The Daily Stoic - Sebastian Junger on the Wonder of Existence and the Complexity of Freedom

Episode Date: May 22, 2021

On today’s episode of the podcast Ryan talks to author and filmmaker Sebastian Junger about his new book Freedom which details his 400 mile journey along the railroad lines of the American East Coast, the unforeseen consequences of fighting for freedom, how the fragility of life reveals a wonderment at existence, and more. Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe.  As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film "Restrepo" was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. You can have your donation matched up to $1,000 before the end of June or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org/STOIC and pick podcast and The Daily Stoic at checkout. Beekeeper’s Naturals is the company that’s reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. Beekeepers Naturals has great products like Propolis Spray and B.LXR. As a listener of the Daily Stoic Podcast you can receive 15% off your first order. Just go to beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout to claim this deal.Policygenius helps you compare top insurers in one place, and it lets you save 50% or more on life insurance. Policygenius will help you find the insurance coverage you need. You can save 50% or more by comparing quotes. Just go to policygenius.com to get started.Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoicFollow Sebastian Junger: Homepage: http://www.sebastianjunger.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/sebastianjungerFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/sebastianjunger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sebastianjungerofficial/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke 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 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. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wendery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward.

Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I was so excited to have today's guest on the podcast. I've been a fan of his work since I don't even remember. I almost feel like I was a little kid when I first saw the perfect storm. When I was starting out as a writer, someone gave me this great advice.

They said, if you want to be a good writer, you have to go live an interesting life. You have to do interesting things. And I think Sebastian's work is a great reflection of that. He's had hard jobs. He's gone to dangerous places in the world. He's even this book, his new book Freedom, which just came out, is about him walking across the United States with not much more than a few friends and a dog and a backpack. And he's exploring the idea, as the Stokes say, not abstractly, not theoretically, but practically. You know, Stokes talk about these sort of pen and ink philosophers. I'd

argue Sebastian is not a pen and ink writer. He's a writer who goes, lives the stories and then puts them through what you might call sort of a Hemingway-esque pen. And I joke about this with Sebastian in the interview. I've never read a Sebastian younger book, and I loved Freedom, and I loved his last book, tribe. I've never read one of his books and thought that could have been shorter. Freedom is this complicated topic. Of course, people have written thousands and thousands of pages about it, and his book clocks in at a whopping 150 pages give or take. He reduces things down to their essence. He really thinks about them.

And I think, you know, even he talks about this, you feel like he must have gone on this journey like a year ago. It was several years ago and then I think he spends a lot of time thinking. So every word packs an incredible punch and I think that's what makes his writing so great. Do you check out the new book? He's a number one New York Times best-selling author. He's made great documentaries. He's a great journalist too, but I think, like I said, he sort of reduces these things down to their essence. You know, the dedication on this book is quite beautiful. It's just to my beloved family

who taught me the true meaning of freedom. We talk about a bunch of great stuff in this interview. I think you're going to enjoy it. Here's my interview with the one and only Sebastian Younger and check out his new book, Freedom. And if you haven't read Tribe, you absolutely should as well. I remember listening to your interview with Tim Ferris and you had gotten to his house early and you were reading or something and I remember you guys briefly talking about Seneca which you said you hadn't read you were flipping through. Did you ever get back around to picking up letters of a stoic? I did and I read it right after that actually

and I underlieed a whole bunch of stuff and I but it was long that, actually, and I underlined a whole bunch of stuff. It was long enough ago that I don't think I can have an intelligent conversation about what I underlined. Unfortunately. But I was a huge admirer. I was really reading passages to my wife, which might be an abuse of marriage, abuse of the marriage contract, but I was reading him aloud to my wife. No, it is fitting. Seneca talks in one of the letters. He talks about how the mind,

if not given relaxation will break. And he says, we must go on on wandering walks, which did remind me of your wonderful new book. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. of your wonderful new book. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. Well, I read two books before I read yours that sort of informed my reading. Maybe people have brought this up to you, but I stupidly re-read Kormick McCarthy's the road at the beginning of the pandemic. And then I also recently read a book which you might not have read. I don't know if I have it here.

Called, oh, here it is. Called Lincoln on the Verge, 13 days to Washington. And it's about Lincoln's train trip from Illinois to DC. And all, yes, to stop in all these towns, but Lincoln was one of the early proponents of sort of American infrastructure.

So it's this sort of journey along the canals and railroads, but I'd first heard of a bunch of the towns that you talk about in this book because he passes through them in this insanely inefficient journey from the west to the east. Right, right. Oh, fascinating. Yeah. I haven't read that book, but I'm a huge, admirer of of Kormac McCarthy. And I'm not sure the rober's is best book, but, but, but,

but everything he's read, and I think it's pretty stunning. Yeah. I think it's, it's, it's certainly his best book if you have young children, and it's, or, or worst, depending on how you, how you want to categorize it. It's best his best book if you have young children and it's or worse depending on how you want to categorize it. It's best and worst. And it was again the best and worst book to read in, I think April of 2020 as the world is falling apart. But there were scenes in here where you know you're just chilling out under an underpass and someone takes a shot at you for no reason that kind of reminded me of the dark insanity of of human beings. Yeah, absolutely. And it was this interesting, I mean, I've done a lot of backpacking in the wilderness

in the woods, whatever. What was interesting about this is that it was such a raw physical existence that we walked 400 miles along the railroad lines, but it wasn't wilderness. I mean, some of it was wild. Some of it was urban ghetto. It was, or mixed use, industrial suburbs. I mean, it was sort of every flavor of American landscape. And the thing that really intrigued me about this particular trip along the rail lines, I called it the last patrol,

was precisely that it wasn't in the wilderness. It was, we went right through and right around the edges of American society. We were dependent on American society for our food, but we had to avoid the police. We had to basically scoot through without getting into trouble. And that little game that we arranged for ourselves

was just endlessly intriguing to me. I'm in New York and there's a lot of traffic outside. I'm so sorry. I could close the window. I love it. Obviously, they're not stoics out there on the street. Well, so maybe you didn't get far enough in Seneca, but there is. There is actually, let me see if I can pull this up. You might like this. Hang on one second. I don't see if I can pull this up. You might like this. Hang on one second. I don't know if I have a copy.

