Stop Waiting To Be Chosen | Adam Skolnick

0:00Ryan Holiday: I know it's not good for me to just run. I need it for my mental health, but it takes a toll on me physically and I need to mix it up. So one of the things I'm trying to work on this year is doing more diverse kinds of workouts and specifically doing more strength training. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. Tonal provides the convenience of a full gym and the guidance of a personal trainer anytime at home with their one sleek system. designed to reduce your mental load tonal is the ultimate strength training system helping you focus less on workout planning and more on getting results plus there's no more second guessing on your form tonal gives you real-time coaching cues to dial in your form which i need a lot of help on and it helps you lift safely and effectively plus tonal sets the optimal weight for every move and then adjusts it makes a tiny bit harder each time in one pound increments as you go and as you get stronger right so you're always challenged which is one of the other things, right?

0:56Ryan Holiday: We get in our rut. Even though we're doing something positive, we're doing it in a way that's actually getting progressively easier instead of progressively harder. So right now, Tonal is offering our listeners 200 bucks off your Tonal purchase with promo code TDS. That's tonal.com and use promo code TDS for 200 bucks off your purchase. That's tonal.com promo code TDS for$200 off. Shopping at Whole Foods is one of the things I do in our family, like the grocery shopping is my job. So I was glad to be able to do that even on vacation. And then, you know, being here in Hawaii, it was the same Whole Foods experience we're thinking about, but then also a bunch of regional stuff too that they only have at this Whole Foods.

1:39Ryan Holiday: We love shopping at Whole Foods because there's always new flavors and foods to choose from whichever Whole Foods you are like, whichever Whole Foods you happen to be at. So save on regional flavors at Whole Foods Market, and maybe I'll see you at the Whole Foods in Austin sometime. Three, four times a day, I reach over and I grab my wife's phone and I check something. Not social media. I check the Shopify app. Because Shopify is how I see how the Painted Porch and the Daily Stoic are doing. We've been using Shopify for almost 10 years now. It's great. And we're not the only ones using it. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and brands all over the world.

2:20Ryan Holiday: They do 10 % of the e-commerce in the U.S., from household names to Gymshark and Allbirds to little brands just getting started and little things in between like Daily Stoic. Everything is all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer service, which we have used many times at Daily Stoic and with The Painted Porch. It's time to turn those what-ifs in to sales with Shopify today. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash stoic. Go to shopify.com slash stoic, shopify.com slash stoic.

3:08Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

4:00Ryan Holiday: hey it's ryan welcome to another episode of the daily stoic podcast a couple of weird confluences of things that sort of connected up in to today's episode i'm just moving some books around in the office like does this go here i'm like rearranging finally now that i finished the four virtues series and i don't need a bunch of the books i was working on for that like right behind me, I've been moving books around. And some of the only books I have at my house, I have all my fiction at my house. And then I have my very large collection of books about animals. I don't know exactly why it broke that way, but I love weird books about animals.

4:39Ryan Holiday: The Tiger is one of my all-time favorite books. That's John Valance's book, which is, I've said, one of the greatest narrative nonfiction books of all time. I rave about it at the bookstore all the time. So when a couple of months ago, a friend of mine who I've known for a long time, I met him through Rich Roll and I'd read one of his previous books about free diving called One Breath, crazy good book. He also was the ghostwriter for both of David Goggins' memoirs, Adam Skolnick. Anyways, when Adam Skolnick sent me a message, he said, hey, you know, hope you're doing well. I wanted to send you a proof of my new book.

5:14Ryan Holiday: You'll see why this sentence appealed to me. He said, it's called American Tiger, and it's a novel based on a story I covered for LA Weekly 20 years ago when an escaped tiger was rumored to be prowling around Simi Valley. He says, I think you mentioned you have some tiger owners not too terribly far from your place. Have you ever been out to see it? In this book, I visited many private zoos and sanctuaries. Drop me your address. I'll send it over. And I said, just bring it with you. Come down and do the podcast and we'll talk about it. So that's what today's episode is. And it's funny, the zoo he was talking about, there is this like small little zoo down the street from where we live.

5:50Ryan Holiday: Like whenever we have meat that goes bad in our freezer or like I have too much meat after going hunting or whatever. And one time we were cleaning out this hunting fridge. We just had so much meat. I didn't feel comfortable eating it anymore. And my assistant take this big bag of it over there. And she was like, dude, the dude came out and he like started crying. And I was like, oh, that's beautiful. Anything we can do to support the animals. I don't know exactly how I feel about the zoo exactly, but it does exist and the animals there shouldn't start. And it's funny, I just told my assistant when we were taking down the Christmas tree, because I'd seen a video of like zoo animals playing with Christmas trees, I was like, see if they want the Christmas tree.

6:28Ryan Holiday: So all of that perfectly coincides with today's episode, which is me talking with Adam Skolnick. We talk a little bit about tigers and some other things, but mostly we're just talking life and philosophy. I thought this was a great conversation. I'm a big fan of Adam and his work. You can check out his new novel, American Tiger. And of course, I also recommend One Breath, Free Diving, Death, and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits. You can follow him on Instagram at Adam Skolnick, and you can hear him co-host Rich Roll's podcast from time to time as well. I'll just get into it. Here we go.

7:08Adam Skolnick: how far did you swim in garden springs oh just a kilometer i've been having like i think i caught rich's back pain we can talk about that i think i think i have do you ever have like sympathetic pain with your spouse and so like i i never had it with rich before but i got like a herniated disc flare-up like right around the time he started really talking about his back pain on

7:31Ryan Holiday: podcast it's like psychosomatic yeah it's like two months ago now and so it's like

7:37Adam Skolnick: finally kind of coming out it's still not great so i'm not pushing it but i'm doing a little bit more so i think that's like the best pool in the world oh my god it's up there icebergs in sydney

7:45Ryan Holiday: and that one yes yeah yeah yes i was in australia last summer and there's something about where you like how long is this going to last you're right because like the ocean gets higher and it always

7:57Adam Skolnick: gets wrecked. Did you know? When I went and visited icebergs and swam in it for the first time, it was just getting refurbished and redone from something. And then the king tide came again and smashed it. It's been closed again at least once since then. And it was more recently. Yeah. Yeah.

8:12Ryan Holiday: So the idea of being sucked out into the ocean, by the way, is not a fear you have to have in the spring.

8:20Adam Skolnick: There's none of that raging ocean smashing into the rocks and the king tides are becoming more prevalent but usually you can i'm not even sure you could get i mean i've seen it in other little pools there too where the where the where the tide gets high and it starts crashing

8:34Ryan Holiday: there's a famous story about something it's like the most australian thing ever it wasn't that one it was maybe the one in manly or something where like a shark got washed into it yeah and this rich actually sent it to me and like the this woman was swimming when it happened and she went over and got grabbed it and just threw it back in and then kept swimming

8:54Adam Skolnick: that's very australian yeah it's like the most australian thing yeah we like manly i mean that's where april's from sydney and so and and so she was living in the northern beaches when we first

9:04Ryan Holiday: got together yeah some of the other ones might be better they're not as they're not as good of a pool

9:09Adam Skolnick: but they're like prettier yeah they're more but they're more just kick back and have a dip they're not really lap pools like icebergs and there's another one there's a there's a one in like downtown like the central area not far from the opera house that rich likes as well that's not quite it's it's a little bit more removed but it's also one of those uh natural pools they're

9:28Ryan Holiday: kind of the same era as barton springs where like people like we used to build things yeah do you know like we were like hey this should exist for everyone and we're gonna spend yes our money on making this thing and it's gonna last for a hundred years right that doesn't really happen anymore

9:47Adam Skolnick: No, we should. I mean, that's definitely like the Works Progress Administration kind of started it. Right. Like in the New Deal stuff that was happening. And it was not like a negative checkmark to anyone that the government was trying to improve your lives or invest in infrastructure. It wasn't like a big fight or battle. Some of that might be it was just cheaper, like things like the inflation hadn't happened. It was like.

10:11Ryan Holiday: Well, not just like financial inflation, but just like that everything is insanely bureaucratic and difficult and takes forever. They were just like, we're going to have these kids build a swimming pool because there's no jobs and they don't need to be like world class engineers or whatever.

10:27Adam Skolnick: You know, that's true. Just do stuff. That's true. They just do stuff. And but, you know, at the same time, though, like this at the same time that was happening, like the Army Corps of Engineers was was concreting all the rivers. And so like there's like as many good things, there were also kind of mistakes because my theory on it is like we wanted to improve life because life was so hard in the early part of the 20th century. And so like we look back, say, as environmentalists now, we say, how could you make the mistake of concreting all the rivers and getting all the rainwater out of the city and into the ocean?

11:00Adam Skolnick: But like in those days.

11:02Ryan Holiday: People were dying from floods. Exactly right. Exactly right.

11:04Adam Skolnick: Right. So we wanted to save lives and life was super cheap then. And so we do it now. It's kind of the reverse where we're so concerned about not offending or say, you know, that we can't get anything done.

11:15Ryan Holiday: So, yeah, it's like the things that were awesome are still here. Yeah. And then the things that are terrible, truly terrible, like somebody died and so we destroyed them or we just we just assume they were always there. so we don't think about whether they should be there or not. So that's a really good point. So yeah, we build Barton Springs and then also we cut cities in half with interstates, bulldozing and raising whole neighborhoods, not thinking about what we were losing in that process. And now you're just like, there must have always been a freeway here. And it's like, no, this didn't exist until the 50s or 60s in some cases.

