The Daily Stoic - Matthew B. Crawford on Practical Philosophy and Shop Class as Soulcraft | This is The Opinion To Care About

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

On today’s episode of the podcast Ryan talks to author Matthew B. Crawford about his New York Times bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft (which you can pick up at the Painted Porch), why philosophy must be practiced and experienced in actual life rather than in the classroom, our inherent fear of death and how it impacts our day to day existence, and more.Matthew B. Crawford is an American writer and research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is a contributing editor at The New Atlantis, and is also a motorcycle mechanic. He is the author of the instant bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work as well as The World Beyond Your Head and Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. Listen to Rams GM Les Snead’s interview: https://dailystoic.com/les-snead/Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50.Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC.LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn, Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Matthew B. Crawford: http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily 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 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 in 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 Wundery'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. This is the opinion to care about. The knock against the Los Angeles Rams for seasons now is that they've traded away too many of their first round draft picks.

Monday morning quarterbacks and living room GMs seem to be convinced that they know better. And so does most of the sports media who hasn't been afraid to criticize the team's moves, especially after setbacks and losses. Less need the GM of the Rams, who I interviewed on the Daily Stoke podcast back in August, told us his strategy for ignoring the noise while building his second Super bowl team in four years. I've taken a lot of the wisdom from the Stoics. He said, I intentionally practice Stoicism enough to know, okay, this comment or this

tweet or this simple take shouldn't disrupt or even ruffle my emotion. I'm also aware that good television requires debate. Someone has to take the side that the Rams are doing cool things and somebody has to take the side that they're not. Then they banter about it. That's all just noise that is part of being in this business. And if it gets you to doubt what you're doing, your process was probably a little bit flawed. And we should remember what Marcus are really disappointed at that. while we all care about ourselves a lot, for some strange reason, we often value other people's opinions of ourselves, of

our actions and our choices more than our own. We seed authority to and accept the premise of arguments from people who have no idea what they're talking about. When you know what you're doing, less explained, you have to let your confidence double as armor against criticism and complaints. It's not that he's egotistical or that he thinks he's better than anyone else who has his kind of job. It's that he knows there was a well-thought-out strategy

in place that guided their decisions to trade away those first and second-round picks. In short, the Rams view is that since drafting in the early rounds is so hit or miss, they'd rather trade for proven players than gamble on the potential of a first rounder in order to win right now. And with this, you can rest easy

and move confidently in the work still in front of him. A stoic knows what they're doing. They don't win it. They don't react emotionally or do things without thinking about them. They have a process. This is not just a better way to make decisions. It's also a better way to live with those decisions, no matter their outcome. Even when they're misunderstood, even when they're doubted. You don't have time to care about what other people think about the things that you know.

You can't afford to spare the energy or the effort required to respond because you need every bit of it to get better to make the next set of important decisions. It's your opinion, your standards, your strategy that you should care about most. Those are the things that are going to help you win right now. And with the Rams in the Super Bowl this weekend, do check out my interview with Les Sneed on the Day of Soap Podcast. You can check that out at the link below. You can also just check it out by going to dailystoak.com slash Les, LES, Dash, Sneed, SNED,

EAD. I was trying to think about when I read the book, Shot Class, as Soulcraft. And I don't think it could have been in college because it came out after I left college, but as I grabbed my copy off the shelf, we sell it here in the painting porch also, but I grabbed my copy because I had a bunch of notes in it. I have this big sticker on it that said like, college used textbook. So I must have bought it, like, used on Amazon or something. I don't know, but I got an old copy, or a very worn copy, and then I put some miles on it,

because I just, I loved this book. And I was thinking about interesting people I wanted to have on the podcast, and I just recommended the book to a friend of mine, and I thought, man, I should have Matthew Crawford on. And I reached out and he was excited to come on. Matthew Crawford, he's an American writer, research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

He majored in physics and then turned to political philosophy. He has a PhD from the University of Chicago. And on top of all this, he's a motorcycle mechanic. His first book, Shop Class, a Soulcraft in Inquiry, into the value of work was an instant bestseller, and then he followed that up with the world beyond your head and why we drive toward a philosophy of the open road.

I was really looking forward to this conversation. Matthew is someone who has inspired me to think about things I do with my hands, how I structure my life in a lot of ways and I'm a big fan. This was an exciting book when I was thinking about books to stock in the painting porch I know it's thinking what I wanted in the philosophy section that wasn't just a bunch of dead old people This was one of the first books that I thought of because it's a really accessible, practical book.

It's what philosophy is supposed to do. It's supposed to change how we think about what we do and make us better at what we do and hopefully make us better citizens in the world. And that's what we talk about in today's episode. You can go to Matthews website at MatthewBCraftford.com or you can pick up his wonderful book, Shopclass as SoulCraft at thePaintedPortgetthePaintedPortget.com, anywhere books are sold. If you want to get a used copy on Amazon,

I guess you could do that too. I'm sure Matthew would appreciate the slightly more sustainable approach in theory. It's better for the author if you buy a new copy. Support Matthew is great writing and enjoy this interview with the one and only Matthew Croford on shop class as Soulcraft. So I thought I'd go way, way inside baseball to start. I was flipping back through the book. I must have read the book in college because I have the, I have like a used college edition that I don't remember, but I read it many years ago,

and as I was going back through, there's this one little section where you talk about some of the, how you got all your tools or how you paid for all of them or something. And then you mentioned a grant that you got that was originally supposed to be for a book about Plutarch. Yeah. I want to nerd out about this because I would love to read that book. So tell me what that was. And let's talk about Plutarch. Wow. Okay.