Oh man, I don't. But there is a letter in Seneca where he speaks about being in this apartment in Rome and he's trying to write. And he can hear the vendor shouting below, the police are arresting someone below his window. He's above a gym. He can hear the weights dropping.

He can hear the fat men being massaged. He describes basically what's happening outside your window right now, minus the car horns. And I think that is what I love about whether it's the road or Sennaka or your thing, is that some of these sort of human experiences are so sort of timeless and the themes running through them, the dates and the places and the names change,

but like human being trying to have some quiet out there window, somebody going through a walk in unfamiliar territory, there is this sort of primalness that as much as we'd like to be gone never does go away. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're primates, we're animals. Why would we have it? We haven't changed much in some thousands of years. Of course, it's all the same behaviors. And the sort of solipsism of our existence is always stunning to me. We, we all get angry in traffic and, and, you know, really angry sometimes, right?

And, I mean, and one day I was stuck in traffic and I was found myself just going to be absolutely furious about it. And then I said to myself, listen, man, you're traffic, too. Like, you're somebody else's. Yes. You're someone else's traffic. Like, don't get so high in mind, you about the fact that you're stuck in that traffic.

You're traffic also. And once I thought of it like that, it actually allowed me to calm down. It was actually a great device for diffusing the anger that we all feel when we're stuck in traffic. When I think that what the Stoics would say, and I'm trying to find this passage, because I marked it, you said, the railroad lines we followed were there because that's where the settlers roads had been. And the settler roads were there because that's where the Indian trails had been.

And the Indian trails were there because 250 million years ago, the one-eater river had sought her way through the shell and limestone strad of that country faster than the tectonic forces that could lift them up. It's not just that you're a traffic. The Stoics would say, there's been traffic in this exact spot in some form, whether it's a train or a wagon train or a hunter gatherers or bands of marching soldiers. Traffic is traffic and you're just one dot

in a continuum of traffic in the same spot. And it's not all a conspiracy to ruin your day, which is how people experience traffic. It's pretty funny. Yes, yes. And of course, right, you blame everyone else and you can't think about how you are contributing to the exact problem that you're bemoaning. Right.

I mean, the guy behind you's blaming you, right? I mean, you know, it's quite funny. So what is that darkness, though, that you experience on this walk? So I live out in the country about a bit outside Austin, Texas. So you sort of mentioned the ghetto. There's sort of also this kind of rural ghetto, which doesn't get as much attention. There is this experience I have every once in a while interacting with my neighbors or people out here where you go, oh, you live out here because you can't function

in polite society, right? So you tend to have this idea of sort of southern hospitality or like country manners. And then you also realize that some of these people live out away from everyone because they've been slowly exiled from polite society. It did seem, you know, yeah, I just, the idea of just shooting at some total strangers

who are sleeping under a bridge or walking down a trail, that's probably incomprehensible to some people, but also completely jies with my experiences. Well, yeah, I mean, I have to assume that if he was shooting at us, he was trying to not hit us or he would have hit us. And I think it was a kid with a revolver just empty five rounds over our head because he didn't like the fact that strangers out of towners, this is a small town in Pennsylvania.

A lot of guns in Pennsylvania, I think there's often a certain view of outsiders that maybe isn't that great. And there we were looking dirty and ragged with backpacks on the dog and squatting by our packs on the railroad lines. And I think he was like, why don't you guys move on to the next town? That would be a good idea. And that's how we communicated it. So we had, you know, we all been in a lot of combat. And so bullets over our head produced a certain reaction in all of us.

But at the end of the day, I don't think it was any more threatening than a warning. Yeah, it's, I think what it reminded me of the road, why it reminded me of the road, is you're sort of, you're on this walk, but you're deliberately having to skirt society and skirt other people. The theme of the book being freedom, we have this idea of freedom being wonderful and welcoming, but actually freedom for you sort of depended on interacting with human beings as little as possible. Yeah, but and keep in mind that we all depend on others for our survival. The ultimate freedom is to be by yourself in the wilderness, but no one survives in the wilderness

by themselves, right? The humans die immediately and very quickly. So to survive in the world, to survive on this planet, human beings need to be in some kind of group. And as soon as you're in a group, you have to abide by its rules or your cast out of that group and your survival is in question again. So this idea of freedom as this sort of ultimate experience where you're completely unfettered in your actions is just nonsense. I mean, yes, you can do that in the Canadian wilderness, but you'll only enjoy your freedom for some days or weeks. Yeah, did you read The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel? Yes, I did. I did.

Yeah, it sort of goes to your point, which is that his freedom, the hermit who lives in the woods, he sort of escapes from society. The only reason he's able to exist is because he steals from the same society that he's escaping. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And today, the word freedom is thrown around a lot by people with various kinds of politics. But what they're all forgetting is that they're all of those people, like every single one is completely physically dependent on this very complex industrial society for everything that they need. And so the idea that you're free, like it's like, I mean, there are forms of political freedom or whatever democracy is a form of political freedom.

But the idea of being like free as an independent of all other systems that you don't have to answer to is just complete juvenile nonsense. Yeah, that's kind of been one of the weird debates during the pandemic, right? I totally get why people would feel, you know, minorly constrained, let's say, having to wear a mask or not being able to do this or that. And it strikes me as odd that our focus though

has been on that and not on the global health crisis that is forced the constraint to begin with, right? So, yes, it's a constraint to wear a mask, but in not wearing a mask, we're not sort of observing some basic safety protocols, then a large percentage of the rest of the population is now worried about dying of a disease. So this freedom is this thing that we throw around a lie. I think that's sort of what you're talking about in the book, but it's much more complex

than whatever the thing the person wants to be free to do in that very moment. Yeah, I mean, exactly. I mean, the word freedom really means freedom from oppression. It doesn't mean freedom from obligation. And you're one of your primary obligations is not to endanger other people. So you are not free to run a red light. I don't care how, you know, how important quote freedom is to you. You're not free to run a red light in this society where you depend on the infrastructure and the laws to get by in your life as well. You're not free to do that because you might kill somebody. And so if the group in that in this case the country decides that you're

endangering other people by not wearing a mask, you don't have to agree with them. You're part of this group, right? So you have to abide by that rule. And if you don't like it, you can leave. You don't have to be here, right? Yeah, there's a big difference between driving without a seatbelt, which affects only you and driving drunk, which externalizes the consequences on your actions on other people. At the root, I guess there's both freedom is at stake in both cases, but in your freedom to do one, you are implicitly depriving another person of freedom. That's right. That's exactly right. And that's a distinction that I think is lost in some of the heated rhetoric these days around the ideas of freedom.