11:53Ryan Holiday: And there was a vibrant neighborhood and community and you could walk places and that's all gone. And we just go, why aren't there more stuff? Why isn't there more stuff? We learned the wrong lesson, and then we overlearned the reaction to that lesson, and then we can't do stuff. If you're ever in Texas, there's a better one than Barton Springs. Oh, really? Well, in Austin, so there's Barton Springs, which is incredible. And then there's Deep Eddy, which is a little bit further up. I guess it's on the other side of the—is that on the other side? Other side of the river, right? I think it's on the other side of the river, yeah.

12:26Adam Skolnick: Is it a river or a lake?

12:27Ryan Holiday: It's a river. It's the same river that's behind us. But it's dammed, I think, five or six times. So there's a series of lakes. And again, because there's terrible flooding, right? There's a sign over on the trail where it's like, wait, the water went up to here? This would have made the entire place uninhabitable. So anyways, it's dammed. Here you can get in the water because it's a real river. There, it's not only pretty stagnant, but one of the dams broke at some point. And so that whole area is filled with like concrete and rocks and rebar. That's why you're allowed to paddleboard on Town Lake, but you can't swim in it.

13:07Ryan Holiday: Oh, interesting. Except for once a year, they do a triathlon where they're like, the danger doesn't apply because it's a group of people.

13:12Adam Skolnick: Right, right.

13:13Ryan Holiday: But anyway, on the other side, there's Deep Eddy, which is a It's a pool. I think it's 30 yards. That's filled with the same water from Barton Springs. Okay. But it's a pool.

13:23Adam Skolnick: So the spring fed, but it's actually a pool. So no chlorine. Yeah.

13:26Ryan Holiday: They drain it every night and refill it.

13:27Adam Skolnick: And it's 180 yards, 180 meters or whatever? 30. It's 30. Oh, 30. Okay.

13:32Ryan Holiday: That one's awesome. That's more like what you have in Australia. It's like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like six hours from here, there's one called Balmorya or Balmorya. Okay. How we pronounce things in Texas is ridiculous. But it's like three times bigger than Barton Springs. Really? Yeah, it's much bigger. It's like a quarter mile? In terms of gallons.

13:50Adam Skolnick: Okay.

13:50Ryan Holiday: It's just like unimaginably big. And it's so big and so old that it has a species of fish in it that is extinct everywhere else. Like they captured them in this pool and then we killed them everywhere else. And it's like the Comanche pupfish. It's the only place in the world that exists in this one pool. That's amazing.

14:12Adam Skolnick: Yeah. It's like the Army Corps captured it and there's no fishing in the pool. Otherwise, the fishermen would already have taken it. Yes, yes.

14:19Ryan Holiday: Or we would have killed them by pollution or drought or whatever. Somehow. And then the other funny thing is, to go to the point about learning lessons, it has this stone high dive. And if you notice, like, no public pools have high dives anymore. No, right. People get hurt. But it's protected by the National Register of Historic Places. Like, the high dive is protected. They can't take the high dive down because it's protected. So it's like two different government sort of like statutes are like normally you'd be like, you can't do this. The government says it's not safe. And then here you're like, but the government says we can't touch this.

14:54Ryan Holiday: So it's just there. Yeah. Jonathan Haidt would be very happy. He wants risky play. Yeah. He wants kids jumping off high dives. Yeah. It's awesome. And then so anyways, that's the best. That's probably the best natural pool in the United States.

15:07Adam Skolnick: It's interesting. You know, it was the more free use of eminent domain in those days. And you could do that. And it's partly because these communities didn't have a voice or they didn't know or they just like if the government said so, they said, OK, we'll go over here, whatever it was, probably some mix of all of it. And so they could use it. And now you could never do that. So there's so many reasons why it's not happening now. And a lot of it's just political will and just like people are just scared.

15:31Ryan Holiday: What's political will and political power? Have you read The Power Broker?

15:34Adam Skolnick: No.

15:34Ryan Holiday: The Robert Carroll book?

15:35Adam Skolnick: No. Do you know this book? No.

15:36Ryan Holiday: Oh, so it's about Robert Moses, who was the Parks Commissioner. It's a famous book. And then I'll give you another. He has a shorter one called Working, where he talks about himself as a writer and how he learns lessons. But yeah, like Robert Moses built bridges and parks and did all this stuff because he just, it's like he really cared about parks and bridges and stuff. But he also just really didn't care about Puerto Ricans and black people and poor people. So he was like, well, I want the bridge here. And then because he didn't care, he was able to do it. So there's something about the brutality of it that's both appalling and, I mean, as they say, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

16:18Ryan Holiday: Like the reaction, counter reaction of Robert Moses, who's like, fuck everyone. I want to build a bridge. And then you have Jane Jacobs, who's like, but I love my corner grocery store, a little tiny, you know, old building. And then the result is like not enough people can afford to live in Greenwich Village. And that's why it's so expensive. And the tension between these two things is like as fascinating. It's like you want to know why things are the way they are. It's stuff like that.

16:45Adam Skolnick: That's interesting. It's like the unintended consequences of good intentions is kind of the demise of everything. It's like it's like we think everyone thinks what they're doing is the right thing to do. I mean, almost everyone. Yeah. Like there are certainly horrible people that know they're doing the wrong and they want to do it. But there's but a lot of most people, 98, 99 percent think what they're doing is exactly the right thing. Yeah. And whether it's right or wrong, there's all these unintended consequences. Sometimes this thing that we all dread is to benefit us, right? Like 10 years later, 20 years later, and vice versa.

17:15Adam Skolnick: So it's interesting, you know, in LA, the good example to that is Chavez Ravine and Dodger Stadium. And we love, you know, we're all stoked. We love, I mean, Dodger Stadium to go there in a home game. It's like a power spot for LA. It's like this place where all of LA comes together. We rejoice together. It really is a beautiful experience for those of us who live there, especially like like long-time residents or lifelong residents. And so it's one of those places, but it was built with eminent domain. It was the destruction of a community. And sometimes that bubbles up and you hear about it.

17:44Adam Skolnick: There was a book about it. But was it worth the sacrifice, like long-term? Like not personally, but just if you look back, not because I'm happy there, but like just all the people affected in a positive way, was it worth the sacrifice? You know, like that's a question.

17:59Ryan Holiday: It always comes down to political power. So the story Robert Caro tells, I think, is really interesting. So Robert Moses is building this highway that's going to go to this park or something. And so the highway is going to cut through somebody's property, right? And if it goes this way, which is the most natural way for it to go, it cuts through these sort of Gold Coast mansions. And specifically, it will cut through the private golf course of some billionaire from whenever, right? And so obviously it doesn't. No. It doesn't because they have political power. And instead it goes, you know, it veers this way, goes around the golf course, goes this way.

18:38Ryan Holiday: And it cuts through this guy's farm who had 40 acres. And now his farm is cut in half and he has to to get to his other acres. He has to go down here to a turnaround. And Robert Carroll, like, just really dives into, like, the physical cost to this one dude. Like it ruins his farm income and it ruins his property value. But just like the hours every day that this guy has to go to do this loop to get to his own property. So this guy's golf course could remain untouched. And you go, yeah, like things are the way that they are. Right. The core of it is power. Like, do you have power? Yes or no. And I think we would like to think power doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

19:19Ryan Holiday: And it's like, no, no, somebody had power. Lyndon Johnson had power in Texas and he was like, build this. Like Lyndon Johnson was in charge of, is it the WPA or the youth WPA? So those things exist because he had favors and power. Right. And he used some of it for good and some of it not for good.

19:38Adam Skolnick: And his power in Texas is the reason he became vice president and president eventually anyway. Like that's the reason JFK had him to the ticket. So it's interesting. Before I became a writer, like the last day job I had was at Tree People. Tree People is an environmental group in Los Angeles famous for planting trees in neighborhoods and at schools. My job was to take out Blacktop and put trees in with kids. It's probably the most impact. The opposite of development. Yeah, the most impact I've probably ever had in my life is the trees I planted with kids years ago. And so what we, our base of operations was this park above Beverly Hills, between Beverly Hills and the San Fernando Valley on Mulholland called Coldwater Canyon Park.

20:15Adam Skolnick: I've been to that park. Okay, so Coldwater Canyon Park was our base and that was William Mulholland's ranch. That was where so we live now. It's like fancy offices. But where we worked were these old breaking like tumble down shacks were literally where Mulholland would plan his takeover and his diversion of water from the citrus farms in the San Fernando Valley. And he created that valley. I mean, just through the through his power. And so it's really interesting to think about. You're right. Like that that changed the face of Los Angeles. And on the other side of it, Santa Monica, where I live, at one time, the people in Santa Monica wanted the port of L.A.

20:51Adam Skolnick: to be built there. They didn't want like where the pier is. That would be the port of L.A. instead of Long Beach. And so it's two competing factions. And they thought they lost. Santa Monica thought they lost. Yeah. And instead of having a big port like Long Beach, which is awesome in its own way, we have like this tourist destination, Santa Monica, with these awesome beaches with Venice and Santa Monica. So it's a trip, right, to think about how it really does come down to, like you say, these people with power. I, like, used to be very much interested in politics. I mean, I'm still interested in it to some degree, but I was like an activist.

21:25Adam Skolnick: Yeah. When I first came out of college, I was an activist. I was an environmentalist. I was like into justice. And now as I get older and kind of understand it a bit more, I'm less interested in trying to build political power and more interested in just observing it and seeing where it goes.

