The Daily Stoic - Dr. Peter Attia On The Philosophy and Quality Of Life (Part 2)

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

Ryan speaks with Dr. Peter Attia on the philosophy and quality aspects of our lives, early morning routines we still practice from the stoics and quotes from Dr. Attia's new book OUTLIVE The Science & Art Of Longevity.Peter Attia, MD, is the founder of Early Medical, a medical practice that applies the principles of Medicine 3.0 to patients with the goal of lengthening their lifespan and simultaneously improving their health span. He is also the host of The Drive podcast.Dr. Attia received his medical degree from the Stanford University School of Medicine and trained for five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery. He also spent two years at the National Institutes of Health as a surgical oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute.Subscribe to The Drive:Apple Podcast: http://bit.ly/TheDriveAppleOvercast: http://bit.ly/TheDriveOvercastSpotify: http://bit.ly/TheDriveSpotify☎️ Sign up for Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/✉️ 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.

Hello, I'm Hannah. And I'm Seruti. And we are the hosts of a Red Handed, a weekly true crime podcast. Every week on Red Handed, we yet stuck into the most talked about cases. But we also dig into those you might not have heard of, like the Nephiles Royal Massacre and the Nithory Child Sacrifices. Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behaviour. Find, download, and binge Red Handhanded wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I'm Rob Briden and welcome to my podcast, Briden and. We are now in our third series. Among those still to come is some Michael Pailin, the comedy duo Egg and Robbie Williams. The list goes on, so do sit back and enjoy. Bride and And on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bosch Legacy returns, now streaming. Maddie's been taken.

Oh God. His daughter is in the hands of a madman. What are the police have been looking for me? But nothing can stop a father. We want to find her just as much as you do. I doubt that very much. From doing what the law can't. And we have to do this the very way.

You have to. I don't. Bosch Legacy, watch the new season now streaming exclusively on FreeV. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these St stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the

challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. Today's guest is someone who, I've been all over the world. I've been a lot of really interesting, important, powerful elite performers and leaders over the years. There's sort of a zealot-like figure

who's connected to all of them. That's because he is himself one of the best in the world at something that those folks are often quite interested in and certainly have the financial wherewithal to pursue. I'm talking about today's guest, Dr. Peter Atia, who in addition to just being an expert on the science of longevity, his practice works with, you know, I've met princes in Abu Dhabi, I've met sittings, I've met elected officials, I've met professional athletes, I've met billionaires. I've met a number of people who are clients, fans, followers of this guy's work.

And I got first connected to Dr. Atia through a mutual friend Tim Ferris. Peter wanted to have me on the podcast. This was several years ago. And we sat down. We spent like two plus hours when he was in Austin talking about stoicism. He was clearly a fan of my stuff.

And we became friends. And then he moved here during the pandemic. And we've gotten to know each other. So this is a long time coming. Peter has been out to the studio before, but we recorded this one remotely because he's got a cool studio. We've both been really busy.

And I just, I really wanted to do this interview. His books come out recently and just absolutely crushed. Outlive, the science and art of longevity is a massive bestseller for very good reason. I saw Oprah was raving about it among many other people. I think you got to check him out. He's just a great dude. I'm sure you're familiar with some of his stuff.

Maybe you've seen podcasts clips over the years or you listen to the, or you listen to his podcast, which is awesome. He's got a medical degree from Stanford. He's spent five years at Johns Hopkins been on the cutting edge of all sorts of scientific and medical breakthroughs for many, many years now.

And it's just a thoughtful dude. And I think you're really going to like this interview. It's not going to be about medical stuff. It's not even going to really be about longevity so much, but it's going to be about philosophy and quality of life, which I'm much more excited about. And he spends a good chunk of the last part of the book about. So that's where I go in this interview. Thanks, director. Peter Atia for coming out. I think you're really going to enjoy this interview. You can follow him at Peter Atia MD on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Check out his podcast as well. I'll link to that in today's show notes and check out the new book Outlive, The Science

in Art of Long Jevite. It's similar to like an eating disorder or a sex addiction, I think perfectionism and workaholism where it's tricky. It's not just that it's hard for outside people to recognize where you're sick or where those behaviors are maladaptive or destructive. It's hard for you to separate when you're doing it for good reasons and bad reasons, when it's compulsion or when it's excellence, right, or when it's just pleasure. And so it's hard to go, hey, I'm doing this, I'm insisting on this because it's the right thing in this situation or I'm doing it because my sick lens,

my lack of identity you said, my lack of self-worth is compelling me to do it because it's the only thing that makes me feel like not a piece of shit. Yeah, absolutely. I think those are great points. Yeah, I think with perfectionism and sort of discipline, one of the places I struggle with that, I wonder if you do too, where I struggle is I was talking to you earlier about routine.

It's like, okay, if I go, hey, I don't need to do that today. I'm going to take a break today. I struggle with, is that laziness? Or am I better? You know, like, like, have I actually conquered the compulsion? And I'm acting in a way that healthy people are able to operate in, which is I decide consciously whether something is a good thing to do or not, or am I just doing the opposite of my compulsion. Like they talk about this in workaholics anonymous, it's not just the workaholism that the addiction can manifest itself.

It can also manifest itself in work aversion or procrastination or the fleeing from the thing. They're both an inability to sort of aversion or procrastination or the fleeing from the thing. They're both an inability to sort of healthily reasonably do a thing that most people don't have any issue with whatsoever. Yeah, I think that's one of the real perks I think of having a family.

Is it makes it a lot easier to deal with that than if I try to imagine my life today as a 50-year-old single guy, which by the way for me personally would be just a nightmare. So I'm really grateful that that's not the life I have, even though I'm sure there are many 50-year-old single guys who couldn't be happier. But for me, if I decide not to do a workout and I choose to sit around on social media, I think I have pretty good reason to say that was a dumb idea after the fact. But if I skip a workout and instead I take my son to Home Depot to get some lumber to come home and build a target. I don't think that's ever happened and I haven't felt like that was the right thing to do. So I think there's just something about having a family that gives you a really good litmus test for what am I making this change for?

Is it in service of something that is taking me closer towards my values and my goals, in this case as a parent? Or did I skip the workout today because I wanted to do something that was effectively valueless, but just short-term idiotic pleasure like scrolling social media? Yeah, the horrible, torturous part about having kids is that as they say, it takes your heart and it puts it outside your body, right? So there's this little vulnerable thing running around that you care about more than you care about yourself.