That's been 20 years, but I'll try. So yeah, I was at the University of Chicago. I was writing a dissertation, the HD.D. on ancient political thought, and Plutarch became intriguing to me because of our number of reasons. But for one thing, he's writing at this time, he's writing around 100 AD, just to put it in perspective. So this is a time when Rome rules the world, obviously. This is sort of peak of the Roman Empire. And he is a Greek, and the Greek cities have been subdued by a Roman rule, which is a little hard for them because they, of course, thought

of themselves as the real ass kickers of the world, you know, sort of the Athenian empire was this sort of shining moment that they're clinging to. And Blue Tark finds that the whole political psychology of the Greeks is kind of obsolete. They cling to this idea, they tend to engage in a lot of sort of factional fight amongst themselves in these Greek cities. And that just invites the Romans to come and put it down brutally. So he's kind of saying as a subject people, you need to reconsider what courage looks like, what love looks like, and that's where it got really weird and interesting, and that became the focus of the dissertation. Interesting. No, I think what would jump down at me is like, if I was to think of like what philosopher or writer,

I might suspect that someone like you would be really into, Plutarch might be at the top of my list. Just, and I don't know what I have to base this on, but I feel like Plutarch was sort of a much more hands-on philosopher, even though he was Greek, it didn't feel like he was, you know, sort of very abstract, he was very practical. I mean, even just the fact that he was interested in

the philosophy of like political life, like philosophy for the actual ruling of an empire, as opposed to merely the philosophy of ideas, that there always seemed to me to be an immensely practical and down-to-earth grittiness to Plutarch. I like that, because it fits with his method, right? About half of his corpus consists of these lives, these biographies that he wrote. So it's a very sort of sociological and sort of phenomenological approach.

How do the permanent problems of existence show up within a particular life? And it's, I think it's not merely a pedagogical kind of device. I think, I mean, I've tried to, I guess, emulate him in that sense of treating the concrete as sort of the way into the most important questions. Because if it doesn't sort of manifest concretely somehow in life then I guess there's a risk of just kind of going off into some kind of mental masturbation.

That's right. It's like he's an anthropologist writing philosophy and and he does seem to be when he's talking about really simple, simple, it's the wrong one. But when he's talking about down to earth, the lives that I think really sing from Plutarch, are Cato, when he's talking about the Spartans, you know, he's really interested in the sort of active wheel, I mean, they all tend to be guys,

but he's interested in like the guys guys of philosophy. Maybe, you know, there's no Plutarch's lives of Socrates. He's interested in Cato or, you know, Leonidas or something like that. Right, somehow it's in the act of life of public engagement that I don't know that we see the man in full, right? And someone has to put their, you know, if they have a claim to wisdom, well, let's see

how it plays out in the real world. I think the problem of self-delusion is really has to be kept front and center for any thinker. You can wander into a kind of garden of, you know, self-consistent fantasy. And, you know, to bring it into the world of deeds, offers a kind of check on your own subjectivity. Ultimately, Plutarch has to practice what he preaches in that he's a politician. He's like mayor or governor of some province, right? He actually is in a position of leadership, as opposed to just a writer about leadership ultimately.

Yeah, he was a man of affairs. And yeah, I don't, you know, you may know more about his actual life than I do. I didn't make that a focus. Although, you know, someone should write a life of Cuntar. That's what I was hoping you were writing when I saw that. So that sort of gets at the figure of the public intellectual. Yes.

Well, I think what I like so much about your book and so much about your writing, and I think that's also what I like about Plutarch is the idea that philosophy is not what happens in philosophy class, that actually life is the philosophy class, or as you're saying, you know, shop classes is where you work on your soul. How did you sort of come, I imagine, you studied philosophy, how did you come to think of philosophy as something very different than, I would say, most people or most of your peers, do you think about it? Well, I think it was just a kind of set of accidents in a way. I mean, I didn't feel very well suited to being a professor. I didn't, feel very well suited to being a professor. I didn't, it never really appealed to me, but you know, I just felt this urgent need to read the most important books and to do so with guidance,

with teachers, and to have a kind of apprenticeship in thinking. thinking. But, you know, I, I, there's such a glut of PhD. So there I am trying to get it, you know, a professor job with everybody else. And I never, it wasn't a fully sincere effort in my part to get such a job. So I worked at a think tank for a little bit and hated that. And so that's when I quit to open the bike shop. And that turned out to be, for a while, you know, a pretty good thing. I guess at that point, I felt more like a kind of dissident thinker could outside the system.

And that's a great, I mean, it's a precarious position to be in, if you're, but on the other hand, it's very freeing because you're not trying to please some tenure committee or peer-reviewed journals or something like that. To my taste, academic thought has gotten quite constricted. And I guess there's a couple of problems. One is a professionalization, which is inherently kind of policing the boundaries of a discipline. And the other, of course, is the politicization where it seems like everything has to somehow support the regime, broadly understood.

