just facts, you know? And that's what science is. And what's, you know, things just happen the way, because I was saying things didn't have to happen this way.

29:13The universe could have been much different. He goes, no, they're just the way it is. That's how it happened. It proves that by the fact things exist, that's how they had to be. And there's no sense of wonder. There's no sense, you know, you're just adding your own human emotion to that. And then all I did was I took a quote from Einstein and just sent him the quote from Einstein. What did Einstein say? I use the quote in the book about how if you don't feel a sense of wonder and awe about the universe that you're studying, you're as good as dead. Right? Yeah. So a scientist studying these things doesn't see them as facts.

29:47He sees them as this insane story. Right? He can't even begin to comprehend these mysterious forces that surround us.

29:55Ryan Holiday: And it's not just the questions of like existence and science, but I think this is the historical sublime as well, which you can so easily lose track of. And I think there's certain theories out there that sort of mute this, unfortunately. But like David McCullough talked about the great biographer said, like, the one thing you can never lose sight of as a historian is that it could have happened a different way. And to the people in that moment, they didn't know which way it was going to go. Nobody knew how it was going to go. And so when you realize that these wars you're reading about from a thousand years ago to how they navigated the Great Depression or the market crash to anything you're studying, that it was touch and go at every moment and that humans had agency and it could have gone differently.

30:42Ryan Holiday: You just all of a sudden you're just you go from these are the facts to know the facts could have been moved around an infinite number of ways. Right now I'm going so deep into what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. And just you just take it in a seemingly like a consequential event, but not an event that everyone thinks of as like the most important moment in world history. and you just think about all these individuals making all these choices and what influenced this person and what they were thinking about and what influenced this person, everything that led up to it. It's like the Big Bang.

31:24Ryan Holiday: It's just a series of random things throwing, but just one detail in one different way, one human being asserting agency in a different way. And you and I might not be here. Like the whole scope of humanity could have gone differently. If you're feeling bummed out or bored or cynical, you just have to contemplate something like that for a few minutes. And all of a sudden, like everything is up for grabs. So this is like the what if kind of books about history. And the one that always grabs me is the Mongols are advancing. They advance through Russia. They advance through the Middle East. they're now in Vienna.

32:07They've come all the way into Hungary, right? And they're advancing like crazy, like fire. They're crushing all these European armies. They're on the doorstep of entering Vienna itself in, I don't know, the 13th century. I'm not sure what the exact date is, right? And they're going to sweep through Vienna and then the whole doorway up to throughout France and then probably to England. And then I think it's Genghis Khan dies in that moment. And they all have to return for his funeral. And so the invasion is stopped, right? Yeah. But if he had died two weeks later, they would have pushed through Vienna.

32:43And who knows, all of European history would have been completely rewritten. Nothing would be the same. Nothing would, everything would have changed. The Mongols would have conquered Europe easily, right? What would history be, you know? And there are a thousand little points like that as well, you know? So...

32:59Ryan Holiday: We went to Thermopylae last summer. Oh, wow. Oh, what does it look like? What is it? Well, you talk about certain geological time. It's miles from the ocean now. You think of 2 ,500 years of river sediment, like the shoreline has moved. How far away? It's like two miles from the ocean, several miles from the ocean. And what was it before? It was the oceans on one side and then the passes on the other. That's how they're pushing them into the sea. And so, you know, you're at this place, like the Genghis Khan story you're telling is like a freak historical moment. Like his health, like, you know, he'd been born with a better heart or whatever he died with.

33:40Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's one thing. But, you know, you go to Thermopylae and you're like, okay, you can bathe in the hot springs that they bathed, that the Spartans bathed in the night before the battle. Like the reason it's called the hot gates is that there is a hot spring there and it's just there by the side of the road. And you walk in and you go in this water and you're bathing yourself. And then you go to the site of the battle, which is this tiny little marker, you know, it's nothing. And you're like, if one guy had taken a bribe, you know, if like King Leonidas had taken a bribe 2 ,500 years ago.

34:17Ryan Holiday: Christians would have overrun Greece. All of Greece culture would have changed. And so, you know, the great man of history theory is this thing that sort of academics sneer at. And yet, if you actually study history, it does. It comes down to the choices, good and bad, of a handful of individuals. And then, of course, obviously, the cumulative choices of lots of other individuals. But you're just standing there and you're like, everything leading up until this moment shifted on one decision that one person made or a heroic series of actions by a few thousand Greek soldiers who decided like this was the place.

34:54Ryan Holiday: This is where all the values and myths and stories of our culture, which they didn't always live up to. Sparta is this brutal slave owning culture that, you know, is nothing. They're obsessed with freedom as they oppress these little people who do all their work for them. But like in this moment, they decided to live up to everything that they said they believed in. And all of civilization after that hinges on this moment. And you can just go and stand there. And how can you not be overwhelmed by that experience? You can see the same thing about marathon, can't you? Of course. You know, these soldiers running in their armor for 26 miles and, you know, they just barely make it at the right moment.

35:36Ryan Holiday: I just got goosebumps thinking about that. Not just because of that story, but because this is the other part of, I think, the historical sublime. is like you think about how much historians or writers sweated and worked to get the arrangement of exactly what they said right. And yeah, did I tell you I ran the original marathon? At marathon? Last summer I ran from marathon to Athens. And you start in marathon and it's just a little line painted down the center of the road and you can run it all the way. But it's actually about 25 miles. Is it paved or is it dirt? Some of it's paved. You go under freeway underpasses.