And so you're terrified all the time because you don't want anything to happen to that thing. But one of the, the upsides of it, one of the things that can really be healing is that you can also recognize that heart outside of your body, that five-year-old, 10-year-old, 15-year-old that's running around. That is your inner child manifested in human form. Like it's, inner child work is hard, right? To go back and sort of work on what happened to

you when you're three or five or seven, that can be extremely difficult to do because you're having to imagine it. You can't maybe, especially if there was trauma there. Like I have trouble, I have trouble really identifying with who that person was. So some, I've been stuck in a lot of ways. But when I had kids, I'm like, oh, this is what a three-year-old needs. This is what a seven-year-old needs. This is what an 11-year-old needs. This is what I need, or I need it at that age. And it forces me, or allows me to, by being what they need, by focusing on them, by doing the right thing, as opposed to the workaholic thing, let's say, or the accomplishment thing, it allows me to put it somewhere else,

where it's actually easier for me to make the right decision that's helpful to them, but also indirectly helpful to me. And I found that part of being a parent, sort of an unexpected benefit that I didn't anticipate. I think that's an amazing point, and I agree completely that the way I think about that is that your kids can become a mirror for you, and I don't know if there's any actual data on this, so it could be anecdotal. And it just maybe hasn't been studied rigorously enough, but I've now seen it several times. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's a signal here

in the noise, which is you'll have an individual who's had an awfully traumatic childhood. Something terrible happened to them as a child. So not kind of like a bunch of little T traumas, but they've really suffered some big T trauma at some point in their life. And let's say it occurred when they were seven years old or something like that. Fast forward 30 years, and they have a child, presumably let's just say of the same sex,

and everything seems rightfully repressed until that child hits the age at which they suffered the trauma, and all of a sudden they become completely unhinged. And again, I've seen this with my own eyes several times now, that I have to believe there's something to it, which is that what you said, that only in that moment do they actually internalize what happened to them. Because now they say, oh my God, like all of this time, that has been an abstract compartmentalized thing. But now that I can see my seven-year-old daughter, I now realize that's what I was when that happened to me.

And then all of a sudden, you know, either things can get really bad or sometimes things can get really good. That's the thing that they need to go and get help. So, I think a lot about that is I watch my kids go through different stages of their lives. I know it. It had that effect for me with my relationship with my own parents, right? Because sometimes you don't, you can't really wrap your head around what it was like to be a Three-year-old living with those people and then you see those people around your three-year-old who's like you in so many ways and you go,

Oh, I get it. This must have been very hard. This is where that started. These are where these habits or these coping mechanisms or that that problem began. And so, yeah, it is this. It's a second chance, I talk about this in daily, dad quite a bit. It's a second chance because you're getting to see yourself at each one of these ages. And although you can't go back in time and fix what happened to you, you can be what a different two-year-old or three-year-old or 13-year-old or 30-year-old, you can be what they needed. And there is something healing and empowering about that to give what you didn't get, so to

speak. Absolutely. Yeah, I think it's, honestly, probably one of the top three perks of being a parent. Well, you talked about one of the most moving parts of the book. You tell the story of your son having a serious medical emergency, your wife calls you, you're on a business trip. And I know how these trips go. You know, It is a business trip, but there's also dinner and there's also all the other things you're doing. You sort of get this call on the way to dinner

and then you hear he's at the hospital and then you go to the dinner and you don't come home right away. I have moments like that in my life. When I read people share those stories, I try not to judge, I just try to go, when have I been like that? And I can think of times that I've been like that.

But now hearing you talk about your own childhood a little bit, it also makes me think that sort of the metaphor there than neglect in that moment is also the same neglect that you are inflicting on the 10 year old version of yourself on an ongoing basis. Do you know what I mean? But it's like, you know you need something,

you know you need someone, just as you know he needed something and your wife needed someone, and then you're saying, but I am busy. But oh, this thing is more important. And so that's kind of what I took from that, that little story, that it's not just, it's like hurt people, hurt people, you know?

And you were hurting them, but also hurting yourself because all of you were wounded in some way. Yeah, it's certainly would rank among the most shameful things I've ever done in my life. And it was hard to write about, actually. But again, going back to kind of what we were talking about at the outset here, I just didn't see a way to do this any other way. I didn't see a way to write about this and not include that awful example, which was, by the way, not a unique example

of my selfishness, just one that was particularly egregious, but it's effectively an illustrative case of kind of how I live most of my life. But isn't what's weird about those things, like when I look back at them, is that it made sense at the time, you know, like it made sense to me at the time. I didn't think I was doing something egregious and selfish. I thought the reasons made sense. And then what's remarkable is how not very long after it, it does not age well. And it becomes overwhelmingly clear to me, the person who made the decision who was on the other side of it not that long ago, just how embarrassingly stupid the logic that I rationalized the thing.

I'll tell you, I was so deep in the throes of despair. So that event happened in July of 2017. This was a month after he was born. It wasn't until May of 2018. So 10 months later, that a friend of mine was, she does a lot of work with people in prisons. And she runs this program. It's really amazing. And she said, look, I think you should come for a day to, you know, earn federal penitentiary. This is back when I lived in San Diego. So this was, you know, five, six hours away or something like that. And she runs this event, and it's,

it was me and a few of my friends, and we spent a day in there with these men who were, you know, all in prison for, you know, homicide, you name it. I mean, this was not like, this was, this was not white collar prison, right? So a lot of these guys were never going to get out of prison. Some of these guys were on death row. Every one of these guys was in there for something violent.

And we spent an entire day with them. And it was one of the most moving days of my life. And we did very structured activities at times. So for example, one of the things we did was we did the, I'm sure you're familiar with the step across the line game, right? So every one of the men who is in the prison is standing on a line. And those of us who were visiting were standing on a line, we were kind of facing each other. And then the moderator would say, okay, step across the line if you grew up in a house with two parents.

And you look at the difference between those of us who are not in prison and those of us who are, or those guys who are, and it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's It's easy to sit here and judge these guys, but technically I can't relate to their life. Yes. But the most moving part of the day for me was when we were paired up one-on-one with another guy, with one of the inmates. And we went through this exercise where we each had to tell each other the biggest mistake we've ever made in our life. And I tell him that story.