Yeah, the professionalization of philosophy is interesting to me because so many of the great philosophers in the ancient world, philosophy was the hobby and there was some actual profession through which they were understanding and applying the philosophy, whether they were politicians or whether they were generals, whether they were advisors or diplomats or whatever, it's like they had philosophy is not supposed to be the job, right? You're supposed to have a different job that helps you understand the philosophical ideas. Yeah, a moment ago you used the wordological, and I think that's right.

I mean, to be a knower of human beings requires intercourse with human beings. Yeah. Yeah, and there's not a faker intercourse than the academic classroom setting, right? Well, I want to pull back now from, from that thought because I think at its best, the seminar room can be a pretty magical place. I think you have to have a kind of rare teacher in a rare environment where the students feel that the most urgent matters are at stake and we are creating an environment here of respect and seriousness and really searching. And I've

had seminars like that and they were really something. No, no, I agree that the classroom is a way to teach. I'm saying that the professor, that can't be their primary lens through which they understand and interact with human beings. Like, so I think when you look at the ancient world, it's their experiences out in the world that then qualifies a person to speak philosophically. Right? So your idea of intercourse, like you're writing the motorcycle shop, you're dealing with

yourself, you're dealing with the machines, you're dealing with the customers. This is giving you a lens through which to understand the world that you then communicate in the book, which a book is academic. If you're teaching a class on shop classes, so crap, that would be fine too. But you couldn't have discovered what you discovered in the setting in which you, in the book itself. You had to go out and do something.

Yeah, I think an iterated process of kind of acting in the world and reflecting upon it and a dialectic is how you kind of close in on some kind of insight. The action provides a kind of check on, again, this tendency towards self-enclosure and fantasy, but also experience in the world is always ambiguous and requires interpretation and reflection, and that's where other people can become very

helpful interlocutors who help you kind of clarify your own experience by talking it through considering it from different angles. Yeah, I think about this like I have this this little bookstore here in Texas. I had a marketing business for many years. Although I would be writing to a large general audience, it was often those individual one-on-one interactions with the troublesome client or with, you know, the fact that I've got to repair the roof on the building or whatever.

It's like the things that I've got to repair the roof on the building or whatever. It's like the things that I'm experiencing then allow me to have a sort of a specificity that I can generalize out in the writing. So I've got to imagine as you're working on someone's motorcycle or something or you're dealing with some issue, that's then informing what you're writing or thinking about. Yeah, I mean, it's all a big mess. Yeah, but you try to make sense of it. I think that's what writing is good for, is like taking the big mess of experience and thought and trying to impose a coherence on your life.

I mean, if your writing has an autobiographical element in it, then it becomes this attempt to almost create a work of art out of a life that while you're in it always feels you're fixated on the future or regrets about the past. And to bring it into view as a kind of hole that makes sense. That's, I guess that's the task of living altogether.

Does writing feel like a craft to you? Like is there something similar to sort of working on machines and then trying to solve the puzzle that is a piece of writing? I would say so in this sense that, you know, I really loved when I quit the Think Tank job and started the bike shop. You know, Think tanks are inherently corrupt because, you know, somebody's paying the bills and they want, you start with conclusions and then come up with the arguments that support them. Whereas in fixing motorcycles, either the bike starts and it runs right or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, you can't weasel your way out of the fact, you can't interpret it away. So there's a reality principle

that you're held responsible to. And writing for me is very much like that. I don't want to merely write elegantly or something like that or eloquently, but to really get at truth, I guess. I mean, it sounds pretentious, maybe to say so. But so it's a painful process. I love writing, but it's also just really hard work. I mean, I throw away probably 75% of it. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi.

And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Diss and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans,

a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondery App. Yeah, and I think there's also the commercial element one might think is corruptive, but it's actually I think important. So yeah, if the bike doesn't work, the customer doesn't pay you like it, you know, the system doesn't work. I think

there's something I've always found to be a bit alienating and weird about a lot of professional philosophy or you're reading some book and it's obvious that philosophy or you're reading some book and it's obvious that the idea of the reader never occurred to the person writing it. They sort of comfortably wrote a book knowing that it would sell 200 copies, right? The idea of like making something that worked for regular human beings who might want to apply these ideas in their actual life, sort of doesn't occur, I think, too often in academia, not just philosophy in all elements. And so to me, and I think your books are a testament to that, when you can get something

that works, that then appeals to people who don't read books about philosophy, that's like one of the toughest puzzles there is to crack. I mean, you wrote a best-selling book that has the word soulcraft in the title. That's a pretty tiny target to hit. That's not easy to do. Yeah, I think you can, so the idea of commercial viability for philosophical writing is an interesting one.

