Read This Book Instead of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’

Summary

Podcast Summary: Old School with Shilo Brooks Episode: Read This Book Instead of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ Date: December 4, 2025

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Overview

In this episode of Old School, host Shilo Brooks sits down with bestselling author and Daily Stoic founder Ryan Holiday to discuss Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. Together, they explore why this underappreciated, existential Southern novel resonated so deeply with Holiday—and, more broadly, how great books can diagnose and even help remedy the spiritual malaise of modernity. The conversation winds through philosophical themes in Percy’s writing, why old books outlast trends, and what it really means to live a meaningful life in a consumerist age. Throughout, both Brooks and Holiday compare The Moviegoer’s existential themes to more familiar works like Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, while considering how reading itself offers communion with the dead and insight across time.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Painted Porch: A Curated Bookstore (02:01–03:14)

• Ryan Holiday describes his bookstore’s philosophy: only books he and his wife have personally read and loved are sold, making their selection about 1,000 titles (rather than the 10,000 of a typical indie shop).
• Holiday emphasizes the value of older, sometimes underappreciated books that have lasting power:

  “Most bookstores are filled with new books, and most new books come and then go. They don’t have any staying power... I really like books that are old, that are maybe a little less well known. But when you read them, you’re like, how did I not know about this?” [02:45]

Making Time for Reading & The “Superpower” of Books (03:14–06:29)

• Holiday considers reading a kind of job—even before he became a writer—and sees it as a way of “talking with the dead.”
• Holiday:

  “Books are a way to talk to people who are not alive anymore... I tend to think of reading as this, like, superpower, this way of talking to the dead, this way of learning, like, you know, living multiple lives effectively.” [03:49]

• Both dismiss speed reading as a scam; real value comes from thoughtful, deliberate engagement.
• Brooks: “People think it just... if you just say, I’m gonna read more, it’ll just kind of do itself. It doesn’t do itself. You have to figure out a way... There has to be some discipline to this thing.” [05:27]

Summarizing The Moviegoer: Modern Malaise and the Search (06:36–11:07)

• Holiday traces his discovery of The Moviegoer to his early 20s in New Orleans, realizing how deeply it resonated.
• He summarizes the novel:

  “It’s not an action packed novel. It’s a novel about a pilgrimage, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s about this internal search... He’s a young man who has done what everyone has told him his whole life, and he feels very empty. He feels stuck in this life.” [08:00]

• The protagonist Binks is affluent but hollow, medicating with “busyness, with work, with the movies”—a strikingly modern phenomenon.

Everydayness, Existential Dread, and the Search (11:07–15:23)

• Much of the novel’s diagnostic power lies in its meditation on what Binks calls “everydayness”—the deadening routine of modern life.
• Passage from the novel, read by Brooks:

  “When I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness. Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible... Only once in my life was the grip of every dayness broken when I lay bleeding in a ditch.” [18:24]

• Holiday ties Percy’s work philosophically to Camus, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard:

  “We credit Camus as being a sort of novelist and philosopher... And I don’t think Walker Percy gets fully enough credit for having done something very similar.” [18:46]

Binks vs. the Older Generation; Alienation and the Unsatisfying “Good Life” (13:27–16:44)

• Binks’s older relatives are sure of purpose—duty, honor, God. The “search” is foreign to them, while Binks is adrift despite having what used to count as a good life.
• Holiday cites a key line:

  “Uncle Jules is the only man I know of whose victory in the world is total and unqualified... It is hard to know why he takes the trouble for the world he lives in.” [14:08]

• Binks distracts himself with fleeting pleasures—jobs, women—but nothing satisfies.

Kate: Parallel Crisis, Gender, and the Limits of Therapy (25:40–29:51)

• Binks’s step-cousin Kate suffers her own version of modern malaise, manifested through dramatic mood swings, trauma, and therapy. After a fatal car crash, she feels more alive, not less; both she and Binks are expected by their parents to “have it all” and be happy, but something’s always missing.
• Holiday:

  “What they both have in common is that they’re sort of letting their parents down. That it’s like, the world is your oyster... Why isn’t this working for you?” [27:10]

• The novel uses car crashes as metaphors for moments of waking, shaking the characters from their stupor.

Religion, Catholicism, and Its Insufficiency (30:18–33:20)

• The story is set during Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday, with Catholic themes throughout.
• Binks is surrounded by religious relatives, but religious or stoic advice doesn’t “land” for him.
• Holiday quotes Binks’s aunt:

  “In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated, but a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.” [32:14]

The Ending—Submission to Everydayness or Maturity? (33:30–39:41)

• At the end, Binks marries Kate and enters medical school: is this resignation, growth, or settling?
• Holiday:

  “Maybe what he needed to do was get married and be a regular person... maybe that’s kind of the point. There is no grand answer. It’s just this realization that me and this person are both on a similar search and maybe we’re meant to be together.” [34:32]

• Brooks wants “a more profound articulation of the riches of embracing the everydayness... tell me about marriage, tell me about the goodness and fulfillment.” [38:44]
• They note that adult meaning may be less about epiphanies and more about ordinary commitments and acceptance.

Comparing The Moviegoer and The Catcher in the Rye (54:08–56:26)

• Both novels feature anguished male protagonists confronting a sense of emptiness.
• Holiday:

  “The Catcher in the Rye is something you read when you’re a kid and you relate to the fundamental immaturity... The Moviegoer is about an older man... trying to answer, I think, some slightly more substantive questions.” [55:47]

• Holiday recommends The Moviegoer over Salinger for readers ready for the more mature, adult question of meaning.

Why Read Diagnostically? Literature as Mirror and Communion (40:50–44:48)

• The greatest novels may not offer solutions, but by “diagnosing the spiritual malaise” they speak to readers’ real experience.
• For Holiday, that’s the spark that makes someone a lifelong reader:

  “Pick up a novel, especially a novel that’s old, and go, how did it know what I was thinking? How is this nailing an exact experience I have?” [42:07]

The Modern Moviegoer and Social Media (42:32–44:48)

• Brooks and Holiday discuss how the protagonist’s passivity and need to be “the star of the show” parallels today’s Instagram culture, where everyone curates a “movie” of their own life:

  “Living your life as if it is your Instagram grid. It looks exciting and compelling, but it’s profoundly empty and devoid of meaning.” [44:27]

Stoic Perspectives: Accepting Life & Responding to Adversity (45:04–49:08)

• Stoicism’s eaching: focus on your response, not external events; see adversity as opportunity.
• Holiday’s own life:

  “You have to see the things that happen to you in life as an opportunity to practice these virtues. That’s basically what stoic philosophy is.” [46:45]

Rereading as Maturity: The Catcher in the Rye Effect (47:27–49:27)

• Holiday observes that on rereading, books like Catcher in the Rye can feel self-indulgent or overwrought—the angst was universal, the cure is moving into adulthood:

  “What you have to figure out is life... sometimes that inner monologue, that question, the searching almost is itself the problem.” [48:17]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Holiday on reading as communion:

  “Books are a way to talk to people who are not alive anymore... Living multiple lives effectively.” [03:49]

• On the futile search for meaning:

  “He is trying to stave off the existential despair that he feels creeping in.” [09:17]

• On the insidiousness of ‘everydayness’:

  “Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible... Only once in my life was the grip of every dayness broken when I lay bleeding in a ditch.” (Percy, via Brooks) [18:24]

• Holiday on the inadequacy of stoic or Catholic answers:

  “The prescription was always there, but he thought he was somehow exceptional, or he thought there was something exciting out there. And actually what he needed to do was get married and be a regular person.” [34:32]

• Brooks wanting more from the ending:

  “What I wanted from Percy was a more profound articulation of the riches of embracing the everydayness, which Binks concludes...” [38:44]

• Holiday, on the meaning of adult life:

  “There’s something profound in the pedestrianness of choosing and settling... It’s about him settling into himself and life.” [37:30]

• On literature finding us:

  “Pick up a novel, especially a novel that’s old, and go, how did it know what I was thinking?” [42:07]

• Holiday on Stoicism’s relevance:

  “Stoicism... is the struggling with these things. When you read Meditations, you get the sense that Marcus Aurelius has a temper, that Marcus Aurelius is anxious...” [57:10]

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Important Timestamps

• Bookstore philosophy & curation: [02:01–03:14]
• Making time to read & “conversations with the dead”: [03:33–06:29]
• Summarizing The Moviegoer: [08:00–09:52]
• Everydayness & existential malaise: [17:15–20:23]
• Kate’s parallel struggles & car crash motif: [25:40–29:51]
• Catholicism, Stoicism, and meaning: [30:18–33:20]
• The ending—resignation or growth?: [34:32–39:41]
• Comparison: The Moviegoer & Catcher in the Rye: [54:08–56:26]
• What literature offers as a ‘diagnosis’: [41:49–44:27]
• Social media as the new ‘moviegoing’: [42:32–44:27]
• Stoic practical principles: [46:44–47:02]
• Rereading, maturing, and outgrowing angst: [47:27–49:27]

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Conclusion & Final Reflections

Shilo Brooks and Ryan Holiday’s conversation reframes The Moviegoer as a crucial, diagnostic novel for contemporary readers—especially men searching for meaning in a world bloated by comfort, distraction, and self-curation. Rather than offering easy answers or climactic epiphanies, Percy’s novel (and the act of reading itself) invites us into deep, ongoing reflection on the shape and substance of a good life. As Holiday argues, books like this aren’t just entertainment or assignments; they are mirrors, companions, and teachers for our own most pressing uncertainties.

Holiday’s parting praise:

“It’s a coming of age novel, but it’s not coming of age from, you know, 15 to 20... It’s coming of age into adulthood... In a world, I think, right now, especially for young men, where something has clearly gone wrong, that’s not happening. And I think Walker Percy is trying to address that.” [53:21]

Transcript

[Shiloh Brooks]

Every once in a while, someone makes something that feels bigger. Not another Hollywood reboot, but a story built on courage, faith and meaning. The Daily Wire did that with their new seven part series, the Pendragon Rise of the Merlin. Based on a book series by Stephen R. Loughead. It's a retelling of the classic King Arthur legend. The first official trailer just dropped and you should go check it out. In this world, while pagan gods fall silent and empires collapse, one man's vision ignites a civilization's rebirth. Merlin becomes the bridge between myth and history and shapes the destiny of kings. The Pendragon Cycle the Rise of the Merlin premieres exclusively on Daily Wire plus January 22, 2026. Go watch the full trailer now at DailyWire.com I'm Shiloh Brooks.

[Podcast Host]

I'm a professor and CEO and I believe reading good books makes us better men.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Today I'm sitting down with Ryan Holiday.

[Podcast Host]

Ryan is a marketer, bestselling author, and.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Founder of the Daily Stoic, a platform.

[Podcast Host]

That promotes applying stoic philosophy in everyday life. He also owns a bookshop in Bastrop.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Texas, called the Painted Porch.

[Podcast Host]

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, published in 1961, changed Ryan's life. Today I'm asking him why. This is old school.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Where I'm from, we don't wait for the highlights. We're watching live start to finish. No spoilers, no score alerts. I want to feel every play as it happens. And now on Fox one, you can stream all your favorite live NFL Sundays, college football, nascar, mlb, postseason, and more. I'm talking those nail biter finishes, those high octane moments that get the whole state buzzing. Like if the Cowboys ever actually get it together and win a game. With Fox one, you get it all live. The passion, the plays, the pride. Fox one, we live for live streaming now.

[Podcast Host]

Ryan Holiday, welcome to old school.

[Ryan Holiday]

Thanks for having me.

[Podcast Host]

So you are, if I'm not mistaken, the first bookstore owner that we have had on the show. And so I am very lucky to give you a platform. But let me ask you this about your bookstore. How do you go about selecting the books on the shelf in that store? What's your principle?

[Ryan Holiday]

When my wife and I opened the bookstore, we decided it would only be books that we had personally read and that we loved. So a bookstore of our size should have maybe 10,000 titles and we have about a thousand. And so they're all face out and they're all books that I get really, really excited about when people come in and I like. That's my favorite Thing is, people come in the store and. And I just go, like, here are, like, 20 books that I want. And I'm going from section to section of, like, my favorites in these various different categories. And so, like, a lot of the books are not new. That's the weird part of publishing. Most bookstores are filled up with new books, and most new books come and then go. They don't have any staying power. And so I really like books that are old, that are maybe a little less well known. But when you read them, you're like, how did I not know about this? That's like my. That's my dream.

[Podcast Host]

Well, you have come on the right podcast, my friend. You know, I get the question a lot, and I think you do, too. How can I read more? You know, because people say, well, you do this podcast. You read these books. You must read everyone. And yes, I do. I'm curious. How do you answer that question? When somebody says, how can I fit more reading into my life? What do you tell them?

[Ryan Holiday]

I tell them that reading is my job. Now, as an author, that's literally true. But even before I'd written my first book, I always thought of it that way. There's something strange about our insistence on learning things by trial and error, when books are effectively a way to have to not learn painful lessons by trial and error. And in fact, Stoic philosophy, which is the philosophy I write about, it comes from a story that sort of illustrates this very idea. Zeno, the first Stoic philosopher, is visiting the temple of Apollo, and the oracle tells him, you will begin to become wise when you have conversations with the dead. And it's not until he washes up in Athens in a shipwreck, he loses everything. And he passes a bookseller, so a little cart in the marketplace, and the bookseller is reading a story from Socrates. And he realizes that that's what conversations with the dead are, that books are a way to talk to people who are not alive anymore. And so I tend to think of reading as this, like, superpower, this way of talking to the dead, this way of learning, like, you know, living multiple lives effectively. So I just take it very seriously, and I think it's funny. It's like if you walked into someone's office and they were sitting at their computer, you would be like, oh, they're working, and you wouldn't ask too many questions. But if you came in and they had their feet on their desk and they were reading a book, you'd be like, what are you doing? How do you get Away with this. And the chances of you getting something substantive out of that book, I think are much higher than you actually accomplishing much with that email that you're responding to. So I just consider it a big part of my job and life. And I've obviously built a job in a life where that's more true than maybe your average person, but.