Yeah. And he tells me the story of what landed him in prison, which I have to tell you for a guy who's serving life in prison. I don't know the answer to how society fixes these issues and I'm not saying he shouldn't be in prison and nor is he, but boy, one awful decision can ruin your life. And so the story that he tells me is, you know, he's a, he's a, he's dealing drugs and someone has wronged him in some way and he comes home to get his gun. And as he's pulling out the driveway to go and kill this guy, his last memory is his five-year-old son trying to stop him and saying, Daddy, please don't go. And instead, he goes, kills this guy,

and now he's in jail for the foreseeable future. And it's like he can't get that image out of his mind that he, in that moment, all he had to do was listen to his son and the world's a different world. And so he and I are telling each other these awful stories and we're just sobbing, right? I mean, it's just, it's such an emotional experience. I tell that story because it took that long,

I think, for me to realize the depths of what I had done. Go SoundReal, at least is a journalist, that's what I've always believed. Sure, odd things happened in my childhood bedroom, but ultimately, I shrugged it all off. That is, until a couple of years ago, when I discovered that every subsequent occupant of that house is convinced they've experienced something inexplicable too, including the most recent inhabitant who says she was visited at night by the ghost of a faceless woman. And it gets even stranger. It just so happens that the alleged

ghost haunted my childhood room might just be my wife's great grandmother. It was murdered in the house next door by two gunshots to the face. From Wondry and Pineapple Street Studios comes ghost story, a podcast about family secrets, overwhelming coincidence, and the things that come back to haunt us. Follow ghost story on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. And it sounds like a renewable natural gas bus replacing conventional fleets. We're bridging to a sustainable energy future. Working today to ensure tomorrow is on.

And bridge, life takes energy. Well, it goes to what you're saying earlier, which is you're probably never, ever, ever going to regret the decision to spend time with your kids, right? If he had said, I'll put this work thing off, and I guess it was technically a work thing, to play with my five year old. You know, I don't think you look back on your life and you go, what a waste of time. And conversely for you, you cancel the meetings, you know, you fly home.

You're not gonna regret it, but we come up with all these reasons why the other thing is important, even though it's not. And then the worst, most insidious part is that we continue to tell ourselves to identify as the person who does it all for our families, which couldn't be further from the truth when you look at the evidence, right? When you look at what you, like the calendar doesn't lie. You say you do it for your family, but why are you gone all the time?

Yeah, it's, I think I was mentioning this earlier on a podcast, but it's, it's such a great story. You, I'm assuming you've seen Breaking Bad. Mm-hmm. Remember, I think it's like literally the very, very, very final episode. When at this point, you know, he's talking to Skyler and I forget why he goes to see her one more time or has her come to see him. Presumably, it's about the kids. I don't quite remember. Walter says something to the effect of, you know, I've always said that all of this business I've gotten into has been for you and for the kids.

And Skyler kind of rolls her eyes as if to be like, just shut the fuck up again, will you? But for the first time ever, he acknowledges it's total bullshit. He goes, but Skyler, it's not. That's, it's been all about me. And it's the first time and it's the final episode where he dies, where he finally fesses up to be like, this was all about me.

None of this was about you guys. And that's just, I think it's a remarkable and extreme example of what I think a lot of us do is we tell ourselves these lies, but what we do and why we do them. Well, I mean, the deeper message, the show is like, he's not even doing it for the money, right? He's doing it, he's doing it for the grievance.

He's doing it because he was wounded at some point. And because you can't process that wound, you can't deal with how certain things have made him feel. He'll literally kill thousands of or hundreds, thousands of people, he'll abandon his family, he'll potentially spend what, for most of the show, he thinks his very limited time less on Earth. All of these things are more important or easier, it's easier to become a drug pin, Kingpin, that

it is to go, man, those people really hurt me. And I'm mad about it. And to process and deal with those feelings, which is actually, I think, a really important thing that you and I have talked about this before. There is this conception that stoicism is the absence of emotion or the conquering of emotion. And really what that stuffing of emotions down gets you is into dark fucked up places like that because it doesn't go anywhere. It just festers and rots or metastasizes inside you.

And maybe sometimes it propels you to be successful in one field or another. But ultimately, I think it kills you and the people that you love. Do you ever think through the, like, does the world need to have really extraordinary people who accomplish really extraordinary things at enormous personal toll. I don't want to use any people who are currently alive, but let's say a Steve Jobs,

for example, right? And let's be clear, I mean, I've only read a couple of his biographies, I won't even pretend to know anything about his life, but let's say a case could be made that, and maybe this is a lousy example, but a jobs like character who really actually is one of a few people who kind of fundamentally changes something about the world. But maybe, and again, whether it's jobs or someone similar, But like the cost on their own personal life and their own relationships was great. And maybe, again, I'm trying to think of a better example. I'm sure you would have many better examples. But do you ever think about how does one balance that out?

How does one balance the bending the arc of the universe for good at the expense of your own thing? Because my guess is there are a lot of people who think they're doing that Who are deluding themselves right like up to be clear? I'm not for a moment including myself in that discussion. I don't think anything I do is relevant or should be viewed as relevant And the only thing I think is relevant is my relationship with my kids as far as legacy But I but I think there was a day when I was believing that I was more important than I was. Yeah, from an evolutionary standpoint,

I think we can understand why these sort of wounds or sort of experiences that sort of transform someone into these the heights of power or success can be adaptive. I think we can understand why insatability, you know, is maybe as generally good for sort of progress and the human species, but it's maybe bad for individuals. But I imagine, you know, and I can guess that part of the reason you don't want a name names is that some of those people are the types of people that

end up coming into your practice. And you get a glimpse. Certainly, I've gotten a glimpse having met some of these folks over the years. They've read my books or whatever. You go, okay, yes, there are parts of you. You you, the part of Steve Jobs that is brusqu or impatient or doesn't have much sympathy for people's feelings on the way to accomplish stuff. Okay, maybe that's part of it. Maybe you can, you can't run Pixar and Apple at the same time and be really friendly to strangers who make your smoothies.

Maybe I don't know. Does Steve Jobs have to repeatedly deny the paternity of his daughter in order to invent the iPhone? I'm not sure how these are related to each other. And I think what often happens is that people get really used to their success protecting them from having to deal with certain parts of their personality or their issues. And I think we all do this. We almost deliberately specialize in things.

So we don't have to deal with what's over here because over here sucks up all the attention like maybe one of the reasons someone like me becomes A public person and write stuff and put stuff out of the world to get validation is so I don't have to think about the fact that I don't just Internally feel that way, right? So I think there's that, but what I have noticed and up close in person with some of these folks is that as constructive as it can be, it's also indisputable, the area is that it holds them back, the places that it causes problems for them. And so you can't look at a successful person who's an asshole and go, oh, their assowness made them successful. Because when

you really parse the evidence, often what you see is all the areas that being an asshole prevented them from being even more successful. Yeah. I think that's right. I think it's more often success despite those things as opposed to because of those things. Yeah. It's like, you know, Michael Jordan takes the incident on his high school basketball team as this sort of formative moment. You know, he tells the story over and over again, and I've heard it repeated it, you know, he gets cut from the varsity basketball team as this sort of formative moment. You know, he tells the story over and over again, and I've heard it repeated it, you know, he gets cut from the varsity basketball team. Actually, as admitted as he wasn't a senior, right?