21:40Ryan Holiday: But also writing about it and detailing about it and explaining it is a form of sort of activism. Yeah, for sure. My friend Brent lives in this ghost town in California near Owens Lake, which is the classic Mulholland example. He's like, I want this fucking water. We need this fucking water. You live in the sticks. You have no political power. 100%. We're going to steal that water. We're going to take it, which he does. And then you go like, wait, wait, there was a lake here, like a Lake Tahoe-esque lake that just is now a dust bowl.

22:15Adam Skolnick: Right.

22:15Ryan Holiday: Because one guy was like, and you go, oh, it could have been something else. It could have been something different. It could have been otherwise. Right. But this guy had the political power. He had the political will. And the other people didn't think it was important or didn't have the political power or didn't understand what was happening. Right. And they got outmaneuvered. And now, like, you're on Mount Whitney and you should be looking down at a gorgeous lake. And instead, you don't just look down at a dust bowl. You look down at an environmental. They have to now reflood it with water because when you take the water out, then the things at the bottom of the dust bed become this giant source of pollution.

22:49Adam Skolnick: It leeches like toxic cloud, right? Yeah, yeah.

22:51Ryan Holiday: It's now like the illusion of a lake because they have to put just enough water in it that it doesn't do that. And you go, this is the legacy of one human being. And then history is the unintended consequences of those kinds of decisions.

23:03Adam Skolnick: 100 percent. Like, that's it. The unintended consequences of good intentions is what got us into this mess. And it's also going to save us. Yeah. Well, it's all messes for all time.

23:12Ryan Holiday: Everything is unintended consequences.

23:14Adam Skolnick: That's what I think I love about your stuff so much is like when you go back into it, like and I'm sure that's the fun of it, of going into these books and looking at the Stoics and looking at history is it's all already happened. And you even say it in wisdom. It's all already happened a million times. Like, yes, nothing we're doing now is really that original. Nobody's that original, essentially. No, no.

23:35Ryan Holiday: Like, there's this line, Truman, he was like, whenever I had a problem in politics, I would read Plutarch, who is this Greek Roman biographer 2 ,000 years ago. And he said, nine times out of 10, I would find the solutions to the problems there. And you're like, well, how could someone 2000 years ago help you when you're setting up the UN? Yeah. Or, well, it's like, because the Greeks had to ally against the Persians and these disparate states had to come together and band against an ascendant, you know, enemy in a global power crisis. Or, you know, you had a Caesar. Okay, so that's like a MacArthur character.

24:14Ryan Holiday: Right. Or a Stalinist. Like you, you, the same personality types are always there doing the same things that they always do.

24:24Adam Skolnick: Yeah. It's interesting. You seem attracted to like the Trumans or the Pattons. Like, not that Patton wasn't a great individual, but he's not MacArthur. Like you seem attracted to these thoughtful, like well-read kind of not really the top people people think about, right? Like Truman and even Lyndon Johnson gets a lot of flack and rightfully so, but like in some respects. But like you see and like I think of it like you're finding these the like Eisenhower. I think of Eisenhower. Yeah. Like Eisenhower as a Republican president. Like when you grow up and you start thinking, oh, was he any good?

24:57Adam Skolnick: And then you actually go back and see. Yeah. And he was really not into billionaires. He was really into fairness, more so than like the Reagan ideal that everyone lifts up. Eisenhower is interesting. Like, I wonder if you looked at him. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

25:11Ryan Holiday: Well, so that it's like right about that era. So it's like 50 to 70 years, you stop caring whether someone is a Republican or a Democrat. And they're just like a person. Right. Yeah. Like the partisan labels don't matter as much. You can kind of study them. He's a fascinating person. I've written about him in a bunch of my books. But like, you know, he faces like McCarthy and the rise of McCarthyism and he has to do it. But there's this great book called The Hidden Hand Presidency that's all about how Eisenhower deals with McCarthy, but never gets his hands dirty. Like he he's sort of maneuvering to shank this guy without challenging him publicly.

25:48Ryan Holiday: That was his thing. He's like, I never deal in personalities like he would never say if he didn't like someone or he was opposed to them. He would never say their name and he would never address them directly. He would just work behind the scenes. And that was kind of his thing to go to our point about power is like we think power is like I condemn you from the podium. Right. And it's like that's like what a weak person does. A strong person who can actually move the needle knows like, hey, it's actually better if I don't tell you that I'm coming for you. Right. And then when you get shanked, you're not even going to blame me for it.

26:18Adam Skolnick: Or even the way Abraham Lincoln, the ultimate power broker, right? Abraham Lincoln, who doesn't even want to come for people, but he wants to utilize people wherever they are. And he'll only come for you if you come for him, essentially. And even then, he's like the ultimate matador, right?

26:35Ryan Holiday: If he can still use you, he'll keep using you until he's done with you. Yeah. And then he'll find a nice exit for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that goes to the savviness of power, too, is like we don't, we just go, oh, Abraham Lincoln was this nice, honest guy. And it's like he was, and he was a brilliant operator. And I think the problem with a lot of activists is they think it's like, well, what matters is that your heart's in the right place or whatever. Right. Which it does, but then you also have to be a savvy operator or you don't get anything done.

27:04Adam Skolnick: Well, right. Right. I mean, the problem I've had, like, so coming from kind of environmental politics and just being involved in politics as an activist back in the early 90s, like I was the only one that cared about it. Like none of my friends cared that much. I mean, they all were kind of aligned with positive causes. I mean, California in the early 90s, but like for the most part, their lives did not revolve around it. Yeah. And so I was one of the only people out there trying to push people to get more political. Now it's the opposite. Everyone's too involved. And at the time, early on, I was like, God, I wish just more people would care.

27:36Adam Skolnick: And now I realize, no, no, no. I wish less people would care.

27:48Ryan Holiday: So I told you I was at this Airbnb here in Maui on this trip we took. And, oh, man, the mattresses were not good. I did not sleep well. The kids did not sleep well. I wish that they had Helix mattresses. If you've ever slept on a Helix, you will know why so many people love them. Basically, you take this Helix sleep quiz that matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and sleep needs. We've got the midnight mattress at our house. It's medium firmness, not too firm, not too soft. And that's probably why it is their top selling model. Helix is the most awarded mattress brand tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired.

28:26Ryan Holiday: They've got free shipping, seamless delivery, and the whole process is super simple. They deliver the mattress right to your door with free shipping in the US, and you can rest easy with the Happy With Helix guarantee that ensures seamless returns and exchanges. Risk-free, customer-first experience. The Helix guarantee is designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress and includes a 120-night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty. Just go to helixsleep.com slash doak for$27. off. That's helixsleep.com slash stoic for 27 % off. Make sure you enter our show name at checkout so they can know we sent you helixsleep.com slash stoic.

29:06Ryan Holiday: If you're selling online or out of a storefront full time or a side hustle, you know, it's a challenge. People got to find you, you got to wait for them to walk in. Well, today's sponsor, Whatnot, flips that. On Whatnot, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you got, they ask questions, and they buy. And you know what? They keep coming back. WhatNot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform, whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, even cookies. Sellers are building real thriving businesses on WhatNot. WhatNot buyers spend more than an hour a day on the app, and they're not just browsing, they're bidding and buying and coming back.

29:42Ryan Holiday: So you can go live, show off your projects, and turn that into real income. People selling on WhatNot sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. And that's because you're not just listing products. You're building real connections with buyers. For a limited time, Whatnot will match your first$150 sold in the first month. You just got to visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell.

30:13Ryan Holiday: You were saying about like Truman and Manhattan and whatever. I do think, you probably think about this because I see this in your writing. It's like LeBron James is interesting. But that's not who lights you up as a writer. It's never like the most well-known, most famous, most generally admired of the people that make the best stories. Right. No. You want to find that it's the characters or the people that are doing things they shouldn't be able to do or they do it in a way that doesn't really make sense. Yeah. That's the most interesting.

30:46Adam Skolnick: I think so. I mean, for me, it's a function kind of it's more functional. Like I was never a staff writer, so I could I never. You didn't have the access. I've never had that. I've never had that. So even like after I published a book, after I've been published in the New York Times several times, like I still couldn't get interviewed by like small papers when I was in a financial crisis. Yeah. And so I was I was kind of by nature drawn to the underreported stories. Yeah. Because I couldn't tell the the the well-reported stories. Right. That's a staff person's job. So for me, I just followed that.

31:19Adam Skolnick: It's almost like just like survival in a way, but also like I'm not an analytical writer. I'm an organic writer. And the analysis comes in at the end. It's not like that my work isn't related. It's that I'm not really overly thinking the process through. I'm following it and kind of flowing with the process. Does that make sense? And that's true of the kind of writer I am, too. I make a plan, I outline, but then I also kind of allow it to organically unfold. And so I think my career is an expression of that kind of because I had to follow that.

31:48Ryan Holiday: I actually do think that's good career advice. I think people go like, let's say you want to be a writer. They're like, I want to be a writer. And then so I'll get a job at Rolling Stone. Some of these are dated, but I'll get a job at Rolling Stone. And then they'll assign me a cover story about Bad Bunny. And then I'll get to meet him and write a story about him. Right. And it's like, maybe, maybe there's one person that gets to do that. But actually, it's you have to find these obscure or unknown figures or the fascinating stories that other people aren't reporting. And that's your way into those things.

32:19Adam Skolnick: A hundred percent.

32:19Ryan Holiday: And so, yeah, most people are kind of sitting around waiting to get picked or they're like throwing themselves against this closed door that it's never going to happen. And meanwhile, there's all these equally fascinating, unknown, undiscovered things and that that's actually your way in.

