The Daily Stoic - Champion Distance Runner Lauren Fleshman on the Power of Sport

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

Ryan speaks with Lauren Fleshman about her new book Good For a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, how the Stoics approached many of the gender equality issues that we still debate today, the unique power of sports to shatter perceptions and shift perspectives, and more. Lauren Fleshman is a retired world champion track and field athlete who competed in the 1500, 3000, 5000, and marathon events. Lauren graduated from Stanford as a 15-time All-American and five-time NCAA champion, and went on to become the U.S. 5000 meters champion in 2006 and 2010, as well as a top-ten finisher in the 2011 IAAF World Championships. After her running career, Lauren became Co-Founder and Brand Director of a gluten and dairy free energy bar company, Picky Bars, as well as the Co-Founder of Believe I Am, a business creating sport psychology tools for female athletes. She has also Co-Authored the Believe Training Journal as a resource for runners. Her work can be found at www.laurenfleshman.com. 🎧 For a limited time, you can purchase The Daily Stoic ebook for only $1.99 on Kindle✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message

from one of our sponsors. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to Business Wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holliday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.

As you know, I'm a runner. Try to run every day. I'm going to run shortly after this. I'm waiting for a break in the rain Which did derail my walk with the kids this morning and I did it later last night My schedule is a little disrupted, but I'm going to go for run and so I'm always fascinated with thinkers and of course doers in the sphere of running and Lauren Fleshman is one of the greatest runners of all time.

Just an absolutely fascinating and not just a fascinating person, but an elite athlete. She was the US 5,000 meters champion in 2006 and 2010. She is also the founder and brand director of a gluten and dairy free energy bar company called PickyBars. And she is an activist for athletes' rights and female athletes. She took a break from running in June 2012 after the Olympic trials finals.

And she's back now. And even after taking a two-year break, she could still put down a 450 mile, just an absolute beast of a runner. And a really interesting thinker. We talk less about running itself and more about what athletics can teach us about virtue and justice in this episode. I really enjoyed this conversation. I found her book to be absolutely fascinating.

Good for a girl, a woman running in a man's world. You can follow her on Instagram, at FleshmenFlyer, you can follow her on Twitter, at LaurenFleshmen, and you can go to LaurenFleshmen.com. Check out the new book, Good for a Girl, a woman running in a man's world. I think a must read for any female athletes out there, anyone who coaches athletes, and anyone, everyone else, I think will really enjoy this conversation.

I had a lot of fun doing it. Her young kid popped her head in a couple times during the interview. We had some fun with that. I'm not sure if it made the final cut, but it was a great laid-back interview. She did this from New Zealand where she was on a trip during our interview and enjoy this conversation with Lauren Fleshmann and myself and check out her book, Good for a Girl, A Woven Rutted in a Man's World. So what are you doing in New Zealand? Visiting a friend that is like long overdue. I had tickets for March 14th of 2020 to come here for three weeks and work on my book.

That's crazy. Wow. Yeah. That's what it looks different. It's me and my spouse and our two kids now. So we're all here. That's amazing. Well, I love the book. I thought it was awesome. And I'm, I'm come to do this. Oh, great. Well, thanks for reading it and for having me on. Well, okay. So I want to take you back to the year 25 to 50 AD. This is Musoneus. This is Musoneus Rufus, one of the the early stills. I'm going to read you this passage. I want you to tell me what you think. It's a little long, but I think it's good. He says,

once when the question arose to whether or not sons or daughters ought to be given the same education, he remarked that trainers of horses and dogs make no distinction in the training of the male or the female. For female dogs are taught to hunt just as the males are, and one can see no difference in the training of mayors if they're expected to do the horses work and the training of stallions. And then he goes on and he says, and yet that there is not one set of virtues for a man and another for a woman. He said, a man must have an understanding and so much so must a woman for what would be the use of a foolish person. And he says, and then it is essential that that one no less than the other live just least since a man would not be a foolish person and he says, and then it is essential that that one no less than the

other live just least since a man would not be a good citizen and a woman would not if they were not just. And he goes on, he says gluttony drunkenness and other related devices are the vices of excess and bring disgrace upon both the man and the woman for self control is most necessary for every human being male and female alike alike, for the only way of escape from wantonness is through self-control and there is no other. I just thought it was so interesting because here they are, you know, 2000 years ago, having effectively the same debate that we are having today. And, you know, we still haven't figured it out.

No, that is really interesting. I really like hearing that. It's interesting because the horse is there's a horse analogy that comes up in my story too, or I'm searching as a child for evidence that this whole concept that boys and girls are different and that boys are faster than girls or stronger than girls, that that's an immutable fact. And I don't want that to be true because I want to be able to be the best at anything that

I work hard at and try to do, not just good for a girl, right? And so I do research in the library and find out that fillies have won the Kentucky Derby three times. And I use that as some sort of evidence that because it is true and horses, which it's three times is not that many, but it does happen. And so I thought, okay, maybe this whole sex-based differences in sport thing is really in our head or a matter of who's been given a chance to do it or not. And all those things can be overcome.