I think you're right that if you're getting at something real, when hopes that that will be accessible to a lot of people and therefore maybe viable commercially. But then there's this other question that overlays that and that is what is valued in the marketplace. And that isn't necessarily line up with your aspirations as a writer. I mean, there is such a thing as,

just kind of trying to pander. So, yeah, I mean, these two things, I think you hold intention and you're, you know, it's interesting. I feel like I've never domed anything down. And that's, I guess I'm proud of that. Also, it doesn't, it wouldn't come naturally to me. You'd be painful to give something less than the most subtle and finesse and hard account that I can. But somehow the process of clarifying my own thought tends to produce something that is clear enough, I guess, that other people

can dig it. No, that calling that attention, I think, is well said. It's probably a little bit like Aristotle's mean where it's sort of something in between doing it exactly the way you want to do it and then doing it in a way that is considerate or respectful of where the audience is and how that idea can be made accessible and usable for them. I think it was Epicurus who said, vain is the word of the philosopher which does not heal the suffering of man. I think you could have a pretty expanded definition of what healing or suffering is, but I think the idea is that the purpose of the writing should be to have an impact on actual people's lives, and that is easier said than done. Yeah, and you've mentioned

suffering. So, right, there's a kind of therapeutic impulse, I think, in a lot of stoic thought and some of the other schools that were around the same time, the cynics and the Epicureans. And it's funny, we're living at a time right now where I think the idea of, you know, sort of fragile selves in need of therapy has become so prevalent as really, I think, distorted our view of ourselves as being kind of a very little capacity to endure adversity. Yeah, we don't seem to be a particularly resilient population at the moment. It's very fragile and very averse to anything

challenging or uncomfortable. Yeah, and I think that's, you know, one thing I've written about is what I call safetyism. There's this weird dynamic wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining biscupiers. And I think, so there's a kind of strange feedback loop there. And I think one way to try to understand it is that it That dynamic gears into a whole set of material interests, right? We have the helping professions who are determined to make us think of ourselves as You know

in need of Of help and as a fragile. And there's the whole therapeutic state that's kind of, you know, think about the whole COVID regime where we've had this extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. That seems like a consummation of this longer trend of kind of giving up our own judgment to to experts and sort of giving up on the idea that we can determine what's

appropriate risk for ourselves. But don't you think part of that is because one cannot determine in something like a pandemic, it's very difficult to separate one's personal risk tolerance with the consequences of those decisions on other people. Yeah, right, it's a collective action problem because it's contagious very much so. And right, none of us are epidemiologists. So there's necessarily a certain amount of deference, this incumbent on us. But what's so

extraordinary is we've seen how the apparatus of science has been bent toward purposes that don't. At times seem flatly anti-scientific. And it's this phenomena where science, you know, the capital S, has been pressed into duty as authority. And if you think about it, you know, science as a mode of inquiry is almost, you know, the whole idea of authority is an athema to it. It's a sort of freedom of the mind. So it's like science has to become something

more like a religion in order to serve the function that we've assigned it. Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day. I wonder how much of this is a result of different much of this is a result of different entities abdicating their duty, thus forcing other entities into inappropriate roles. So like, the reason the judiciary is so political is because the legislatures have ceased to do their jobs, right? Or the reason that companies, like a corporate culture is now politicized, and companies are woke or whatever you want to call it, is because the employees in those companies are frustrated that they can't affect political change through the ordinary means, right? And so I wonder when the legislatures or the president or also just like basic human beings advocate their responsibilities or obligations to each other, it forces that energy to go to inappropriate

places. And I wonder if really a lot of the trouble we're having is because nobody is doing their job. And then inappropriate entities are stepping up and trying to fill that breach. Yeah, I think we've seen a fairly wide-ranging transfer of sovereignty from democratic decision-making to technocratic bodies that operate really quite insulated from the pressures of democratic politics. And this actually relates to the theme. So my most recent book is titled Why We Drive.

And it, you know, it, like the first two books, it's about individual agency. So the, the polemical hook that I open with is the prospect of driverless cars. And human beings are actually pretty good at driving and it up and the- Pretty impressive considering it's not like something we evolved to do. It's kind of magical.

Well, yeah, and there's actually some great cognitive science on our capacity to mutually predict one another's behavior as this evolved capacity of our brains. And it's kind of scaffolded by social norms that help us predict another's behavior. And if you ever are in an intersection in Rome or Bombay, and you see these unregulated intersections where there's no lines, there's no lights,

there's no curbs, there's no nothing and you've got buses and doggies and cars and bicycles and pedestrians all just kind of finding their way through. It's actually, it can be beautiful to behold. You're witnessing the human capacity for an improvisational cooperation. But when one of these tech guys looks at that, he's horrified because it looks chaotic. It looks messy. There was this episode where an experimental self-driving car by Google came to an intersection, it was a four-way stop. And so it came to a full

stop and waited for the other cars to do the same before proceeding. So it's following the rules. But of course, that's not what people do. You know, they kind of roll up on the intersection, see what the situation is, maybe you roll through. There's ambiguous cases of right of way. So what do we do? We make eye contact. Maybe someone gives a little nod or waves the other person through. But the Google card just got paralyzed and it sort of melted down. And what was interesting was that the guy in charge of the experiment said that what he had learned from this is that human beings need to be less idiotic.