Yeah, and you hear people say this like we all have different risk tolerances, which is true. We all have, you know, some people feel comfortable jumping off a bridge of this height into the water and other people, you know, would be at a lower height. The problem is when your risk tolerance is implicating or affecting other people. Yeah, you can't choose other people's risk tolerances for them. So when you run a red light, you're running a huge risk yourself, but you're also choosing a level of risk for other people. And you're not allowed to do that.

It's immoral and it's illegal. And as it, well, it should be. So that's where your quote, freedom ends. I was, I think one of my favorite scenes of the book, and this also jive from my experience, it's at the beginning, you're talking about how this guy asks if you can come with you and you say, no, you can't. And he says, oh, well, if you change your mind, you know, let me know. And, and you, you, you point out that,

you know, nothing was stopping this guy from, from leaving his front door and going on a walk himself. And I found that, you know, on stuff that I've done, whether it was, you know, sort of moving out to the country to buy a to live on a farm or different decisions. I've made people say things like, I've always wanted to do that. As if, you know, financial constraints were a lack of financial constraints was why I was able to do that. When it's like, actually, you know, this life that I have out here, I assure you costs less than the average person's, you know, monthly rent in Manhattan. People often say they can't do something,

they're not free to do something. When really it feels like that lack of freedom is an illusion as it was for the guy who wanted to come with you. Yeah, I mean, you're right. You're not willing to trade one thing for another. Usual trade is I want comfort and security, and I'm not willing to give those up in exchange for freedom and autonomy. And so this, I don't know who this guy was. We were walking along the rail lines of Pennsylvania.

It was midwinter, it was very cold, it was snow on the ground. He was parked in a really old, beater car along the railroad lines up ahead, and we stopped because we thought he might be a cop. It's illegal to do what we were doing. So we put some binoculars on and then watched him for a while, figured out he wasn't a cop. So we walked on past him and he engaged us in conversation. He was like, listen, I can be back here in 15 minutes with my gear if you'll let me come with you.

And in my mind, I'm like, I mean, he was in his 70s, right? I was like, what is going on in your life? Where, like, joining in mid-winter, joining four guys, you don't know, trekking along the road, it's better than what's going on at home. Like, are you okay? I didn't want to be part of his solution, but I also sort of noted in my book, I said,

you know, there's nothing stopping him from doing exactly what we were doing, walking out his front door, just keeping on going on the railroad line, still a hip to Pacific. I mean, you know, there's nothing stopping him from doing that, but I, what I acknowledge, and this is where human sociability and interdependence comes in, there are some things that, when you do them alone, they actually feel like a form of exile. And when you do them with other people, it feels like you're getting away with something

or a form of freedom. And one of the things, I mean, in my book, I say, you know, we walked 400 miles along the railroad lines, and most nights we were the only people who knew where we were. There's a lot of definitions of freedom, but surely that's one of them. Honestly, had I done this whole trek by myself, it wouldn't have felt like freedom, but surely that's one of them. Honestly, had I done this whole trek by myself, it wouldn't have felt like freedom, it would have felt like a gauntlet of fears and hardships that I might have been able to physically do, but it certainly would not have been as exhilarating as this sometimes was with this group of guys. Well, this goes to the point of your last book, which is that if the tribe is doing it,

it's a lot less scary than if we're doing it by ourselves. And our whole evolutionary process has been to want to be part of a tribe and to not be the exiled solitary figure. Yeah. And as humans, your safety comes from the fact that you're part of a tribe that can defend itself, whether that tribe is the United States or the ancient Scythians or whatever it is, you can defend yourself because otherwise you will lose your freedom to an outside aggressive force.

But then the tricky thing is a society that can defend itself from an enemy is also capable of oppressing its own. So what you need to do is be in a society that's sufficiently guarded against outsiders, that it can defend itself, but you don't wind up with rulers, with leaders who are, who want to oppress their own people. And that's the other part of freedom. What you end up doing is basically, as I say in the book, you change loyalty to one thing for basically, as I say in the book, you change up loyalty to one thing for loyalty to another. So in the early days of this country, people were often fleeing to the frontier to escape what they felt was the oppressive scrutiny

of the colonial government and then the American government and on the Pennsylvania frontier, it was incredibly dangerous, right? I mean, it was Indian territory. There was no back up, like you were out there on your own with your family and you didn't have the government breathing down your neck. But in order to survive that, you had to be part of a coalition of other farmers, other people in the community, settlers, that would have sort of had an agreed upon mutual defense. And that was the only way to survive the Indian wars. But immediately, once you're part of that coalition, you have to respect the norms of that group.

And one of the norms was that as a male, as a man, you had to, at all times, carry a flintlock rifle, a tomahawk, and a scalping knife. And if you were caught without those things, at all times, you were shunned and shamed within the community. That was, so pick your freedom, right? You want the freedom to not have to deal with the government, or do you want the freedom to not have to deal with neighbors who are going to cast you out because you're not abiding by their norms. There's no escaping the fact that you will have to obey

group rules or you run the risk of having a very short life. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies,

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So if you want to get inspired, and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early, and add free, on the Amazon, or Wondery. It's funny how far back that tension goes. I was actually just rereading a new translation of Marcus Reelius for an interview I'm doing next week. And I didn't notice the illusion before, but in meditations, Marcus Reelius alludes to Asop's fable about the town mouse and the country mouse.