36:21Ryan Holiday: It's just a random trail. But the most moving part of the original marathon, because the actual distance from Marathon to Athens is about 25 miles. And the 26th mile is right almost at the beginning. you run around the funeral mound of the Athenian soldiers who died at Marathon. Oh, wow. Which is not typically how the Athenians - This is at the end? At the beginning. At the beginning. Which is not typically how the Greeks buried their dead, but they left them there in this mound. And you do a one mile sort of circle around these people for whom they made this ultimate sacrifice. And then as you run the additional 25 miles, you're exactly on the course of the soldiers who made their way back in their full kit.

37:13Ryan Holiday: But all I could think about was that description that you wrote in, it's the 48 Laws you tell the story, right? Or is it - It might be Strategies of War. But you so beautifully wrote about it. And I remember reading it at 19 or 20 years old and not knowing that history could be written that way. And to zoom in on that one thing, that one lesson of like, no, no, no, you thought you were done and now you have to run a marathon to fight one more time. In your armor. In your armor. Did you run with your armor? I did not. I did not. I mean, and so this experience that you're having that is already - And they're probably barefoot or something or - Yeah.

37:54Ryan Holiday: But I mean, you're already like endorphins and hormones are going crazy as you're running a marathon, as I was, but as I'm imagining somebody else doing it in the context that they're doing it. And it's just this profound emotional experience. What I'm trying to, what I talk about in the historical splime in that chapter is, you know, don't think of yourself as a tourist. You go to Paris, you go to Rome, you go to London, and you just kind of look at things from a distance and you go, oh, there's Notre Dame, how pretty, you know, you take pictures on your cell phone. You're not a tourist, you're a time traveler.

38:30And so you're entering spaces. If you don't do that, what's the point? It's just another selfie on your smartphone, right? So to do that, you have to know a little bit about the history, right? But knowing just about the history isn't enough because it's just facts. Oh, that's Notre Dame. This is when it was built and how long it took and what was there before. you read the history and you know all the things going on and then you bring your imagination to it and things come to life and you start feeling the ghosts that are there and then you're in a city like Paris and there are ghosts everywhere if you know the history of Paris and all the layers and sediments of things that have happened the history comes alive to you right and you feel it inside and we are historical creatures we would not be here if it wasn't for billions of people that created language, that built the world that we live in.

39:25If you are disconnected from the past of humans, you're not really a human being. It's who we are. We're historical creatures. And history isn't a bunch of dead facts from dead people. It's something that's alive inside of us right now. We're living and breathing the past. Just the fact that we speak a language that was created, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, patterns our thinking. We live in the past. And if you don't know that, if you're not drenched in something is, I think, it gives you perspective on the present moment. You think everything is new? Nothing is new. Everything has happened before.

40:02History goes in cycles. There is nothing new. Social media is new? No. People were gossiping for hundreds of years about what other people are doing. nothing is new so why get so excited and hysterical about what's happening in the world today it's you know it gives you this incredible perspective to cut yourself off from all of

40:20Ryan Holiday: the context in the history and everything that led up to the moment that you're in is to like choose to live an ordinary experience rather than an extraordinary experience yeah yeah and to even think of like all the invent you're washing the dishes and you're not thinking of like, you know, this goes back to the Romans and their aqueducts, how they would deliver water and, you know, like all the technology and innovations and, you know, experiences that led up to the thing that you are doing and then taking completely for granted is to just choose to like, you could choose a poetic life or an unpoetic life.

40:58Ryan Holiday: And why, why would you choose to not live a poetic, beautiful existence? Well, that's one of my favorite passages in meditations of Marcus Aurelius when he talks about wine and where it comes from and the feet that were like, I don't know if I'm quoting it correctly. I think he says that it's rotten grapes and he talks about how the purple in his cape was made from shellfish blood, which is, by the way, a fascinating process. It is a whole story by itself, yeah. And that's another thing we take for granted. We live in this capitalistic society that is able to bring exotic minerals and spices and ingredients for it you're the this thing you are touching and this and it's all the product of this incomprehensibly large supply chain and logistics and i was researching the story of sappho that i use in the book um you know she was from on the island of lesbos and what really weird she lived like a hundred years after homer so that's kind of kind of crazy on an island right near where he lived.

42:04But she was obsessed with the color purple. And then you start researching that and you realize that very few people had anything purple because it was so rare and so difficult to find. There are purple flowers, but they're not like everywhere. So the color purple was really strange to see it. And it was this dye that came from from shellfish right yeah and it was so difficult and so rare that only royalty could afford that's why we associate the color purple with like royal robes right and she was obsessed with that color and you makes me think must have been so rare to actually see a fabric dyed purple and how exciting

42:45Ryan Holiday: that would be you know yeah and you know xeno was a a dealer of tyrian purple that's what he the founder of stoicism was a purple dye merchant. Oh, really? Yeah. He's a merchant in the Mediterranean. He suffers a shipwreck. He loses everything. And that's when he goes on to found stoicism. But just it was like the rarest of rare commodities. Yeah, yeah. And just to have the emperor of Rome who could ordinarily take this for granted, like they say, like, to the queen, the world smells like fresh paint, you know because everyone's cleaning and redoing every room before they get into it like mark surrealist could have taken the color purple completely for granted right and instead he's going like where did this come from is this natural and he's thinking about that yeah and i do think some of the most beautiful passages in meditations are the poetry of marcus surrealist like he talks about the stalks of grain bending under their own weight like looking at it and And you're just like, oh, yeah, I did.

43:47Ryan Holiday: That is beautiful. He talks about olives, you know, sagging a branch until it falls down. I have to reread my meditation, so I don't remember this. Yeah, it's like these are like it's just he's seeing the ordinary in an extraordinary way instead of what I think would have been so tempting for someone with such power and access, which is chasing more and more extreme pleasures. Like that's, I think what happens to, you know, like a Tiberius is like the ordinary pleasures get so routine that he has to get weirder and weirder and weirder. So why is there a Tiberius and why is there a Marcus Aurelius?