Yeah, it's interesting how low the debate has has become today and yet also how timeless it is. There's another quote I've always loved. Theodore Roosevelt was asked about, this is when they're deciding whether women should have the right to vote and someone saying, but there's differences between men and women. And he says, that may be true, but he's like the differences between men and women have never he says, you know, that may be true, but he's like the differences between

men and women have never struck me as greater than the difference between men and other men. The point being that like, you know, we take abstract go, you know, but this, you know, on average, men are faster than women in this race or that race. And it's like, but you're not. You know what I mean? Like this is nothing like, like a elite is elite. It just happens to be relative to each individual person. Yes, absolutely. Like I would be able to beat nine out of 10 men off the street,

no problem. But I'll never be able to, if I, if lined up against equally talented and trained males, um, to me, then I, I won't be able to beat them unless they fall in her themselves or something. Right. It's like most people can't beat LeBron James, not just LeBron James. Yes. Not just most women, exactly. Good point. So it matters, but only two points. Yes, yes. And often we, I think we get stuck in these distinctions

instead of just answering the more interesting question, which is, are you maximizing your potential as an individual? Yeah. And I think within sport it's it's interesting because sport there's there's very few areas of life voting wouldn't be one of them where your anatomy differences can impact significantly the task at hand right but like if you're talking about something specific to the

uterus, males just don't have one. So it's not, and there's not that many, fortunately, there's not that many things like that among the human race, right? Yeah, no, it's funny. It's also, it's not always like a male, female thing. Like, I have this bookstore here in Texas and we have this large window display that my wife wanted to put up that is

It says don't tread on me and it's a it's a picture of a woman's uterus. It's like a play on that famous flag, you know and I was standing outside the store the other day and this woman walks by and she goes You know, isn't that disgusting? You know and and and and, and, and, and, and her husband's like, what? And she goes, it's a vagina. And I was like, I'm sorry, I couldn't help, but over here, that's not of a vagina. It's a uterus, you know, and she was like, I know what it is, you know, and I was like, you know, clearly not. I just heard you. And, husband, you know, he goes, do you have one or something?

She was like, I know I have one. She's like, I know what it is that you have one. Do you have one? And I was like, obviously, I don't. And that's why I don't tell people what to do with theirs, you know. And then they sort of stormed off. But it's interesting that it's not just this sort of male female, the sort of closed mindedness of it is remarkably consistent even within various genders. Yes, absolutely. It is,

it's true. It's like, that kind of ties into what you were saying earlier. It's like the ignorance isn't separated by gender. And the like facts of performance aren't clearly separated either. And you can oppress people within your own group. And you can, yeah, it's all, it's certainly, and that's something that is tricky about writing a book where you're leaning into the ways that we're playing, I'm playing with this space, of the ways we're similar into the ways that we're playing with this space, the ways we're similar and the ways that we're different and learning that as a child growing up through the world and sports being the arena that's teaching me primarily, because there's

also the world teaching me, but it's really sports is this place we like to think of as very cut and dry and meritocracy and all these things. And so as a kid who didn't really have a strong gender identity at all, I was essentially learning what gender was through the thing I loved most, which was sport in these divided sports categories. Well, it's also interesting to think like, OK, so if you're like, oh, it's a meritocracy, you're obviously not strictly true in your missing stuff.

And then if you go, well, you know, we should, we should, you know, it's totally different. Like what's, what's, is this sort of paradox of it, whereas like if you insist that there should, if you insist that they're fundamentally different, you're, you're missing what's the same about them. And then if you insist they're the same, you are missing what is fundamentally unique or special or different about them. And I think what it comes down to probably why the issue is so overall tricky to go to the point about most people. Most people are just not good with nuance or paradox or complications period and is a nuance and complication that goes fundamentally to who we are as people. And so it probably shouldn't surprise us that most people struggle with distinctions in

that regard. Absolutely. And when you look at historically, the push for equality has generally required like an emphasis on sameness. You have one group that overwhelmingly has the power and decision to decide who gets what and who gets rights. And in order to earn those same rights, you have to prove your similarities to that group. And that was the case in the push for racial equality and the push for gender equality and so many other things. And but then an pro-approach

and so many other things. But then an approach works in the short term, it's proven historically, it's like, we're the same as you, don't tread on me. And then over time, you see, as we've seen with the Black Lives Matter movement a couple years ago, we need to be ready to have conversations about nuance, because focusing on our sameness can get us in the door, but we're not going to be

able to thrive equally. It's about equity. We can't thrive equally unless you're willing to to get into that nuance of our unique needs. Simply calling things equal is not the same as creating a just or a fair environment in which like sort of everyone is able to thrive. I mean, think about it. It's like, look, we're all the same. We're all equal. And that doesn't change the fact that, you know, your building should have a ramp on it. So a person in a wheelchair can enter said building. Do you know what I mean? Not to compare anyone to imply that someone of a different gender is disabled, but people are the same fundamentally, but then access and