[Podcast Host]

And you gotta make time for it, too. I mean, people think it just. If you just say, I'm gonna read more, it'll just kind of do itself. It doesn't do itself. You have to figure out a way. Either it's this hour every day, or it's this many pages every day, or there has to be some discipline to this thing. You can't just romanticize the whole thing.

[Ryan Holiday]

Or people think there's a way to do it faster.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

So they want to not read for very much, but get a lot of reading done. And I think speed reading is a scam. I've not read any well read person.

[Podcast Host]

Me too.

[Ryan Holiday]

That is actually a speed read. And it seems like such a strange thing to try to rush through also, like, it's a delightful, important, edifying, even spiritual experience. I'm not trying to get it done in as little time as possible. I cherish that time. Now, look, when you have kids, it's harder to make that time. And I always tell people you go through sort of seasons with reading and you try to find ways to squeeze it in, but you squeeze it in because it's important.

[Podcast Host]

So you said a minute ago that reading is, in a way, communing with the dead. I mean, this is part of it. So let's you and me commune with a dead man.

[Ryan Holiday]

Okay.

[Podcast Host]

Walker Percy wrote a very interesting Southern gothic novel called the Moviegoer. This novel has a storied history. Percy came out of nowhere. He published this thing in his 40s. He won the National Book Award. Nobody saw it coming. There were some amazing authors on the list that year when it won it. But we'll get to that. Tell me about you. When did you. And where did you pick up the moviegoer? And what effect did it have on you? How old were you? Where were you? Do you remember all that?

[Ryan Holiday]

I was probably 23 or 24. I was living in New Orleans. I was working on my first book. And I don't remember exactly where I first heard the name Walker Percy. I may have heard of the Percy family. There's a great narrative nonfiction book called the Rising Tide, about the flood of 1927, which his sort of very storied Southern family was a part of. So it might have been there. I may have just seen it in a bookstore. But sometimes you pick up a book and you just go, how did I not know about this? I often read books and I think, why isn't this one of the things that I was assigned in school? This is what's like. This lights me up. This is exactly what I'm going through or experiencing. And it just hit me. It's a very. It's an interesting novel to say the least.

[Podcast Host]

Can you summarize for people? This is going to be hard because this is not a novel with the traditional plot structure which you tell people. But can you summarize for people what this thing is about if they've never read it? What is this thing?

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, it's not an. I hope this doesn't sound like I'm not selling it. It's not an action packed novel. It's a novel about a pilgrimage, but it doesn't really go anywhere. It's about this internal search. He is a. A young man who has done what everyone has told him his whole life, and he feels very empty. He feels stuck in this life. And he understands, he believes there is something more. There is some spiritual question he wants to answer, but I don't think he really even knows what that question is. And so he's on what he calls the search. And like most of us, it's a shockingly modern feeling novel. When you go, okay, this is a novel written about the. Written in the 60s in the south, about an old Southern family, you know, and yet it feels very much of the moment because he's sort of medicating himself with busyness, with work, with the movies. That's why it's called the Moviegoer. Instead of, you know, zoning out on social media, he's just watching movies all the time. Not as many as you would think from the title. He only goes to a couple movies, but.

He is trying to stave off the existential despair that he feels creeping in. And so it's, I think, a novel ultimately about, you know, the answer to that question. What is the meaning of. Of life or what is a good life? And it's a book very much influenced by Walker Percy's Catholicism, but also his Southern heritage. And then more specifically, the stoicism of his uncle, who is portrayed as his aunt in the book.

[Podcast Host]

For somebody who picks up this book expecting a traditional sort of like, there's a plot, there's some tension, there's some resolution that's not really going to happen. And so my sense is this, that the plotlessness of the novel is itself meant to contribute something nuanced to its sort of existentialist lost theme. In other words, the plot is itself that way.

[Ryan Holiday]

I think it's supposed to feel very modern and accessible. This way he's not thrust in these crazy situations. It's not an action packed novel. It is interesting. I mean, there's flashbacks, he's a Korean War veteran, but all that's kind of in the past. And now he's just in this kind of America in the 1950s and 60s in which everything is pretty good but nothing is working right. And I think that's sort of the thing. He has a good job, he makes good money, he's. He's surrounded by women and dates and family, and yet he's terribly alone and sad. There's.

There, I think it is very much intentional that nothing really happens.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah. A kind of mirror for life in a way of the. So people.

[Ryan Holiday]

That's why he likes the movies, by the way.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Ryan Holiday]

The movies are the opposite of that.

[Podcast Host]

So people call this novel a diagnostic novel, meaning Percy himself may have used that term. I'm not sure that the novel is meant to diagnose some affliction. So I wonder if we might not take a couple of characters. In a way, it's a character study. It's a character study of the main character, Binks, and. And his step cousin named Kate. And we will get to them. But I wonder if we might start with Binks. He's a veteran, He's a stockbroker in New Orleans. He's relatively well off. There's this beautiful introduction where he talks about he uses the right deodorant and his armpits don't smell. And he's got all the fineries and pleasantries of modern life available to him at his fingertips. He can go see beautiful movies, he can buy wonderful meals.

[Ryan Holiday]

He.

[Podcast Host]

He doesn't smell bad, he uses the right toothpaste. I mean, whatever the case, teeth are pearly white, whatever the case may be. And so he is a kind of paragon of human life at the cusp of modernity. Like with all of his conveniences and yet with such wealth, with such good teeth, with such fresh smelling armpits, his life is relatively meaningless. At least it seems something like that. He's on what you have called, and he calls this himself the search. He's looking for the search. So I wonder if we might not diagnose exactly what he suffers from. What is the search?

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, I mean, that's the ultimate question. And I think the best novels, they don't beat you over the head with the answer. So I think it's a novel, I think it's worth saying about the search and not a novel that provides the answer. But there is something, you know, if we can understand what's happening here. This is the invention of sort of mass culture and mass consumerism. This is the America in the post war boom. And so all these problems that plagued the previous generations, mostly of scarcity, of danger. Like, one of the themes I noticed rereading it is like, how much death there is in the novel of children. Like it's just on the cusp of that, sort of.

Some of the breakthroughs and just like the comforts that we take for granted. But he's in this seemingly modern world and yet.

Having solved for those problems, it seems what's popping up is the problems that the previous generations didn't struggle so much with. Like his aunt or his great aunt is. Is, you know, obviously from another time. But she has really no doubt about any of these questions that she's on, like that. Duty, honor, responsibility, purpose, meaning. The older characters in the book don't really seem to be conflicted about this at all. He says something about his uncle, like, he's the only one, the only person I know. Actually, I wrote it down. I was. I was very struck by this phrase.