44:26Ryan Holiday: Well, I mean, one argument would be like philosophy is the dividing line between sort of becoming a hedonist and being a person of the mind. But like Immanuel Kant wasn't thinking like this, nor was probably Hegel. I don't know. Or some other. It's not inherited in Western philosophy. But yeah, and I do think that is one of the tragedies for some of the philosophers, which is they kind of think themselves out of the beauty of the world. They grow increasingly depressed and cynical. And I mean, this is what happens to John Stuart Mill early in his life is that he gets sort of so caught up in his own mind that he has like a nervous breakdown.

45:08Ryan Holiday: And it's not until he comes out of it and he falls in love with poetry and nature and then later his wife that he becomes a more well-rounded, balanced human being. Well, I just went for a long run here in Perth, Australia, and it was hot, let me tell you. And I noticed when I'm not hydrated, it affects everything, energy, focus, speeds when I'm running, my writing ability. I'm glad I brought some instant hydration with me. The premium electrolyte drink designed to support hydration, energy, recovery, focus, and overall performance without sugar or unnecessary additives. Over 70 % of Americans are chronically dehydrated, even though they're drinking tons of water.

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47:16Ryan Holiday: And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast terms and conditions apply. If you're hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. You know, we live in a world that's scientific where we keep discovering these new amazing things. You know, there was just an article in the Times the other day about black holes and how they were formed in the early part of the universe.

47:57Then you scratch your head and you go one billion years after the Big Bang. A billion years is a long time, but there was an early universe. What's the early universe? You know, like the universe was created. What was there before the universe? Anyway, scientists uncovering these things that should just be, you just can't fathom. They're so insane. They're so amazing. You sent me the one about recordings from the dinosaurs. They had made recordings of the Cretaceous period of what insects sounded like 300 million years ago, right?

48:30Ryan Holiday: That's time travel. You can listen to what it would have sounded like, even if it's not actually right. It's close to being right. And it's a new layer of comprehension of a thing that was previously incomprehensible. I mean, I did that chapter on the dinosaurs where I tried to recreate the last day of the dinosaurs, right? And in researching it, I got this feeling like this was this beautiful world. It was kind of like it was in Montana, because I wrote about the Tyrannosaurus rex in Montana, where they were all killed. It's this beautiful world. It's not like how Montana looks now, because it was tropical.

49:12And there were all these hundreds of rivers bisecting these valleys, and all of these strange plants that no longer exist, and these trees that no longer exist. And insects, some of them are familiar, but some of them are different with pterodactyls flying around. It was actually there. It was there. It was a world. It was a universe. And now it's completely gone. But I was able to kind of get, by going into things like this, sounds of what they sounded like, because I actually tried to get recordings of what the Mausaurus, what they actually sounded like. And you could hear that. You can actually, through these details, feel what this world must have been like with the dinosaurs.

49:50But my point is, science is immersing us in these facts that you can't even begin to fathom. And you have to take one step and you have to be overwhelmed by it. You have to open yourself up emotionally, your senses. So it's not just science, it's like a part of you. It's a part of your experience. You're experiencing life through these insane facts. But if they just remain facts about the universe, about black holes. It doesn't have that effect. So you use the word poetry and that's what it is. It's a mix. The sublime is a mix of poetry and science. Because if it's just pure poetry, it's just kind of like just fantasy.

50:28But the fact that our world is so insanely poetic is what excited me and why I wrote this book.

50:35Ryan Holiday: Do you know about those human footprints in White Sands, New Mexico? It's like the oldest evidence we have of humans in North America. It's a set of probably female footprints, quite a decent span of them. And then there's some children footprints, but they're intermittent. And so just from these sets of holes in the ground, they're able to go like, okay, this is a mother walking with her child. And then the kid's like, pick me up, pick me up. And then they have to pick them up and then they have to put them down because they disappear for a while and and you know take them pick them up and you're just like that was me and my walk with my three-year-old yeah and in 20 000 years nothing has changed except you know crisscrossing the footprints yeah are giant sloth footprints and mastodon footprints you actually see this yeah it's it's one of the most incredible discoveries in north america you can't like walk there though because you're going to...

51:34Ryan Holiday: No, no, no. There's pictures of it. Oh. I think you can see some of them, but you can't walk in all of them. But just like what this handful, like this little bit of information, just the immense story that it's telling you and how different it was and then how exactly the same it was. Yeah, yeah. And then when I'm reading this, I'm sort of blown away by it, but I connect it with it because there's a state park maybe two hours from here called Dinosaur State Park. Totally about that. Yeah, and you can stand in these dinosaur footprints. Like you wait out on this river and you're just standing in them.

52:07Ryan Holiday: And you're just like, in that instance. They let you stand in them? Mm-hmm. Like a hundred million years disappears. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you just think about the immensity of that and then it all collapsing in that instant. It's just, it's magic. Well, you know, sometimes you can get kind of depressed about humanity, particularly now. Sure. You know, with AI and how we're probably going to destroy ourselves in so many years or whatever. But there is a story to be told about how sublime the human mind is and what we could be if we could just turn things around a little bit. But the fact that we're able to explore the universe and know through kind of like these footprints what black holes were.

52:49We can figure out what the Big Bang was, when it was. We can still hear sounds from the Big Bang. They can record things in outer space. That we've been able to, like from Stephen Jay Gould's book about the Cambrian explosion 600 million years ago in the oceans and how they've been able to recreate through the smallest little fossils in Canada, what life was like back in the oceans, multicellular organs, the first multicellular organs. we are an incredible species what we have done we are absolutely our conscience is absolutely miraculous what we can accomplish when we think like this and we go through these processes and we analyze and then we recreate worlds through footprints or whatever yeah we should be in awe of ourselves and what the human brain is so instead of celebrating machines and technology which is the new religion of people, I'm afraid, we should be celebrating the human brain that creates these things.