Now of course, what he meant by that is we need to behave more like robots, be a rule follower. And it completely invisible to him was this distinctly human form of intelligence. And I think the ambition to do away with the necessity of that kind of intelligence is politically significant. Tocqueville, when he went around America, was very impressed with the observation that it's in these sort of everyday practical activities,

requiring cooperation that the democratic character is formed, the ability to work things out among ourselves. I was thinking about what you said about safety as a, I dropped my five year old off today, and he goes, instead of going to kindergarten, he goes to what's called outdoor nature school. And it's an outdoor school. There's no desks or chairs, and they just,

they play, but they go on hikes and they learn things, they have lessons. And as I was dropping them off, you know, there was a fire, like in the campground as a fire, which sort of makes you a little uncomfortable as a parent. The teachers shaving, kindling with a very sharp knife and then she's setting it down on the thing. There's trees that could fall in cliffs and mud

and water and stuff. And there was a part of me that was uncomfortable because as a parent, all you want is your kids to be safe all the time. And then the other part of me that was like, this is so amazing and so perfect, such a better actual preparation for the world. And then the other part of me was sort of trickling at the fact that, you know, sure, there are dangers from the things I just said, but also in the middle of a pandemic,

being outside all day, instead of being in a small, effectively windowless, poorly ventilated room, is also much safer. So it also strikes me that oftentimes, in the name of safety, we actually do things that are profoundly unnatural or unsafe, and we just get normalized to them so they don't strike us as odd. Yeah, I think one problem is that we get fixated on one danger in particular, and sort of a tunnel vision. And so by way of comparison, if every hundred yards as you're driving down the road, there was a giant flashing billboard that said how many traffic deaths there have

been this month, well, people would just stop driving. And that's kind of I think what we've seen in the pandemic I mean the whole media and bureaucratic symbiotic sort of ecosystem has fixated on this one thing and We sort of lose sight of the fact that we accept all kinds of risks in daily life that are comparable in their likelihood. So the lack of a holistic picture of the risks that we take on just for the sake of living and doing meaningful activities. Yeah, that's real. Yeah, the other thing the pandemic has done for me is just

maybe the flip side of what you're just saying is, yeah, we were normalized to a whole bunch of risks that maybe looking at a fresh, give us a different perspective. So for instance, we get very concerned, I don't know, vaping comes out. So someone invents vaping and we get very concerned, I don't know, vaping comes out. So someone invents vaping and we're very concerned with all the deaths, you know, or negative health benefits to say vaping,

which I'm sure are real and I wouldn't vapen, wouldn't want my kids to vapen. But, you know, if alcohol was invented today, we would be horrified by it, right? So there's all these things that we've just become normalized to that have existed for a very long time. They're just functions of society that are totally and utterly insane if you had any kind of perspective about them.

Yeah. And there's also, there's institutional opportunity in picking out one risk and, you know, and kind of out of context in such a way that it becomes really scary because that that's what facilitates this kind of transfer of agency, well, both sort of individual judgment to experts and politically from democratic decision making to technocratic one. So it's not like all of this is completely innocent. There is a political dynamic to it. Well, the other thing I think about with COVID,

so like, you know, I think the death toll is like 1,200 to 1,500 a day, which is horrifying when you think about it. But that's roughly about how many people are less than like die of heart disease. So all the arguments that you hear about like, hey, this is a public health crisis, this affects all of us. Nobody has the right to overrun the hospital system, etc.

And then you're sort of like, wait, we've become very passively accepting of a rolling public health crisis, the number one cause of death in the United States, heart disease, that we've just accepted as being normal and, you know, a byproduct of modern society, which, you know, if we were to focus the amount of energy that we focused on COVID, if we really address the root causes of that issue, would also have a transformative, you know, impact on society. And a lot of the same moral arguments that people are making about COVID protocols and public health responses to that could be addressed to other public health crises that are just as important.

Yeah, I think, I mean, standing behind all of this, I think, is the fact that we modern people have a hard time accepting death, I mean, just the reality of it, right? This is all kind of frantic evasion of this existential fact that we are going to die. But you know, to say that, of course, is not to be pro-death and to say, you know, don't try to maximize your health, but it is to kind of point out that these risks being, we have very

little perspective on them. And I think to live well, necessarily, involves accepting accepting risk. To try to eliminate risk is to have a kind of half-life. I mean, you mentioned alcohol, I shouldn't have been one of it without it. No, it's funny though, like we are terrified of death and then profoundly unhealthy day to day. And those two things are not just intention with each other, but very unhealthy or very hypocritical. So it's like if you're so afraid of risk and so afraid of death, you know, what are you doing stuff in your face with this junk food that will inevitably kill you prematurely, no doubt. So it's funny how you would think if you were if you were rationally terrified of death

You'd live a very antiseptic aesthetic Healthy existence, but that's not what most people do most people live recklessly with their individual choices and then go Someone should take care of this for me So in the in the most recent book why drive, I talk about the spirit of play, which is very much connected to risk-taking and the tension of not knowing how things are going to come out in sport. And there's a Dutch historian,an Heisenga, who wrote beautifully about play as the basis of civilization, that it's sort of the origins of social order playing games.