Uncle Jules is the only man I know of whose victory in the world is total and unqualified. He has made a great deal of money. He has great many friends. He's the Rex of Mardi Gras. He gives freely of himself and his money. He is an exemplary Catholic. But it is hard to know why he takes the trouble for the world he lives in. The City of Man is so pleasant that the City of God must hold little in store for him. I see his world plainly through his eyes, and I see why he loves it and would keep it as it is. So, like, the older characters in the book do not have this existential uncertainty or dread or need to search. And that's kind of the alienation. It's not just that he feels it and the younger characters feel it, but the older characters can't seem to understand why the younger characters feel it. In many ways, it's baffling because they're like, we just defeated fascism. You have everything you could ever want. What do you mean, this isn't enough for you?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

And so, again, this is why I think the novel holds up so well is that this is. There's something both timeless and very timely about that kind of inflection point and cultural.

Divide, you know.

[Podcast Host]

And it's funny you mention this because you talk about his uncle and it seems like the main character is not satisfied by. On the search by things that ordinary men might find satisfying on their search. The thing that sticks out in my head is women in love. He goes through a variety of his secretaries who he treats, you know, he's like the Linda's and the. You know, they're sort of these objects, they're interchangeable, they look the same, they are the same. They're just sort of for him. And in the book he's got this woman named Sharon who again, they're sort of these, like, anonymous names with faces. You can kind of picture any woman. And yet even those things, you know, these trysts or, you know, they're not fulfilling to him. There's this other woman on the horizon, Kate, who we'll get to in a moment, who's interesting, but who has a certain kind of mental affliction. Those things which would constitute a good life for the previous generation. An income, a wife, a family. For him, they're sort of shopping items or something. You know, he sort of puts them in the car, tries them out, takes them out. You know, they're not. They're not. They don't provide permanent satisfaction, in a way.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. I think his. He's trying to, as the. As one philosopher said, like, distract himself with pleasure to compensate for an absence of meaning. And.

There'S something kind of Don Draper esque about him. He's very good at his job, but is mostly obsessed with the woman sitting at the desk outside of his. His office.

[Podcast Host]

Temporarily obsessed, like it too will pass.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes, yes. And I mean, he talks about this in the novel that he. He is. He is interested in them only up until a point. And then when he gets what he wants, it immediately ceases interest.

Ceases to interest him. And then he has to replace them with the next secretary.

[Podcast Host]

Right, right. I mean, this. This word. So we've talked about the search and now we've discussed how unfulfilling that is. There's another word that comes up in that context or another phrase that comes up in that context that I think captures this phenomenon that I wanted to. He uses this word when he talks about the kind of malaise of modern life. He calls it modern life's everydayness. Yes. This is a word, if people have ever read Martin, heidegger's Being in Time. Heidegger talks about Dasein, which is man. I mean, it's not necessarily man, but man and his everydayness. That for most of us, most of the time, our being and the meaning of our being is not a question for us. And so we remain kind of chatty in our everydayness. Like, what did you do last night? The kind of. The chatter about the TV shows, the kind of. He calls it idle talk, right? And that this is part of our everydayness and that we. So most people are not themselves plunged into the kind of existential crisis that would expose this everydayness for the superficiality that it is. This guy sees it and he identifies it. And I'm going to read this passage to you where he uses that word, everydayness. He says this. When I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness. Every dayness is the enemy.

[Shiloh Brooks]

No search is possible.

[Podcast Host]

Perhaps there was a time when every dayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of every Danish broken when I lay bleeding in a ditch. Now that's pretty powerful.

[Ryan Holiday]

We credit Camus as being a sort of novelist and philosopher, that these are like philosophically driven novels. And I don't think Walker Percy gets fully enough credit for having done something very similar. Heger's probably a subtext there. Kierkegaard is a subtext in his writing that very explicitly is the epigraph. And then. And then the Stoics are in there, too. He was a profoundly philosophical thinker, also a religious thinker. And so these. I do think this is a novel that's worthy of being up there, like with the Plague or.

The Stranger, because that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to teach philosophy through the novel. And, yeah, this everydayness. I thought the most striking passage in the book where he deals with the everydayness is he's having this kind of trivial conversation with someone that he bumps into in the street. And he keeps saying to himself, like, this is death. You are dead. Just the total emptiness of existence for most people. And yet there's also a part of him that kind of admires or even envies the people who are not aware of the philosophical implications and weight that he is carrying. Like, I think at some level he would like to be able to talk about.

Sports scores or, you know, water cooler stuff, and he can't. He's just sort of paralyzed by this sense that life should be more meaningful. That this isn't what it's all about. That none of it's as exciting as, you know, fighting the Chinese in Korea.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And the only time in his life when he's felt the energy and vitality of a true meaning and purpose is when his life is on the line in the war. So he comes back home and begins to participate in that liberty which the war was for. In other words, which he won. And it seems as though he's disillusioned by its cheating in a certain way. And so that's sort of. It seems to me what the search is for is a way out of that world which he thought was worth fighting for, but which he was never more vital in than when he was fighting for it. The payoff is not as vital as the struggle.

[Ryan Holiday]

I think one of the scarring things about Korea is that Unlike World War II, we sent these guys over there to do this horrible, awful thing in one of the most horrible, awful places in the world. Like, he's talking about, you know, basically Korea in the winter there. And.

Why we were there wasn't fully explained. Right. Like, it wasn't a popular war. It wasn't so much a forgotten war as it just was a poorly explained war. Right. Truman calls it a police action. And everyone's kind of maintaining this fiction that we're there for this certain reason. I mean, we're in Korea fighting the Chinese. It's a strange kind of disorienting experience. I do wonder if. If it's less clear cut than what you're saying that he, like, went over there for as part of this great crusade and then came home. I think it's more like he was a cog in this big machine and then came home and was sort of like, I don't. I don't really get this either. And the masculinity aspect is interesting, though, because he is chasing women. So that's kind of your, you know, maybe a traditional masculine thing that you might go, oh, this is where he's finding purpose and meaning. It's. He's not living. He is. He is very much living in a patriarchal society. So the men are not neutered in the sense that we might say that they are today. And yet he actually doesn't like most of the masculine activities. Like, he doesn't like hunting. He and his father both don't like fishing. So I think there's something too, about him being kind of this, like, thoughtful, philosophically inclined person in, you know, what you might call sort of Eisenhower early Kennedys, America, where that isn't necessarily the dominant cultural currency. Do you know what he's like out of place? And New Orleans is an interesting place in that it's got this kind of writerly, artistic tradition, and yet it's a party capital, and it always was then. I mean, this is all happening during Mardi Gras. That's like one of the subtext of the book. And yet it's also kind of this conservative, traditional place. And so I just think it's like nothing is lining up, and he just doesn't know where he fits and what it's all for.

[Podcast Host]

The word of the day is a person, it's a philosopher. Martin Heidegger, who was a German that lived from 1889 to 1976. Now, Heidegger has something of a mixed reputation, and after all, he was an avowed Nazi. He was the rector for a short period of time under Hitler of the University of Freiburg. And in his book Introduction to Metaphysics, he talks about, quote, the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism. So he never seems to have recanted it. On the other hand, Heidegger's philosophy is perhaps more influential than anyone else of his generation. Books like Being in Time, for which he's most famous, in addition to many commentaries on Plato, Heidegger says that the human being is a peculiar being among all other beings, among all other animals, among all other things, because the human being is that being for whom, Follow me on. This being is a question, meaning the human being is the only one, unlike squirrels, unlike cows, unlike monkeys, who can ask the question, why am I here? What is the meaning of being? And that means that the world comes to make sense through the human being. Now, Heidegger was also a critic of reason. He didn't think that reason made adequate sense or provided adequate evidence and insight into the world. And so he initiates a critique of what's called rationalism, in the aftermath of which we get postmodernism, meaning that all the old authorities, reason, nature and God, fail to be authorities. In the aftermath of Heidegger's critique, and we're plunged into a kind of existentialist crisis in which man is required in to give himself the meaning that those old idols, in his view, used to provide.