32:37Adam Skolnick: A hundred percent, like finding the underreported stuff, but then also just saying yes to all the jobs. Like I said yes to everything. Like my first business card was all things written. And I was literally, I think you had some of this too. Like you would write anything someone gave you. So I remember like at one point I had like some, I don't know, like some rob report of like South Florida hired me because this person found a story of mine. She goes, I want to just hire you for my very small vanity publication. and they said okay I said okay and they're like can you write about these knives and some Japanese knife companies sent me a bunch of knives and I literally had it on my website I probably was in 20 30 stories on my website at that point and like I mean it's hilarious now if you think about I'm writing about like very seriously about these knives because I wasn't I wasn't really self-conscious of it or embarrassed by it was like I needed work and I wanted to do it exactly and so you just get better and so like ultimately it's hard to hear that though when you first start really it's about getting better.

33:34Adam Skolnick: It's not about the story you're writing. It is, but it isn't. You have to care, but it's really not, the outcome is not there. But it's hard to hear that when you're young and you're starting and you have ambition. You know, it is hard to hear, but it is true also.

33:46Ryan Holiday: It's like, I've written press releases. I've written scripts for explanatory videos. You know, I've just written like thousands of things. Do you know what I mean? Ads, right? You wrote ads. I mean, when I was at American Apparel, I probably wrote the press release for 50 to 60 store openings, you know, one after another. And how do you do that and not blow your brains out? Like you have to find a way for it to be interesting to you, you know? And so the challenge of that plus the challenge of just actually doing the thing and then you're then it actually does get read by people. And you're like, no, you just do this over and over and over again.

34:23Ryan Holiday: And even think like the thing that you're so like, it's weird to think like this book, your new one could be reps for a future book that you can't even conceive of yet.

34:33Adam Skolnick: 100%.

34:33Ryan Holiday: But you have to care about it in the moment and think this is my the best thing I've ever done. This is so important. I cared about it. And then also somehow in the back of your mind, know at some level that like in the future, you will you will look back at this and cringe. I might I mean like my first book I had to do I did a five-year anniversary and I'm doing a 15-year anniversary now of it and it's like it's weird to go like hey my first book is was practice for all my future books and now when I read it I mean obviously I think it's good at some level I'm not like ashamed of it but you're like I published this yeah right you know yeah yeah because you that's how it should go because you should get a lot better 100 I mean that's the the ultimately

35:20Adam Skolnick: But it's funny because with books like in record albums, artists probably think their later stuff's better and people aren't really that into the later stuff. So it's funny how timing plays such a big part, I'm sure, in success. I mean, American Apparel being like you guys were the zeitgeist at that time. It's funny to think about it now. And not just that this brand did well, but the aesthetic around the framing of this brand was very original. Right. And you see it now kind of coming through.

35:50Ryan Holiday: Yeah, it's been gone long enough that there's nostalgia for it. Yeah. That's fucking crazy. And then also, though, you do these things and you go, this is going to be on my resume. You said you'd throw something up on your website. Yeah. And then you're like, like, literally no one even. That's not that they don't care. It's that, like, it doesn't register to them. Like, for 10 years when I would get introduced as a talk to me, he's a former director of marketing at American Apparel. And now if someone says that, you can hear it's like a record scratch.

36:18Adam Skolnick: It's just like, what? Well, I had no idea. Rich told me about it before I finished the afterword of Wisdom Takes Work. I didn't know about that yet. And so in my head, because I came to you through the Stoic and through the Daily Stoic on Instagram. I mean, I was aware of your work, obviously, prior to that in 2016, I think, when I first heard about you. But I wasn't clued into your pathway to being an author. And so when I started to clue into what you're doing with the Stoics and bringing them forward and this old wisdom, which is very close to my heart because I've been studying the Tao for a long time.

36:51Adam Skolnick: I do it. I read it almost every day. And so it's kind of a parallel thing, but I've never been a classicist. So everything I hear about from, no, but these are kind of classics, like the Western classicists, like Greek and Roman. I had no idea about these guys. Like, I didn't know about them. And so, I mean, Marcus Aurelius, I heard about in Gladiator. Yeah, me too. That was it. When I said I'm not a classicist, I meant that I have no training in this. Right. Right. But I thought you had. So in my mind, like, I'm like, this guy's fucking smart. He must be like, he must, where did he go? Like Princeton or Yale?

37:24Adam Skolnick: I thought, and then I found out that you have a much scrappier backstory. And I was like, whoa, because I had no idea. I'm one of those people that would have been introduced that I'd be like, wait, who, what, when? Yeah.

37:34Ryan Holiday: You know, I mean, there's sort of a metaphor for this in writing, which is like what the first draft and the finished draft often don't resemble each other like at all. Yes. And like your sort of life in your career is that too. There's echoes of it, but it's like it sometimes not a word of it from here makes it to here. But that doesn't mean but but but certainly this would not have been possible without that.

38:02Adam Skolnick: dude you know who exemplifies that the most is it is it lauren lauren groff laura groff lauren groff she wrote florida she's a short story she's a great great writer and she um short stories and novels and she's got a little bookstore in gainesville so she's kind of like just heard about this yes and and um so she is incredible and what i heard i don't know if it's true because i don't know her but i heard from uh liz gilbert that what she heard because she likes her tune they never met either. But what she heard was that she writes everything out longhand. Yeah. And then she gets, like, she writes her story, then she shreds it or whatever, gets rid of it, and then she starts again.

38:40Ryan Holiday: Wow. And just the memory of it is the only part that is connecting that handwritten draft to the next one.

38:47Adam Skolnick: Yes, exactly.

38:48Ryan Holiday: Wow.

38:49Adam Skolnick: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And she's, I mean, as a short story author, I mean, she's, I've only read her short stories, but I'm sure the books are, the novels are good too. but like remarkable like one of the best going right now i know there yeah i do all my my research

39:03Ryan Holiday: handwritten like uh and then i do think there's a lot of the great biographers like mccullough and carol they write longhand uh-huh susan straight who was just here uh and she was telling me she's like a great california writer she was telling me about her process and then she was going to that bookstore so that's how i just okay cool but but she does all her stuff longhand too i think there's something about the inefficiency of it and the the just sort of going through the motions of it there's probably something to the hand like the hand of the brain thing you know like we're babies

39:35Adam Skolnick: we have our hands here and so there's some connection there i i um i used to do all of it like notes in notebooks so everything was notebooks so when i first started writing before when i was journaling before i even had any ambitions of trying to do this for a living it was always kind of like a notebook and a pen and then as i was started to get into reporting it was obviously the same and the early lonely planet stuff and then at some point i switched to the notes app because lonely planet was switching to like a content management system and the guy came out to shadow us on the road and he's like listen we want you just for this one don't use your notebook just use your notes app and just to see yeah just for an experiment you can go type it on your phone yeah just type it and i thought that's not going to work it takes too long blah blah but now like from that moment i'm like i'm like a trained dog yeah now it's always the note app so it's still kind of the same thing it's still a dump site it's still like if you go through you know you could see my my box of old notebooks it's probably not that different but i do miss it you know i miss the the hand to paper well i find it's like so it's like if i'm

40:39Ryan Holiday: typing it and then i need to use it again or whatever i'm copying and pasting it yeah and And like, so what I'm losing is one step where I have to do it again. Yeah. You know what I mean? So I wrote the process where I'm writing it by hand and then I'm typing it again. Yeah. And you can imagine like if you do your things on a typewriter or you do it longhand and you're like, I want to move this section over here. You have to do it again. Yeah, you do. And in doing it again, you're doing, you're almost certainly doing it better. I agree. Because you're fine tuning it. and like I gotta imagine when you did the uh audiobook for Can't Hurt Me yep were you editing

41:16Adam Skolnick: as you were recording still no it's kind of punch and roll so like if you flub or anything but we weren't editing the what we manuscript the manuscript no really done because I do my

41:26Ryan Holiday: audiobooks in here and I have never once not made cuts and changes having been forced to say it aloud yes because then I'm like oh this like every interaction with the text in a new context text forces you to re-examine things.

41:42Adam Skolnick: And you can write for audio much more. Like this book, I'm still like, we're still doing the last pickups for audio. There's so many alliterations and I'm reading the book. It drives me nuts. I'm like, I'm not going to write like this anymore. I'm going to write for saying it because you can stumble over the, sometimes it sounds good in your head, but speaking it is harder. But so the reader, I don't think they need to be the same so my my feeling is like going forward is they shouldn't be the same we don't need them to be the same but there's this thing in publishing where it has to be the same yes that's gonna go away at some point too like for instance like like when you're writing you

42:20Ryan Holiday: should say like he said she said whatever like it's obvious when you're hearing dialogue yes you know especially like what i hate is um when you're listening to an audiobook and it it's like the voice of the person. And then it's like, he said, it's like the voice, you would never do

42:38Adam Skolnick: that in a movie. Like, like, right, right.

42:40Ryan Holiday: I agree. They're going to diverge more and more. And I know with that one, you guys, like you added in extra stuff.

42:46Adam Skolnick: Yeah. So that, that stuff we did. And, and, and, um, we did, we did a couple of multiple takes of some of the in-between stuff a couple of times, but no, the book was done because, you know, that was a very compressed production, wasn't it? I guess it was. I mean, it started, we started to write it, um, the beginning of 2018 and it was out by November. So yeah, so, uh, it was, but because, you know, David is such a master storyteller, right? He'd been telling this story back when he was in the Navy, like it's in the book, like he would, he would recruit for the Navy. And so they sent him out. So he was telling his childhood story, not maybe not the ultra version, but he was telling his childhood story.