They have some rules, and within that, those rules, it's a contest for honor, and you can't have play without putting something at stake, you know, without risk, and not very often that's a risk of physical harm. And you know, that spirit of play is what gives rise to culture. So what I loved most about your shop classes, Soulcraft book, I guess you're not technically outside because it's, you know, you're in a shop usually. But there does seem to be something special about being outdoors or at least not in a perfectly

sanitized modern office building. Do you know what I mean? Sure, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't, I've had a few office jobs and there was just like something physically, like I can't do this, I cannot sit here. And I think, you know, there's a lot of this are fairly rare thing. That's not the typical human

way. And so the idea that you're going to learn by sitting in a chair and reading a book or looking at a screen is a fairly novel and unusual idea. And so what do we do? Well, we medicate kids with riddlands, so we can get them to sit there and start to make up for the fact that this is a fairly unnatural situation created for our zones. Yeah, I was reading the safety protocols at this gym and it was like, everyone inside the gym must wear a mask because of the pain. This is a while ago. It's like, except if you're doing the car, except if you're doing cardio, like on a treadmill. So the first up, the preposterousness of like, that's like the one thing you would not,

that's where you're breathing out the most aerosols. But I was, I just remember thinking, you know, you can run outside, right? Like you're aware that you can do this activity outdoors. And not just that you can do it outdoors. It's much better outdoors. Like running on a treadmill is terrible or walking on a treadmill is terrible. And so yeah, it's strength is we take off. We have all these wonderful things being outside going for a walk, going for a run, you know, and then we find a way to do them in an inferior way indoors. Yeah, there was early in the pandemic, there was a meme going around, I only heard about it,

but apparently it was the picture of a Peloton class that was being, you know, so it was on these stationary bikes, but it was being held outdoors, of course, because of the pandemic. And the caption was, you know, something like on the br break of a great insight. Yeah, meaning they're going to go, oh, wait a minute, but wheels on

these things. We can actually go somewhere. Yeah, no, I mean, that's that's one of the like the, I feel like in a lot of ways, the pandemic is sort of this forced lifestyle experiment. And you know, working from home instead of a long commute above a boss, I think a big breakthrough for a lot of people, but it was like, hey, you know, working out of my because it's sort of this forced lifestyle experiment. And working from home instead of a long commute above a boss, I think a big breakthrough for a lot of people, but it was like,

hey, you know, working out in my driveway with a kettlebell is a far superior way of doing it, whether I'm doing it at night and I'm looking up at the stars like I was last night, where I'm, you know, doing it in the middle of the summer and feeling the sun on me. Is this better than going into some basement of a building in New York City and getting sweaty

with a bunch of random people who, by the way, none of us are communicating. We all have headphones. We're all pretending that we're alone. Like, I think there's something special about being outside. It's like we've trained ourselves into a kind of dependency

on having an official designated place. Yes, this kind of pathetic. I think it was Nietzsche who said that only ideas had while walking or of any worth. To me, philosophy and walking are impossible to separate. Mm. Yeah, yeah, like that. to me, philosophy and walking are impossible to separate. Yeah, yeah, like that. And then I, I, is, is, when you would work in the garage,

is, is it a solitary experience for you? Like, is there something to the solitude of it that's valuable? Both valuable and hazardous, I think. Yeah, I ended up just like, ranting out loud to myself. And I feel like I should probably, I've had people working with me at times and it's, it's good. It's, it was good to have other people to check your own thinking off and, you know, come up against problems and get stumped. But, yeah, I'm in there mostly just, you know, ranting at the radio or something like an old fart.

Yeah, I think, I think, like getting lost in, there is something that flow state, the solitary flow state where you forget what time it is, you forget what's happening, you forget everything but the task in front of you. To me, that's like peak performance as a human being. Do you get that when you're working or is it, is it, you're so?

Yeah. It's a fleeting experience. There are times, usually it's, so I do a lot of metal fabrication. And it's usually in those, especially if I have something a little bit repetitive, like, set up a jig and drill a whole bunch of the same hole. I wouldn't want to do that all day, every day, but when there is a kind of stretch of time in front of me, where I know just what

I'm doing, I'm all set up, get a certain rhythm, and I feel my whole body relax. And those are really nice moments to be relieved of, you know, having to constantly, there's a lot of just, it's thinking, working, it was very cognitively demanding, but those stretches of time where I can just go a little bit on autopilot or just really nice. Yeah, it's kind of like that Zed idea of chop wood carry water. You're just sort of doing it. It's a little more complex than chopping wood and carrying water, but just like I find like fix when I'm checking or fixing fences on my, on my ranch. It's like a very menial, menial manual task, but you just sort of get into it because it's so repetitive like your side. Yeah, the idea of rhythm, like bodily rhythm,

I've become aware is, is really valuable. And if I sort of step outside and ask myself, what would I look like to an observer? Do I look relaxed? Do I look natural and comfortable in what I'm doing? That's kind of a good sort of check to take. And okay, how can I arrange my workspace to be more, I don't know, just more zen or something? Yeah, I think that, to me that comes back to walking. I think like as a sort of a nomadic species that was meant to cover long distances, I think that rhythm, because I definitely feel tapping, I'm tapping into that when I'm walking,

like if I go for a long walk, I think that's the body sort of getting into that like space where you're you're you're effectively traveling, even if you're staying still. Somehow what you just said made me think of sometimes when I'm watching like really top musicians, you know, like total masters, musicians, like total masters, the relaxation in their body is like total. It just looks like so effortless. I just recently watched this bass player, Edgar Meyer, and this giant instrument, and he's a big guy, but it's almost like it's been incorporated into his body. So, those really high notes, way down on the neck that require a lot of pressure,