[Shiloh Brooks]

At St. John's College, every student reads Homer, Aristotle, Euclid and Einstein.

[Podcast Host]

I went there, and it's where I.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Was taught to question, listen and revise my thinking. St. John's College offers students the quintessential liberal education.

[Podcast Host]

Ancient in spirit, radical in practice.

[Shiloh Brooks]

If you or someone you know is up for joining their undergraduate or graduate.

[Podcast Host]

Community of learning, visit St. John's College, the original old school, at SJC. Edu. That's SJC.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Edu.

[Podcast Host]

Let's bring in to this situation and complicate it with this woman, Kate, because then we can talk about him more fruitfully. So she is his sort of step cousin. She has had a very difficult life. If I'm not mistaken, Kate was engaged to be married and she was in a car crash in which her husband died in the car wreck. She's now engaged again to some guy, Walter or something like that. Is that his name? Who she's not. No one's really impressed with. But the defining feature of Kate is that she too suffers from some kind of emptiness.

[Ryan Holiday]

And.

[Podcast Host]

And she too has what would be sort of called an existential crisis. Although hers manifests itself in a kind of debilitating mental illness, such that she's often given to taking pills and being on the brink of suicide. And she has very high highs in which she's this sort of charming, extraordinary spirit. And then very low lows. And Binks, the main character who we've been talking about, can often see those things coming, and he has a kind of barometer for her mood and these sorts of things. Now, toward the end of the novel, interestingly, they kind of get together. I mean, they get. And that's a real surprise. But I want to talk about her character and what in particular she suffers from that's different from or the same as him. Because it seems like she's got her own malaise and it's not the same as his, but it's still there. And I just wonder if that doesn't bring out another dimension of the everydayness and that kind of cheapness of modern life.

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, what they both have in common is that they're sort of letting their parents down. That it's like the world is your oyster. We have sent you to college, we have provided for you. You can do anything you want. You're beautiful. You belong to all the right clubs.

We've now set you up effectively on your second arranged marriage or society marriage. Why isn't this working for you? And I get the sense that for the previous generations, it was this kind of like, suck it up. What do you mean, you don't like this? What do you mean, you don't like this person? Like the Kate sort of talks about how the greatest moment of her life was this car accident, because not only did it sort of extricate her from this marriage she didn't want to be a part of. But life seemed real and exciting for the first time. I think she is struggling in this moment with similar existential uncertainty to Binks. But then there's obviously questions of gender and societal roles, like, she can't go have a career necessarily, not as a sort of society woman from New Orleans. And, yeah, you're right, it manifests itself much more clearly as mental illness or depression. It's more diagnosable. Or perhaps the argument is they are more inclined to medicate it. You know, she. She talks about her therapist and her doctors a lot, and it seems like her parents are kind of. They're worried about her, but, like, if they could have lobotomized her to make it go away, they probably would have.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting you say that because that she came to life after that car crash, because I noticed this about the structure of the book, and I'm not sure what to make of it. He himself is involved in a car crash, and she is involved in a car crash. And she says, when I got in the car crash with my first husband and it killed him, everyone around me thought that it's the thing that made me sad, but in fact, it's the thing that gave me life, which I think people don't expect and the reader doesn't expect. Then he later, with Sharon, his secretary, who's from Alabama, who's just another sort of faceless woman, he's involved in his mg. I mean, this is like the perfect car for the kind of meaningless soul. I mean, I don't want to get too down on the mg, but at any rate, he's out there in his MG and it crashes, and he has a car crash and he hurts his shoulder. And, you know, I wondered about whether these parallel car crashes are meant to tell me something as a reader, but I wasn't sure what it was. Do you have any thought on that?

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, and it's obviously kind of a plot device. It's like shaking them out of their sort of stupor. You do get the sense that life is just extremely boring. And these are in some ways the most interesting things that have ever happened to them.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Yeah, that seems right to me. I mean, let me ask you about this, because this goes along with the boredom and the search for meaning. So if they're in this situation, that contemporary modern liberalism, with all of its sophistication, its freedom, its wealth, its opportunity, has failed to provide them with meaning for life such that they can live very comfortably but with no purpose. That seems to be at least part of what's going on here.

Wrapped around this whole novel is a religious subtext with Catholicism, Ash Wednesday, Mardi Gras. So you've got this, you know, this kind of.

Purposelessness of contemporary liberalism with all of its comforts and no meaning taking place. The story takes place on Ash Wednesday and at Mardi Gras, and he talks about his relatives being good Catholics and these sorts of things. So how do you interpret that part of what Percy is saying? It's almost like he's saying, is he saying that the spiritual remedy lies in, you know, rigorous religion? Or what's he doing with religion?

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, the interesting thing is that Walker Percy is both a Catholic and a Stoic, explicitly practitioner and follower and admirer of both. And yet the character Binks in the novel finds both Stoicism and Catholicism to be, like, woefully insufficient. And his aunt is, like, trying to talk to him about this all the time. He comes home one day and there's a note in the door, and she's scribbled down a quote from Marcus Aurelius that she wants, but it just. It doesn't land for him. And so what's interesting is that, yes, there is this sort of emptiness, but it's not as if everyone around him is.

You know, materialistic and superficial and shallow. Like.

His aunt and his uncle are deeply spiritual religious people who I. I bet, if you ask them, had a sense of. Of meaning and purpose. And. And. And as I was saying earlier, didn't seem to. To wonder why they were here or what this all meant or what they were supposed to do. Like the. The famous passage which is her sort of riffing on.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

On stoicism.

[Podcast Host]

Share a passage with us. You want to share one?

[Ryan Holiday]

She says, I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder, spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is the secret which the high gods have not confided in me yet. One thing I believe, and I believe it with every fiber of my being, a man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated, but a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man. So there's, like, exactly the prescription for purpose and masculinity and duty and honor and all this, but it's not landing with him. And what I think is interesting is not Only is it not landing with him, but we know that the author is sympathetic to that very idea personally in his actual life. And yet we see in the novel the character sort of wrestling with the inadequacy of it, or you get the sense that he's hearing it. It's just he's not able to fully buy into it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, how do you see then, in that case, the ending? And spoiler alert, we're gonna talk about the ending.

Because you've talked about. Well, there's a superficiality of the world. You just read a passage in which his aunt prescribes him the kind of cure for this, which is basically, as I understand it, to constantly fight for good in the forces, you know, against the forces of evil. At the end of the novel, he marries Kate. And then everybody in the novel is sort of always telling him, you should be a lawyer or a doctor or something like that, a researcher.