then being able to thrive and being able to fulfill one's potential or pursue what wants to pursue. It's more complicated than simply saying, well, I pretend not to see what's different about me. complicated and simply saying, why pretend not to see what's different to happen? Yeah, and when it comes to sex and gender and sport, I really believe most of the problems with female athletes experiencing more injuries and disproportionate mental health outcomes, negative mental health outcomes and whatever,

it isn't due to maliciousness or something. I think it really is, just people think really, really great people, think that the best way to equally serve people is to to provide them the same thing the dominant group has had without examining what that actually is or if it's even still valuable to even the dominant group. Like does it really serve us anymore. And and it's like I can't even tell you how many times in my life the best compliment I could get was you are you act like a guy you train like a guy you compete like a guy and that's that's the gold standard and and that and I learned to have that feel really good. And and to a point I mean guys are great, but there's things about that that feel great,

but then if females are having a totally different physiological experience and development through puberty, it's not really helpful during that time. The metaphors that we use in sports being like the dominant metaphor of so much of life, as it was in the ancient world, like what I love about my dystokes is they're talking about wrestling and fighting and, you know, throwing the ball around. Like this is what we've always been doing. Even when we still fought lots of wars,

people preferred sports metaphors to war metaphors. Yes. But like, you have this scene in the book where you jump off this thing and your dad says, you have huge balls. And it is, it's one of those tricky things where it's inherently gendered and inherently sexist in its implications.

And yet, it so perfectly describes a thing that is good, right? Like having courage or being willing to take risks or having a strong sense of self or whatever. It's a problem, obviously, that we associate that with masculinity because, as the Stokes would say, it is a universal ideal, a thing that's great in men and women, but we're stuck with this way of describing that thing, that since we don't have a replacement for it, it inherently leaves some of the people that get branded with that feeling awkward or weird or just not quite right with it.

Yeah, yeah. And the fact that especially when you pair that with when female genitals are used to describe the complete opposite characteristic, like if you're being a pussy, you're the opposite of having balls, right? And so and those things are not accidental. They're they were intentional, right? And we've maintained them like you could think about like uterus has the ability to crush a can, a soda can And we've maintained them. Like you could think about, like, uterus has the ability to crush a can, a soda can, at any time that contracts. Like it's incredibly powerful and persistent

and can grow life, but we don't have any cultural terminology around like resilience and power and strengths and like creating things around the term uterus. It's not, it doesn't exist. It's fundamentally we're using those two forms of anatomy to describe the most basic of the virtues, courage and the absence of courage. Courage and cowardice.

If we could just say that, it would be wonderful. We end up taking this thing that most people would agree on. And then we stick it in this like political incorrect sphere that I think anyone stepping back would go, yeah, I get it. It's not quite right. But then it's just like, that's how we don't say courage and cowardice. Like that's not what we say. And it's tough.

Yeah. And I think and it's tough. Yeah, and I think that it's hard. It seems like a little thing if you're a person with balls, right? Like if you have them, that word has always been associated with something affirming that you don't have to really think about it. And you don't, you know, you don't have a vagina. So you don't need to worry about if someone calls you pussy, it's like whatever. of a vagina. So you don't need to worry about if someone calls you pussy. It's like whatever. It's more of an intellectual thing to think about. But if you're the person that actually has doesn't have the balls and has the vagina, then those things, as a kid, I mean, those scenes that I write about a lot of the book is just trying to say, here's these cultural things that just exist. Let's see it through the eyes of someone of you happens to be female, not particularly

attached to the gender, just happens to be female and driven and motivated going through the world. And what is it like to be one of those people? I'm just one person, but I hope a lot of guys read the book because I think it would just be interesting. I always like to read other people's experiences that walk through the world differently than me, takes it out of the intellectual space and more into an emotional space. No, I was just talking to someone about that recently. I read a book about sort of American politics

that was written by a British person. It was like about the founding of America from a British person. And it was like, it just like never occurred to me that like they would have a slightly different view on things., is that the day be like, oh America shouldn't be its own country, but they would have a more nuanced view on our case for independence, right? Yes. If you read, if you read a Native American perspective on American history, you know, they would have a slightly different view on what America did. And it's always interesting

when you get that different view. I saw, I saw like an Indian comic, like India from, Indian from India talking recently. And it was like, I was in the audience and it was great. But then I realized like, I was the out group. Like the comedy was really funny, but there was all these assumptions that like just I did not fund it, like not just assumptions, but just like basic, like the reality that he lived in had certain stereotypes about parents, about brought,

like all this cultural, you know, sort of view that just like I could get it intellectually, but it was less funny to me than the people sitting around me. And then realizing like, Oh, this is not for me. It's not like good or bad. But like, this is this is drawing on two decades of living with a mother that I didn't have, right? Yes. And how rare that experience is, but how much better you are for having it, because then I'm like, oh yeah, like when I talk about what parents do, I mean my kind of parents. And that this actually isn't remotely as universal as I would like, when I'm being lazy, I assume that it was.

Oh yeah, I mean, that experience, like you think about you didn't find it as funny, right? But how you really only needed to have an experience like that probably wants to go to have it shift into all these other places of your life to bring that awareness everywhere. And so I find that really powerful. I wish we could mandate everyone to have experiences like that. You're just so much less likely to assume that you're the default and you just make space.