53:50It would shift our whole focus around if we started feeling a sense of wonder about who we are and not about these things that other people are creating for us, being active with our minds instead of passively consuming things.

54:03Ryan Holiday: That's to me kind of a meta level of sublime that you can get to when you contemplate, yeah how much work went into the science understanding and communicating and um capturing this small scientific fact we have or i think about like i know how long did you work on law of the sublime seven years so when you're reading the pages can you zoom out for a second and just think seven years of human labor on this thing or you think of darwin you know spending a decade trying to figure out these barnacles to add just a small layer on the theory. Like when I read Robert Caro's works and I think about him as typewriter, I think about him living in the hill country, just the sheer human labor, the cumulative human labor to get what to me is reading as 10 minutes on like this little section, how many leads he had to chase down and people he had to talk to.

55:03Ryan Holiday: Just the majesty of that I'm appreciating on top of the historical sublime of being inside Lyndon Johnson. Yeah, yeah. What I think of is like the internet. So when I wrote about the internet as being this kind of infinite space, and I think we can all remember if we're old enough, the early 2000s where there was this sense of excitement about the internet. And it was this vast, it was like the far west, it was a new frontier. I could communicate instantly with somebody in China far on the other side of the earth. And we could connect. It was this open realm. It was kind of beautiful. It had a sense of freedom.

55:42And it was infinite. This is infinite space. It was like the human brain, a global human brain. And look what it has become, right? If we could have just kept close, if we could just have kept, you know, adhere to that original concept and remain true to it, it would have been something else. But it degraded into this other thing. And so I want us to get back to a sense of the human scale of things and to actually look at things as they are as opposed to how the dark side changes everything.

56:17Ryan Holiday: My favorite part of the book was the stuff on the pagan sublime. The woman going to the temple, being inducted into the mysteries. Yeah, yeah. And just because I think like even watching this new movie, this new version of the Odyssey, the main gripe I would have with Christopher Nolan. There are a few. No, is that like Odysseus's palace looks old and Troy looks old. It looks like a Greek ruin, which it wasn't to them. They were new. It was like when you would pass the port of Piraeus, you would be blinded by the light at a certain hour of day. You would be blinded by the sun hitting the giant gold statue of Athena miles away.

57:03Ryan Holiday: And you just think like it was the brightest, shiniest, most advanced technological society that you could have ever imagined. And to us, it's ruins. To us, it's old. And the copper is green. And the temple has got chunks out of it. But that's not what it was to them. It was power and spirit. And it was all these, it was a different thing. Well, I'm not going to put myself on the level of Robert Caro. Don't get me wrong. But to do that one story on the Eleusinian mysteries, because that's what you're referring to, You have no idea the amount of research I went through to recreate that one story of 12 pages or whatever.

57:46So I first had to look at maps of ancient Athens to figure out what neighborhood they came from and what the neighborhood was like. I read books about what women's life was like in ancient Athens and the drudgery and how most of them died in their early 40s and what their life was like. I had to read about the gate that people stood before, before they were able to enter into what it looked like. Then I had to go through Google Maps and then through other things and the route that they took on the road to get to Eleusis and what that looked like and the flowers and the different shrines on all the sides.

58:22There were shrines to all these different gods everywhere that they walked. It was like walking through Greek mythology for these people, right? And everything, as you say, was new. Athens wasn't like this decaying city. It was this beautiful, beautiful, you know, Pericles. It's the center of the world. Yeah. And then just all the little details of what the torches look like, what the costumes look like, what they wore, with the men who came out of the river to, like, make fun of the people there. the myrtle, the crowns, and the smells, and the frogs. I just had to get every tiny little detail, it's like a mosaic.

58:59Some of the details never made it in. And then finally, you get into the temple where they're going to participate in the mysteries, and nobody knows what happened. That's why it's called a mystery, right? And Marcus Aurelius was initiated, and so many other greats were there. Nobody whispered a single word of whatever happened, because if you did, you'd be killed. That was part of the mysteries. Anybody who revealed the mystery would be killed. But I had to like, there were like the footprints in the sand. We had certain things. We know that they brought these goblets together to drink this certain kind of drink.

59:35And people have speculated that there were drugs inside of these drinks. Anyway, I had to recreate, and I'm sure I missed some of these things. But all of the details, to me, suddenly, I felt as I was writing it, like I was taking that journey and I was entering into that world. I can't even explain what that feels like, where the Greek gods, I tried to explain to the modern audience, are what you think they are. They're not these cliches. They're not these cartoons of people bickering in the skies and having all these petty... They're like these forces of nature that are inside of you. They're invading you.

1:00:12And so when you felt like love for someone, you were feeling Aphrodite passing through you. When you felt this closeness to nature or something, just something like Persephone was actually possessing you. And this closeness to the forces of nature and how it actually felt to go through this mystery is what I tried to recreate in some way, not just a bunch of facts and distance, but literally get the reader inside those mysteries. That was the task that I gave myself.

1:00:42Ryan Holiday: When the historical sublime is that you can And you can walk, I mean, they're all obviously different, but it's like you can walk up the sacred way in Delphi and see some sense of it. Yeah. And you wash your hand in the spring that they would have done and you - And did you climb that mountain? Yeah, you climb this mountain. I mean, the thing that struck me about it was - Is this still that kind of cut out in the mountain, this weird geologic - Not only is it far from the ocean, you go, oh, like they would have come into this port and then had to make this long journey. up. But you go, it's hours from Athens by car.