[Ryan Holiday]

You should be a cancer researcher and researcher.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, God bless all you researchers out there. But it's not going to help him with his existential crisis. It's only going to get worse because you're in. You're in a laboratory doing work that feels insignificant to you, may bear no fruit.

[Ryan Holiday]

You're making this tiny contribution to this larger.

[Podcast Host]

You'll never see. You're just a tiny thing in a giant machine.

[Shiloh Brooks]

So.

[Podcast Host]

But in the end, he gets married and he starts going to medical school.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Like, does. How am I supposed to take that? Does that mean he. He sort of gives up on the search? Was the search supposed to lead to the everydayness? In other words, he kind of plunges himself back into everydayness, you know, and so I'm sure what that's supposed to.

[Ryan Holiday]

Mean, but I wonder if that's sort of it, is that.

There'S something about just actually submitting to it. So, like, the prescription was always there, but he thought he was somehow exceptional, or he thought there was something exciting or, you know, remarkable out there. And actually what he needed to do was get married and be a regular person. Like it. There's almost. You're right, it's a little anticlimactic. And maybe that's kind of the point is that there is no grand answer or enormous epiphany. It's just this realization that me and this person are both on a similar search and maybe we're meant to be together and that life is. Hey, at the end, she's still suffering from her, you know, sort of over overwhelmingness, being overwhelmed by life, and he's like sending her on a little errand on the streetcar to pick up some papers. And he's like, it's gonna be okay. You can do this. So there's something kind of remarkable about how unremarkable the ending is.

[Podcast Host]

I look at that and I think, you know, if the problem. I mean, I'm gonna now restate the problem of existentialism in a more Nietzschean way.

We create meaning for ourselves, lo and behold, according to one existentialist thinker. But that meaning has less authority over us precisely because we created it. And so we are aware of its arbitrariness in a way that if I were a practicing Catholic, let's say, the meaning in my life wouldn't be arbitrary. Its authority is in God. And so it has roots in substance. God said right versus Shiloh, made up for himself this goal. So that's the kind of crisis of existentialism, as I understand it, that we come to see the arbitrary character of the meaning we create for ourselves. This character is bereft of meaning, trying to create it for himself because he can't find it in his toothpaste or his trysts. But then at the end, the meaning comes from.

A marriage in a medical school and kind of integrating himself into the everydayness. And I'm just not sure for a person who really suffers from it, I mean, for whom the everydayness and the search really weighs on their heart. And trust me, I've been there, that that is gonna be good enough, you know?

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. I think the more I read the book, the more unsatisfying that is. But maybe that's kind of the point now.

[Podcast Host]

Religion's a different story. I would say. If that's what the person finds, that might. It's conceivable to me that that might go towards solving the problem in a way, you know?

[Ryan Holiday]

And we know that's what he personally did. Yeah, but. So that's why I think it's interesting that the character is somewhat rejecting the two big sort of spiritual pillars of the author's life.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

But maybe there's something kind of.

Small and beautiful about the marriage and the connection and the decision to actually participate in the life as opposed to sort of imagining your life is supposed to be this movie and it's supposed to be glamorous and exciting where I think a lot of the solutions to some of the angst and the struggles that people are going through. It is like, you know, if you stopped swiping and you just picked one of these people.

Your life would would be easier and better. It's. It's the abundance and the endlessness and, you know, and. And so I think there's something sort of profound in the pedestrianness of, of like choosing and settling is a word, I think, obviously that has a certain connotation. That's not what it is. But there is something about him settling into himself and life. And maybe this is something that, like, if, if, if you had been a veteran of a horrendous foreign war, might land a little bit differently than it does for, say, me, where he's kind of deciding to reenter society in a way that it was mitigated before.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I suppose. And I don't want to blame Percy or Binks for this, but I do. What I wanted from Percy was a more profound articulation of the riches of embracing the everydayness, which Binks concludes, so talk to me about marriage. Tell me. I mean, not you. I'm saying to Percy, now, you're free to talk to me about marriage if you want. But I'm saying, okay, Percy, if this is the solution, give me an argument in a defense of the goodness and fulfillment that will come to me. You know, you find this in a thinker like Rousseau or somebody or something where I can embrace those things and know that that meaning will be there. And I think, again, that's, you know, religion does this, Catholicism does this, which he gestures to in the novel. But I did find the ending to be.

Mysterious and I was going along with him and I expected there to be like this massive, awesome defense of the goodness of a decent life, and there wasn't. And that's. He's an artist, though, and that's. I think he might have left me to continue the search in a way.

[Ryan Holiday]

I think that's exactly it. Because we were talking about philosophical novels, right? And so Camus writes these beautiful philosophical novels. I think Percy writes these philosophical novels. Obviously, Ayn Rand is writing philosophical novels, but she, and this is where I think she is inferior as an artist, always says exactly what she wants you to think. Like, if this was Atlas Shrugged, there would be a 40 page speech at the end where she explains it all. And instead, I think the more artistic, the true job of the novelist is to leave most of that unsaid. So there's something kind of Hemingway esque here where you understand it's there, but you're only looking at the little. The little but there. But there isn't a great sort of button on the end.

[Podcast Host]

I can't tell if the moviegoer is meant to awaken me to the modern problem, whether it's meant to provide a solution for me to that problem and guide me through it. What am I supposed to walk away with? What is this novel supposed to do to the reader? It could plunge them into an existential crisis rather than healing the crisis. You know, that's true.

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, I was thinking, as we've been talking about young men, I think obviously historical fiction is great. Thrillers are great. Reading as entertainment is certainly better than other things you might be doing with your time. But what I think a novel like this does, or even a novel like Fight Club, which is much more popular, I think it is a great entry point into novels and fiction. And as something that actually speaks to what you are feeling and going through, like Fight Club has a similarly unsatisfying and potentially.

Dangerous set of implications.

[Podcast Host]

More so, yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

But I don't think that's why it's popular. It's popular because it's nailing. You call that a diagnostic novel? It is diagnosing the spiritual malaise and the. And you go, oh. So even if it doesn't answer it, what it does go is it says, hey, art, fiction, literature, philosophy.

These can speak to you and what you are dealing with. And that in and of itself is a powerful thing to pick up. A novel, especially a novel that's old, and go, how did it know what I was thinking?

How is this nailing an exact experience I have?

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Ryan Holiday]

That is when you get that for the first time in a novel.

I think that's when you become a lifelong reader, when you go, oh, this isn't just entertaining. Yeah. And it's also not just something that you have to do for school and write essays about. You're like, this is this. They see part of me. I see part of myself in it. And it sees. Yeah, something in me.

[Podcast Host]

You know what I think this novel really brings out? Well, I mean, it, you know, about our time is the title the Moviegoer. I mean, you mentioned this a few times, that he goes and sees the pretend life on the screen and then he kind of walks out of the screen experience and lives his own pretend life. I think it speaks to our time because I think we often do that, especially now in a kind of saturated media world, but we do it in a different way. He's going to see the movie and then living his pretend life. What happens now in the age in which there are cameras that everyone can point at themselves is that they actually become characters in a movie.