You make space for there to be other ways of being. Well, no, another one that hit me, I worked many years at American Apparel, which is this fashion company. And one of the designers was talking to me one time. And she was like, I think we should stop using the color nude. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like, what do you mean? And she was like, like, when people say the color nude, they mean like our color skin,

right? And like, that's not what literally billions of people are new, right? And it was like, it just never occurred to me because as the default, like not the, as the cultural default, just like, like, we decided that you drive on this side of the road and some countries decided you drive on that, but you accept or you assume that this is how it goes. And then when people challenge that frame of reference, you have a choice. Either you're like, what are you doing?

Like you're fucking up the way it should be. Or you go, oh, that's really interesting. I never thought about it that way. Yeah, you think about how much collective comfort if the world is sort of built around you and your norms. Yes. And you just, you know, I'm in New Zealand right now and I rented a car and I'm driving on the left side of the road. And I am paying attention to driving in a way that is actually really fun. Driving has been just, I could, I could like mentally be writing

my book while driving on the right side of the road, right? And you think about if you're in a world that's built pretty much for you or people like you, it's this collective ease of going through your days with a type of freedom that's hard to put into words versus when you're not, when you're in the out group in whatever way that is. And in the book, I think I wanted to try to, it's my sport story, but it's really like, if you're in a system, it's not really built for you. Where are the places? Where you are experiencing that discomfort or friction? Where do they come up? And most, you know, and that I just found really interesting. Once I kind of got on to that is the the reason for

being or the way I wanted to tell the story. I was like, okay, I'm going to walk them through. Here's the places where it feels comfortable because we're pretty much the same or at least I am pretty much the same to the group. And here's where it doesn't feel the same. The Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other people's money, but he allegedly stole. Many thought Sam Bankman Freed was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes

and Vanity Fair. Some involved in crypto saw him as a breath of fresh air from the usual Wall Street buffs with his casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings. But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse. An SPF would find himself in a jail cell with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondering comes Spellcaster,

a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman Fried. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. No, and I think we're so enriched for that. I think you're right. It's like you could bottle it and give it to people. The whole world would be better. I was reading Walter Isaacson's book about Jennifer Doudna, the like basically the creator of MRNA research. And he's born in probably what, like the 30s or 40s, if she's 58 right now.

So, anyways, he's a literature professor. So like the canon that he taught his whole life was like mostly male novelists, right? And then he has this daughter and she starts to get older and he realizes like, I would like my daughter to learn about female marvelous and he's for he he ends up changing his curriculum. Not like it's not

till he has a daughter that he realizes just how male centric the can and he's been teaching is and then he's forced to make this effort to to to find things that she's interested. Your center center of gravity top in the frame. Look at this, I'm the internet meme now. Hold on a minute. Hey baby, you need to ask your dad for help on this right now, okay? Come here.

Yeah. I don't want people to pay it. Okay, dad's gonna help you. They're in the dryer. Okay, go down and tell him, okay? I love it. How old? Not only five-year-old.

I have a six-year-old. Just for extra credit. You do. Nice. A six-year-old. They're the exact same way. But anyways, he's forced to reconsider what he teaches. After a lifetime of doing it a certain way,

growing up thinking, you know, these are all the greats, and he's forced to challenge it. And obviously it works. And but you think about, let's say he had not done that. Let's say he's like, it should only be male novels there, better, whatever. Maybe his daughter doesn't grow up and invent, like see herself in the pages that he teaches. Yeah. And, you know, like literally millions more people die of the pandemic and all the things that later come from the reason. Like it really does have a huge impact, the ability to, to it first off, not see your worldview as rigid but as malleable. And then to the more people you manage to include and reach in what you're doing, you never know what the impact of that could be.

Well, and you think about he, he like was born and alive during like, suffrage was a thing, like there was a whole feminist movement happening, but it takes having your own daughter so often, right? Like we're so limited as animals. Or kind of pathetic animal self sometimes just drives me nuts. Because I'm like, dude, it's everywhere. I hear politicians say this all the time, like, well, I have a daughter. And it's like, okay, great, you have a daughter,

you have a wife, but like, at what point can we get to where, and we have all the tools we need with social media, and like, books, like endless books, like we can tap into other people's experiences without needing to share DNA, you know, with them, to be able to develop compassion and empathy and care. And it and but that is there, I feel like there's some kind of hole in the human brain that makes that more difficult to do unless you're directly related in some way, you need to feel connected and that's the power of story.

That's why I felt like there's plenty of scientific articles and journals. I mean, there's not really enough about this, but there are many and they're not changing things because you have to find a way to feel like to get people to feel like you're their daughter or you're their friend or whatever to to activate something, some willingness to change. And a story can a well told story can do that. Yeah, no, the I think it was friend Leibowitz was talking about like as you read, um, door, book should be doors and not mirrors or windows and not mirrors.