Right? You know, each one thinks that the other's life will be better. They get it. They hate the country mouse is anxious in the city. And the city mouse is bored in the country. And it is funny, for all of time, people in small towns or small areas have rejected the provincialism and the oppressiveness

of the small community where everyone knows their business, the tribe, as you said, that can tell you what to do. And then we get these big societies, the farming societies, you know, the agricultural societies and the cities. And then that feels oppressive and isolating and alienating in its own way. And we crave the freedom of the tribe and the small town again. And so there's this, it feels like we're just

pinging back and forth between these two extremes, never learning the lesson. Yeah, we're toggling back and forth. And some people find the oppression of a large overarching state or government to be more oppressive than the oppression of a small community that's gossipy and can shame you and cast you out. I mean, there's

no escaping some form of societal control. So pick your poison. But also, it's interesting that this sort of toggling back and forth between boredom and anxiety. I mean, that is the human condition, right? And different people have different levels of each that they're comfortable with. Some people just cannot abide any board on whatsoever. They're risk takers, right? Statistically, they live shorter lives. Young men have, I think, six times the mortality rate as young women, while in their early years, 18 to 25, I think it is six times the mortality rate, early, you know, year is 18 to 25, I think it is six times the mortality rate. Because frankly, they're easily bored and they take stupid risks and they jump off of stuff and they shouldn't jump off of, they drive too fast, they do all kinds of stuff, they

get in fights, they do all kinds of stupid stuff. They're definitely sensation seekers statistically compared to young women and it gets them killed. So there you have people talking back and forth between these two human evils, right? Board of board of men anxiety. And, you know, we all have to find our own middle ground. Well, what's your middle ground? Because you see him like you chase these,

sort of romantic, although not always romantic, but these far-flung destinations, sometimes violence, sometimes war-torn, sometimes through the wilderness, like in this book. And then you live in New York City. Where do you find that sort of stillness or the satisfaction that you need? Well, when I was younger, I was a war reporter. Before that, I was a climber for tree companies. And I've worked 80, 90 feet in the air. Sometimes with a chainsaw hanging on a rope, taking trees down in pieces. The interesting thing about tree work, unlike everything else, is that there's no random

element. It's like there's no random element in chess. If you lose a chess game, you lost the chess game. There wasn't a role of the dice, a draw of the card. Likewise, in tree work, you're just dealing with physics. And if you cut, if you top a tree out wrong and it comes back and falls on you and crushes you, you did that, right? There was no random element in combat. There's a lot of random stuff in combat. I mean, I had a bullet hit a few inches from my forehead into a sandbag.

You know, from a guy who was shooting from 400, 500 meters away, you know, what's the angle on that that saved my life? You don't even want to think about it. Totally random, right? So after one of my colleagues, Tim Heatherington, who died 10 years ago yesterday, I made a film called Restruppo with him. He was a dear friend, a wonderful guy. After he was killed in Libya, again, randomly,

I got out of war reporting, because I didn't want to do, it's one thing to take a risk with your own life. But I realize, really, you're taking your risk with everyone else's lives because you're gonna devastate everyone who loves you for the rest of their existence. So you're really gambling with their lives,

not with your own. And when I realized that, I got out. Now I have two young children, two little girls. So I wouldn't, I mean, I don't even cross the street against the light. I'm like super, super cautious person. Yeah, I would say the most devastating part of your entire book is that stream of consciousness letter from what's his name? Is it Michael Maelon in the Irish jail? Oh, Jesus Christ.

And let's make sure people understand he was in prison tried for treason for being part of the rebellion against British forces in Ireland in 1916 during the Easter Rising. So, you know, he wasn't some street criminal who was, I mean, he was, you know, he was trying to affect freedom, essentially, affect freedom for his people. He was, he was tried and executed for it. And this, yes, this is the letter he wrote in the hours for his people. He was tried and executed for it. And yes, this is the letter he wrote in the hours before his execution. When I read the audio version of this book and when I read it in the studio,

I mean, I started choking up. I mean, I choke up easily now because I have children. Like it comes to be incredibly easily. But the director who was sort of on the line with not in the studio, but sort of on the line with me, she started just crying. And so yeah, I mean, a century later, it's an incredibly powerful piece of writing.

Yeah, that was my experience rereading the road as well. I finished it, you know, 10 or 11 at night and I just went into my four-year-olds room and I just broke down and wept while he slept. There, that is an interesting tension to go to your point about, you know, you take these risks, you look for freedom, but the consequences of that risk are not evenly born out. And that was sort of my reading on that letter. He's fighting for this thing that he believes in. He wants this freedom, but he knows that his freedom is not just a death sentence for him. It's a life of trauma for the people that he's leaving behind. And so there's really no way to sort of get freedom for free.

That's right. I had an unexpected and really profound run in with that. Last summer, I almost died last June. I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery. Totally asymptomatic. It developed over decades, apparently. Not related to anything. I'm a pancreatic artery. Totally asymptomatic, it developed over decades apparently, not related to anything. I'm a very healthy guy, I'm an athlete,

and one afternoon, without any warning, it ruptured, and I lost 90% of my blood into my abdomen. I mean, I just blood out. And it was really interesting. I mean, I'm an atheist. I'm not religious. My father was a physicist. He was an implacable rationalist as MI. And as I was, I was dying, you know, they got me to the hospital. It took them an hour to get me to the hospital. And I was, you know, they cut my neck open and started trying to get blood in a vein

to bring me back. And, um, And this is during COVID in New York City, so I imagine response time is slow. I was actually in Massachusetts, and it was a small hospital in Massachusetts, Cape Dot Hospital, they saved my life. I mean, they're small, but they're amazing. So I had no idea I was dying. None.