[Ryan Holiday]

We call this Move character energy.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And live a fake life on Instagram or whatever. And so they become movie stars and moviegoers in this whole new way because there's cameras, like movies everywhere. The fakeness of the whole thing. He feels back in whenever this was. And we are extraordinarily guilty of. I let you reflect on that.

[Ryan Holiday]

No, no, I think that's what makes the ending a bit transgressive. Right. So the decision to just get married and be a regular person in a regular life.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

If you're seeing yourself as John Wayne or, you know, this movie star, you know, doing all these glamorous things, that feels very different. But it's a radical choice. Right. It's the choice to be a real regular person in a. In a multifaceted life instead of the star. I think there's something here. He wants to be a character in a movie, which means he's always seducing the beautiful woman. You know, he's driving the mg, he's making money. Everything is famous. It's certified on the screen. It has to be. There has to be a novelty and a newness to it. That's a trap. Living. Living your life as if it is your Instagram grid. It looks exciting and compelling, but it's profoundly empty and devoid of meaning.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

There's something weirdly much more. More humdrum about meaning that it's actually not in the accomplishments or winning high office or selling a company for a billion dollars that you think it's in these peak experiences, but the meanings in much smaller, more ordinary moments.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah. This makes sense to me. And it leads me to want to ask you, you know, I know that you're an elegant expositor of stoicism and all that it can do. So can you talk to me about the way that you see stoicism as a remedy for the diagnosis that Percy has provided for modernity?

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. So the Percy family, there's this sort of multi generational chain of Southern stoics in the Percy family. They don't always live up to it because I think that's another sort of subtext of this book. It's like the culture that his aunt is like, trying to fight for and preserve is the culture of segregation and racism and a caste society. But so the Percy family is by no means flawless. And if you read Rising Tide, you see this sort of betrayal that happens in the flood of 1927. But one of the Percy's, I forget which one, said something about stoicism, that it was like, when all is lost, it holds fast. I think it's this kind of spiritual and philosophical bedrock of an ancient tradition that has been helpful to people in precisely moments of flux and change and uncertainty, because that is the most timeless thing. Life is always changing. Things are always falling apart. It always looks like the last generation had it figured out and then they didn't. And so I think as a philosophy, it's there, like religion, to be something that you turn to, to find meaning and solace and resilience in.

[Podcast Host]

Do you have a couple principles of stoicism that you live by? I mean, I know you've done a lot of work on this, but that you could recommend to somebody with respect to just how to begin to cultivate their life.

If they suffer from this?

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. I think stoicism as this idea that, you know, you don't control the world around you, you control how you respond to the world around you. That. That you have to see the things that happen to you in life as an opportunity to practice these virtues. That that's basically what stoic philosophy is.

[Podcast Host]

So what do you think about you. You said at the top of the show you found this novel when you were in your 20s. Is that right?

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

You're now. I don't know how old. Jarvie, you're not 20.

[Ryan Holiday]

No.

[Podcast Host]

And we don't have to tell people, but when you look back at you then, and you look back at this character as you understood it then how has your perception of yourself and this character changed if you. You know, when you read this thing today.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. I think it's like when you read Catcher in the Rye in high school, you relate to Holden Caulfield.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

And then when you read him when you get older, he seems kind of like a whiny bitch. You know, there's something about when you're young and you're asking some of these questions for the first time, they feel very transgressive and radical and new and profound. And as you get older, you realize that they're kind of self indulgent and they're kind of overwrought and, you know, what they definitely are is incredibly cliche that everyone has gone through this and that what you have to figure out is life. Like, you have to figure out how to just be a person in the world.

And that sometimes that sort of inner monologue, that question, the searching almost is itself the problem. Like, I. Again, I think, you know, just rereading it, you're sort of pointing out that the ending is a little unsatisfying. I'm I'm wondering if. If actually what it is is just adult maturity, responsibility. Like, there's the. What is interesting is that he's older than you think. You know, he's not. He's not 22. He's not just graduated from college. He's older. But it's a coming of age novel about that older period. The world has to stop revolving around you and you have to.

Just kind of accept life as it is and figure out how to make it work. Because that's what life is.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. It's not this romantic thing.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes. And there's not this. There's not some like, peak spiritual experience that like.

Answers all of it for you.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Ryan Holiday]

There is something a little unsatisfied. What's interesting about this novel being sort of a spiritual quest is that it's really these kind of small little.

Experiences where he's seeing it one way or another. I was thinking about that because I mentioned the fall earlier, but it's like he maybe thinks that he witnessed someone falling into the canal.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, right.

[Ryan Holiday]

He may. He has a somewhat disquieting confrontation on the road. You know, like it's these little things that just give him a slightly different perspective on his life and his culpability and his moral responsibilities. It's not like what people think. People think today, apparently, that you, you know, you and 10 of your friends pay a shaman to come mix up a paste for you. And then at the end of it, all of life's questions are answ, you know, or that it's. You read one book or you go to, you convert to this religion and then all the questions are answered. From what I know even about Walker Percy, is that although he was.

A pretty ardent Catholic, he was, you know, as I think most of the people of faith are. It's something he's struggling with and has a lot of questions. His faith is not absolute.

[Podcast Host]

Clean.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, he's thinking about it a lot. He's friends with Thomas Merton. Yeah. You know, he's, he's a. He's a. He's a philosophical Catholic, not, you know, a peasant who's blindly accepting, you know, the, the. The rule of the cardinal or something.

[Podcast Host]

Maybe the poetry of the book lies in what you just said, that the small moments of enlightenment over the course of a life are the thing that constitute wisdom and, and provide direction. That's not like it is in the movies.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

In other words, it turns out in the end that the life that he's going to live is quite different from the kind of thing you would see in a movie. It's the moviegoer, right, where you go. And then there's this about halfway through, the character has a moment and then it's all clear. Like, that's, you know, for him and for us, that's not the way it's going to be. And so the title takes on a kind of new poetic resonance when you see that life is not a movie in that way. So we've said, you know, throughout the conversation, that the moviegoer, you know, it's a. It's an unconventional novel, and for some folks, that might be intimidating. I think far from the case. People should check this book out. It's an extraordinary book, but what do you love about this book?

[Ryan Holiday]

I love that it's. It's. It's deep and profound, but anyone can follow it. It's not. It's not a bunch of philosophical concepts you can't wrap your head around. In fact, all the sort of observations are like, things you'll be like, yeah, I've experienced that. That's happened to me. So Walker Percy does this incredible job of writing this really accessible, shockingly modern novel about these really profound philosophical ideas that you'll see yourself in. Like the. The. The spiritual quest that Binks Bowling is on, I think, is the spiritual quest that. That every person is on. It's a. It's a coming of age novel, but it's. It's not coming of age from, you know, 15 to 20. It's not a John Hughes coming of age. It's. It's coming of age into adulthood, like into being a responsible, contributing member of society in. In a world, I think, right now, especially for young men, where something has clearly gone wrong, that's not happening. And I think Walker Percy is trying to address that. That malaise, that frustration, that resentment, that disconnection. He's like, I'm feeling that.