1:01:19Ryan Holiday: Like, we've got to find out about this Sakshis guy. Go ask the oracle who the wisest person is. Or, you know, should we fight Sparta? Go ask the oracle. And you go, oh, this would have taken weeks. It would have taken weeks to get there and back. It's not like asking chat GPT or something, right? You can't even, like, geographically, you just comprehend it totally differently. I've seen it there. Also, like in the winter, it was completely inaccessible and stuff. And then, you know, you go up these buildings and you think it's going to be this one temple, but it's all these buildings. And I'm just now I'm rereading Thucydides.

1:01:56Ryan Holiday: We're reading for a book club. We're reading History of the Peloponnesian War. And one of the arguments I think it's Pericles makes at the beginning is like, well, we have all this gold at Delphi that Sparta doesn't. And then you realize these were treasuries. Tributes. The statues were there to be beautiful, but also just to like hold the gold. And she's saying, we also have these things in Acropolis, at the Acropolis in Athens, and we can melt that down and hire soldiers. And you just realize like, oh, these aren't just these disparate, random things. They're all connected together. And it was part of a coherent world.

1:02:37Ryan Holiday: and then all of a sudden you're just in it at this level that you ordinarily couldn't be in. I tried to put myself in the shoes of Zeno standing at the oracle going like, what's the secret to the good life? Oh, Zeno, was it the oracle? Zeno, so as a young man when he's this merchant, he stops at Delphi, probably on his way to Athens, and he asks what the secret to the good life is. And the priest goes back and he probably gets high off the fumes or whatever. Yeah, priest does. And then comes back and says, the secret to the good life is to have conversations with the dead. And he just has no idea what this means.

1:03:14Ryan Holiday: It just sits with him for a decade or more. And just the idea of your ordinary person, it'd be like, hey, I'm going to go to St. Peter's or I'm going to go to St. Mark's or I'm going to... And you just stand there and you ask this question, just how ordinary and also extraordinary that experience is. Yeah, yeah. And that's what human beings have been doing for centuries, is like looking for answers, going to magical, sacred places to get answers, and then... Well, how are we doing that now? Well, I mean, now people, you know, after my divorce, I went to Bali and I, you know, like, or I climbed this volcano in Hawaii.

1:03:56Ryan Holiday: We still, we do our own versions of that still. I did an Ironman. You know, like we still push ourselves to get to that kind of place where hopefully you have some kind of breakthrough or you become a vessel for wisdom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. You know, the other thing about the historical supply, you mentioned it about when you were talking about the Odyssey and that gold statue and how magnificent it must have appeared. I did these stories like the conquistadors entering Tenochtitlan for the first time and just absolutely staggered. This is the most beautiful thing they have ever seen in their whole lives, right?

1:04:38Yeah. The quote is like, I felt like I was in a dream. It was like a fairy tale, right? And if you can literally visualize it, it was this city built on all of this water, right? Everything was islands and canals and lakes and water. And these cities dotted around it. And they were all of the same materials, this glistening white. I don't know what kind of stone it is, but they're all the same material. and people are boating across these canals. It's like a live city with all these magnificent temples and pyramids and everything and gardens on top of all the buildings. It was just the most beautiful thing they'd ever seen and not a single trace of it exists to this day.

1:05:19Everything about it is gone, right? But the point of it is that some of these things in the past, like Tenochtitlan or like ancient Babylonia Bologna or like Athens in the period of Pericles were so beautiful that we can't even imagine how beautiful they were because our cities, I look now at cities and I used to kind of think New York was beautiful, but I see all of these buildings that don't go together of different materials, right? It's kind of a mess. It's kind of disorderly. It's almost even a bit ugly, right with all the noises and the smells these were like these magnificent cities of all this material all this stone and water and and and vegetation and everything beautifully perfectly designed ancient babylonia the houses were all beveled so the sunlight would hit in a certain way it's like you can't even imagine what what what it would felt like to be in a place like that because that's all they knew but what all we know is these cities of like weird glass buildings here.

1:06:23And, you know, I was just in Toronto and it's kind of...

1:06:26Ryan Holiday: But here, let me push back on you because there's this story I love about Margaret. Please push back. Margaret Thatcher was doing some tour of the United States and they took her to Phoenix or something. And they come over this hill and Phoenix is sort of laid out before her, which is like, in some sense, like a quintessential American city, like it shouldn't exist, unending urban sprawl, suburbs, no planning, you know, in some cases an environmental miracle. And then in some cases, like you get another reading, like a environmental catastrophe. They're kind of trying to convey that it's not one of our great American cities.

1:07:01Ryan Holiday: And she looks at this suburban sprawl and she goes, isn't it wonderful? Because to her, it's the lack of central planning. It is It is just natural evolution and growth. It's just humans doing what they do. Yeah, yeah. And so in that sense, because of her ideology, she sees Phoenix as something different than Jane Jacobs would see. Right, right. No, you're right. And actually, one of the points of the sublime is it's all around you. Even a decrepit building falling apart has a sublime quality to it because it's poignant and it's full of emotion. Yeah. So I agree with you and I agree with your pushback.

1:07:40I just meant to say that we really don't know what these places look like because the emotional quality, that's all they knew. But if we could time travel to them, we would be absolutely astounded at what humans have created at a period of technological primitiveness, right? You know, the bridges that had to be built over the Euphrates River in ancient Babylonia, how would the engineering accomplish that? How did they do that with the technology that they had at the time is pretty damn insane, you know?

1:08:14Ryan Holiday: Yeah, like you look at those sort of temples in South America and like the stones are dark and there's vines on them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it would have been gleaming and bright and new in this sort of... And you just imagine how far it was from the other things. Yeah. You really can't comprehend what it must have been like to them. Yeah. And yeah, to contemplate that you can't contemplate it is interesting, but then to also think about what it must have been to someone who, you know, like there's this passage in Meditations where Mark Sreos talks about taking the view from above. He says like, be like a bird, you know, you're looking down and you're looking at the world sort of before you.