I mean, what was it like a softballer? Softball, yeah. So he just doesn't make the team, right? Which is itself illustrative, the story that he tells himself. So he just doesn't make a team that he feels entitled to be on, but he is in fact not entitled to be on. just doesn't make a team that he feels entitled to be on, but he is in fact not entitled to be on.

He doesn't make the team. But what he takes from this is this grievance or this slight that he spends so much of his time trying to rectify to punish, to prove wrong. And he does, the next year, he makes the team. We also grows like eight inches between the sophomore and junior years, right? So he gets this narrative in his head that, hey, this thing happened to me and I conquered it by being driven and angry and, you know, seeking my vengeance. And it's actually a story with almost no basis in reality. And that is something you learn when you start to do some of this work on yourself, is that a story can be propulsive and totally untrue.

And eventually, the untruth of that story is going to start to cause issues for you, I think. And a lot of the work that we have to do in our lives is about asking ourselves these stories that I tell myself, this identity, these assumptions I have about the world. Do they have any basis in reality? Are they serving me well?

And I think the alarming answer is how often they don't. often they don't. I love that story about Jordan because it's one of the things that really caused me to kind of go back and ask the question of my own stories. Like, we all have a story. And I just think that some of us are really strong in those stories. And I know that that's sort of me. And my story, clear as day, growing up, even though I can't tell you why this is the case. Like, I can't point to an event that said, this is why this story is true. But after a long enough period of time believing the story, it is true. I mean, it just, it becomes your truth regardless of whether it's objectively true. The story was your only asset, your only value, your only skill is your determination and capacity to work harder than others.

And in fact, you're actually worse than others in every other way. So, you're not as smart, you're not as strong, you're not as this, you're not as that, you're not as good, you're worse than everybody in every other way, but you have a superpower in that you can endure more pain and you can work harder. And somewhere around the age of 12 and 13, that became codified into the mother board as the story. And then at some point, like you lose sight of like, where did that come from again? It just, no, no, that's the story. And again, it's a lot of work to undo that story. And to your point, that story can serve you pretty darn well.

Like, that's a net positive story for most of my life until it's not. You've talked about this and I think it's great. That story can serve you well if you don't know what you're optimizing for, right? So the critical question you talk about this in your book and in lots of places is, if you don't know what you're optimizing for, you know, that a story that makes you successful,

a story that makes you money, a story that makes you famous, a story that makes you capable of doing things that people have never done before, then great, the story is serving you well. But if what you're optimizing for is, yes, success and mastery in my profession, but also not wanting to kill myself all the time. You know, maybe that story is not serving you well. If I'm optimizing for having healthy, well-adjusted kids who don't feel like I do, then that story

is not serving me well, right? And so if you don't know what you're trying to do, you know, Sennaka's line is, if you don't know what you're trying to do, you know, Sena Kuzlain is, if you don't know what port you're sailing for, no wind is favorable. But conversely, when you know where you're trying to end up, you can go, hey, this story is motivating and propulsive in a professional context, but it is poison in a personal context

or in a personal relationship context, but it is poison in a personal context or in a personal relationship context, then you can start to decide which parts of it you're going to keep and then which parts you're hopefully going to get us. And by the way, that's the ultimate irony of that story is it starts to become really quite a bullshit selective story because I never once thought to apply that rigor to relationships or to self-improvement, right? Like you would think, well, Peter, if your true motto is, you have the capacity to work harder than anybody else, and that's your only talent, shouldn't you be working harder than anybody else at fostering better relationships? Shouldn't you be working harder than anyone else on introspection?

And of course, the answer is no. Of course not. I'm just going to work on the things I want to work on. So yeah, the web of self-wise that we can tell ourselves is truly remarkable. One where it's insidious is, in say, Jordan's case, you know, that's the story he tells himself when he's 13 or 14. The problem is when that story is now in a Nike ad campaign, and it's in newspaper articles

and books and movies, and it's repeated over and over and over again, your lie is now a myth, like your other people are complicit in that story, right? And I think this, this, this happens all the time, right? We, we are, our story can be so preposterously untrue, but we got so good at marketing it that it, it, um, it starts to fuck with us and we don't know what's real or not. You know, I, um, I told the story and ego is the enemy. I think it's interesting. It repeats itself later with Trump. You know, Nixon had this sense that he was the underdog, right?

That's how he always identified is, you know, the other kids had more money than me. The other kids went to better schools than me. The other kids were, you know, more handsome than me. They fit in. He had this sense of the underdog and he was kind of an underdog until you become the fucking president. And then you're not the underdog and he was kind of an underdog until you become the fucking president and then you're not the underdog anymore. Right? The ability for very successful people, in some cases, the most powerful person in the

world, to also simultaneously see themselves as a persecuted victim. That's one of the most insidious, destructive stories that can happen because in reality, you're here. But in the seven-year-old who lives inside of you, you're something totally different. And that's who's making the decisions, but they're being perceived and they're having consequences in the world. Totally different. And you know, you now live in this sort of mirror world. And eventually, I think that's why those people tend to destroy themselves.

Yeah, so it's a great point. Well, I think it's, we've obviously been talking a lot about the emotional stuff, which I agree was the key to sort of unlocking the stuff in the book. Because, you know, getting a sense of who you were and how painful it must have been. And again, some of these very powerful people were talking about, I can imagine a certain kind of person who has all the money in the world who has access to the strategies in

the book, into all the medical technologies that you talk about, where 20 years of life extension is like the worst thing you could wish on that person. Like where you go, hey, I'm actually just gonna give you more rope to hang yourself with, or another whip to whip yourself with. Like if you can't figure out how to optimize for happiness, for love, for relationships, for contentment, for stillness, why the fuck do you want to live longer?