43:27Adam Skolnick: Meanwhile, he was out training with kids at these little stops. Whoever wanted to run with him, he'd run. So he was telling those stories too. So it was just ingrained in him. He had his greatest hits. Yeah. And he is like just a master oral storyteller. Like there's a great American tradition of them. It goes way back, you know? And so he's one of them. And so when you're working with someone like that, it's like this process and a chapter by chapter process, it's easier to build something that's super tight by the end. It's not the same as us rattling around in our own heads and constantly kind of changing and not that, not that we didn't tinker and make sure it was perfect, but, but, um, but I think it's a slightly different experience.

44:09Ryan Holiday: I also think on the audio front, I don't get, since it's a file, like why

44:12Adam Skolnick: isn't there like five narrators?

44:14Ryan Holiday: Like it doesn't, it caught like for a big book, like I did a kid's book and I was like, I'll read it. I'll have my kids read it. I'll have someone with a British accent read it. It's like, just put like 10 files.

44:26Adam Skolnick: A pastiche. Pick what you want to listen to. Oh, and you let the people pick. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting.

44:31Ryan Holiday: You know, there's just no reason that it's like. I like that idea. This is the narrator.

44:35Adam Skolnick: Take it or leave it. No, no, no. Yeah, no, I like that. Like a chosen. Well, AI is going to make that.

44:40Ryan Holiday: I think it'll make it easier. But at the same time, like also why I don't get why every audio book doesn't have what you guys did which is just like cram a bunch of other stuff in there right like it's it's a it's

44:51Adam Skolnick: a package us and gladwell gladwell once he started doing revisionist history his most his more recent

44:57Ryan Holiday: books he basically writes for audiobooks he's yeah and he's just yeah exactly exactly but we

45:02Adam Skolnick: we did that first and it was just kind of like a natural thing to do because he's so good extemporaneously on the mic so it's like you want to have that as much as possible

45:18Ryan Holiday: As you know, AI is everywhere. You're probably using a handful of different AI tools in your life, you know, day to day now. But how many of us are stopping and asking, should I be asking this to AI? I think about that all the time. Do I want to give it my personal information? Do I want to upload this thing that I worked on that I own the copyright to? I don't know, right? Got work stuff, personal questions, late night thoughts, medical issues. We're sharing a lot with AI, maybe even more than we realized. And that's where DuckDuckGo comes in, because they just built Duck.ai for folks who want to keep their conversations with AI tools private.

46:00Ryan Holiday: You go to Duck.ai, and you can chat privately with the same AIs that you're already using, whether that's ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. And it protects your info from hackers, from scammers, and data-hungry companies. It's a win-win. Plus, it's from DuckDuckGo, the company known for protecting your data, not collecting it. No signups, no subscriptions, no learning curve. Just visit DuckDuck.ai and start chatting. If you want to use AI without giving up your privacy, visit DuckDuck.ai slash Stoic today. That's DuckDuck.ai slash Stoic, a private way to chat with AI from DuckDuckGo, where AI is always optional and private.

46:41Ryan Holiday: We've got an employee here at Daily Stoic. I won't say who because it's kind of private, but they've been using Monarch, today's sponsor, to track their progress as they try to pay off their student loan debts. I'm a college dropout, so I don't have any debt, thankfully, but I can only imagine how overwhelming it would be to have this thing hanging over you. And she's been using the app to budget and save, and it's bringing her a little bit closer every day to being debt-free, which I can only imagine would be a huge relief. Monarch shows you exactly where your money is going. it helps you redirect it towards what matters.

47:15Ryan Holiday: With automated tracking and clear projections, you can actually see yourself getting closer to being debt-free or hitting your savings milestone instead of just hoping it happens. Unlike most other personal finance apps, Monarch is built to help make you proactive and not just reactive. And Monarch helped users save over$200 per month on average after joining. You can set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. And you can use code stoic at monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com code stoic.

48:01Okay.

48:01Ryan Holiday: You mentioned Elizabeth Gilbert earlier. Yeah. Last time I saw you at Rich's place, she was there. But then my producer was telling me you're in Eat, Pray, Love. I am. I didn't know this.

48:11Adam Skolnick: I met her in Bali in 2004. It was my first time kind of bundled. I bundled a few assignments from like kind of secondary magazines, not bad, but like Islands Magazine, which used to be a good travel magazine. But but it wasn't like travel leisure. So I got a few of those and I packaged them together and fronted my own travel costs. This was me becoming a travel writer. This was my first kind of big step in that direction. And so when I was out there in Bali, because it was in Indonesia at that time, Hotels were blowing up in Jakarta. Bars were blowing up because it was like, you know, Al-Qaeda, Indonesian Al-Qaeda.

48:48Adam Skolnick: Oh, literally blowing. Oh, yeah. We were like, Indonesia was on the State Department watch list. So that was kind of part of the pitch to the editors. Hey, let's go to this place. Somewhat dangerous. Lots of cool stuff happening in terms of spiritual energy as well. So let's go check that out. Yeah. And so I did that. And so somehow through a contact of mine said, hey, you got to meet Elizabeth Gilbert. She's in town. She's awesome. She's here doing a book. I'm like, okay. And so I didn't really know who she was. Then we connected and we just became fast friends. And then pretty soon, like I realized who she was because she had written Coyote Ugly for GQ and that became a movie.

49:22Adam Skolnick: Oh, she wrote that? She wrote that. She'd written a novel that's really, really good called Stern Man, kind of a coming of age novel about a lobster woman who can't get in the game, you know, like a young woman who wants to do it. And so just a remarkable person. And so we just she became kind of right away this person that helped me right away, like as a mentor. And so a friend and a mentor. So I just hung out with her in Bali. And so I was at when I first met her was at like some birthday party. And and that's when I met her. And so, you know, some kid was there and said, the kid asked me what my favorite animal was.

49:57Adam Skolnick: And I said, I don't know, pelicans. And that's the word pelicans. That's my line. and he probably, I've just name checked. I have no impact on the story. It's just a name check, just an inclusion. I'm like, oh, all right.

50:09Ryan Holiday: Is it you as, like, full name or are you a character? No, no, it's just me. That's so funny.

50:14Adam Skolnick: I'm the guy, I'm this guy that likes pelicans. The California, the California bro at the party that likes pelicans. I still like pelicans. Pelicans are awesome. They're so fucking weird. They are weird. Have you ever seen them eat? Yeah, it's nuts. It's got to hurt the way they eat.

50:27Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

50:28Adam Skolnick: No teeth, they swallow it and it's like.

50:30Ryan Holiday: Well, and then, like, you think, because it's like a bird's beak, you think it's like this hard thing, and then it's like this weird, I don't know, I've never touched it. Yeah, just lodged in there.

50:38Adam Skolnick: Yeah.

50:39Ryan Holiday: But it's just like, it's like this, I don't know, it's weird.

50:42Adam Skolnick: Yeah, I don't know, it's weird. No longer my favorite animal, though, I would say. What, is it tigers? Right now it's tigers. Right now it's tigers. Probably whales, but then tigers, yes.

50:51Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I like all whales except for killer whales. Like, I find orcas just existentially horrifying and scary. Oh, interesting. Like, I don't like, I like the Pacific Ocean, but I don't like the Pacific Northwest. Interesting.

51:05Adam Skolnick: I just find it very ominous.

51:07Ryan Holiday: And like, like you go to Hawaii, you're like, the ocean's amazing. And you go to the Pacific Northwest and you're like, this ocean will murder you.

51:14Adam Skolnick: Don't go in here. Cold and creatures. Although there's never been an account of an orca killing a human being in the wild. Really? Yeah, never. Not one.

51:24Ryan Holiday: It doesn't, doesn't do anything. It doesn't, doesn't make it any better for me. All it means is it's going to happen soon, right? I don't like that they can go on the beach, you know? I don't like that they can, they'll break the ice to get at things that they want. It's just, I don't know. I think everyone kind of has like some animal that fills them with dreads. And that's mine for me. That's yours.

51:48Adam Skolnick: Okay. All right. Do you know John Volant? He wrote -

51:51Ryan Holiday: Yeah, of course.

51:52Adam Skolnick: I don't know him, but I know the book.

51:53Ryan Holiday: Right, because he wrote a book. But he was telling me the story about like, I think I was telling him about this, but But I think what to me encapsulates the Pacific Northwest is like you'll see these logs up on the beach and they're just like as smooth as they could possibly be. And you're like, that was a very large, very rough pine tree or redwood. And you're like, the ocean just took this thing and turned it into a. And he was saying there's some cliffs up near Oregon or Seattle or something where like the ocean will hurl these big logs at the cliffs and it makes a sound like it makes us like they'll vibe.

52:29Adam Skolnick: vibrate like a musical instrument. And she's like, That's crazy, dude. I read Passage to Juneau. You familiar with that book? The author is escaping me. I'm really, really sorry. He wrote a book called Badlands also. He's a great English author that moved to Seattle. And this is all about him sailing his boat from Seattle to Juneau through the Inside Passage. And one of the scary things about it is like he has to be on watch for these logs.

52:56Ryan Holiday: Yeah, because they either fall into the ocean or it's from those logging ships that are moving them around.

53:02Adam Skolnick: The barges. They escape. Right, the barges, and they'll submerge, and they can just wipe you out.

53:06Ryan Holiday: Yeah, just a 200-foot floating speed bump of death or something. Next thing you know, you're floating around by yourself. Well, I was going through some of your New York Times pieces, and I was fascinated. Like, in a way, it's like it's all these different sports, right? Yeah. And yet at some level you're writing about like the same person every time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does that ever strike you? That like one of them swimming 90 miles, the other is running 500 miles, or this one's trying to dive this deep, or this one's, but like it's the same maniac. Male, female, different cultures, but it's the same maniac every time.

53:46Adam Skolnick: It is. I think there's an archetype there, right? Like the, whether it's, I think daredevil is the wrong word. It's the it's the archetype of the person that that needs to find the edge. I don't know what we'd even call it, but it's like it's like is is is most themselves, most who they're supposed to be when they're trying to find the edge of what's possible. And so that's kind of the archetype. I think I haven't thought of it that way. What I thought about recently, because I had to redo my website, you know, for this kind of stuff, you redo everything and rethink. And like I said, I'm not that analytical, but looking back, what I, what I noticed is that all my work ties together with this idea of there's more to this life.

54:28Adam Skolnick: There's more to yourself than, you know, and that you, that you allow yourself to know because to just get through life where these bubbles kind of floating around and we all have that bubble, even these people that we're talking about, their bubble is just much closer to the edge, but you got to pop it and take a look around and see, wait a second. There's so much more to learn, so much more to understand about myself and about this world. And so I think that is the through line. And so these particular people are learning it through ultra endurance or through trying to dive as deep as possible in one breath.

55:02Adam Skolnick: Or now I'm into the wing seat base jumping. I'm researching a book on that. And so that is like that crowd of trying to find. That's more the daredevil. That's more daredevil, but it's the same thing. It's the same people who are trying to find an edge because that's giving their life a different perspective. That's more like the people who are using like the Buddhists who are meditating on death. It's like this kind of unconscious meditation on death to give your life meaning or like the free solo guides. It's no different. And so I think that's the way I look at it is this kind of opening that we are more.

55:36Adam Skolnick: We can do more. We can be more. And we are just more naturally also. Yeah. Also.

55:42Ryan Holiday: It's like they're like engaged in this like perennial battle against the self and whatever limitations the self perceives. That's right. Can a human being do this? Or how can I get to the point that I can't not do it? Right. And that's the edge they're looking. It's not like an edge in the there. So it's about like finding the edge and then seeing if that's actually the edge. Yeah.

56:06Adam Skolnick: And they're not doing it for any glory. I mean, except for the really top people, they don't get money. They don't get notoriety, really. They are doing it for the experience itself. And that's kind of what I think, not just myself, but the sports editors that I work with who are constantly doing stories on the big sports and like all these athletes that want the glory. They loved doing these stories with me because it was like the purity of sport, right? The purity of finding out, can I do it? and the humility that comes with it. Because like, I mean, the best freediving competition in the world, they still have to bring out the diving platform themselves.

56:46Adam Skolnick: It's like, imagine the Ironman athletes before the race having to set up their own barricades. That's what it's like with some of these sports that I cover. So I think -

56:54Ryan Holiday: Yeah, they're not just not getting paid. It's an expensive hobby.

56:57Adam Skolnick: Right, right. Exactly right. That's 100 % right. I mean, the only professional athletes in high altitude mountaineering, I mean, for the most part, unless you're the really top guys, are the Sherpa. Right. You know, that...

57:09Ryan Holiday: Oh, yeah, climbing Everest, the only one getting paid is the person that lives there. They're the professionals.

57:13Adam Skolnick: Yes. Everyone else is a tourist. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

57:16Ryan Holiday: And I mean, I guess you probably saw this with Goggins. Is it like a wound? Is it a death wish? Is it a competitive desire? Like, what is the... I'm sure it differs from person to person, but what motivates someone to go like, no, I want to swim 100 miles, or I want to dive further than any human has ever gone, or I want to run for 36 hours straight. What makes a person do that? Like once it's like, okay, I think a normal person can relate to that, right? Like everyone's like, I want to try, a lot of people are going to try a marathon, I want to try an ultra marathon maybe. But the people that do it as a thing they're trying to master, what is that?

57:59Adam Skolnick: Well, I think I could, if we take kind of three examples, right? Like, let's take the ultra marathon example. There's a marathon, you know, the marathon monks in Japan? No. It's like a Zen Buddhist sect that they run every day. Like, I forget how many days in a row, but like 50 miles a day for however many days in a row. And it's kind of like you get into a meditative state. So anytime you're doing these ultra events, you're coming up against the point of delirium because there's sleep deprivation. You're coming up to the point of pain and injury. And then when you get through it, there's this euphoria.

58:37Adam Skolnick: And we call it the second wind. But there's also this euphoria that, wow. David calls it the 40 % rule. We all think we're done at 40%. And after that, there's this amazing wonderland of energy and strength and power that you tap into. I think breaking through that surface, especially for ultra runners, is the is the what gets you to want to do it again. Got it. I think there's this breakthrough, this power, this euphoria, this this this this energy that you get. And that's why people do it over and over again. I don't think it's the suffering itself, although certainly there's people who are masochistic.

59:13Adam Skolnick: But I think it's what comes after that. That is that is a thing.

59:17Ryan Holiday: And it's not just breakthrough transcendent moment is what they're chasing. I think so.

59:20Adam Skolnick: I don't think it's to say I did this race. Because how do you explain a guy like Harvey Lewis that's just doing it over and over and over again constantly? He's chasing an energy. He's chasing a feeling. Right.

1:00:00Adam Skolnick: Her life had no meaning until she stumbled into a free diving pool session and she found this thing that gave her life energy and power. And so we started off thinking about power. Right. And I think it all comes down to personal power. Power over the self. Yeah. And not just power over the self, but a sense of your own, not power over it, although that is right. But I was speaking more of the important power that we all have to feel good about your life. Yeah. Like that's the empowerment we all can tap into. Like for me, it started back with, you know, out of college, I started reading the Carlos Castaneda books right out of college.

1:00:39Adam Skolnick: Robert Green, your mentor, talked about it on a video not too long ago. And Carlos Castaneda is now being posthumously - Canceled? Yes. And I'm not commenting on him at all. But those books meant a lot to me. And one thing that they got me to do is I would just go out on the trail in nature and I would just contemplate nature and try to tap into the power that I heard, you know, that Don Juan was teaching, you know, the Carlos Castaneda, I mean, can't forget his name now. And I was like channeling that. And that's the first kind of sense of individual power that I ever had. This power to kind of feel good about my own life through connecting to this source.

1:01:19Adam Skolnick: And I think that the source for a lot of these athletes is their, the medium is their source. And that's who they are. And it's not just identity. It's something beyond that. It's like this tap into a power source.

1:01:30Ryan Holiday: Yeah, there's a stoic line, he is powerful who is under his own power. So like, you know, you're, I wanna be king. I wanna be senator. That's what you think power is. Yeah. But if if you're doing that because you want to be loved or you want to be remembered or whatever, you're actually or you're addicted to it. That's actually not power. You're powerless because like this thing has the power. And also whoever decides whether you get it is the powerful. That's right. But when you're like, no, this is who I am. This is what I do. This is what I'm working on. And then your success or failure at the thing is up to you.

1:02:05Adam Skolnick: Yes.

1:02:06Ryan Holiday: That's a magical thing. Right. Like like I think we probably love the same thing about writing. Like it's publishing is one thing.

1:02:13Adam Skolnick: Yes.

1:02:13Ryan Holiday: And it comes after the thing you actually love, which is doing the thing and being in it for months or years. That's the part you control. And if you love that part the most, you'll do really good work. If what you love is that feeling of exhilaration of making or not making the bestseller list or checking how when the when the advance check arrives. Right. One of those is a very self-contained approach and the other is a very externally motivated approach.

1:02:41Adam Skolnick: Yeah, 100%. I think we do have the same feeling about writing because we love it, but we also recognize it's also not that fun a lot of the time. Like running an ultra marathon is probably not fun. Exactly. And this book particularly challenged me in so many ways because for the first, I don't know, year, year and a half I was writing it, I didn't think it was good. And I'm like, am I wasting my time? It's like, I'm going, my family's kind of doing their thing. Like, Izuma was a baby. April was working hard on that. And I'm sitting here doing this thing and it's not making us any money. And like, is it, am I completely screwing up and wasting everyone's time?

1:03:15Adam Skolnick: And it took a long time to get to the fun part with this particular project. It took a long time. Not that I didn't find it worthy, but like the project worthy. But I wondered if the book would be worthy. It's kind of, if you go back into my career, I didn't know. you know I was making it as a writer I was already doing lonely planet guidebooks I was but I didn't know that I was really any good yeah until I I suffer from the external thing until I I got my first New York Times assignment and I realized how the editors were treating my work yes and it was like because I was always fighting from the outside in and any any kind it was like a constant battle and when they anointed when I felt like they approved then all of a sudden I'm like okay I actually am pretty good.

1:03:56Adam Skolnick: And it took a long time for that. That's my own self loathing.

1:04:00Ryan Holiday: It's a hard thing because I think it's hard in anything to like feel like you've made it or you're part of it. But then it's hard in a profession where anyone can call themselves the thing. Yeah. So it's not just that it's not that you necessarily feel the imposter syndrome, although I think everyone does. But there is this like, am I being one of those posers or am I actually one of the handful of people really doing it. And like that, that, that kind of self-consciousness is probably good. And then it means you're not like an egomaniac, you know, probably like that. That's a good, that's a sign of humility, but it is hard.

1:04:33Ryan Holiday: Like when you can get to a point where someone says, what do you do? And you're like, I'm a writer and you're not like, you know, and then, and then when they go like, and what do you write about? And then you can confidently just be like, and this is external stuff can help with that.

1:04:46Adam Skolnick: It totally helps. It Totally. I mean, even with this, I was like, I felt like I did feel I do feel like this is some of my best work. I mean, I'm not going to judge it against everything, but I feel very good about this book. But, you know, we didn't find a major publisher for this book. Right. And so it was fucking with me. It was like, I don't understand it because everyone I was handing it to believed in it. UTA believed in it. All these people believed in it. And you have a decent track record.

1:05:09Ryan Holiday: It must have been frustrating because if you'd had any kind of more conventional or down the middle idea, you know they would have fallen over themselves based on your track record to spend a lot of money on it. And then you're like, is it a bad idea? Is it I'm not doing it right? Or is it that they have some blind spot? And that's a hard thing to parse.

1:05:33Adam Skolnick: I think ultimately what I came around to is it's a mix of things, but like, it's not really that it's a bad idea, but the blind spot is that it doesn't fit the boxes. Right. And it took me a long time to come to that. So for like a year, I was pissed. Yeah. Like I was, well, we were looking for it. I just couldn't understand it because I read a lot. I'm like, I'm not sure. I mean, I do have some humility, but at the same time, I know what a good book is. Yeah, I know it's good. And so I was like, I was just puzzled by it and confused. And I felt like maybe these people don't care about like the Goggins book.

1:06:04Adam Skolnick: Maybe they don't care about these things. Maybe it doesn't register to them. And I think it doesn't in some ways because David went outside the system to publish his book. And so, and also it's his book and also it's fiction. And so there's this nonfiction. Yeah. So it's nonfiction and fiction divide. So there's all these things I'm trying to break through. And so my whole goal was, well, if I write something bulletproof, it won't matter. And so I thought I had something bulletproof. I didn't. And it's a good lesson. And I think coming back to your point about external versus internal, what happened for me was I realized that I was waiting to be anointed.

1:06:39Adam Skolnick: And I realized that I was still trying to be called something, called a novelist, because I always loved novels. That's why I became a writer, right?

1:06:48Ryan Holiday: You wanted the novelist people to go, you have been invited to join us. And this this counts.

1:06:55Adam Skolnick: Right. I wanted to be like, I've always, I think my progression as a writer has always been, it's been hard for me to be get on the inside. You know, I've always felt like I've had to scrap on the outside, which is why I find these underreported stories. But eventually what I came to realize is I talked to Rich's wife, Julie, uh, Julie Piat. And she said, you're waiting to be anointed. You don't need to be anointed. You'll, you'll, you'll find a way to publish this novel as soon as you decide you're a novelist.

1:07:20Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

1:07:20Adam Skolnick: And that was it. Like the light flicked on. I was like, wait a second, she's right. And then I've looked into it. Jane Austen self-published Sense and Sensibility. Charles Dickens paid for the publication of Christmas Carol. So it's like this thing that I thought I wanted, I didn't need. And because of Can't Her Me, I was able to do it. And so I thought, you know what?

1:07:38Ryan Holiday: By the way, most of those people whose space you would want to be part of their, they got$3 ,200 as an advance and the book sold 17 copies and like it feels like that's actually the better safer cooler club and it's it's only because you don't know not you but it oftentimes the thing we want desperately is actually not better it's just safer and it seems safer because it's more conventional right that's just something we made up you have like someone behind you saying yes you know but but i those dollars would kill to actually be in your position financial or contact or platform wise.

1:08:18Adam Skolnick: Well, totally. Well, I mean, here I am sitting with you talking about it. And so it's like, it's, it's, um, to be able to do that is awesome. But also coming back around, like when I was going through this process, at some point I looked at the blacklist, you know, the, the, like the scripts. Franklin Leonard's thing. And they, he started a fiction one. And so this whole time I'd been like wondering why didn't, I still don't understand why, why not me? Why didn't they pick me? And then I'm looking at this blacklist thing and said, you can join and you can pay a little money and you join this contest and, you know, and we'll celebrate you if you're one of the picked novels, the unpublished novels.

1:08:53Adam Skolnick: And it asked me to pick a category for my book. And that's when I realized I could, I couldn't pick a category.

1:09:00Ryan Holiday: They had a point like that. Yes. Like you realize a lot of times just not being clearly one thing or another is a huge disadvantage. Not like as far as quality or it just you're asking a lot of people.

1:09:16Adam Skolnick: You are for for for the people who are packaging them. Yes.

1:09:19Ryan Holiday: But for readers, it won't matter. And so like that's what I thought. I'm like, OK, so no one's being an asshole. No one wants to spend a shit ton of money on a book from the guy that wrote David Goggins books, his novel that's hard to explain. Right. If it works, of course, but like you don't make any more money for buying a good book in publishing. But you definitely get fired if you fuck up or do something that makes you seem stupid. That's right. And that's what you people don't realize. They're often bumping up. It's like, why won't these VCs fund me? It's not that it's a good idea or a bad idea.

1:09:52Ryan Holiday: Right. It's just they don't want to be laughed at by their peers. And as you're currently presenting it, it could potentially be something that puts egg on their face. Right. That's that's the main thing they're trying to avoid.

1:10:05Adam Skolnick: Right. I mean, this book isn't that hard to explain on some level, but what it gets into is much more subtle. And, you know, we're talking about a book where where there's a tiger slinking around the suburbs of L.A. Right. And that's based on a true story I reported for the L.A. Weekly 20 years ago. And so it was a true story. And so that's it. So everyone understands that. That concept, I thought, always worked. And it's kind of like a tight timeline. It's over the course of this search. Is there a tiger? Is there not? But what makes the book work, and I think why people are responding to it, who have had a chance to read it, is that it's just a deeper experience.

1:10:43Adam Skolnick: And so what all, to me, what all great books do, what your books do, what the things I I write, I try to do is they wrestle with the fundamental question of what it means to be alive. Yeah. And that's, I think, what all great books do. Right. That's why people come back to meditations. So that's what's amazing about Marcus Aurelius. Right. That he was wrestling with it. True. I mean, a guy in his power was wrestling with it.

1:11:03Ryan Holiday: It's an insane fluke. But talk about a book that doesn't work in a category. Right. He wasn't thinking about it as a book. He didn't want it to be a book for 500 years. It wasn't a book. Right. You know, it just it's a It's a random confluence of circumstances that it even exists. If you had pitched it to someone, they would have been like, no, thanks.

1:11:22Adam Skolnick: You know, exactly. And then I think what you explained with Elon Musk, by the way, I mean, you're Elon. It's the best I've ever seen anyone explain Elon Musk. I haven't read Walter Isaacson's book. So, I mean, obviously you have multiple sources. That's one of them you write in the book. But like the way you explain him and build him up and take him apart is, I think, the best I've ever seen. And one of the things that he is is a guy that doesn't wrestle with what it means to be alive. And that's the dangerous people out there are the ones that don't wrestle with it. They're not interested.

1:12:00Ryan Holiday: That means a lot to me that you point out. That was the hardest thing in the book to write. And it took the longest and I had to read the most. And it's also the scariest because you're writing about a vindictive person with unlimited resources who, by the way, owns like half this specific town. I didn't realize that until afterward. All of his stuff is here. Yeah. And like people that work there live on my streets, you know.

1:12:23Adam Skolnick: They agree with you, I'm sure.

1:12:24Ryan Holiday: I don't know. But yeah, that was a challenging one. Yeah, there is a stunning lack of self-awareness or introspection, which is probably his superpower in some ways. Yeah. But yeah, that was a rough one to write. Speaking of which, I was thinking of this book because when I drive my kids to school, sometimes we like on the New York Times app, you can listen to stories. Yes. So it's like instead of their terrible taste in music or whatever, we'll all like pick articles. When I'm reading the news throughout the like, you know, I go, oh, I think my kids would like this story. And there's a story that I said, we listened to it.

1:12:54Ryan Holiday: There was a report of a lion in Ireland like two weeks ago in the woods in Ireland.

1:13:01Adam Skolnick: An African lion.

1:13:02Ryan Holiday: Yes. Which seems crazy. Except for which I'll get to in a second. But there were some reports of this African lion. And it turns out it was just a dog that a guy had shaved weird and it liked to trot around in the woods and they found the dog. And so it was this huge story because now this dog's like a hero and everyone loves this dog. It's a very famous dog. But anyways, that's the first half of the article. The second half of the article is, of course, you're probably like, how would an African lion have been in Ireland? Obviously, that's dumb that people. Ireland was at one point like the breeding capital of lions.

1:13:37Ryan Holiday: It wasn't really. The MGM lion is from Dublin. It was bred by a lion breeder outside of Dublin or something. That's amazing.

1:13:45Adam Skolnick: And you're just like, man, life is so fucking weird. Oh, dude, it was way weirder. In the first half of the 20th century, like around the turn of the century in the 20s, people were doing all sorts of shit. Like people would have like chimpanzees as pets, like all the kind of weird exotic pet stuff starts then. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

1:14:01Ryan Holiday: Because rich people could travel and there wasn't like strong. So it'd be like you took the boat to Africa and you took a lion home with you or whatever. Like that, you know, that famous viral video about the lion running and hugging those people. Yes. That they were they lived in London. That's where that lion was. They bought that that lion at Harrods. Yeah. Did they really? Because they sold. Yeah. They're like thing about British colonialism, by the way, up until much more recent than you think. Yes. And nothing brings that home to me, by the way. I was just having to talk to my UK publisher because there's a bookstore in Australia that wanted something from me.