At that point, my brain wasn't working very well. And so I don't even know if I could have understood that I was dying. None. You know, by, at that point, my brain wasn't working very well. And so I don't even know if I could have understood that I was dying. I just, what I knew was that I was getting pulled into a dark pit that was underneath me. That was how I experienced it. And then my father, my father's debt, my father appeared and started comforting me. And I, listen, I don't believe in anything, right?

Nothing. And then I can't measure or see. And my father was, I didn't want to talk to him. I sort of waved him away. And, but here's the interesting thing. I didn't know I was dying. Like, what was he doing there? And the next day, the ICU nurses told me

that I'd almost died and it was sort of a miracle that I'd survived and all that. I mean, my blood pressure was 60 over 40. I mean, basically, I didn't have a pulse. And then it all came back to me. And it really has left me the sort of atheist rationalist with a really enduring question about what I experienced there. And I still don't understand it.

But apparently, it's a very common experience for people who are dying and then obviously come back to have dead ancestors appear and try to help them and help them with knowledge that the dying person actually doesn't really have on their own. The very mysterious thing. That is very mysterious and also quite beautiful as tragic as it is at the same time. Yeah, and what was really traumatic to me was that you can be snuffed out of existence at any moment. I'm a healthy guy, I wasn't driving at a car, I was in my driveway. I have a pulse of 60, whatever.

I mean, I have a, the idea that you can be taken out within an hour with no warning says something really fearsome about the universe. And the other part of it was, it wouldn't have none of it would have bothered me that much, except for my children. And what they would have had to go through had I die, I mean, not to mention my wife,

but particularly my children, that to be was just unbearable to think about. And that my, the real trauma of this, and it was traumatic, it was a lot more traumatic than my wartime experiences. The real trauma of this was rooted in that knowledge about my children. Well, I carry a challenge coin in my pocket. Our video is a little blurry. I don't know if you can see but it has a quote from Marcus Aurelius on the back. On the front it says,

Momentumori put on the back from Marcus Aurelius, he says, you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think. And he actually has an exercise that he gets from Epictetus, one of the other Stoics, he says, and I try to do this in as uncreepy a way as possible, he says, as you tuck your children in at night whisper to yourself, like you will not survive till the morning, not you. He means them, like that your kid might not run into your bed in the morning at 4 a.m. That this could be the last time you do it. And there is a certain morbidity to that, especially when you realize I think Marcus Aurelius had six children who did not survive to

adulthood, including two sets of twins, which is just unbelievable. But I think the point there is, like, don't rush through this, don't take it for granted. Life is random, and you could be bleeding out at this very moment and have no idea. Yeah, yeah. I mean, all I felt was a weird pain in my abdomen, and then within minutes I couldn't stand and started going blind. You know, then my dead father was talking to me. I mean, all I felt was a was a weird pain in my abdomen and then within minutes I couldn't stand and started going blind You know, then my dead father was talking to me. I mean, it was crazy and it was a beautiful day in June And I had no no zero warning and you know the idea it's terrifying that we can all be

Canceled by the universe at any moment. Yes But what that what you get in return, what you get in return from that is if you allow it, a kind of wonderment and existence, and at least that's what I've tried to get out of it. And the, I mean, it's a miracle that we're here. And I mean, it's a, I don't mean that in a religious sense. I mean, it's staggeringly unlikely that any of this would exist and that we're here. And I mean, it's a, I don't mean that in a religious sense. I mean, it's staggeringly unlikely that any of this would exist

and that we're here to witness it. And yet we are. And the beauty of that thought can be so transcendent. If you really stop and look around, like, where you are right now, right at this moment, like, oh my God. Look at this. I'm surrounded by, like, I'm surrounded by this. He's even the technology that we're talking to each other on is marvelous.

Yeah, and but even at a more basic level, just the fact that you're conscious and looking at anything at all, I mean, apparently in terms of the physics of all this, it was pretty unlikely that a universe would be created that would, I mean, forget about having stars and matter and all. That would create a kind of matter that can think about itself. That's insane, right? And yet it did, and here we are,

and that that's true, and that you can hug your children. Like that other part of it that that can happen. Like, okay, I'm good. Like, I don't want to die anytime soon, but here I am, and I'm going to squeeze the most I can out of every moment. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show, Stay Tune.

Well, I like to use the word cancel there, because you know, the sort of the bugaboo now. And people on both sides of the political spectrum are talking about, we talk about this idea of cancel culture. And every once in a while, I'll catch myself thinking, like, did I say something a long time ago? Did I do something embarrassing in high school and I could be canceled?

But the truth is, on the scale of random things to worry about, having your book deal taken away or having your platform canceled from you is probably not the Freak Black Swan event that you want to take active steps to prepare against. You should be worried that you could get hit by a truck. Yeah, or get ready for the abdominal hemorrhage that you didn't know about. For that matter, I just read a terrifying, unbelievably terrifying article in Wired just came out just recently about what happened physically to the planet during the last major

asteroid impact. Asteroid meteor, I'm not sure which, At any rate, the one that killed all the dinosaurs. Yes. I mean, that could happen in any week, right? I mean, we don't know. We're not tracking everything. We might have, I think, a week or two of warning, and no one's going to survive. Like, everything will be gone, right? And the physics of that are so horrifying. gone, right? And the physics of that are so horrifying. And so the whole of human endeavor civilization is going weak by week, right? And you know, once you wrap your mind around that, your book deal doesn't matter so much. Yeah, I spent some time thinking about that in March of last year. I sort of went back

through the headlines and I thought, what were people really worked up about in December and January and February? And even the first week of March, I remember there was a story about, American Airlines or United Airlines, making a statement that they didn't want people to recline their seats on airplanes. And this was a huge controversy,

people were very upset, you know, how dare you try to take away, you know, my one inch of extra space on a plane. And meanwhile, what's tracking in the background is the inability to fly at all for months and months and months. And so, yeah, we do tend to sort of think about a whole bunch of trivial nonsense, meanwhile, existence itself could be taken from you

like that. Yeah, but that truth is too huge to keep in one's mind constantly. And if you can keep it in your mind a little bit, it can deepen your appreciation, your sense of gratitude about existence. I guess gratitude is the word. appreciation, your sense of gratitude about existence. I guess gratitude is the word, and I don't mean gratitude to God.