And like it does give you the ability to sort of gain other perspectives and experience you know the world in a way that's very different than yours. But then yeah there's something sometimes that's not enough and then you actually have to live with the person and go oh actually my worldview or world view or my decisions, it's, it, I'm actually seeing the harm that it's doing to this person. Like, like for me, obviously, I know it's important to like, you know, work life balance or whatever. Then you have kids and you're like, oh, when I stay late at the office for no reason, it hurts as well, child. And then they're sad, and I feel bad that they're sad. Like, Like, it brings these things home to you in ways that maybe,

unfortunately, you know, learning from the experiences of others is not sufficient. Yeah, it's true. It's just the way it is, I guess. Yes. Yeah. Now, it's so strange. You'd think we just, we like people or people, I want everyone to feel good, but like for whatever reason, stuff gets in the way. Yeah, well, I mean, the world is full of obstacles and friction. But it's just like, I think, yeah.

Sports has a unique way of shattering that, right? Like for what you should need to see Jackie Robinson stealing home plate to be like ah this is being capable of there is something about it right or or there is something about sports when you see someone pull off a feat of just raw human excellence that makes you reconsider you know whatever your preconceived notions are. And that's been true for thousands of years. And I think there's a reason. It's like a it's a contained arena of that holds so much of

the life experience. And it plays out like theater and these small kind of defined periods of time on these defined days. You can kind of dip in and out and I think that's really beautiful and sports has intentionally been used as a space to change people's minds about race and gender for better and worse like create stereotypes. When it comes to female athletes, the love something a lot of people don't really know is that around the 1984 Olympics in LA, it was a big deal to have, that was the showcase,

the first global showcase post-tidal nine of female athletes, truly like in the sport on the highest level, we have now had 10 years of equal access in theory, right? Like we've been investing in women's sport post title nine for 10 years and now we're having this big Olympic pageant and decisions were made intentionally about like how do we create uniforms for the female athletes that assure people of that that athletes are still feminine that these gender stereotypes that participation and sports bucks up against that make people uncomfortable. We need to kind of create almost like an apologetic for them.

And the ways that we show these women in commercials or the ways that we tell, or the women themselves felt they needed to present themselves to a homophobic and whatever population. And those were still having the impacts of that. Like the whole uniform rules for female athletes still require the showing of like more centimeters of skin you know, than male uniforms.

Like it's kind of like a huge volleyball. Still. Yeah, yeah. And I just find that fascinating. Like when I was researching this, because yeah, I grew up in the 90s, and my sports experience started then. I wouldn't have, I had no idea why my uniform was like a tiny little bathing suit and crop top.

Yeah. I just was like, oh, that's just what it is. But what was it? I just saw something on the female athlete project that talked about how white shorts were just outlawed for maybe it was home games or away games in soccer when in soccer or something. Like that used to be there was some tradition that you always wore white shorts and I might have the details wrong about when it was but it obviously makes all the female athletes uncomfortable to have to be required to wear white shorts for certain games because of your menstrual cycle. So to just even change a little rule like that can create so much less anxiety and comfort for an entire group of the population.

It's weird how much like sort of the order of society or the conservatism in the small sea sense of society is sort of demonstrated through sports, right? It's like the athlete should be wearing suits during their away games. Like we can't have them, we can't, we can't have these mostly black athletes dressing in the style that they like. They need to be dressed as if they're Mormon missionaries or salesmen from the door to door era. I remember when I was running the mile in high school in a track meet and they gave you the hand me down uniforms and they gave me this huge shirt and I came out of the shirt.

I came out of the shirt. And so, like in maybe like lap two, I took it off. I just took it off and threw it on the grass, on the track. And as I came around the third time, someone grabbed me by the arm and pulled me off the track. Because the idea that you would not be wearing a shirt in a spot, which of course is how you practice, which is how people, you know, would work out at home or whatever. But you're just like, who was that person that decided, like, this should not be allowed. There's this weird kind of tyrannical, like, I'm going to tell you

like the, and I mean, sports is even chipping away at this, you know, are they allowed to be called owners anymore? What like there is this kind of top down hierarchical like we decide what society is going to look like in this Strange artificial world and you by challenging it or being human or whatever, you know that threatens it and we're gonna come down very hard on it whatever, you know, that threatens it and we're gonna come down very hard on it. Yeah, and now most of those things, people don't even really understand why we're reinforcing them. It's like, it's reinforced by a group of people

that just associates it with the environment they love. And now they're in power and they police it so that it feels familiar to them, but without really thinking about how it, what does it need to be there? What's the point? And who does it negatively affect? Because it may not affect everyone the same way.

The one I don't get today that's less gendered, which is like, I don't understand why people can't listen to music or podcasts while they compete in, especially extreme, long distance events. It's preposterous. It is. And what do you expect it to do? It entertains yourself.