I guess is the question. Which, I mean, let's, I think that's almost verbatim how I talk about it in the first chapter when Esther Perel poses that question to me circa 2017, which is, their parallel poses that question to me circa 2017, which is, do you not find it the least bit ironic that you place such an emphasis on living a longer life and helping other people live a longer life and yet you place absolutely no emphasis on the quality of that life emotionally? And yes, I think the point is 20 years of life extension to a miserable person, whether they realize that or not is torture. I mean, it's a curse. Yeah, it's like you can imagine some play from the Greeks or whatever where the gods come up with a particularly terrible torture

for Alexander the great or whatever, and the torture is, we're going to let you conquer the world, and then we're going to let you keep living, and you're going to realize, oh, it sucks to be Alexander the great or whomever, right? That the life extension, the immortality that you seek, if you haven't figured out these other things, it's not only not a blessing, it's a curse. Yeah, 100%. And of course, obviously you talk about this,

I think more practically too, there are people who are really interested in life extension or if you said, hey, if you take this pill, you'll live longer. And then if you actually, hey, if you take this pill, you'll live longer. And then if you actually looked at their quality of life day to day from a health perspective, it's not good either, right? I mean, we see people extending end of life care

and end of life care, even though sort of day to day reality is almost excruciatingly painful. Yeah, and I think that's really the problem, I think, with our current medical system is, the saying is what gets measured gets managed. Well, the thing that gets measured in medicine 2.0 is lifespan. It's the metric everybody cares about.

So what's my proof of that? Well, it's self-evident. So what stats are tracked? Life, life expectancy, median life expectancy, maximum life expectancy, all of those things. Do you see a national database that's tracking strength, that's tracking cardio respiratory fitness, that's tracking all these things? No. I mean, those data exist, but they're not at a national level. They're not the things that the CDC is tracking. CDC wants to know how long you live and what you die from. And if that's what gets measured,

if that's what gets managed. And we are, I mean, we're not even really moving life extension at this point. I mean, we've basically stalled out and it's kind of moving backwards now. Although that has less to do with chronic diseases and more to do with diseases of despair or deaths of despair. So it's as maybe you've covered elsewhere in other podcasts.

For the last three or four years, even pre-COVID and even net absent of COVID, life extension is actually going down slightly in the US. And it's driven by three things. It's driven first and foremost by opioid poisoning, but also alcohol-related deaths and suicides. None of those are, of course, chronic illnesses in the way we think of heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease. But even if you ignore that, you would say, well, we're not really making any life extension gains on the big four chronic diseases that ultimately will kill, you know, 75% of

people. And that's why I think that we really need to focus on health span as the metric. Because again, if you make that the metric, that's the thing you'll manage. And if we focus on, okay, it's not just, do you make it to 82 or not, but at the age of 75, how far can you walk?

How much can you walk? How much can you lift? How strong are you? You're waking up in the morning. Yeah, like, yeah, all of these things, if we could create a healthcare system that was focused on those metrics, people, by the way, would actually live longer because by direct, you can't fix those things, those health span things without also boosting lifespan, but it becomes the indirect way to live longer

by focusing on living better. Yeah, right. It's, it is weird. I mean, I can see why it's been beneficial as a society to become more and more accepting, to be less and less judgmental, to let people live and act, however they generally want to act.

This is also just what it means to live in a free society. If you want to stuff your face and not take care of yourself, that's I guess your choice, right? But you get to a place where people are profoundly unhealthy, and they don't even have the ability to see anymore that that is unhealthy, because everyone around them is simultaneously unhealthy, and it feels relatively normal. When it's not, mobility should not be impeded by your size, barring, you know, certain medical conditions, let's say. But for the most part, you should be able

to walk around and walk up a flight of stairs and not get winded, you know, you should be able to go to sleep without the, you know, the help of this or that, you shouldn't be living in physical and existential pain on a daily basis. That's not what we were designed to do. And if things are going well with you and in society, you're not gonna feel that way. Yeah, and I think part of the issue is, we don't spend enough time around people at the end of their life to...

Sure. ...and I don't mean like the last week of life, but I mean like even in the last decade of life, we, you know, there's been lots that's been written about this and discussed about this, but we're not a society that places great reverence in our elders. And so, you know, the elders are not the people that we spend a lot of time around. And so in their marginal decade or their last decade of life, on average, you know, their less front and center to us. And therefore, I think the message here is, if you're a 40-year-old and you still have lots of runway in which to make choices about

how you're going to live that last decade of your life, you don't have a great template for what to avoid or why you might want to. So in other words, imagine for example, it was front and center to see every person who made it to retirement without saving enough and to look at the difficulty with which they're living their final years. Where their Medicare, pardon me, their social service, Social Security check isn't covering things they're barely getting by.

And if you saw that and you're a 25 year old, you might say, and that's not the life I want. Like I need to figure out a way to save 10% or 15% of my check every month. Even though by the way, it means I got less money to spend now and there's a short-term cost to that. But now it's not just sort of an abstract exercise. Like now I really see why I'm doing this. And I think similarly, maybe the one thing I've had going for me in this area is I've seen so many people, my both because of my career choice, but also I just think my innate curiosity

about this particular issue, I've seen what it looks like at the end when you have not sewn the seeds. And for me, that has been a very powerful motivator to fixate not so much on the performance today, how fast can I run a mile today, how good am I at anything today? It's no, what am I doing to ensure that in that last decade? I'm functioning at the level of someone who's a decade or two younger than my birth certificate age. And that means doing things that I know will bring me pleasure with, you know, grandkids, for example. Yeah, I've come to say like, everything is a lagging indicator, right? All the important things are lagging indicators.

So, you know, when I sit down to write a book, that's a lagging indicator of whether I've done the research, had the experiences many years previous to set that up. And, you know, yeah, your health at 80 or 90 is a lagging indicator of decisions you made at 40 and 50 and 60 and 70. But we lack the ability to think in those terms and we don't have enough cautionary tales close to us to really go, oh yeah, this is what happens if you don't do that. Like in the way that your parents might have said, hey, like look, if you don't do well in high school and go to college, you're going to end up like these people. We kind of

do that when when kids are younger about maybe, you know, where they'll live or what kind of job they'll have. But then we kind of go after a certain point, everyone's equal, but everyone's not equal. There are 70 year olds and 90 year olds, where the 90 year old is way better off than the 70 year old as far as day to day living, because they made very different decisions. Yeah.