if you've ever tried to play a bass, but it just looks like he's barely touching it. Well, that's what's so interesting about music. And I guess a lot of the creative things is, is it's a cognitive task, but then it's also a physical task, like metal working or something, right? There's the physical component of the mechanics of actually doing it. And then there's also the inspiration and the creativity and the expression. And when those two things become perfectly entwined with each other, I think you get the magical stuff. Yeah, and I think it's, you know, first you lay the groundwork with endless hours of practicing scales, there's a kind of submission to the mechanical necessities of that particular instrument,

it's a long process of just grinding it out, but that becomes the foundation for expression. And once that, you know, just the physical part of it has become the second nature, then, you know, the piano player is not thinking about his fingers, he's not thinking about the keys, his attention is directed the keys. His attention is directed to the sound and the music. And so it's like his attention is just passing through his hands through the instruments to the music. And that's a real shift from what the beginner is doing, which is attending very carefully to the clumsy attempts of his hand to produce a sound. Yeah, though any beginner of music, especially like something like the guitar, the first thing you notice or the first thing you feel is the calluses developing on your fingers,

because it's also that physical tap. You're doing something with your body or your fingers that they're not used to doing and you're putting a stress or doing a damage to them that they have to toughen themselves up to be able to... I bet like a mechanics hands and the hands of a bass player or a guitar player, I don't know if you could distinguish the two. One might be a little dirtier than the other, but I bet they'd have the same toughness to them.

Yeah, calluses of playing a stringed instrument are so particular, like there's a one little spot on those fingertips. My hands are just traumatized in every possible way. Speaking of starting something, I think one of the things, I don't remember if you talk about it in the book, but it does seem important. Like being bad at something when you start strikes me as something that we don't talk enough of out, right? Like, like, there is, I think, philosophical value in, like, not just learning, but like, being comfortable with how

uncomfortably bad you are at something at the beginning. Yeah. And that gets back to what we were talking about earlier, of a kind of cultivated fragility that is so sort of widespread society. So yeah, I have two kids and you know, I want them to have those experiences of crushing failure and ineptitude, because, you know, absent those, you can have a sort of sense of yourself that doesn't match reality, and it becomes a crutch, you know, and then you, any experience that,

where that self-image gets punctured, is then really painful. I think you have to experience it early on. Yeah, although let me ask you guys, I didn't know you had kids. Is that was something I was thinking about in the book? I know you talk about people will go like, well, I don't change my own oil

because my time is too valuable, right? And so they sort of rationalize not doing these things because the opportunity costs. I definitely get that. I have some fond memories of like just fixing fences on my ranch, and I was talking to my wife about them a while ago, and she was like, you know what I was doing? Well, you were doing that.

I was taking care of our infant. Her point being that I was indulging myself, fixing this stuff, getting back to the land, doing this task. But it's not just that there's an opportunity cost to it. There's almost kind of a selfishness to it in a life where we only have so much time. So how do you think about that? Well, opportunity cost is very real

and you can't learn to do everything and get good at it, such that you could do it in a reasonable amount of time. So, yeah, you have to pick your battles. I guess the sort of extreme on the other side would be an ideal of complete unenvolvement, which, you know, if you can sort of outsource every skilled activity to some technology or to some, you know, guest worker, then I guess that facilitates, right, I mean, it's kind of this image of freedom, but underneath the freedom is, I think, a sort of lack of self-awareness of your dependence on others, really. Now, of course, the fantasy of total self-reliance is just that, it's a fantasy. So you can, yes, you can try to do everything for yourself, but the metal of those tools was

smelted in some foundry, and there are miners who dug it out of the earth. So again, you have to kind of widen your field of view to take in your, we are dependent creatures. There was a very good book called Dependent Rational Animals by Elastra McIntyre. Well, and it's probably not honest, right? So we tell ourselves, oh, I don't mow my own lawn because I don't have the time. And then it's like, but did the 30 minutes you save? Did you spend that with your kids? Or did you spend that on your phone? Like, where are you actually spending the time that you're saving?

Are you spending it being present? Are you spending it being available? Or are you spending it on more digital work, or more knowledge work? And that probably, if we're being honest, that's where the vast majority of the time-saving goes. Yeah, and I think we're afflicted with a bad conscience about that time-gilt,

because we fuck off so much, right? All of us. Whether it's on the internet. I mean, people used to complain about novel reading as this kind of feminized soft waste of a life. Now, I think the digital stuff is categorically different because it's designed to maximize time on device, the engagement algorithms.

I mean, it's addictive by design. So that gets a little sinister. So how have you thought about teaching your kids about some of these ideas as far as getting their hands to the shop classes, Soulcraft? How do you, I get how you write about it in a book for adults? How do you teach it to an eight-year-old? I think just by example, you know, just something breaks and, hey, look at this, I've got

some tools here. We can take this thing apart and see what's going on. You know, it's not by argument, but just by modeling a presumption that the world is intelligible, the things we depend on, can be understood. We take the effort, take it apart. And I mean, just yesterday, so my wife had taken her car up in the mountains with chains and the tires and the chains came loose and took out the wheel speed sensors and a brake line. Anyways, you got it towed.

The dealer wanted $1,300 to get it back on the road. And I fixed it with $75 worth of parts, you know, and I think about a day, but I sort of told my daughter, look, if you have tools, that's the best investment you can make. No, that's interesting. And I think also, like, the internet, these digital devices, they are also a tool, right? So you can use YouTube to fuck off all day and watch nonsense. There's also, this kid works for me. He does, like, sort of handyman pass with all my different projects. And he doesn't know how to do anything, but he teaches himself how to do it from YouTube videos.

