Host (4:42)

Ryan Holiday, welcome to Old School.

Ryan Holiday (4:44)

Thanks for having me.

Host (4:45)

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 (5:02)

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 that's my favorite thing is people come in the store and I just go, like, here are like, 20 books that I want. And I'm going from section to section of my favorites in these various different categories. And so 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 my dream.

Host (5:58)

Well, you have come on the right podcast, my friend. I get the question a lot, and I think you do, too. How can I read more? Because people say, well, you do this podcast. You read these books, 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 (6:18)

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 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 know, you. You actually accomplishing much with that email that you're responding to. So I just. I just consider it a big part of my job and life. And. And I've obviously built a job in a life where that's more true than maybe your average person, but.

Host (8:11)

And you got to make time for it, too. I mean, people think it just. If you just say, I'm going to 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 (8:25)

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

Host (8:27)

Yeah.

Ryan Holiday (8:28)

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.

Host (8:40)

Me too.

Ryan Holiday (8:41)

That is actually a speed reader. And it seems like such a strange thing to try to rush through. Also, 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.

Host (9:14)

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 (9:21)

Okay.

Host (9:21)

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 (9:46)

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. It just hit me. It's a very. It's an interesting novel, to say the least.

Host (10:34)

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

Ryan Holiday (10:45)

Yeah, it's not an. I hope this doesn't sound like I'm not selling it. It's not an packed novel. It's a novel about a pilgrimage. But he doesn't really go anywhere. It's about this internal search. He is 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 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.

Host (12:46)

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Ryan Holiday (13:14)

Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastow County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on. Thought, this isn't going to work. Stopped, parked, it walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us. Not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids, who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that, if you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it, wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory. Learn more@toyota.com Trucks Adventure detours.

Host (14:50)

For somebody who picks up this book expecting a traditional sort of like, there's a plot, there's intention, there's some resolution, there's. 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 (15:14)

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

Host (15:57)

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

Ryan Holiday (16:01)

That's why he likes the movies, by the way. That's right, because the movies are the opposite of that.

Host (16:05)

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, 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 (17:23)

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, 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 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, 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? Yeah. 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?

Host (20:22)

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 what, you know, they're not fulfilling to him. There's this other woman on the horizon, Kate, who is. 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 (21:30)

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.

Host (21:51)

Temporarily obsessed. Like it too will pass.

Ryan Holiday (21:54)

Yes, yes. And. 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.

Host (22:13)

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 ask you about. 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 in 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. No search is possible. 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 (23:44)

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 is 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.

Host (25:21)

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 cheapness 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 (25:59)

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 and the winter there and why we were there wasn't fully explained. Right. Like, it. 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 it's less clear cut than what you're saying that he went over there 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 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 subtexts 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.

Host (28:13)

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. 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 (29:43)

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 role. Like she can't go have a career necessarily. Not as a sort of society woman from New Orleans. Then, yeah, you're right. It manifests itself much more clearly as mental illness or depression. It's more diagnosable. Or perhaps the argument is it.

Host (31:01)

It.

Ryan Holiday (31:01)

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.

Host (31:16)

Yeah. Yeah. And it. 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 (32:09)

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.

Host (32:24)

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 (33:29)

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. His. His aunt is, like, trying to talk to him about this all the time. She 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 bet, if you ask them, had a sense of meaning and purpose and, as I was saying earlier, didn't seem to wonder why they were here or what this all meant or what they were supposed to do. Like the famous passage, which is her sort of riffing on Stoicism.

Host (34:39)

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

Ryan Holiday (34:47)

She says, I don't. 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 stuff, 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. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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