If you wanna use God for that, that go ahead, but you don't need to, it can just be a blind gratitude of the fact that you exist and have people around you who you love. Let's talk about the power of walking really fast, because I'm a big believer in that. Every morning, I do like a three mile walk with my two kids. My rule is I don't touch the phone.

I don't bring the phone. So whatever time I went to bed, till when I get back from the walk, that's my sort of phone fast every day. And we go outside, we see the deer, we see rabbits, you know, we watch the sun come up. My one piece of parenting advice to people with young kids is that walking will solve 90% of all child problems, right? And you briefly talk about this in the book that there's something about it that just it loels them to sleep, it loels you into a different headspace. What do you learn walking hundreds of miles in the middle of nowhere, you know, carrying heavy stuff? Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, humans are a very ambulatory species. Children are walking

large just, you know, in hunter-gatherer societies. Children, you know, of course, there were no strollers or anything like that. So children by age four were walking all day. And by age five or six are carrying gear to help their community. So just in terms of our societies to dependents on things with wheels on them, children really don't need all that stuff starting at a pretty young age. But what we were doing,

we didn't have children with us. We were carrying 60 or 70 pounds, which is a fair amount of weight. And what did I learn for walking? I mean, it's incredibly hard if you do it for more than a couple of hours. I mean, it really, really takes a toll on your body. If you're carrying weight,

carrying weight is really beats your legs up. But it get there are there are times when it gets very easy. And I in my book, I talk about falling into a cadence with other people. And all of a sudden, it's very, it's a very identifiable moment. A very identifiable transition from the sort of minor struggle of putting each foot forward over and over and over again to all of a sudden it feels like it's easier to walk than to stop. And when it feels easier to walk than to stop, you're in cadence.

And you can have that by yourself or with others. But if you're walking with other people, you feel carried along by their energy as well. Doing that with a group of people makes you very close to them. And the other thing that makes people feel very close is sleeping outside. I don't mean sipped up into little tents. I mean outside the way humans have always done it under trees, under the stars, worried about what's out there in the dark, trying to figure out what are we going to do in the morning to cook breakfast. That kind of experience, if you can sleep outside with your children, with other people,

the feeling of closeness that's engendered by that is absolutely extraordinary. And I think it's something that's actually missing from our modern society and that we miss quite a lot. Yeah, I've read a story over the summer about some fossilized footprints they found in Sands, in White Sands National Park where it's a set of footprints and then every so often for a few steps there's children's footprints.

And what they sort of recreated from this is that it was a father carrying a young child and you know, they go pick me up, pick me up and you carry them for a little bit and they go, put me down, put me down. And then they make it three feet and then they go, pick me up, pick me up. And it was amazing that they were able to even track from the size of the footprints, like how old the kid was, that they were traveling at roughly four miles an hour for short bursts. And you just go, human beings have been doing this thing for as long as there have been human beings,

and that we're evolved for this, and that it's connecting us to some sort of deeper, primal experience that's kind of washing away the dust of modern life in a really meaningful way, I think. You know, we've never had a stroller. I really, yeah, yeah, I mean, of course, strollers are a pretty recent invention. They need, you know, they need to pavement had to be invented first, obviously. But, you know, like, I mean, I have a one and a half year old that I can put on my chest and I have a four year old that goes on my shoulders

and that's less than I was carrying on my 400 mile walk in the railroad lines. And so we have to go anywhere, either the four year old walks or she climbs up onto my shoulders and I can walk all day long like that if I have to. And I have to say the pleasure of human contact, a touch,

particularly with your children, of just being physically close to them, particularly when they're really young, when they're one year old. I mean, the fact that your child is right next to your heartbeat. I mean, all of that visceral touch stuff is so rich, it's so good and it's so ancient. And one of the things I realized about modern parenting

is that essentially the more you separate the parent from the child physically, the more you can monetize that relationship. So if you don't carry your child, you need a stroller. And then of course, a company can sell you a stroller. If you don't sleep with your children in your bed, you're getting, you need a cradle, you need another room, you need a video monitor.

All that stuff can be monetized. And if you go to the core parenting experience, human parenting experience, there's no way for a company that wants to sell you something to get inside that relationship. You have to stop receiving that you have milk for me, whatever, they can break that risk of up in a lot of different ways. And, you know, there's a lot of very good reasons to use that stuff, but for the most part, it's for the convenience of the parents, not for the good of the child.

Like for the most part, what you were trying to do is allow parents in this very hered, hectic, over committed Western society to carve out a little bit of autonomy and time for themselves because they, frankly, they need it. But, but none of us should be under any mistake that it's like better for the kids, like the kids that, you know, my daughter would write, you know, she doesn't want to be in a

stroller. She wants me to ride on her daddy's shoulders, you know, it's very, very sweet. Yeah, the Silicon Valley term for that is disintermediation and that the genius companies disintermediate relationships and then act as the middleman and you can charge whatever you want to be the middleman. Exactly. I mean, you know, in the 60s, I think it was in the 70s, there was a big campaign, I believe it was by Nestle, to convince mothers that press feeding was actually bad for the children,

like unhealthy for the child to breastfeed because they wanted to sell the milk formula. I mean, that's insane. I mean, the species is several hundred thousand years old. We got here somehow and we did pretty well getting here. Like, the idea that Nestle knows better than human evolution is so, it's just so laughable and insulting. And yet they they made millions billions of dollars of it. No laughable is the right word. I remember a few years ago my mom found like an old photo album. They had a photo of her and me right after I was born and I was drinking out of a bottle and I said, what am I doing? You know, drinking out of this bottle, I'm like 20 minutes old. She's like,

oh, the custom then is that the doctor, you would give the baby water, like a bottle of water. And it struck me how absurd that was, like, for hundreds of thousands of years before bottles were invented, how were kids getting this water, right? They weren't. This is a random theory that's obviously no longer in vote, but just how random some of this disintermediation is and how far it takes us from where we probably should be. Yeah, and you could look at social media as a massive example of that. I mean, it's replacing what people used to do

face to face in a circle. And now you put a bunch of people face to face in a circle and they're all looking down because there has been a process that has got inside that one-on-one relationship and basically monetized it. I have a flip phone. I refuse to have a smartphone. I just, I mean, I'll hear a proof of it. There it is. I refused to do that, right? And I find it watching people's behavior around their smartphone, I find it really depressing.