1:08:58Ryan Holiday: I can imagine him on top of the Acropolis or something, but he couldn't get much higher than that. Like you think about the highest point that he would have ever. Just the view that you got out of your airplane window on the way here was incomprehensible and impossible for all human beings up until 1930. When were planes getting that high, right? Well, I was talking to Brad about this. One of the things I was researching, I didn't include, was the first people who went up in balloons in the 18th century. Yeah. Ballooning was this new thing, particularly in France. I think it might have been 1780s and 1790s.

1:09:37They weren't as high as an airplane, but they were suddenly looking down on Earth from a distance that no one had ever been before. Even higher than a mountain, right? Yeah. And what that must have been like, you know, and how mind-boggling that was.

1:09:51Ryan Holiday: Yeah, and how few people had... Like, the number of people that had that experience was probably akin to the number of people today who have been to space, you know, like a few hundred. And then you think of airplanes, it's like almost everyone has had this and is just totally lost on us. Like the amount of philosophical enlightenment you would have to have to get to the place that just staring out an airplane, the perspective that staring out an airplane window can give you. It's a shortcut, but maybe because it's a shortcut and we didn't have to work for it, we don't actually get the value of it.

1:10:28I have that thing in there. I use Charles Lindbergh in the book and his flight to Paris and how arduous it was and what an ordeal it was. And he's flying over the English Channel and he sees like a luxury cruise ship. And he thinks back and goes, think of all the people who had to suffer on the seas in these tiny little vessels risking their lives and how many of them died. And now people are on these cruise ships in these bubbles and they're not even aware of what they're on. They're not even aware of the feel of the ocean, how dangerous it is. And he goes, God, I hope that never happens to flying, right?

1:11:04Because he's the first person to cross the Atlantic in this very primitive small plane. And that's how it is. But, you know, connecting to a different chapter in the book, when you were a child, you had those experiences. You had these kind of sublime experiences. The first time you flew was like, whoa, you know, I remember I couldn't stop staring out the window. I remember probably one of my earliest memories is like five years old. And my parents are driving to San Francisco. We're driving into San Francisco and we're crossing the bridge. The Golden Gate? The Golden Gate? Yeah. And the lights of the city before us.

1:11:40I was like, oh my God. I was like a fairy tale. It was so beautiful. Right? So when you're a child, everything has that kind of newness to it. And I have this idea in the book that because we once knew what it was like to feel these things like flying, like being in a train, like the lights of a city, looking at an animal. Now we don't have that anymore. And we're missing it. We know that we once experienced the world like this. And we're kind of haunted unconsciously by the world we once knew and has disappeared for us. And that's what we're trying to get back somehow. That if we had never known this kind of childhood experience, then we wouldn't feel...

1:12:24I think it's the source of a lot of our misery and depression, that we once experienced the world that way and it's gone.

1:12:30Ryan Holiday: That's one of my favorite quotes you have in the book. The child sees everything in a state of newness. He is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a small child absorbs form and color. Yeah. uh that yeah you're trying to that's baudelaire right yeah that that part of what artists do is tap back into that child-like way of seeing the world and we can feel it refracted back to us in their their art do you um feel that with your own child do you go through that can you can you experience the world through the eyes of your children yeah i mean one of my teach you one of my son's first flights i remember because we have a video of it he gets on and goes can we have a crash landing?

1:13:11Ryan Holiday: Like, like he can't even comprehend what we're doing as being dangerous that a crash landing would kill us all. And, you know, he's just excited. He wants the crash landing. Yeah. He's like, can we have a crash landing? Um, and, and just the, that sort of innocence. And we were driving in the car, uh, the other day it was quiet and, you know, maybe they fell asleep or something. My oldest son, he just goes, just breaks the silence out of nowhere. And he goes, I think I would watch a gladiator fight. I think I would watch gladiators fight in the Colosseum. And it was hilarious because it came out of nowhere.

1:13:48Ryan Holiday: And then it's just like, oh, that's just what's happening in his brain. We're driving to his cross-country meet. And I'm thinking about how long it's going to take us to get there, what the way is going to be hot. I'm thinking he's thinking about it's his first race. How's he going to do, you know, all this stuff and he's in ancient Rome 20 centuries ago weighing the ethical question of whether he would watch human beings fight each other to the death. And you just go, oh, there's just so much going on in there. It's how incredible that must be. Well, one of the things that I wrote about in that chapter is, you know, we tend to think of children as being these kind of cute little creatures.

1:14:35They're so innocent, you know, how lovely, how, but what we don't realize is the intelligence that they have, that in some ways we have kind of lost. And one of the things that this book I wrote, which is actually a book I didn't like, but it had some interesting things called The Philosophical Baby, and children or babies, they don't have, they have what's called disinhibition. So normally the human brain is filtering everything before you into this narrow little perspective that only has to do with survival, like how long it's going to take to get there, what the weather is going to be like, kind of thought process that we're going through.

1:15:10We all do, right? It's constantly filtering it so we don't have to think about so many things and we can live our lives. A baby, a three-year-old, four-year-old doesn't have all that inhibition. They're paying attention to everything. Everything is interesting and active and colors and smells. There's no inhibiting going on. There's no filtering.

1:15:31Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And so I was thinking of that when we were walking through the Austin airport last night, and I'm kind of trying to look at it as if I'm a baby. And everything is, and I'm paying attention, I'm looking at everything. Because normally you just like walk and you're in your own thoughts and you're not looking. I was just looking at everything and trying to see like how a child would see just the Austin airport. It was kind of a very enlightening experience, very exciting. my youngest this is a couple years ago he just goes you know I can teleport and I go what how can he's like sometimes I fall asleep in the car and when I wake up in the morning I'm in my bed so I must have teleported because and you think about how bewildering it would be to be a child you fall asleep in the car after dinner or whatever and then your parents on very delicately undo the car seat and put you over their shoulder and put you down in bed and then you wake up and You're in your clothes and you're in your bed.