It's interesting we're having this discussion sort of culturally about our very old politicians, right? Which I think kind of illustrates what you're talking about in a lot of ways. First off, we tend to, we don't always remark on the fact that a lot of these are pretty remarkable old people in the sense that they are still functioning at any level at that age. But, you know, we think about it, we go, oh, these old politicians should retire and make room for other people. And we focus on kind of a,

and from the perspective of opportunity and fairness and, you know, whether the system is functioning well. But we don't really focus as much on how profoundly sad it is. Like in one of Seneca's essays, he talks about, he watches these old lawyers who are still pleading cases trying to basically make the headlines, make more money, be relevant. He's like, this is what they're still doing

at the end of their life. They can't see the stage. And there is something, although we can marvel at the fact that, you know, some 90-year-old is still sitting in the Senate from a health perspective that's, I guess, mission accomplished in one respect. But in another respect, like, don't you have grandchildren that you want to see? Don't you have hobbies that you want to pursue? Don't you want to watch the sunrise and sunset? You know, instead you want to be make, you know, soliciting campaign donations still at your age. There's something, there's something pathetic about it that I think we, we have not maybe fully grasped culturally. I wondered what you thought about that.

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Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, or Wondery Plus kits on Apple Podcasts. I think that's just interesting point. I thought you were going to go someplace different, which was around kind of age versus function. And I've heard people obviously, especially in light of our current political climate, where on both sides of the aisle you just have people who are going to be argued too old for their jobs. And my view is, look, to your point a moment ago about the 70-year-old versus the 90-year old, it's function that trumps age in my mind all day, every day. And at the end of the day, I'll take an 80-year-old who's sharp as a tack over a 60-year-old who's

a buffoon or who's lost their capacity to think. Now, how you actualize that is complicated, but that's sort of my view on that. But I think where you went is a more important point, truthfully. And it's one that I've thought a lot about, and especially since turning 50. And I don't know why that is. But I've been slowly struggling this year with the, it's interesting. It's two things.

I suppose it's turning 50 and having this book come out and having the book do really well, which by the way, the book came out like the week of my birthday sort of thing. So it's sort of like it's just a weird coincidence that that would happen. But it's sort of the, you know, receiving so much positive feedback on the book has made me realize how fleeting it all is. And realizing that in 10 years, like it will be forgotten.

Now, I don't think it will be. I think, you know, I think it, I, I hopefully don't think the book will be completely irrelevant in 10 years, like it will be forgotten. Now, I don't think it will be. I think I hopefully don't think the book will be completely irrelevant in 10 years, but it clearly won't be sitting on the New York Times bestseller list in 10 years. And no one will be talking about it the way they're talking about it six months after it came out. And I don't know, I just think

I'll be a lot less relevant in 10 years than I am today. And I don't know why, but there's a part of me that both finds that sad if I'm being brutally honest, but there's a part of me that thinks, well, that's good. Like, let's start preparing for that. Let's, let's, let's start preparing for what the next phase of your life looks like. And what does the next 10 years look like versus what are you going to be like when you're 70 and when you're 80? And as anybody this age knows, when you start to do the math, the next 30 years will go by on a relative basis much quicker than the last 30 years did.

And yet I still remember being 20 like it was yesterday. The last 30 years kind. And yet I still remember being 20, like it was yesterday. The last 30 years kind of went by quick too. So to think that the next 30 are gonna go by that much quicker, and oh, by the way, before you know what you'll be dead. You know? Yeah. There we go.

Yeah, no, it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's, I'll tell you in a moment, one way that I've come to grips with mortality, which is sort of a work in progress. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it, but go ahead and tell me what you're going to say. Well, I was just reading this New York Times piece about senators who retired. This was right before Diane Feinstein died.

It was contrasting Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein. Barbara Boxer, also a pioneering feminist, you know, California senator. And she retires and, you know, Feinstein hangs on to the very, very bitter end. You know, dies doesn't look particularly happy in those sort of last month. And you go, yeah, if your entire, the entire meaning of your life in existence is about clinging on to your greatest accomplishment and ringing out a few more months or years from it, like you miss the point, you know, you miss the point. And you, even if you win, you lost, right? Like, being the longest serving Senator, being the oldest Senator, being the number one

ranked in the world for this, none of it's going to matter that much. And the inability to let go and move on and be at peace with yourself, you realize that these are very powerful people who are in fact quite powerless in the sense that they're not in charge, they're ambition or they're ego or they're their sense of identity, which is tied to relevance. That's what's actually in charge. And I mentioned Alexander the great earlier. He dies this relatively gruesome death.

I think he had like a strange parasite that paralyzed him or something. They more recently discovered what it was. But his sort of last words were to his men who wanted to go home. He goes, fine, go home. Go and tell people that you left Alexander to finish his work of conquering the world.

And I think he thought that was this kind of mic drop moment, but he sounds like the loser. To me, like when I hear that, I go, you sound like the sad pathetic one, not the people who want to return home to their to their fans, their homes and families. Yeah. It is amazing, isn't it? Yeah. It is amazing, isn't it? So, I mean, how do you not to get too philosophical, how do you reconcile sort of how relatively short a period of time we have on this earth? I mean, does that create, what thoughts and emotions does that conjure up for you? I had a strange experience. I think it was a week or two weeks ago.

I interviewed a friend of mine who's dying of terminal cancer, and then I went and visited another friend who's much older, who's sort of in hospice care and sort of towards the end, and sort of hit with two reminders of that very quickly. It does bring home to you, yeah, you know, 30 years, 60 years, 90 years, that seems like a big difference, but it's brief either way.

Any of those numbers is actually a pretty small number. And yeah, it's also the Stokes would say quite a large number if you don't waste it, you know, going down blind alleys or chasing things that don't matter. So I tried to think more in terms of, sorry, I've tried to think less in terms of how long do I want to live and more about like the day to day building blocks of that. So I go, you know, do I actually like my life now or is my life built up of, built up around doing a lot of things I don't like. So someday in the future, I can do the things that I do like. Yeah, which is an interesting balance, isn't it, right?

Like if you take that to extreme, you'd never study hard in college, right? You know, you would never, you would never toil, you would never cut, you'd never chop the firewood to have the fire, right? So there has to be some balance of doing things that maybe in the short term aren't so gratifying in order to have the firewood in the winter where it is gratifying.