Like I feel like my God would alone, would alone the species we've become. It really bothers me. Yeah, I think we often see things as an obligation that are actually a gift. My oldest son, he just never napt. He refused to nap in a bed. He would only nap if he was in some form of movement.

So he'd nap in the car, he'd nap in a bike trailer, he'd nap in a stroller, or he'd nap in a baby character carrier. And so that became this thing where I would have to do most of the net. Like I would put them in a running stroller and I go for a run or I put them in the bike trailer and I go for a ride. And I did the math a few months ago and it's like, you know, we've done like four or five thousand miles together, you know, probably the equivalent of what like in a patch Apache family would have

done over the same period. But, but that bond, I wouldn't trade for anything and it's so much deeper than essentially any other, even though the vast majority of it was in silence and the vast majority he wasn't even awake for, that bond is irreplaceable. Yeah, absolutely. I think that was one way to get through life peacefully and happily, to understand that it's possible that the things that are challenging and difficult and hard are actually have an upside that you're just not aware of. I mean, and that's a really cool trick for getting through things that are just objectively difficult.

Well, I would agree. I have a tattoo on this arm that says, the obstacle is the way, which I wrote a book about. That Marx really says, the impediment to action advances action, which stands in the way, becomes the way. And I think you look at those things as challenges that make you better, and it becomes true. You look at them as obstacles that deprive you of something

and it also becomes true. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I wanna talk about writing really fast. I've never read one of your books and thought that could be shorter, right? You seem to only use no words where to, you know, where someone else might use to, you know, even sort of like, I mean, I have a galley of this,

but it's what, like 150 pages, I can't imagine. You're publisher probably expected it to be longer. For you, is it just about boiling things down to their very essence? Is that sort of where you come from as a writer? I mean, I love, yeah, I love efficiency. And I feel like there's a kind of beauty in efficiency. And there is, you can make a case for being

the comprehensive last word on a topic. I mean, I would want the biography of Lincoln to be a door stop on a topic. I mean, I would want the biography of Lincoln to be a doorstop of a book. An honorable man who played a crucial role in American history. I just want to make sure everything about him is documented somewhere, right? That's not the kind of writer I am. For me, people are busy. You know, they have other stuff, other good stuff to two, stuff that might be better for them than reading of book and so but the ideas that I write about I feel are important and to people personally and to our society as a whole. So my not I haven't always done this, but recently in my book, Tribe and in Freedom, I've tried to just get in and out. Like, what's the minimum amount people need to know about this topic in order to understand

it and then to continue thinking about it on their own in their own terms. I don't have to do all of that thinking for them, right? I just need to start the conversation so that they can, after they read my book, see the world in a slightly different way and continue that conversation with themselves or with others. And that's, so that's why you can read my, I mean, there's a kind of book where you can read

on the Amtrak train from New York to DC. That's a two hour trip, right? And there are books that you can read on that trip and that like sometimes that's the kind of book I want to write No, I'm the I'm the same way and I think there's an accidental sort of marketing trick there which is people think it was They burned through it because it was so good, right? They never go like oh, that's a really short book thing

It was amazing. I read it all in one sitting and you're like well, I don't want to spoil it But it's half the length of a normal book. That's why. Yeah, absolutely. But I think there's, I think there's also on some level, even unconsciously, the reader is like, and I'm a reader too, right? I mean, I mean, I mean, other people's books, but I think the reader is like, thank you, thank you for not making this too long. Right. So that, yeah, I want a book that could fit in the back pocket and you can read in a couple of hours. There's other kinds of books that require more than that, obviously.

One of the things it means, it means two things. It means that you're very careful about the content that needs to be known. Some things need to be known. Other things don't. But you're also very careful about being efficient with your pros. You can really squeeze the excess out of a book or out of an essay by just being critically pretty ruthless about excess wording.

You're another great example of something. I got really good advice at the beginning of my career. Someone said, you know, writers live interesting lives. And I feel like every one of your books is rooted, less in some, you know, creative, you know, breakthrough and more in experience that through that experience, you came to the breakthrough and are communicating experience that through that experience you came to the breakthrough and are communicating what you learned. So, you know, people think they need to go to school to be a writer or they think they need,

you know, a scoop or something. When really I feel like if you have experiences, that drives writing that's worth reading. Yeah, and I'm, you know, keep in mind, I'm a journalist. Like, I started out as a journalist. Um, my job, as I saw it, was to write about the world as it was unfolding around us. And that the last thing, the last honorable topic was me. Like that, I'm not, I'm not the point of any story. I mean, occasionally I pop up in the first person,

but that's invariably because I think a first person, for a moment, for a paragraph, or whatever you have first person perspective will allow the reader to understand what I'm writing about in a more immediate way. But what you don't want to be is, you don't want it to be the only person on stage., you don't want to be the only person on stage. Like you don't want to be the only person in the scene.

If you write in the first person, you don't want to be the only person that you're talking about. You want to be writing about yourself as your experience illuminates other people. And you want to be really, really cautious that the topic, the overall topic of the book is not you.

Like, you're the least interesting thing on the planet. And or you have to try to see it that way. And that everything else, everything else deserves the respect of a full treatment. And you really come at the very, very end of the line. Yeah, I heard a great expression that all bad writing is essentially a love poem to oneself. Yes, yes, absolutely. That's good. Is there a weird tension for you? And I guess maybe I'm projecting, but I feel a little bit you go and do you do all this hard stuff, often this dangerous stuff. And then there's another part of you that is a poet that does love words. Or you wouldn't be doing this profession, right?