[Podcast Host]

It just seems to me that the message is more relevant today, arguably, than it was back. At least it rings more profoundly today because so much of the things he's criticizing are all the more surface level in our ordinary life, you know.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah. In a way, the privilegedness of the character in 1960 is much more evenly distributed today. His sort of malaise and abundance and limitless options and accessibility to entertain, all the things that are kind of the root causes of his alienation are much more shared than they would have been for, I don't know, your average American reading this book when it came out.

[Podcast Host]

So this won the National Book Award. Interestingly, that year, I believe J.D. salinger's Franny and Zoe was among the books that were supposed to be. But it's interesting we mentioned Salinger. You've said that this is a kind of alter Catcher in the Rye in some way. Why do you think people should read this either rather than Catcher in the Rye or in addition to Catcher in the Rye? Because they do, you're right, fall into that same kind of genre.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah, I mean, they're both the main characters in this book and in most of Salinger's work. These sort of people in some state of arrested development or spiritual angst. And we know, you know, knowing more about Salinger now that he himself is in this kind of weird, Michael Jackson esque state of arrested development. He's like obsessed with young girls. There's something that breaks in Salinger, probably in the Arden Forest in World War II. He has a terrible experience that Walker Percy doesn't have. But they come home with this similar alienation and dissatisfaction with modern life. I think Salinger is stuck there and Percy is trying to get over it. And I think Percy does get over it. The Catcher in the Rye is something you read when you're a kid and you relate to the fundamental immaturity of the kid. Everyone's a phony, everyone sucks. But it's similarly true still.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, I'm immature myself, I guess.

[Ryan Holiday]

But it's similarly unsatisfying. It doesn't poach much in the way of what to do about it. The Moviegoer is about an older man.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ryan Holiday]

And, and, and trying to answer, I think, some slightly more substantive questions.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

Philosophical questions.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

And so I don't know, it just struck me as, as a, as a better book. Sometimes you read these books in school and you realize, oh, this is the need they're trying to address. And I'm not actually sure that it's. This is the, this is the one I would, I would assign.

[Podcast Host]

This is like the late, late night Catcher in the Rye. Like you catch her in the rice for like, you know, nine to five.

[Ryan Holiday]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

The moviegoer is like, you know, midnight to 5:00am yes.

[Ryan Holiday]

Like, yeah, one's for 17 year olds and the other is more like 27 or.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

Or early 30s. And you're, you're still acting like a 17 year old.

[Podcast Host]

Right. Do you have time for a lightning round?

[Ryan Holiday]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

All right. I know that you love stoic philosophy and I can't help when I look at some of your work, think about who is your favorite non stoic. Philosopher.

[Ryan Holiday]

That's a good question.

Probably Camus or.

Yeah, probably Camus. And then the irony is that, you know, the Epicureans and the Stoics were much closer together than we think about in the modern world. So maybe Epicurus, again, you're a proponent.

[Podcast Host]

Of Stoicism, but what is your least Stoic habit?

[Ryan Holiday]

What's my least stoic habit? Shit. Well, I think people have this perception that Stoicism is the sort of mastery of all these things.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

And in fact, Stoicism is the struggling with these things. Right. So, like, when you read Meditations, you get the sense that Marcus Aurelius has a temper, that Marcus Aurelius is anxious, that Marcus Aurelius, you know, is aspiring to be what the Stoics are, but is not naturally there. So those two are big ones for me, which is why I think I respond to Stoicism. I think if you are naturally chill, naturally calm, difficult to provoke.

You'Re probably going to crack one of these books and not see what the big deal is. I think what hit me about the Stoics when I first read it at 19 or 20 is I was like, oh.

People are also struggling with this, and this is what they figured out about it. So probably temper and then anxiety are the two. My two more expensive habits.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. Am I right that you live in Texas?

[Ryan Holiday]

I do.

[Podcast Host]

But you're not a Texan.

[Ryan Holiday]

I'm a Californian.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. So this gives rise to the eternal question you already know I'm going to ask. Texas or California? Ooh.

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, I mean, I choose to live in Texas.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you may.

[Ryan Holiday]

I'm voting with my. My fee. But I was just. I was just in Southern California. I was. Did something in la. We drove from Santa Monica to the Inyo Mountains, then from the Inyo Mountains to Lake Tahoe and then back down through the Central Valley. This is a little road trip thing. My kids are out of school and it's hard to beat California as far as being one of the most beautiful places in the world.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, but Texas lets you keep your money.

[Ryan Holiday]

Texas lets me keep my money.

[Podcast Host]

And I. Yeah, it lets me keep my money, too. I'm a Texan. Don't worry.

[Ryan Holiday]

It's also in the middle of the country, which there's some. The coasts are great. Yeah. But if you have to do things in the rest of the country, they're rather inefficient.

[Podcast Host]

I understand that in a previous life, you were a very successful marketer. What is the brand now that has great marketing that you look at and you think, man, they got it.

[Ryan Holiday]

Ooh, what's a brand with great market.

[Podcast Host]

Company or, you know, whatever.

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, Yeti is an Austin company and I'm kind of amazed that they've basically invented nothing and improved nothing. But they'll make you pay $400 for an ICE chest.

[Podcast Host]

Pretty awesome.

[Ryan Holiday]

I'm pretty impressed by that. I'm always impressed when someone can make you take. I feel like that's the. This is something Walker Percy would get upset about. I think we should talk about his other book real fast. But like, how do we take something you were already buying and make it 20 times more expensive and smaller portions or whatever? You know, like that's. That is the modern marketing world.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Ryan Holiday]

That is the whole foodsification of the.

[Podcast Host]

Modern world that gives rise to men like Binks and I guess.

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, so. So his less well known novel, which I love a great deal, is Lancelot. I don't know if you've ever read Lancelot. Lancelot. There's not very many. I imagine no one here has picked any books in the second person.

[Podcast Host]

I don't think so.

[Ryan Holiday]

There's Bright Lights, Big City and then there's Lancelot are the only two books I've read that are in the second person that are good. And it opens with the main character in a prison cell in New Orleans. And he is basically committed an atrocity in sort of anger and rage against modern society, the excesses of modern society. Actually, my book Conspiracy has an epigraph from Lancelot where he's just. It's something like, I can't stand this age. I can't stand it. But here's what I figured out. I don't have to. And it's this sort of like, sort of screed against modern society. And there's a thread of that through Walker Percy's writing that isn't as visible in the moviegoer, but it's in Lancelot.

[Podcast Host]

So you've written a number of books. You just mentioned one. Tell me about what you're working on right now. What do you got coming out?

[Ryan Holiday]

Well, I just finished a four book series on the cardinal virtues. So I did courage, then I did discipline, which is how I rendered temperance. Temperance being a not particularly exciting word these days. And then I did justice. And then the fourth and final one is Wisdom, and its title is Wisdom Takes Work.

[Podcast Host]

Wisdom Takes Work. That's a really good title.

[Ryan Holiday]

Thank you.

[Podcast Host]

Congratulations to you.

[Ryan Holiday]

I think I'm pretty good at titles. That's one thing I'm good at.

[Podcast Host]

Brian Holiday. Thank you for coming on old school.

[Ryan Holiday]

Thanks for having me.