But that's a very interesting balance. One of the things that I've thought a lot about in the last six months or so is, and I don't know what prompted me to think of this, is, and I don't know what prompted me to think of this, but I was just doing the math, and I was like, look, there have been about 110 billion human beings born to date. If you go back, this is going back 250,000 years ago to basically the birth of the Homo sapien. So there's what, like eight, eight and a half billion of us are alive at the moment, about a hundred billion people have been born and died over the last 250,000 years. And I was like, well, you know, one thing I could take and by the way, when I say, I, this is true of anybody today, one thing we can all take great comfort in is how lucky are we to have been born when we were? I mean, like, would you rather be you or the King of England 1500 years ago? A thousand years ago, right? I mean, it's like even the wealthiest, most powerful

person 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, lived in awful existence compared to the one we have today. Sure. And that's true of virtually any human on the planet today, not simply someone living in the United States. And so, you know, I guess I found myself taking some comfort in that, right, which is, yes, on the, you know, grand arc of the universe, 13 billion year old universe, yes, on the grand arc of the universe, 13 billion year old universe,

or life on this planet, or even humans on this planet, our existence is so trivial. But we really were fortunate. We picked a great time. Not to be done anything to do with it, right? But we hit the lottery when it came to a reasonable time to exist. And we could sit there, I mean, we can romanticize and say,

it would have been cool to have been born in the 20s and have lived your life into the 90s. Maybe that would have been a better 70 year window run. But all things considered, like, you know, it's, we're staggeringly fortunate. Well, also though, you zoom out, you go, okay, 100 plus billion people have ever been born. How many of them are truly sort of notable or memorable, right?

The vast vast vast vast majority of people had essentially no significant impact and were totally forgotten. And there is something freeing about that. There's a Bertrand Russell or some writers said something that I loved which was the first sign of an impending nervous collapse is the belief that your work is terribly important. And when you have this sense of grandiosity about what you're doing and how so much depends on it and if you don't get to do this,

that there will be consequences. That's when you are in a delusional, manic, unhealthy state. And when you can zoom out and you can go, hey, the vast majority of people have ever been born have been forgotten. And by the way, the ones who have been remembered, it doesn't do that many good. They're not around. You know what I mean? They didn't get to take that with them. And in fact, it doesn't seem like it was actually that fun to be them, it should help you kind of turn things down a bit and hopefully

lock into the present moment a little bit. Enjoy the sunrise, the sunset, your family, the pleasure of a nice hobby or whatever. It should help you do that too. I think that's totally spot on. And yeah, it's interesting to observe for sure. And by the way, how many of those very, very, very, very, very, very few people who did leave a mark did so positively? I mean, we have to sit and do the math and the accounting on that, but I got to think at least half of them did it negatively, right? Yes.

Yes, or that they were even in that position because of anything that had anything to do with them. Do you know what I mean? You're born in the moment that you're born in to the circumstances that you're born in. And you have some agency here or there, but we are also, you know, the Stoics would say, like each of us gets assigned a role, you know, in the play. And some of us get starring roles in the vast majority of us don't.

And you sort of just got to figure out how to play your role well. That's the, I think, humbler way to think about it. Yeah, yeah, indeed. But I think, you know, your point of the sort of marginal decade, what do you want that last year of your life to look like? And of course, I think people are going to want mobility. You know, one of the ones you talk a lot about is, do you want to go skiing? Do you want to, you know, you know, be able to keep exercising? Do you want to be able to go for your nightly walk. But the big one is probably going to be, you know, something like, can you pick up your grandchildren?

And it's not just going to be, can you pick up your grandchildren? That's the physical component, but do your grandchildren want to come visit you? Right. And so that's where the emotional side of it comes right back around you, you cannot escape those decisions as we're thinking about longevity and, you know, being living a healthy life. Yeah, exactly. And just and I think that's why it's so important to frame it up as physical. We haven't talked about the cognitive, but, you, assume there's a cognitive piece, and then the emotional piece. It's not sufficient to wait until you're in your marginal decade to do something about it. In other words, you can't get to the marginal decade completely out of shape and say, okay, now I want to make sure I can play 18 holes a golf in my mid 80s. If in your 60s, you couldn't do it either. Like this is a glider that is falling and you have to be able to make sure

you start with enough physiologic headroom to make that work. And the other point, and this is where I think it's for especially for someone like me, such a wake up call several years ago was, you can't have this fantasy that, well, I don't have time with my kids today because I'm so busy, but I'll make up for it with my grandkids. And it's like, really? What in the world makes you think

your kids are gonna wanna be around you, let alone have their kids be around you when you were, you know, a raging piece of shit. Like, in other words, this is the exercise equivalent of what you have to do today to make sure you have that life tomorrow. And in that sense, it's a perfect parallel between the steps you have to take physically and cognitively to ensure a high enough physiologic headroom in your marginal decade. You have to have a high enough relational headroom as well. Yeah, you can't have this,

you can't neglect relationships and other people and friendships and all of those things and then continue to indulge the fantasy that you will be surrounded by all the people who care about you on your deathbed. Because you will have pushed all those people away by the time that that happens. And you have to plant the seeds for the things

that you are going to want to enjoy later. And a lot of us are not only not planting the seeds, we're actively salting the earth around us. Yeah, and I've seen some sad cases of people die, not even able to make peace with that. I mean, including someone I'm related to, who was going into a very risky heart surgery. And he had lived a bad life. There's no question about it, right?

This is just a human being who had lived an awful life. He was my uncle, my dad's brother. And he abandoned his child when his child was young. So I never knew this cousin of mine. And I won't go into the details of his life, but it was one awful, awful misstep after another and all he did was alienate every human being alive. And when he was going into have this huge heart surgery that looked 50-50, he would survive. You know, my mom was like,

hey, maybe you should come back to Toronto for this. And I was like, what do I give a shit about this guy for? And he was the worst human being to me I've ever remembered. And she's like, well, for your dad. And I was like, all right, fine. So I come back and I almost, I don't know if he appreciated, I think he did, because it was made pretty clear how long his odds were.

So you'd think that as they're wheeling him off to pre-op, where he's going to be anesthetized, which is potentially the last conscious moment he will have on this planet, he'd have something nice to say. And he didn't. Instead, he just spewed vitriol to everyone in the room and said the meanest, most hurtful things I've ever heard a human say to someone that they are related to. Awful things I would never repeat. I can't believe he could say what he could say. And enough to make you want to cry for the people he was talking to. He has the surgery. He survives

the surgery, but he never woke up again. He died two weeks later in the ICU. And I just remember thinking, like, how is this possible? How is this a life lived? Yeah. And what's not? Yeah, it's just, it just breaks my heart. As an extreme example of no emotional health span. As I've gotten older, I've, you know, I think early in my life when I would experience people or things like that, it would make me angry at them, you know, as if what they were doing was unfair. Which it is, right?