I'm like, hey, can you fix this thing or hey, I want you to build this for me. He doesn't have any formal training in these things, but he has the tool, which is his phone, that is an infinitely vast library of instructions on how to do stuff. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of YouTube instructional videos. And, you know, in addition to YouTube, you have these technical forums that grow up devoted to some very particular things. So I'm an air-cooled Volkswagen enthusiast. I'm just finishing a car I've spent 10 years building. And you go on these forums and people are going really deep into stuff.

And they're also pushing the state of the art. I mean, we're getting 10 times the horsepower out of these engines that they were designed to make. And that's, it's a kind of folk engineering, as I call it, where it's because of this community sharing knowledge and sort of pushing each other further competitively out of a kind of, well, is that spirit of play, really, you know, is the honor, I guess, of reaching certain, whatever, horsepower, number or something.

But it's the end result is just an extraordinary progress in knowledge. And these communities, one thing I like about them is they cultivate a deep cognitive ownership of your car, like all the way down, that stands in real contrast to the passivity and dependence of consumer culture. It's also humbling. I get this experience reading books too. There's a James Baldwin quote where he says, you know, you think your pain is so special and unique. And then you read, you know, you realize like, hey, other people are going through it. I always find it hilarious. Your car is doing something weird or, you know,

your house is making some weird noise or whatever it is. And you Google it and it's like, not just one person has had this exact problem, but thousands of people have had the exact problem in the exact same way. And by the way, here is the three-step solution to that thing. Yeah, it makes you, you go from feeling totally alone and miserable to, yeah, you see sort of,

oh, there's a whole bunch of people out there going through the same thing. Yes, yes, we're all very separate dealing with the exact same problems. Yeah. And Google Unitsists. Yeah, that is a nice moment. I hadn't thought about that. You feel, I don't know, you feel almost a friendship with these people. It's total stranger. Simply because you're dealing with same

technical challenge and diagnostic obscurities and scratching your head and beating your head against the wall. And you're some people helping out others. That's great. Yeah, and I think it's like, it's an important reminder to be like, this is also true for pretty much every other emotional or physical issue too. It's not just people who both have all-wheel drive outies that are that are that are doing with with the same problems. It's also people who have been dumped or cheated on or mugged or any of the terrible things that happen in life. People are quietly struggling with that too. And if we would talk about it where we would ask for help in the way that Googling is effectively

asking for help, we'd be able to help each other too. Yeah. And that experience of community has become, you know, is I think is fairly elusive in real life. Yeah. So we seek it out online that the facilities for, well, that's not the right word, the occasions for working together with other people are diminished. There's this famous book you probably heard about bowling alone that documented the atrophy of voluntary associations, things like volunteer fire, fighting crews and trade unions

and mutual aid societies and of course church congregations. So we tend to be quite isolated. A person in his house with his family and a TV or internet connection. So that can be very atomizing and isolating. Yeah, no, facilities actually probably is the right word, right? Because in a previous Because, you know, in a

previous life, you'd be asking that question at the VWF Hall or the athletic club that you belong to or, you know, the bowling alias, as you said, those obviously those connections can't happen at scale at the same way in some sort of local association, some sort of union membership or whatever. But there did used to be those physical locations, and I mean, especially in California, as where I grew up, is like some of those buildings that those clubs or, you know, those mason halls are like incredible, right? Or those old buildings that people would had to build so they could have a place to go together, you know, it's far more meaningful and we'll have far more longevity

than whatever group you set up on Facebook. One thing I really missed from the beginning of the pandemic was my bar, you know, at pub where I you know, you'd see the same people every every day five o'clock and There's something about just the embodied presence You know sort of seeing regularly the same people and they're not people you would have chosen right it's just some random collection based on proximity you know we live in the same neighborhood and so it's an unchosen association and but you there's a serendipity to that yeah exactly serendipity is

I like that word yeah sort, you just sort of throwing yourself into the world and exposing yourself to a kind of chance. You know, the vagaries of whatever happens to be near you. No, I love that. Even the fact that we're having to record this remotely instead of the same room. There's something lost in the atomization of how we do this stuff. Yeah. So it's both. It's all very mediated and kind of distant, but then, of course, the

scale and the infinite, you can connect it just about anybody. But I think also exploding that horizon of what is possible and what is therefore relevant to me comes with a cost because anything sort of merely local and contingent and just happens to be here where I am, maybe starts to look less appealing simply because I haven't chosen it. So we get into this mentality of choosing and you know, you're always wondering what could I have chosen that would be better because

it's so infinite? No, what's that word, afluenza? You have the disease of abundance, right? The disease of choice. This is true on dating apps. It's true on Zillow, because you can see an infinite amount of better things. It makes it very hard to be content with what you have. Yeah.

So, well, this was amazing. I love this stuff, and I'm so glad we got to connect, and I think this is a perennial amazing book, which as I'm flipping through, I can talk about physical. I can see the food that I must have been eating some rice when I read this book 10 or so years ago, but I loved it, and it was an honor to talk.

Yeah, well it was a real pleasure talking with you Ryan. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoog podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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