I mean, I did, I thought something online about how, maybe we saw the same thing that this one race was not, you weren't eligible for prize money if you were wearing headphones. And I was like, oh, it's interesting. I wonder why. Why that would be. And it might just be, like, I just

imagine a race director that's kind of a cramudge in about it That the whole time that there's been music and podcasts is like back in my day We just you thought in our brains when we ran That's the whole point is to be in nature and thinking your brain is like that's great for you man or woman But like doesn't have to be like that. I'm sorry that you sat alone with your thoughts like a psychopath for four hours We should have to. Give us a choice. Also, if it's performance enhancing, and that's the reason, then you'll probably want

to do it too. And if it's not performance enhancing to you, then spend the time in your brain. I don't know. I just don't think they feel. No, it's so strange. Like, yeah, it wasn't like, or when you think of, again, yeah, when they integrated baseball, basketball, all these sports, you're just like, it's not like,

oh, people were a little reluctant or hesitant, but it was like, people thought it was a matter of life and death. Like, you're just like, what? What? And you just realize how much we project onto these things. And I think just just how generally human beings are afraid of change, you know?

Oh, yeah. The trans issue is obviously complicated. And I think if you try to make it black and white, you're probably missing it on both sides. But at the same time, it's like, there is this, as similar with all the other ones, there is this grave exaggeration about how destabilizing it actually is, right? Yes, I think the governor of Utah, who's a Republican vetoed this trans, you know, banning of trans athletes in Utah. And he had this great speech about it.

He's like, I always err on the side of compassion. It was very beautiful. But I think the most illustrative part, he was like, this currently affects six athletes in Utah. Do you know what I mean? And you're like, oh, right. Okay, so like considering like we should probably just err on the side of helping out those six people.

You know what I'm saying? But there is this sense of like, this is how it was when I was young and I must keep it that way or the world will come apart at the seams. Yeah, and it's fascinating too, in the case of trans athletes, it affects six kids in Utah, but making it this massively contentious debate, the way Americans are particularly good at doing, which is like being hateful and stripping all humanity out of anything contentious, that it creates a larger

space of transphobia and misunderstanding, mischaracterization of trans people in general. So it's not just affecting those six people, it's affecting everyone, right? And it's also just making it harder and harder for people to remain open-minded and loving and caring for trans people overall. Because, and I hate that sport is being weaponized in this way, this issue that does affect so few people to harm an entire group of people. And then you watch a thing, I think we all can agree on in a society where you watch like, okay,

they ask the whole crowd to be silent. So a blind kid on a team could like hit a free throw in a basketball game, right? And like, or it'll be like a viral clip of like a kid playing without legs. And you watch it and you're like, the exceptions that were made to the rules to allow this thing to happen, involved hundreds of people or dozens of people, also saying, hey, what's actually more important here is not being awful. And they have to do it. And then this thing comes along that in the abstract is complex, but in reality, again, effects like, can you let this person on your team or not?

Yeah. Yeah. And suddenly we're like, can't do it, won't do it. Yeah, absolutely not. You know, like, gotta go to the barricades over it. Yeah, and there's, I don't know, it just feels like we can do better when it comes to that issue. Like, we also don't have to have the same solutions for every single level of play and space. That's the other thing is that it's like, this idea, this really narrow definition of fairness of is the person born in the female body

able to have a chance to win just like someone born in a male body. I empathize with that. That is the hardest part of the issue for me is like I would love for any child born with female genitals to truly have also the same chance to win. Like to have that option in anything in life, whether that sports or politics or you know being the best mathematician or scientist or whatever. All I would love if all spaces were truly places

where that could be feasible, not guaranteed, just an option. But that's just like one of many ways to define fairness and to get stuck on this one thing sport makes it really easy to get stuck on that one thing because we can oversimplify sport, winning, losing, this time, that time, right? And I think that's why people who really don't like trans people in general are leaning so hard into sport as the arena to push an agenda that harms

them in general. One of the things you talk about in the book that I think is interesting, again, the idea that hey, everyone's the same, It's like you take a female athlete and a male athlete, both super driven, both super ambitious, but both relentlessly want to win. It does seem that only in the rarest cases, does that end up with an eating disorder for the man, but it seems to be relatively common for female athletes, right? I remember this even when I was a high school runner,

is like, it was so obvious when the female athlete was struggling with this, it's like this elephant in the room. It's obviously happening. People are trying to be plain sensitive. They don't want to judge or get involved in someone's business, but it's obviously happening. Do you think that that is a biological thing that, you know, it's just one has a predisposition for that? Or do you think it's actually, you know, sort of an excess of discipline or a sort of a self-discipline turned toxic inside a person? It's also having

toxic consequences for men. We just label it a societal good or how do you think about that? Well, I definitely think that the factors, the forces that make an eating disorder more likely are known and male athlete, male biology and physiology just create fewer males that need to fight their body at that level to achieve something resembling the ideal, right? Whereas the ideal for the female athlete looks a lot like the ideal for the male athlete. We are encouraged to look the most male as possible to strip away the most female parts as possible. You should have small breasts and basically your inner thighs shouldn't touch and you know you shouldn't have like but she hanging out below your bun huggers and and that's because we're told you're not supposed to. It's not because you're not supposed to. It's because the ideal is that way. And there are there are some female bodies that will naturally look like that when they train