I sometimes laugh at the sort of image of, you know, like a hardcore rapper. You know, it's this big tough guy projecting this image. And it's like, but you picked poetry as your profession. Like you picked singing and poetry, and sometimes I love to imagine like your most hardcore rapper, like doing vocal exercises backstage, you know, like me, me, me, me, me, me.

Like I sometimes love, you know, we, Hemingway cultivates this probably more than any other writer, the image of the writer as the tough guy, but I mean, deep down we're nerds and we love books. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's in our society a false distinction between intellect and toughness. And that's probably because of the universities and the academies, you know, it's like route people into careers that where you were, you know,

herring, you know, like a tweets, tweet jacket with leather pants. The elbow patches. The elbow. The elbow. You know, there's no reason that the Greeks understood this perfectly well. There's no reason that the intellect

and physical toughness can't be paired. In fact, one should insist that they be paired, actually. And you don't have to be a big, strong dude to be tough. Stephen Hawking was a very tough guy, and he couldn't get out of a chair. Toughness basically means you have courage and that you're not thinking about yourself foremost. And that can fit into any size body, any kind of person.

Yeah, that's right. That's a good way to think about it is, and it's not, I mean, it's an easy job in the sense that you sit in a chair, but I also find that my sort of experience with endurance sports is what I draw upon when I'm two thirds of the way through a manuscript that I'm starting to think might suck. Oh, yeah. I mean, I was a really competitive runner in high school and college and afterwards. And you know, the most painful things I've ever done were really intense races. When I was a kid, I ran a 412 mile and I ran a pretty good marathon.

And you know, later in life, I would just think that same switch in your mind where you try to disconnect from your experience of suffering, I would try to apply that to all the other things that people suffer through in their lives. And it doesn't always work, but certainly when you're trying to finish a manuscript or something on deadline or whatever, it doesn't matter what it is. I could access that sort of athlete part of myself that was able to practice that ignoring pain. And I could apply it in almost any way.

Yeah, you talk about the little trader in your head that you want to make deals with in the book. Yeah. You know, that you have to, I think as a runner or a biker, you know, basically any physical activity, you learn that that voice is a fucking liar and that it's telling you that you're hitting your breaking point and actually you got quite a bit left in the tank. Oh yeah, yeah. And by the way, Trader, just so that you're, listen, as realized that Trader isn't treason, not Tr that trader as in treason not trader as in trader chose

Yeah, the whole both You make little deals with yourself, too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, he'll come crawling out of the web work at a moment It's known as like hey listen just slow down a little bit and then I'll make it up to you later You're you can make it you know whatever and you just have to be so harsh on that dude really I mean you just you don't start talking to him. Because as soon as you do, it's over. And you have to be quite implacable about it. And the reward that you get is that if you really reject that awful little voice, you can get to a stage

of physical effort or even exhaustion, where you're suddenly free of the experience of effort. And some of the times either running or walking on this long trek that we did where I felt that was physically the easiest, occurring times when I was the most exhausted. And all of a sudden it was almost like a beam of light came down from the heavens. And again, I'm an atheist, but that sort of image comes to mind. And all of a sudden, I just felt nothing. And I felt like I could walk or run all day and all night.

Like someone better stop me, or I'm just gonna keep going. And that, that to me is as close as I've come to a spiritual experience. But so how did you know then, in the moment where you sort of, you get to Ohio and you're like, it's time to go home.

You know, Forest Gump, you know, just magically stops running across the country at some point and realizes that he's done. How do you know that that isn't the lie of all lies from the voice in your head? How does one know when to quit and when to push through? Well, you know, for me, the traitor in your head tries to get, it lures you in, and they're trying to get you to slow down just a little bit, because it thinks that's all you're going to accept. What happened to me at the end of this trip was that I'd spent a year avoiding the reality of my life, which was I was in the middle of a divorce.

I was in a lot of different ways, as I, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, in an extremely bad place. My buddy Tim had been killed. I had a lot of homework to do, and I avoided it, and it was a good decision, but I avoided it for a year by doing this trip. And so what happened to me in Connell'sville one hot summer day when we walked in a Connellsville and soaked ourselves in the river. I realized it was going to take more courage. But I realized it would take more courage to go back and face my life than it would to keep walking. That was what I did. I still did the thing that was in some ways a lot harder and scarier and that was actually going home. So maybe that's what it is. It's like, hey, I don't know if I'm trying to back out of

this wedding at the altar. I don't know if I'm trying to quit this manuscript because it's a good idea or because I actually have a better idea. I don't know whether I, maybe the test is, is the thing you're thinking about doing instead, you know, Stephen Pressfield talks about the idea of the resistance. Is the thing you're doing instead, does that, is it actually harder or easier? And then if you're, if you're thinking about quitting to do something harder, then at least you know, you're not quitting this thing because it's hard. Yeah. And harder in a different way. You know, I mean, I was, I, the, the last patrol that we did was physically very hard, but mentally it was lovely, right?

I mean, going home and facing my life. And now I'm a great life. I mean, I'm remarried. I have two little children. I mean, I did the right thing. I mean, it all worked, right? But I had to go home and face the emotional terrain of my life.

And that felt harder in a different way. And in some ways, that's why I knew it was the right thing to do. No, that's lovely. The last thing and I'll let you go. I really nerded out in your book and I read even the acknowledgments and the sources. And I saw your little conversation with Jack Weatherford. What an amazing writer he is. His book on Genghis Khan is incredible. Unbelievable book. Yeah. Another book called Indian Givers of his that's fantastic

about what I don't think is the greatest title, but it's what the Native Americans gave to Western society. Incredible. Incredible book. I didn't know about that one. I've only read his two books on Genghis, on the Mongols, so I'm going to read that one next. But I loved that he was answering your questions because I'm a big fan. Oh yeah, he's a lovely guy,

exchange emails with him and he's a fantastic fantastic person. Amazing Sebastian, thank you so much. I'm a huge fan. I love the book and it was an honor to chat. Well, I really, really enjoyed it. Thank you for reading my book and having me on. Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference, and of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out.

The crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So 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. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.