It's not nice to other people. And then you come to understand just how awful it is to be them. Like, there's this idea that, hey, if you live a bad life that, you know, you'll die and go to hell, right? This is the basis of a lot of religions, right? And I think the better argument, the stoic argument,

but also maybe the medical and the psychological argument is, he's already there, man. Like, he's already there. That's what that feels like day to day. It is not fun to be that person, even again, if that person is the most powerful person in the world, if that person has more money than God, at the person is the most powerful person in the world, if that person has more money than God, at the end of the day, nobody is suffering more for those sins than the person

who has to live inside that body physically, mentally, and spiritually. Yeah. If you only get one go around, so what a shitty way to spend it, you know, what a waste. Yeah, indeed. Well, as we wrap up, you know, it's been wonderful to get to know you over the years. I have been, it's always cool to me when I get notes from you about having read Daily Dad or the Daily Stoic. I can tell Stoicism has done for you partly what it's done for me or partly done for you what it's done for me, which is just sort of gave you a framework or a set of principles to maybe counterbalance or to rectify bad habits that you picked up early in life.

bad habits that you picked up early in life. Yeah, and I've picked up a lot. And as you've alluded to, for most of us who pick up, quote, unquote, bad habits early in life, they're not all bad. They're partially adaptive, partially maladaptive. Yeah. And the real challenge is in recognizing when these maladaptive components need to be addressed while accepting that they may have been temporarily

quite adaptive. In other words, the things that the behaviors that harm you in your 40s and 50s can, may have been very protective when you were seven and eight, nine years old. And I guess that's partly what I find very interesting in life right now is the softer side of this type of inquiry, right? This is not scientific in the way that I still have an enormous and deep

fascination around the topics of science. But bringing it back full circle to the book, I think that this topic is no less relevant in some ways much harder to grasp, but it is the essential human condition. And Stoicism is a great vehicle, I think, to to create a scaffolding upon which to understand that. It's interesting to read Marcus Aurelius as an old man, the most powerful man in the world, leading the most powerful army in the world literally,

you know, he's writing chunks of it near Budapest, chunks of it near Vienna on what was then the frontiers of the empire. And he's having effectively the same conversation that he's had with himself his entire life. And at one point towards the end, he says something like, you know, he's like, you're an old man and you're still losing your temper, you're still afraid of death. You're still, he's like, you're still fucking doing it. Come on, man. And you realize that not only is it a timeless conversation in the sense that humans have been having this conversation

for thousands of years, but that it's a conversation we have to continue having with ourselves our entire life. You don't just, if, if, if diet or philosophical principles or psychological best practices were a matter of simply grasping them, you just hear them once and you'd be good. But it's actually the day-to-day practice and the reflection and the iteration and the optimization.

That's the whole journey. Yeah, indeed it is. And so too is the reconciliation. If there's one thing I've learned over the past three years, it's, and this has made life a lot easier, it's not that I'm not going to continue to make mistakes. I would say I probably make half the number of mistakes I used to, which is still a huge number given the frequency with which I used to make mistakes.

It's the speed with which I reconcile. And the goal, I think, as a parent given that the majority of the mistakes I make are around my family. But it would be true as a coworker. It's true in all regards. The goal, I think, is not just, hey, can I minimize this? Sure. Of course, that's a good goal. Focus on, I think for me, focusing on,

can you take the gap between mistake and reconciliation and make that as small as possible? Can you get to the point where the moment you say that thing that you shouldn't have said, you can pause and say, I'm sorry, that was an unkind thing to say, I was wrong. As opposed to just saying it, feeling the shame for having said it and barreling down the road and maybe apologizing for it a week later. Have you read Dr. Becky's book Good Inside? I have not. She's amazing.

She would be a great guest on your podcast, but Dr. Becky is incredible. First up, the idea of good inside. She's basically saying that we have to start with this thing that we've known since the second we had our kids, which is that they are good inside, right? And also you have to give that gift to yourself, that you are good inside, right? And that everyone's doing the best that they can. And the behavior that you're dealing with, responding to trying to fix,

is a symptom of, it know, is symptomatic, but it's not changing the fact that inherently they're good inside. If you could start from there, everything is better. But she has this great line in the book, a whole section on the book, you were using the word reconciliation,

she calls it repair. She's like, don't try to be a perfect parent, just try to get really good at repair, right? And she's talking. a better word, that's a better word because it implies from my end what I'm doing. Yeah. Right. And I've just been thinking a lot about that. It's like, hey, you know, how do, how can I get better at repair with my wife, with my

employees, with my dog, you know, with, with, with my kids? Like I'm going to do stuff that I don't like, that they don't like, that's not who I wanna be, but that I can repair. And her point, and this was very healing for me, is that it's never too late to repair, right? And we know this because there are things that our parents could say to us right now,

30, 40, 50 years after the fact that would, we are craving, we are desperate for them to say, right? And would mean so much to us if they could say, even, if they could even just touch on it. And so the idea that you can't talk to your six year old about how you were in a bad spot when they were five is preposterous. Of course, you can do it, right? Or the fact that you can't say to your spouse, I was an asshole yesterday because I was tired, and I'm just going through a lot. Of course,

you can. And so I'm just, I'm really excited slash sort of reinvigorated by this idea of repair. Not because it lets us off the hook. I think in a way it puts you much more on the hook. This idea that it's never too late to repair and that our job isn't to be perfect, but it is to be committed to and good at repairing when we break bonds or mess things up. All right. I'll be ordering that today. bonds or mess things up. All right. I'll be ordering that today. Well, I wrote about 50 daily dad emails about it.

I'm not even halfway through my notes and I've already written, I think, 30 emails. So you can just, you can just stay tuned to the daily dad. You'll get most of the book there. Well, Peter, this is amazing. I am glad you pushed through the perfectionism and got the book out. I think it's really powerful. And like you said, there's all sorts of amazing, just basic cognitive and physical stuff in here, all the stuff that your clients get from you. And then there is this turn in the

book where you get to the personal stuff. And I am, I don't want to enable your perfectionism, but I'm glad you held out because it does make the whole book work that that stuff you didn't feel ready to do that you held out until you could do it right. I'm so happy you did this book. I think it's awesome. Thanks very much, Ryan. And thanks for being a person that I could ask questions of. I remember God, it was probably about a year,

and well, it was the summer of 22. I remember my family came out to the bookstore and we hung out with you guys, and in fact, I remember it was the end of the summer of 22, it was about August, and I still don't think I understood what was in store for me, even though I was effectively done writing. And you're like, wait, have you got into the typeset PDF 1P2P3P and I was like, no, and

you're like, wait, is it still in a word doc? And I was like, yeah. And you're like, oh, you're not even close to done. I always tell people that it's a series of marathons and whenever you think you're done, you're actually just getting ready to start the next marathon. And that's where you were. But I'm glad you made it through

because the book is definitely worth it and clearly it's crushed. So congratulations. Thanks for having me. 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. you Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music,

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