1:16:26Ryan Holiday: Like what happened? And so in his mind, teleportation made more sense than, you know, this obvious explanation that we were carrying. And sometimes I think it's helpful to kind of imagine what it's like to be a child where you're like, they only get object permanence, like well into their like toddler years fully. And so you go, oh, that's why peekaboo is a fun game. They literally don't know that you're not disappearing. And how trippy that existence must be. And that it's all kind of malleable is, yeah, I think to be able to temporarily inhibit that mind or just to imagine what it's like to inhibit that mind.

1:17:09Ryan Holiday: I was on an airplane a couple of years ago and they weren't telling us what was happening, even though something was obviously happening. I couldn't get off the plane. You know, where they're like, oh, we're just waiting on this. And you know, like, you know, there's a problem. You've arrived or you're waiting to take off? I don't even remember. Just like the interminable cycle of delays, right? And you're powerless and you're hungry and you're tired and you're all that. And I was like, oh, this is what my kids' existence is all the time. They don't get to choose things. I am not telling them the truth about, you know, I'm saying it's going to take 10 minutes to get there because I know they'll get mad if I tell them it's an hour.

1:17:48Ryan Holiday: And I was like, oh, I'm a baby on this plane. I'm going to accept this. I'm going to stop being the adult who's getting angry. And I'm just going to be like, well, I guess I'm going to watch this movie or read this book until my parents tell me what I'm allowed to do. And yeah, there's something about trying to get inside someone else's world, particularly the child view, that I think is very sublime. Well, because we all had it usually. I mean, some of us had very abusive childhoods, but every child, you're seeing the world for the first time, it's a universal experience. And, you know, as I said with the story of Nabokov, normally our nostalgia is just around like birthdays and events and photographs and we remember this or that or our father or our mother.

1:18:35But that's not childhood experience. Children experience the world differently. They don't experience it the way we do as adults. And yet we were a child once. It's not like suddenly we're cut off from it. We had that experience once. So the process is you're not going to become a child again, but how can you get back to that experience in the present? How can you have some of that experience now? How can you do, like, as I said, in the Austin airport, I'm trying to, like, see what the airport looks like to a child who everything is exciting. Everything is new and different. And so you don't want to look at your childhood as just this thing in the past and be all sweet and sentimental and nostalgic about it.

1:19:17You want to try and feel how you experienced the world back then and how kind of magical and enchanted it was. And you can do it. It's not an impossible task.

1:19:27Ryan Holiday: No, I'm so glad you said that. I just wrote it down because it's going to, in a flash, it sort of changed how I think about it. It's like they have an excuse. They don't know what it's like to be 30 or 40. No, no. Or, you know, so that's all unfamiliar to them. Yeah. But you don't have an excuse because you have been a two-year-old and a four-year-old and an eight-year-old. Yeah. And understanding that you have been there before, you've just forgot. You've, in some cases, deliberately not remembering what it's like to have your parents, you know, make you do this or say this or not do that. And they've never been in your shoes, but you have been in their shoes.

1:20:04Ryan Holiday: Right, right. Right. Well, one thing I have in the first chapter in the Cosmic Sublime is the idea of scale. And how important that is to a human being, because now we live in a world where everything is built to a human scale, right? And even if we go climb them out, we've got our phones with us, we know how to orient ourselves, we know which direction we're heading in, right? And the scale is almost like we're the center of the universe. Everything is at our fingertips. But a child is very small, very weak, and very vulnerable. The world is immense. Parents are large. Buildings are huge. I remember my backyard as being like this universe.

1:20:51If I look at it now, because my mother still lives there, it's pretty small. But back then, it was like a football field that I would play on, you know? And so, the sense of scale of being in the world that's so immense, time is so immense. You start when you're a child and you read about history and you first realize it's something 100 years ago and how strange that is, you know, and how your parents lived in this other world. the scale of a child is like i'm this tiny little creature in this vast world nothing has changed the scale is the same you might be have grown like four or five feet since then but you're still this tiny insignificant weak helpless vulnerable creature but you don't see it that way anymore you think that you're in control that everything's you know you can manage everything that happens but you can go back to that feeling of vulnerability and weakness.

1:21:45And it's actually very powerful. It makes the world come to life. You know, like when you're a child, a little corner of the, of the garden is like a world. Yeah. Right. And I would play with my army men in a little corner and I'd put my armies here in this. It was like a whole universe to me. And that's a sense of, of, of scale that, you know, I don't know. I don't know if I'm just bad. No,

1:22:07Ryan Holiday: no, it makes total sense. Do you think we were talking about the Southwest earlier? Do you think psychologically it was more significant than we think the idea of the closing of the frontier or the sort of slow after the American frontier, just the discovery of everything on Earth, that there are no real unmapped places or truly unexplored experiences? is that there was something that closed when the world became explained or explainable or accessible to everyone. Well, the thing that interests me most about that is the space was open, but also the encounter with indigenous cultures and how strange that was to be a European or a Westerner and to be suddenly encountering these humans that live in a completely different way, completely different values, how earth shattering that must have been.

1:23:07So, we don't have those kind of discoveries anymore, but it's more like now psychological and even spiritual because the world is still the same. The universe hasn't been explored. Right. And your brain in your own life hasn't been explored. There are things that you're not, you could be entering, there are still frontiers in your own experience of the world. And you You can get it. I say like I was just in Cerro Gordo with Bread and you've been there many times, right? And just the expanse of the Death Valley and Owens Valley and all that, you know, that's still there. It's still, at least in the United States, we still have those kind of spaces and those spaces take you into that kind of world where there's things that make you realize how small and insignificant and helpless you actually are.