1:14:39Ryan Holiday: And British publishers still exist in the empire. Is that right?

1:14:46Adam Skolnick: So when you sell...

1:14:47Ryan Holiday: That's right.

1:14:48Adam Skolnick: You could have UK rights include Canada and Australia and all. In India. Yeah, in India. It's insane. Oh, in India too?

1:14:55Ryan Holiday: English India. That's funny. The English translation, in the English language in India, that is your UK. Kenya too? South Africa. Okay. I don't know about Kenya. Okay. But you're just like, okay, this is like, this is because publishers from 50 years ago were still part of this system.

1:15:11Adam Skolnick: How many other businesses are like that? It's crazy. I'm sure. Like the imports of like commodities. Yes. That's got to still exist in that same. Yeah. Yeah.

1:15:18Ryan Holiday: Like I'm sure like if you buy teak. Right. It's probably some company in Thailand owned by a British dude. And certainly tea.

1:15:26Adam Skolnick: Yeah. T from India.

1:15:27Ryan Holiday: But anyways, I thought I was like, the MGM lion is from Ireland?

1:15:32Adam Skolnick: And the MGM lion has a tiger dubbed in. Oh, that's what the roar is? Yeah, the roar is a tiger. Because the proper roar that we all think of with lions and tigers is only a tiger. The lions have a more cough type of roar. It's like it's a growl plus like, you know, they belt something out, but it's not the classic like clean roar. That's tigers. Well, when I first saw it, I was like, oh, is it set in Texas? because Texas has the most tigers. Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, in those days, so what the backstory is of the true story is that a Tiger King type couple moved their menagerie of cats from Riverside County to Ventura County, and they had a 30-day grace period.

1:16:13Adam Skolnick: Like, you don't have to tell the game wardens of the new county. It's just a law. Like, they have 30 days. And then they lost track of two cats. Just lost it. And they didn't tell anybody. And the lynx turned up first. The game warden found the lynx. and then these guys came to pick up the claim the links and that's when the game ward went to their place. To lose anything else? Yeah and they denied it. Yeah. I mean imagine the strange psychosis of like losing knowing you lost track of a tiger. Sure. And denying it.

1:16:39Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

1:16:39Adam Skolnick: Like that's nuts. I mean that's another level of nuts. And you think you're dealing with like the federal government.

1:16:45Ryan Holiday: Right. But like what happens in Texas for instance is like it's like okay there's some national laws or statewide laws, but it's like most of the things are like ultimately regulated at like the city or the county level. And like most counties are not like, and then let's make sure we pass a law that says you can't own tigers. Because the assumption is there's no tigers here. People don't have tigers. It's kind of oftentimes it's only happens because something like this happens. The safeguards are there because the absurd exception proved the need to have it in

1:17:18Adam Skolnick: the first place. That's right. I mean, that's the history of lawmaking, right? But so what happened is prior to 2022, it was state by state. It was governed as a state. And so certain states allowed breeding, certain didn't, but it was all pretty legal to own them. And then in 2022, they passed the Big Cat Safety Act. This is the great legacy. In response to the documentary. Exactly. And so that happened. And so now breeding is illegal. Tiger petting is illegal. So it's all recent that But this is like it used to be in 2021. You could still go to a tiger petting like concession in the United States.

1:17:49Ryan Holiday: Every time we drive down to Florida a couple of times a year and every time we drive from here and we're passing through New Orleans, I tell my son that when he was a baby, we were driving through and we stopped at the tiger truck stop, which had a tiger in a cage at the gas station. And he's like, can't wrap his head around that being a thing. I'm like, not only was it a thing, I watched someone walk into the gas station, buy lunch meat, and throw it into the tiger cage. You're like, this is not ancient history.

1:18:20Adam Skolnick: No, I mean, I did it when I was researching this book. I went to like five or six of these kind of amateur zoos. One was outside the Sequoia National Park. Still exists. These places still exist. In California. Yeah, in California. All of them were in California. One was in the high desert. One was outside the national park. a couple one was in santa clarita tippy hendren's place yeah some one was outside san diego they were called some of them were refuges so like places that the bad actors would have to they

1:18:46Ryan Holiday: they'll take them because somebody else had one right and they can they have a better situation

1:18:50Adam Skolnick: and they have more better management but they're all like not that great and so then you but you can feed them at some of these like the worst ones you could do tiger feeding i fed them like

1:19:00Ryan Holiday: this they have a zoo down the street it's like twenty dollars to feed the line actually i have I have a picture of my, they had a thing, like they had a dingo there and the dingo had puppies. Oh my God. And you could go and, so as a picture of my kids, like just being jumped on by dingo puppies. Is that right? That's hilarious. Not eating the baby. That's cute. That's cute. But yeah, you're just like, this is not, life's weird. It is weird. It is weird.

1:19:23Adam Skolnick: Drove to work the other day, I saw a zebra in someone's front yard. Is that right? This is weird. Well, you get that also outside of Hearst Castle, you know, there's zebras. Well, that's the Simi Valley thing.

1:19:31Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Because some of those zebras are like Hearst Castle. He had a crazy zoo. You can still see the zoo. But like he, some of the zebras got out and bred with like horses and stuff. So they're still like.

1:19:42Adam Skolnick: They're in the plains, like light below the castle hill. They're still part of the Hearst property. Yeah. In San Simeon. Yeah. Yeah. So yes, I mean, you know, the Simi Valley part of it was interesting because like for a long time I was hesitating writing this book and I was trying to figure out like the best way to tell it. And so I was thinking like a journalist, I'm going to get all the information I can get. I went back. When I was covering for LA Weekly, I was there when they were doing it. So I went back to some of those game wardens and tried to get as many files. U.S. Department of Agriculture, who brought in the trackers, wouldn't give me anything.

1:20:14Adam Skolnick: They sent me this redacted file. I don't know if you ever got redacted files, but it's like a funny game of Tetris, all black, and then like, and. What are they hiding? I don't know.

1:20:23Ryan Holiday: This is just a tiger story. From 20 years ago. I know. So I couldn't get everything.

1:20:28Adam Skolnick: And finally, I decided, you know what? It's fiction.

1:20:31Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

1:20:31Adam Skolnick: I don't have to set it in Simi Valley. I can kind of change Simi Valley to suit the needs.

1:20:36Ryan Holiday: Make it a story. If you can't get the material, make it a story.

1:20:38Adam Skolnick: Exactly. And so there's a lot that's true in it, but then there's a lot, there's the opportunity to kind of get magical with it. And so, and for the whole time though, I thought I was going to treat it pretty honest to what happened until the end and started writing the ending. And I realized, no, there's something else that could happen.

1:20:54Ryan Holiday: Well, to go to your point about power, and then I want to show you some books in the bookstore. I thought the funniest thing, like it's like, okay, William Randolph Hearst, I'm rich, I'm powerful, I need to own a bear and whatever. And then, I mean, obviously this is what the Romans did, you know, and kings and whatever have done forever. But I thought the funny, there's this interview with Ridley Scott when he's being asked about the new gladiator. Because there's this, have you seen the gladiator too? No, I have not seen it. You are obligated. You have to see it. Of course, of course. I should have been asked to do a cameo.

1:21:23Adam Skolnick: You should be at the premiere. Yeah.

1:21:26Ryan Holiday: But like they used to flood the Colosseum and have naval battles, which like we only discovered relatively recently. Talk about imminent domain. Yeah, yeah. But in the movie they do that. But then there's sharks in the water. And this journalist like, so like how'd you have the idea to do that? I mean, he's like, obviously the Romans didn't have sharks in the Colosseum. And Ridley Scott, he gets fucking mad. He's like, you don't fucking know. He's like, do you know how hard it was to build the Colosseum? And then they flooded it with water. and then they put ships in and they have naval battles.

1:21:59Ryan Holiday: He's like, I don't know. Maybe someone caught a shark and put it in there. It's not that crazy. He's like so mad.

1:22:06Adam Skolnick: Don't you love that he's still so passionate about his shit? Some of the stuff now, like these old men that are doing it, some of them are more wise, like Scorsese is kind of more humble than he used to be.

1:22:17Ryan Holiday: They've turned the volume down.

1:22:18Adam Skolnick: Yeah, not him. No. He's gone the other way.

1:22:22Ryan Holiday: But it was just like, oh, this is what lights you up. And you're, yeah, like, you're right. Like, there's something kind of cynical and smug about, like, obviously they didn't do this.

1:22:32Adam Skolnick: And his view is like, maybe they did. Right, well, why are we attached to, when you're talking about story and fantasy or whatever it is, why are we attached to keeping the rules the same of our known world, right? Like the whole idea of, you know, the hero with a thousand faces and the hero's journey, which we're all on, right? We're all on. And that's one thing that you point out to everybody is you have power of your life. You can become your own hero. You can follow these masters and do it too. If we're on the hero's journey, the worst thing you can do is tell yourself that you already know the ending.

1:23:04Ryan Holiday: Yes. Yeah. I mean, we do all know the ending. Instead of just going like, hey, that was a cool scene in this fictional action movie. Right, right. You're like, it didn't really happen that way. Right, no, no. It didn't happen at all.

1:23:18Adam Skolnick: Right, it didn't happen. That point isn't that it happened. The point is, here's a story that you can use to relate and form your life, right? I mean, like, isn't that the point? And maybe just to entertain you, which is all we need sometimes. That's what art is. Yeah, that's all it is, man.

1:23:30Ryan Holiday: You want to check out some books? Let's do it.

1:23:31Adam Skolnick: All right.

1:23:37Ryan 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.

1:23:52Thank you.