and eat healthy and all that stuff, but way fewer than males. So that's really what it comes down to, is that there's no other set of norms for female bodies, especially during ages 12 to 22 when our sport systems are most invested in. There isn't another set of norms that's like, hey, ideal body can look a lot broader than what this narrow male body norm is and you should be softer. Like if you're in a female body going through puberty, like you actually should be softer than your male peers, that's the thing

that I really wanna drive home in the book is it's this assumption of sameness and the refusal to look at the ways we're different. That's creating an environment that's very hostile to body changes in the female body. And that hostility is the problem. It's not the body that's the problem. It's the hostility that's the problem. And then it works in your mind to tell you that your body is wrong for this, you need to change this. And I can't tell you, like, I hear from parents, like, my daughter was so fast as a freshman, but her nutrition is really changed.

And I'm trying to get her to not eat ice cream. She's clearly, like, she's gained weight, she's not running as well. I'm like, would you tell your son not to eat ice cream? Like, ice cream is not the problem. Male athletes can eat an ice cream once a day, and it's not gonna affect their body. Like, it's not the problem. Male athletes can eat an ice cream once a day and it's not going to affect their body. Like it's not the ice cream. That's what I'm saying. But they blame the ice

cream and then it creates this extra pressure on a female athlete to be perfect to have like very few margins or wiggle rooms or pleasures that their male peers can enjoy. And it's just a framework shift of like, no, your body's fine. Well, it's probably hostility and then also like, a lot of ignorance, right? If you think about just like, if you have 2000 years of sort of the study of the male physiology and athletic excellence, and then as you said, you have like,

maybe 50 years of it in the United States. Like, and even for most of those 50 years, the people studying it, the people coaching it, the people putting the bodies back together, you know, taping them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, were old dudes from the generation before. You're sort of just getting now a better understanding and appreciation

and insight into what works and doesn't work. And that's what we're back there too. It really is the main thing. And it's like the assumptions of sameness extend into science where it's still viewed by many that if you have a study on physiology and all of the study subjects are male that it that related to sports physiology included females. And that's like now. So if it's only 17% now, we still have a problem. And ironically, when I was studying exercise physiology at Stanford, the reason why female athletes are excluded from a lot of these studies

is because of our menstrual cycle. Because we have, like the whole thing that makes scientific study work is controlling variables. You want to control as many variables as possible so that you can identify the one you're focusing on. And when you have a female body and you have a menstrual cycle, then you have women, ovulating and women menstruating. You have luteal and follicular, all these different things. And that's complicated.

Additional work. So then the ironies, if the solution is, oh, well, we need to control variables. So we're not going to include female subjects. And then we're going, but it's totally fine to then say that the subjects we did use applied to the female body. It's like you just said, we're too complicated to use in the study. And now you're saying that the way you did the study should work for us, like, what? There's nothing in any sense. Yeah, I was reading, there was some times piece a while ago that was like all the parts of the female genitalia

are named by men. Like they were all discovered by male doctors. And you're just like, oh yeah. And just how profoundly wrong these people were about all these other things in the past. And we're just like, but we got a good idea of all the stories. You know, like it just comes, you just realize just like just the almost absurd levels of ignorance. And but ignorance is one thing. It's ignorance combined with the

presumption of knowledge that creates just the most prepositive understanding. That is true. I was reading about the one where they were basically saying nobody understands, like no medical professionals truly understand the clitoris. Yes. And like, the source of female pleasure is like a total mystery. It's like, and it's not. It just needs to be studied. But then you think about when you're also simultaneously pressuring female body people to have a vulva that looks the certain way and all these women worried about their vulva

looking like unattractive because they're all very different and they're having surgeries, like plastic surgeries, to change the way they look when doctors don't understand the way like the clitoris and sensory nerves and everything go to all these different parts of the anatomy. And you could be removing things that impact pleasure. And they are people are experiencing like problems after these aesthetic related surgeries to their pleasure center. And it's like holy cow, like, would that happen if the genders were reversed?

Like, well, certainly not. I don't know. And it's not like they're like, hey, we figured out that we didn't know this, like 80 years ago. This is like, like the thought occurred to someone like last year that like, no, this thing that affects 50% of the popular.

You know, it's like, you're just like, whoa, okay, this isn't like this. You know, you hear about things in the pet, you're like, did you know that they used, like George Washington got the flu and asked his doctor to bleed him and that's why he died, right? You're like, how fucking dumb is that, right? Like you laugh at these people.

As if like the same levels of absurd ignorance are not prevalent in other things that by the way, we have a lot of very certain opinions about. Yeah, we do huge gaps for women. I mean pleasure and pain. Like I was reading a study about how many like studies there are on male pain versus female pain. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's a world different of how concerned we are with addressing male pain versus female pain. And then the same thing with pleasure. It's like, you know, it's this huge discrepancy. And if you're born female into this world and you're going to walk through it, like sports is a way that I can tell people this larger story. But it's a sports book, but it's not a sports book. It's like,

just if you walk through someone's shoes going through one arena and you can see that that same thing, those same forces are existing in every other space. And then there's their own flavors of it, depending on which marginalized identities you have or even dominant identities that you have that things that are not being addressed. I would suspect though that like at the core, the sort of champions or the greats

or the people who have whatever the thing is that make you go all in on something that both the virtues and the tragic flaws of that person are exactly the same. So like we're talking about eating disorders, right? That's obviously that's a genetic thing and a biological thing and it affects the body in one way. But I imagine it is the flip side of, you know,

I don't wanna implicate anyone, but like the athlete that has to, the male athlete that has to come back for one more season, cost themselves, their marriage, their relationship with their children, you know, their brain health in the process, right? Like at the core, there is some switch, some thing that happens and it's both makes you great

and makes you tragically flawed at the same time. And we're all kind of wrestling with these demons. Yeah, your perfectionism and drive are highly valued traits. They're rewarded in sport to an extreme amount, which I think is what you're speaking to. And so it's just like, that's the tender and you put that in female sports space versus male sports space. And those are going to experience different types of sparks that light it in different

ways. And that's part of the reason why are as manifests and kind of diverts over to eating disorders so much more commonly. Yeah, right. It could be a drug addiction over here. It could also be a drug addiction over here, right? But it's just the idea is it's both the thing that brings out the best in you. Also, if taken too far, brings out the worst in you. Yep. Yeah. I'm sure there's a inscriptions about Greek athletes from 5,000 years ago saying, you know, the same thing, you know, it's like,

you're super power as your lion alone. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And that's like, that's why I don't, I try not to add a lot of judgment to those traits because it's really just about, okay, we know that athletes are tend to be kind of perfectionists and driven and those things lead to success. We also know that those are high risk factors for eating disorders. So what can we do about the environment that people are in to like minimize that risk? What other things can we control. And I think about toxic masculinity is another example of we know that like suppressing your feelings and pushing through things is

successful in sport. But we also know that suppressing your emotions and not letting yourself feel things is associated with mental health crises and suicidality and all these other things, especially, and then the men's sports space, way more sparks for that, because you have the additional gendered expectations of pushing your feelings down and not being emotional. Whereas female athletes are socially permitted to have those outlets and be driven athletes. It's accepted in our groups to have

a lot more emotionality and feelings and it's not looked down upon. So I think that there's a good example where males are disproportionately being, this sports environment is disproportionately unhealthy when it comes to mental health in those ways, I think. What's like if you were easily satisfied if you were felt good with yourself, you know, if you looked for what you did right as opposed to what you did wrong, you'd probably be happier as a person, but that's unlikely to make you an athlete that reaches

spheres or levels of performance and perfection that are to access. So the paradox of what makes So that the paradox of what makes someone great at just about anything also potentially shows the seeds for their undoing or their mental health crisis or their physical health crisis, you know, all of that. It's like a double-edged sword. Yeah, I mean, and that's one of the reasons why the older I get and the more therapy I have, maybe the less driven I have or something something but I think that I've also learned like I grew up looking at excellence as just the epitome of everything to be excellent at something is you know do I have the capacity to be the best like I've obsessed with that and now I certainly appreciate the work of people who are in that space who are driving themselves and probably

have a whole shadow beneath them that's torturing them at night. I can appreciate the fruits of their labor, but I certainly would would rather them be healthy and receive a minus work overall in society. I think we would still be just fine. We're receiving everybody's B plus A minus work and less people were doing that and perpetuating the idea that you must do that. Well, I think for me it's I've come up with a more expansive definition of excellence, which is not simply measured in time or success or sales or whatever. It's more or whatever, it's more expansive. And but yeah, I think generally, we think all of these things

are so tied to performance. But I remember I was talking to Kate Fagan about this and I was like, if we forced NFL coaches to work bankers hours, like they all had to work the same amount. So there was no asymmetry in how much of a workaholic a given coach was. I was like, would a fan notice the on field product any differently on a Sunday? And she was like, almost certainly not. Right. So so much of this has nothing to do with what we do. Just like Michael Jordan, you know, traces getting cut from the high school basketball team

to his greatness and making it the next year. And it's like, you also grew seven inches. Like that's way more of it, but I'm sorry. Yeah, totally. And like when sports face, there's a million little details to obsess over that you think make the difference. And they're not making the difference.

And that's part of the sports story that I enjoyed telling too, is when I started to untangle myself from those societal ideas and sponsor influenced ideas that you couldn't have any other outside interests. You know, that love was a threat to success. And hobbies are a threat to success. And yeah, like am I gonna say that there's no risk involved

if you add other things that take up your time and energy, like obviously not, but we don't often think about the potential benefits to your overall self, your energy, like your capacity to feeling enriched in a multitude of ways instead of focused like razor thin and working incredibly long hours and all these other things. And but they're harder to measure. Like you said, this whole more holistic view

is really comes back to our difficulty with nuance. Can you trust, can you go into a space that feels less clear and less measurable and trust that it's still working? Well, I think that's beautifully said. I love the book and I have to go pick up my kids, so we'll call it right there. All right. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us

and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.