1:24:00Ryan Holiday: It is interesting, the story we tell ourselves about the encounters between, you know, the explorers and indigenous people. It's so tragic and violent and terrible. That's the primary story we tell. But I was, I have a line about this in the wisdom book where I was just like, what did those Europeans think when they saw a kangaroo for the first time? And what did the indigenous people see when some guy got off a boat in a suit of armor? Like those are two equally ridiculous things. On a horse. They don't have horses in Mexico. Right. Right. It's insane. To say nothing of like white skin. I mean, my friend George Raveling was telling me he went to China in the in the in the 80s and people were just like black skin.

1:24:41Ryan Holiday: Like just your average Chinese person just couldn't comprehend this. And so, I mean, it's not that distant, I guess. But you just think that like as America is being founded. yeah people in australia are seeing a horse for the first time and seeing a kangaroo for the first time and just how fucking mind-blowing that must have been but that's the whole point you can you can travel into that world and you can have that experience a little bit like reading it so i read books a lot of books about those encounters like the first encounter between the portuguese and the Brazilians and how odd that was.

1:25:20And we naturally have a Western perspective and how these people, they seem so primitive and so barbaric. But then you read from the other side and how they look at us. They're very interesting books written about because they recorded this, how the indigenous people, how the Mexicans of the various different tribes and cultures there viewed the conquistadors and what they saw in them and the kind of ugliness and, you know, these people, gold to them was just something kind of beautiful. It wasn't a value. It wasn't something, right? And these people were like killing and doing anything they could to get gold, you know?

1:25:58And so you can flip that and see what the Westerners look like from their perspective. History is like perspective shifting constantly as you're constantly moving through their eyes into your eyes and back and forth again.

1:26:12Ryan Holiday: Yeah, you think about Captain Cook and he's pulling up to Hawaii. Oh, yes, yeah. And they're surfing. Like he's some early version of surfing. Yeah. And just like, what? Like, you know, because we so poorly understood like sort of water and we were kind of afraid of water and what was underneath the water. Like even until the early 1900s, I was just reading this book about this, like people just didn't know anything about sharks. Like sailors knew about sharks, but like there was this series of shark attacks off the coast of New Jersey in like 1916. And people didn't believe that sharks could eat people.

1:26:48Ryan Holiday: Oh, really? Because Victorians hated the water. There had been just like generations of like, because the water was sinful because you didn't wear a lot of clothes. And so they were like away from it. And you're just like, yeah, they're watching these people eat shellfish and surf and be good at swimming. And they were just like, what's happening? So you were talking about all the work that went into doing that, just that one chapter about the Greek. The one story. Yeah, the one, 10 pages would be hundreds of books and hundreds of hours of thinking and physical exploration and mental exploration and fiction and philosophy and literature.

1:27:27Ryan Holiday: All that goes into it. But do you think, because I'm in the middle of this book that I'm doing now, all this work for these little details of like what it was like to fly this specific jet or what it's like to land a plane on an aircraft carrier at night. My worry is that we're entering a world where people don't give a shit anymore, like where they don't care about the human labor that went into something. Right. That they want like an easy answer. They don't even care if the answer is accurate or not. Yeah, yeah. You worked on this book for seven years. Your last book you worked on for so long, it gave you a stroke.

1:28:04Ryan Holiday: Are you worried that that labor and intensity and truth isn't valued anymore? Yeah, I mean, we'll see about how these books are received and how like your own books are received very well. And you put an immense amount of labor into your books. But I'm in a very unique position and not once again to compare myself to Robert Carroll, but like him, I'm not under pressure. Right. Right. So I can take seven years to write a book. My publisher won't bother me because I've made them so much money. Right. So I have incredible luxury to waste time to read 12 books that just go into one paragraph. Writers don't have that anymore, right?

1:28:49Because it's so hard to make a living as a writer. Your advances now, you know, you get$40 ,000,$50 ,000, man, that's pretty good. You have to get a job because that's only going to last you for like six months or a year, right? You have to teach at a university. You're a journalist. you're under so much pressure that you only have like a year to write a book. And in that year, you have all these distractions. You have your children you have to raise, you have to teach, you have to do all this other thing. You don't have the time to do that kind of labor anymore. And so I read books now and I can feel that.

1:29:23I can feel the lack of labor and I'm not judging it because I understand the pressures are incredible. You don't have time. So a lot of books, they have like an idea that's very interesting in the first chapter, then the rest of the book's kind of repeating the first chapter. They don't develop it. You can sense that they're in a rush. And that's what everybody is undergoing now. We're under so much pressure to get things done. And we're so distracted that to focus on something for seven years, nobody has that luxury anymore because you have to make a living and you're constantly distracting. You have all these other things you have to do.

1:29:59You know, for me, I cut out all of my speaking engagements. I couldn't travel because I was little. You see how I walk. I'm literally immobile. It was all I had. I just worry the logistics, the material aspect of writing a book is changing now. And now because of AI and stuff, you can do all of these shortcuts. So people are no longer to be motivated to put in that kind of effort. Nobody's going to put that kind of effort in anything. You see it in architecture now. I go into modern hotels and I go, this was designed on a computer. You can tell that the building was designed on a computer because the sink is in a place where it shouldn't be and the faucets are hard to reach.

1:30:42It's illogical. It's missing the thought and consideration. Of a human scale. Yeah. And it's all done on a computer and that's how they did it. Architects don't draw on paper anymore. It's all done on a computer, right? And so the time that you need to do to spend something and to put care into it, the motivation and the ability to do that because of just the logistics are disappearing from our planet and it's very sad.

1:31:22Ryan Holiday: Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini. That's goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini.