The Art of Manliness - A Guide to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast

00:00:10.740 this year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book

00:00:14.580 zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by robert persig it's a peculiar book especially

00:00:19.380 for a bestseller not a lot of it is actually about zen or motorcycle maintenance combines

00:00:23.820 a travelogue a father-son story and philosophical musings and the structure of its narration makes

00:00:28.660 it hard to follow thus it's the kind of book people often buy start and then put down without

00:00:33.680 ever finishing that's initially what happened to mark richardson an author and automotive journalist

00:00:38.540 who was born in the uk but has lived most of his life in canada when the book finally clicked for

00:00:43.100 mark he was so inspired by it that he actually undertook persig's motorcycle pilgrimage himself

00:00:47.680 mark shares that story in zen and now which intersperses stories from his own road trip

00:00:52.400 with an exploration of persig's life and famous book if you wanted to read zen and the art of

00:00:56.800 motorcycle maintenance but haven't been able to get into it today mark will offer an introduction

00:01:00.560 to what it's all about we discuss persig's ideas on the metaphysics of quality and our relationship

00:01:05.500 to technology and how he tried to combine the ethos of eastern and western thought into a unified

00:01:09.940 philosophy of living we also get into why mark wanted to recreate persig's road trip the joys of

00:01:15.000 traveling by motorcycle what mark learned along the way after the show's over check out our show notes

00:01:19.900 mark richardson welcome to the show hey good to be here bro so it is the 50th anniversary of the

00:01:40.440 classic best-selling book zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance it's one of those books i'm sure everyone

00:01:46.020 has heard of maybe they even own a copy or know someone owns a copy but back in the early 2000s

00:01:52.220 you recreated the famous motorcycle trip that the author of that book robert persig took with his son

00:01:59.160 chris back in 1968 let's start off talking about zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance in persig

00:02:05.140 who was robert persig the easy answer is he was a nut bar and a lunatic he was actually certified

00:02:12.660 insane earlier in his life as a complete crackpot but he was also a teacher he was a writer a lovely

00:02:20.600 writer as it turns out he was a philosopher he was a genius he had a an iq of more than 170

00:02:26.640 and he had really been through the ringer in his life he'd spent time in a sanitarium he had gone

00:02:34.040 through electroshock therapy he tried to kill his wife or he put a gun to her head at one point

00:02:39.800 was not good but he sort of came through it all and ended up going on this motorcycle trip in the

00:02:46.840 second half of his life or second third of his life and wrote a book about it and that's the book

00:02:52.280 that i got to read yeah he uh this book zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance it's about a trip

00:02:57.480 it's about a relationship between him and his son it's also about his mental illness yeah very much so

00:03:02.640 yeah yeah and then it's also about philosophy and yeah he was a genius he graduated like he went to

00:03:07.840 college when he was 15 right yes yeah and it was too young for him actually he flunked out he only

00:03:13.980 lasted a year or so because he was sort of in too soon right he was too immature for that and then uh

00:03:19.520 he also he went to india i believe to study eastern philosophy as well yeah he went to india to to study

00:03:26.280 philosophy he says he didn't really study it he just sort of uh loafed around india for a year or so

00:03:31.700 he went to korea he was in the army and he was posted there and that gave him a sort of an interest

00:03:37.080 in eastern thought i guess the spirituality of that that's where he first experienced it then he

00:03:43.440 tried to bring it all back to the midwest he was from minneapolis and tried to bring it back there

00:03:48.680 and give it some kind of use and couldn't really find a use for it i mean there he is trying to make

00:03:55.480 a living he's trying to be spiritual he's trying to think about zen and and all of this stuff but he

00:04:00.800 also has to make a living he's trying to be a journalist and he's not really succeeding at any of it

00:04:06.140 yeah then he also did some teaching and he attended the university of chicago and he was

00:04:12.660 had like some serious conflict there at the time the university of chicago is very famous for their

00:04:17.420 great books program with mortimer adler and persig wasn't a big fan of it and he bumped heads with

00:04:25.620 the higher ups there yeah big time it's one of the uh i'll call it a crescendo in the book where he

00:04:31.840 describes that he describes having an intellectual argument with the chairman of the philosophy

00:04:36.640 department and he says that he came out the winner but of course we've only really got persig's side

00:04:42.720 for that he was attending classes i think in the university of illinois no sorry he was teaching

00:04:48.300 classes at the university of illinois he was teaching rhetoric and he was trying to improve himself by

00:04:54.180 going to the university of chicago and this is kind of where it all got to be all a bit much for him

00:05:00.200 and he uh he ended up having a breakdown because of it do we know what kind of like breakdown did he

00:05:04.580 have was it i mean he kind of was schizophrenic he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic yeah and then yeah

00:05:10.640 he had electroshock therapy but it was against his will like his wife and his dad signed off on it and he

00:05:15.820 got taken away and and it took them a long time to do that yeah they did not want to do it actually

00:05:21.220 his wife kind of wanted to do it because she was the one who was in the bad relationship yeah but

00:05:27.120 his father had to be the one who actually signed off and his father refused to do it right up until

00:05:33.040 the time that robert percy put the gun to his wife's head and then his dad said okay enough is

00:05:38.380 enough and what happened to his mental health after that treatment well it does seem to have improved

00:05:45.340 i mean he had a bunch of treatments over a course of around about a year he was unreleased from the

00:05:52.220 asylum and he came home and he lived tried to live a sort of a quiet life and it was a very boring

00:05:59.920 life uh and as he says he was sort of falling into uh middle-aged decrepitude right he he sort of bought

00:06:06.940 a place he had a horse that sort of thing he was getting fat and he was still trying to find some sort

00:06:14.420 of use for his life some sort of value for his life uh one thing led to another and well actually he

00:06:20.880 found motorcycles because he had had a pilot's license and that got taken away from him when he

00:06:26.900 went into the asylum so when he came out of the asylum he he sort of liked to do something like

00:06:32.680 flying do something with his wife his young children and got into motorcycles and that gave him the

00:06:38.640 opportunity to travel around and do things and see things so what was the purpose of this trip that

00:06:43.140 he went on with his son they go from minnesota to san francisco was there a bigger purpose or did

00:06:48.580 person just want to get out and have a trip as a little bit of everything his wife pushed him his

00:06:55.680 wife nancy she pushed him at the time to sort of spend time with the kids the kids were a little

00:07:01.400 troubled in their own ways they were feeling separated from their father who was this kind of

00:07:06.900 tortured genius guy right so she pressed him to go off and spend alone time with them so this particular

00:07:14.400 trip was with young chris who was 11 years old at the time which people these days say is way too

00:07:20.260 young to have a child on a motorcycle i don't agree with that but i took my own kid around at 11

00:07:25.840 years old because he could reach the footbags and all was good but he'd been on sort of shorter trips

00:07:30.840 before and you know away trips trips where they had stayed out overnight but this was to be the big trip he

00:07:38.300 basically had the summer off and he was spending time with his kid and he had another son a younger

00:07:44.960 son called ted who went to stay with his aunt during this time and his mother was traveling nancy was

00:07:53.100 traveling so they just sort of went off and did their own thing and this was supposed to be kind of a

00:07:57.740 bonding experience for young chris and and bob percy and so this route they took it went basically

00:08:03.300 through the northern united states went from minnesota through the dakotas through montana

00:08:08.120 idaho yeah well you see nobody takes this route right if you're going to do that you're going to go

00:08:14.600 through sturgis you're going to see mount rushmore you're going to do all this stuff the nice thing

00:08:19.780 that struck me about this particular route is that it really is the road less traveled it's got some

00:08:24.720 wonderful scenery along the way you get to go through the bare-toothed pass which is astonishing

00:08:30.580 between montana and wyoming you get to ride down the lola road in idaho it's got like hundreds of

00:08:38.380 turns for the next hundred miles it's a wonderful motorcycling road and all of this stuff and they

00:08:43.660 just sort of found their way across the first half of the trip to bozeman montana he traveled with a

00:08:49.660 couple of his friends the sutherlands and then he stayed with some other friends some friends that he

00:08:56.600 had made when he was teaching in montana state college in bozeman they stayed there for i think

00:09:03.800 it was about five days the sutherlands turned home and persig and his son carried on out west

00:09:08.740 someone most people think of taking a cross-country road trip on a motorcycle they're thinking like a

00:09:13.780 cruiser one a harley or maybe those bmws persig didn't take that what kind of motorcycle did he use

00:09:19.140 well those bikes just didn't exist back then this was in 1968 and persig just took his own bike

00:09:25.120 which happened to be in the garage uh it's a couple of years old it was a 1966 honda superhawk

00:09:30.820 it was a cb77 superhawk 250 cc i think it was and made like 24 horsepower you'd never think to do

00:09:39.300 something like that these days on a bike like that but hey you know it carried him it carried him and

00:09:44.220 his son and all their luggage and he maintained it well along the way so it got them all the way to

00:09:49.960 the other end so uh zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance isn't just a travel memoir it is a

00:09:55.280 philosophy book in fact it's uh been called like the greatest selling philosophy book in american

00:10:00.900 history what philosophical themes does persig explore in this book well he just he explores

00:10:09.460 all of them really he came up with his own philosophical ideal which he called the metaphysics

00:10:15.420 of quality uh and it's kind of like well it's putting both together it's putting east and west

00:10:20.800 together i mean you look at the title of the book zen which is eastern spirituality and you got the art

00:10:27.080 which is the artistic merits to everything and then motorcycle maintenance which is the science of

00:10:32.880 everything and if you go into into philosophy a little bit and to be honest with you i was not a

00:10:39.460 philosopher when i read this book i just wanted to read about motorcycles but it did get me thinking

00:10:44.040 about it and i had done philosophy 101 at university and that was kind of it but it showed me that

00:10:50.880 the greeks the greek philosophers were very practical right your plato aristotle they tended to have reason

00:10:58.600 and emotion and they they prioritized reason and your eastern philosophers were very spiritual

00:11:05.180 this is kind of persig's way of putting the two of them together saying well you can't have one

00:11:12.220 without the other you can't have the yin without the yang and so he came up with what he called his

00:11:17.620 metaphysics his basic principles if you will of quality what makes something good and what makes

00:11:23.780 it the best that it could be so what does persig mean by quality

00:11:27.640 you know people have done phds on this stuff yeah there's actually there's a guidebook

00:11:34.840 to the yeah and i it's this giant i think it was written by a bunch of jesuits yeah yeah well one

00:11:40.460 of them was a jesuit yeah jesuit and yeah it goes into the whole eastern ideal the whole western ideal i

00:11:48.160 i read it i don't know that i absorbed all of it i'm not that smart the story goes that persig went

00:11:54.640 to teach english and he would have been i can't think i suppose he would have been in his 30s he went

00:12:00.120 to teach english at montana state college which was kind of like a second tier college at the time

00:12:07.180 in bozeman montana and one of the profs said i hope you're teaching quality in your course

00:12:13.940 and this is a guy who's kind of on the edge a little bit mentally right he has not yet had his

00:12:19.840 breakdown he's still trying to figure out why am i here and whereas well i don't know about you but

00:12:26.200 if somebody said i hope you're teaching quality in your motorcycle course i'd say yeah it's great

00:12:30.520 quality it's the best there is or whatever but persig took that as a question of well what is quality

00:12:38.380 how am i to teach quality how do i know when i found quality and so he went down he went on from

00:12:45.920 there and tried to figure out what quality was and i don't know that he ever actually truly succeeded

00:12:51.680 uh i think that quality for persig is well as my kid says to me he says i'm the guy who told him

00:13:02.620 that if a job's worth doing it's worth doing well and so the idea is to just try to find the best you

00:13:09.740 can out of any particular situation maybe that's what quality is for persig yeah it's kind of simplistic

00:13:16.120 isn't it it is yeah it's just like what makes something good like what makes something excellent

00:13:19.920 and persig says it's hard he poses questions to his students and they'd be like well we just know

00:13:25.780 it's like okay well tell me like what makes this thing and then he'd do this exercise where he'd read

00:13:31.300 essays that the students wrote and he'd have the students rank them and he's like well how did you

00:13:35.940 determine which one was the best one and yeah none of them could ever answer him and and then he

00:13:42.520 started refusing to grade his students right because he said what is a grade a grade is is just a thing

00:13:48.360 that's that's it's just the scientific reason behind something then there's more to it than that

00:13:53.380 just because i say that this is an a doesn't mean it actually is an a what does it take to make it an a

00:13:58.300 now these days of course you know in in in universities and the like it's very clear what

00:14:04.300 deserves an a what deserves a b whatever but persig would say well there's a lot more to it than that

00:14:09.800 it cannot be so simplistic and it's the art of balancing your emotion with your reason if you will

00:14:16.940 i mean persig broke it all down into what he called classical and romantic and actually later

00:14:22.660 he called it dynamic and static he there's a second book that he wrote lila which gets a lot

00:14:28.500 more into his his philosophy have you read that book i have not read that one but i'm i want to now

00:14:33.700 that i've finished zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance well if you're looking for motorcycles

00:14:38.000 there's no motorcycles in there okay uh there is boats he bought a boat and he talks about sailing

00:14:44.100 his boat down the canal to new york and he uses this opportunity just as he used the motorcycle trip

00:14:50.720 to explain his metaphysics of quality he used the boat trip in lila to sort of to round it all out if

00:14:58.980 you will and sort of get to what he was trying to say but it wasn't a terribly popular book because it

00:15:04.420 was very philosophical and to be honest with you i think it was missing chris i think a lot of people

00:15:10.680 loved zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance because of the father-son relationship and there

00:15:16.320 was none of that in lila going back to quality one thing that persig did to figure this out he like

00:15:21.940 went to the ancient greeks and i think he hit on this idea that the ancient greeks had of erite

00:15:26.700 excellence he says that's that's what i'm talking about when it comes to quality yes and it's just

00:15:33.300 something is good but then he started this is when he got into trouble at the university of chicago

00:15:37.720 because he made the argument that plato and aristotle they missed the mark when they were

00:15:45.640 talking about erite and he said they tried to capture erite in this definition and he says once

00:15:52.680 you do that you basically eliminate the idea of quality or excellence and he said instead we had to

00:16:00.700 look to the pre-socratic philosophers like permenides where they talked about life is just

00:16:05.000 change and in flux and even the sophists this is where he got in a big trouble he said you know

00:16:10.640 the sophists who are the object of scorn in plato's dialogues right he says no actually they got it right

00:16:17.060 they were right and plato was wrong yeah yeah the sophists were very practical realistic types right

00:16:23.380 they came before uh aristotle and plato and the like and and there were lots of arguments in

00:16:29.440 philosophy class all about that i'm afraid much of that is beyond me that's like philosophy 201 or whatever

00:16:34.740 and then other thing that he brought in that eastern aspect he said you know quality is like

00:16:39.300 the idea of the dao or dharma you can't really define it but like it's it's good and excellent

00:16:45.560 you know it when you see it we somehow were able to respond to it did this search for quality or trying

00:16:50.980 to figure out what quality is is that what kind of exacerbated his mental illness yeah he couldn't stop

00:16:57.540 questioning it he never did find what i mean in that stage of his life he just couldn't come up with an

00:17:04.320 answer it drove him literally mad he was trying to quantify something that couldn't be quantified

00:17:11.120 right and he never did do it certainly not at that point i'm not sure as i said earlier i'm not sure he

00:17:17.940 ever did but he at least gave us ways that we can find to look for it ourselves because everybody's

00:17:23.900 quality is different my quality is different from your quality i would say and not a good bad thing or a

00:17:29.780 bad thing or whatever it's just that we're different people so we have different virtues and qualities

00:17:34.200 he also in this book develops his ideas about man's relationship to technology what did persick think

00:17:41.840 about technology well that's a very big part of the whole book right which is the whole technological

00:17:47.360 thing to us persick was actually a very technically proficient guy he had a job where he would write

00:17:53.860 instruction manuals he was writing instruction manuals for ballistics for nuclear weapons i mean

00:18:00.300 he knew what he was doing with this sort of thing he was into computers before anybody i was into computers

00:18:05.540 and yet he also decried technology because he said look we've just become too reliant upon our technology

00:18:12.820 always assuming that the technology will see it see us through and yet technology has many many faults

00:18:19.500 and we cannot rely on that if we're to be the best that we can be we have to to go beyond the technology

00:18:26.020 to find our own arete well an argument he makes too is that part of the problem with modern people's

00:18:32.840 relationship with technology is that they're alienated from it like technology is this thing

00:18:38.220 that they interact with but they don't actually know what's going on with it and that's why we get

00:18:44.680 frustrated with it or we kind of see technology as this this uh evil in our lives and he uses the

00:18:51.120 sutherlands in his book to capture that idea that a lot of he thinks a lot of people have with technology

00:18:57.940 it's like they like it but they don't really like it yeah uh john and sylvia sutherland were his friends

00:19:05.100 and the friends of the family their kids were friends with their boys that sort of thing and john was the kind

00:19:11.900 of guy who would buy a new motorcycle every year and he wanted to have the latest and greatest stuff

00:19:18.180 but he could never really quite understand how it all was and he really didn't care because it worked

00:19:24.380 fine for him and so if his bmw broke down well he'd take it to the shop and somebody at the shop would

00:19:29.380 fix it and that was that whereas persick would say well the person fixing it at the shop is not

00:19:36.740 necessarily doing the best job that they can you're much better off if you know how to work on your

00:19:41.320 own bmw and fix it yourself you'll have a better machine for it one of the things that drove persick

00:19:47.100 a little bit uh crazy was that john sutherland had a dripping tap back at his house and he had just

00:19:54.560 never fixed it he had just hadn't got around to it and it wasn't necessarily that he didn't know how

00:19:59.960 to it was just he he couldn't be bothered uh he would call in a plumber at some point if it was to

00:20:05.940 get to the point that drove him crazy but he never did and yet persick couldn't sit there in his house

00:20:12.740 and listen to a tap drip without it affecting him in some way yeah i think persick understood that

00:20:18.740 technology can be your friend if you engage with it right it can be a tool but you have to not just

00:20:26.020 be a tool to technology you have to actually know what's going on behind with all the gears and

00:20:31.260 things and then you can have this appreciation for it as i was reading this it reminded me a lot

00:20:36.100 of the writing and work that matthew crawford has done have you read any of his stuff yes yeah i have

00:20:40.840 yeah shop classes soul craft he has the same sort of idea that we're alienated from our tools and

00:20:46.460 alienated from our technology and we might be a little not maybe not happier but more engaged with life

00:20:53.140 and not feel technology is this oppressive thing if we actually took the time to engage with it

00:20:58.540 and in persick says it takes patience it takes takes zen it takes like sort of a steadfastness in

00:21:04.700 order for you to do that you can't just expect the technology to work the way you want it you have to

00:21:09.820 to work with it one of the things that he does say in the middle of the book somewhere is that you got

00:21:17.340 to watch out with technology because well his friends the deweezes they had a i think they had a

00:21:23.920 rotisserie and and they had to put it together and his point was that when you put together a

00:21:29.700 rotisserie don't just read the instructions and go from there and put it and bolt it together you

00:21:34.880 should actually take a look at everything take a moment to analyze it figure out why everything works

00:21:39.720 the way it does and then build the rotisserie the way that you think it should be built best

00:21:44.300 because that's probably better than the original design the original design was just done by somebody

00:21:50.640 who was paid to do it and do it probably in a hurry whereas if you take the time to think something

00:21:55.340 through you can probably do a better job of it and i actually met somebody who wrote instruction

00:22:00.280 manuals for rotisseries about a couple of months ago and i put that story to them and they were very

00:22:05.280 insulted by it but so it was an interesting conversation and as i was reading that you know his ideas about

00:22:12.620 technology and our relationship with it and that we should be more engaged with it instead of passive

00:22:17.060 consumers of technology i wonder what he would think about you know artificial intelligence and

00:22:21.960 social media platforms i think if persig was around today he would be one of those indie hackers

00:22:29.400 right he would have a computer but he'd have his own server at his house where he created his own

00:22:34.840 operator he would probably use linux and just be able to control everything he wouldn't go into these

00:22:40.000 platforms like facebook or twitter i think he'd want to be able to control what he did with his

00:22:45.660 computer life he would and yet i mean i wrote some letters and i wrote them on my computer and he sent

00:22:54.340 me back type written letters he used a typewriter to reply to my letters and sometimes he would just

00:22:59.640 type within my letters you know between the paragraphs with his responses which got shorter and

00:23:05.960 more cursed as time went on is because he didn't really like to be bothered by anybody he wanted to be

00:23:10.780 reclusive but this is the beauty of the motorcycle right we come back to the motorcycle that it's

00:23:16.180 something that you can sit on and you can go for a ride and that's fine but if you actually know how

00:23:22.740 to maintain it and make it into the best motorcycle it can be then you can take more pleasure from your

00:23:28.200 motorcycle ride yeah and he also saw that motorcycle maintenance is a way to practice quality or try to

00:23:33.600 achieve quality like he was very fastidious about how you change a tire you got to soap it and you got

00:23:38.740 to do things the right way and maintaining your own motorcycle allows you to practice quality yeah he

00:23:45.320 didn't always do it right but he did try and i think that he's the kind of person that you probably

00:23:51.660 call a fuddy-duddy these days you take forever over something whereas you just want to get it out of

00:23:56.160 the way so you can move on to the next thing uh you know you have an appointment in 10 minutes or

00:24:00.460 whatever and yet you know persick would still be there sort of soaping down the tire getting it

00:24:05.260 just right just smoothly and yet more often than not you know he'd mess it up sometimes he'd make

00:24:10.180 the most egregious errors the most basic errors because he was so busy trying to think of the big

00:24:15.760 picture and the why are we here stuff he would miss out on a little tiny stuff which he freely admits

00:24:20.880 to in his book like the time that he went off on a motorcycle ride with his son chris i think it was

00:24:27.560 the year before this one it was a shorter ride or something and they ran out of gas and he didn't

00:24:32.780 realize that they'd run out of gas because he could shake the tank and hear the gas slopping around in

00:24:37.900 there and so in the pouring rain he was trying to figure out why his bike had stopped and he couldn't

00:24:42.820 figure it out and because he could hear the gas in the tank slapping about he knew he had gas he

00:24:48.300 hadn't figured out the most basic thing which is to just switch it onto the reserve tank because you got

00:24:54.860 a little bit of gas left in the bottom there that's actually one of those things where uh

00:24:58.660 technology's taken over for us a little bit now because i don't think you get a motorcycle now with

00:25:03.520 a reserve tank you have to manually switch over maybe that's an old thing my bike has that but

00:25:07.860 i think most do not we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors

00:25:12.440 and now back to the show he also writes in the book about this idea of gumption and gumption traps

00:25:23.920 he talks a lot about this and actually i really enjoyed this section what did persig mean by gumption

00:25:29.020 and what are gumption traps persig said that he liked the word gumption because it's kind of an

00:25:35.080 old-fashioned word and he's an old-fashioned guy but gumption is is is drive it's not just your drive

00:25:42.260 the thing that pushes you it's not just your impetus there's there's optimism in there there's

00:25:47.000 faith in there you know it's going to get done you just want to do something but then for every

00:25:53.060 person who has gumption they also have the probability of gumption traps which are setbacks

00:26:00.180 there's actually there's two types of traps there's setbacks and there's hang-ups and so you get started

00:26:05.220 on something you're all keen to do it but then you get set back or hung up by something give an example

00:26:11.100 yesterday i had to write a review of a motorcycle uh that i'd written recently and uh i kind of like

00:26:17.760 this bike and i thought it was a good bike and i went into the writing the story and sitting down

00:26:23.060 to write the story i've got the lead i've got the whole thing i've got lots of gumption going i'm all

00:26:27.620 set i got the drive for it but then i realized that i i didn't know all the pricing of it and that's

00:26:33.340 an important part of the story you know is it actually worth the money so i sort of ground a bit

00:26:39.520 to a halt because i didn't know how much it cost to do to have this extra and that extra which i'd

00:26:45.000 appreciated on the bike i couldn't find it online i had to write into people i had to wait for a reply

00:26:50.160 and that kind of took away my gumption right that that was a setback and then the hang-up comes

00:26:56.120 because you're waiting for it and then you just sort of get bored by it you get laziness is another

00:27:00.840 hang-up i wasn't lazy in this i don't like to think but but i was a little bored by the whole thing

00:27:06.000 thinking you know what i mean this bike has all the same stuff that a lot of other bikes does it

00:27:10.220 just does it very well i've written this story before and so i sort of lost interest i lost some

00:27:15.360 of my gumption for this and so normally what a lot of people would do then is they just sort of stop

00:27:21.640 but persig said that what you got to do then is take a break clear your head and but don't give up

00:27:29.000 on the gumption you got to stick with it because it was there in the first place for a reason so stick

00:27:33.420 with it so you can do a few things to clear your head of this stuff um somebody once suggested just

00:27:40.700 taking a nap is a good thing or doing a jigsaw puzzle or just doing something totally different

00:27:44.780 that gets your mind off it the thing that i like to do is go for a ride on my bike i'll just take

00:27:49.440 off for a half an hour and when i came back hey i'd the company had replied with the pricing i i knew

00:27:56.760 where i needed to go to the story and i banged it all out in a half an hour all right so yeah uh setbacks

00:28:02.620 you could probably categorize as external factors right you're like missing a piece or you run out

00:28:08.340 of gas or it'll be something physical it'll be something tangible like your computer goes flat

00:28:14.280 because the battery goes out something like that a hang-up is less tangible than that a hang-up is in

00:28:19.600 your own head where you you just you just don't know where to go to next right he talks about some

00:28:25.000 of the hang-ups you mentioned uh yeah boredom is one anxiety is one egotism you're thinking you know

00:28:30.080 what you're doing but you really don't uh impatience that was another one he talked about

00:28:34.560 a lot is you got to be patient and if you become impatient then you're going to fall into a gumption

00:28:38.620 trap and impatience is a big thing today and even more so today than it ever was back in 1968 or 74

00:28:46.040 when the book was published that sort of thing we have so many distractions now to that help to make

00:28:50.920 us impatient and we also assume that hey we'll find out right away i mean think about it when

00:28:56.340 persig was doing his thing if he needed to find out pricing then he could maybe have phoned somebody

00:29:01.340 and hope to get an answer you know by the next morning whereas i bang out an email and i assume

00:29:06.380 that i'll get it within five minutes and if i don't i'm impatient and it gives me a hang-up yeah as i was

00:29:12.740 reading that section about gumption traps and setbacks it made me think of my own attempts when i've tried

00:29:18.180 to diy stuff whether i'm fixing something around my house one that i often fall into is where you find

00:29:23.800 out you have like the you don't you're missing a part and so you go to the home depot and then you

00:29:29.320 buy the part you think you need and then you come back and it's like no this is the wrong part so you

00:29:32.940 have to go back that's a gumption trap where that's where i'm like i want to give up on this thing because

00:29:36.640 it's just so annoying he actually has a solution to that just bring the piece bring the part with you

00:29:42.340 that you're trying to replace so you can know exactly what you need so that's actually something i

00:29:46.860 picked up on it and i take the piece now to home depot or wherever right and yeah and it's it's

00:29:52.580 makes life a lot easier that way okay and the book itself the way it's written when you first

00:29:57.900 started reading it it can be kind of confusing because it's a memoir it's also a travel log it's

00:30:04.380 this philosophical discourse and then there's it's also talking about his mental illness and there's

00:30:09.880 two narrators in this thing basically there's the narrator who is persig after the electroshock

00:30:16.140 treatment and he's kind of just this flat he's kind of a jerk and he's the guy riding the

00:30:21.860 motorcycle and then there's phaedrus who who comes in every now and then and this is persig before

00:30:28.900 the electroshock treatment and you know phaedrus had his problems obviously with with the mental

00:30:35.240 illness but he was more of a decent guy yeah i think this is one of the reasons why people

00:30:39.820 get hung up on the book i mean you you start reading uh zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

00:30:46.000 with plenty of gumption somebody's given it to you and it's it's got a great reputation and it sounds

00:30:51.040 good and then you have the setback that you can't remember where you put the book but then you finally

00:30:56.660 find it and you read it and then you're hung up on it because you don't quite know what he's saying

00:31:03.180 you're not following this you thought it was a motorcycle book that's how i came into it i thought

00:31:07.720 it was a motorcycle book i was a teenager at the time which is why i wanted to read it and after 50 pages

00:31:14.000 it stops being a motorcycle book completely and it becomes a philosophical treatise and i wasn't

00:31:19.380 expecting that but it's also a little complicated to understand because yeah he writes through two

00:31:25.900 separate narrators and he also uses you don't really realize it at the time but he uses the

00:31:31.940 technique of the unreliable narrator you're not quite sure which one of the two to follow

00:31:36.560 also i mean in in the original book it was all written in the same font and even persig himself

00:31:43.740 certainly the publisher recognized that this was making it a difficult book for people to follow

00:31:48.560 so by the time he got around to i think it was the 10th anniversary book they started writing and

00:31:55.280 certainly at the end when one of the narrators was talking it would be in one font and the other was in

00:32:01.320 the other font just to make it a little easier to follow through what i found was when i first read

00:32:06.500 it i was completely confused hang on who's talking here what's happening i don't understand this and

00:32:12.460 so i put it down for something easier to read and then the next time i sort of pressed through a little

00:32:18.080 bit more and got 100 pages in and i was still horribly confused and this is one reason why i wrote

00:32:24.340 my own book because when i did finally read zen and the art and it all made sense i found it such a

00:32:30.300 rewarding read that uh i figured that just with a little bit of a primer a little bit of of expectation

00:32:37.060 of knowing what you're going into then then people will find it much simpler to read and much more

00:32:41.780 straightforward and hopefully they have done so when the book came out so the trip was in 1968 the book

00:32:47.400 came out in 74 it was a smash success and it's kind of weird that it was because i mean it was rejected

00:32:53.940 by all these different publishers and there's just this one guy who went to the slush pile at the

00:32:58.980 publishing company this might be something what do you think was going on uh why do you think this

00:33:05.220 weird book about motorcycles and metaphysics resonated with americans at the time and it really

00:33:11.320 did resonate with americans it it was an unexpected success i mean percy always expected it to be

00:33:17.740 successful and was very pleased at its success but it came out of nowhere and this was in 1974 and

00:33:26.120 the best explanation i could think of is that america at the time was going through all kinds

00:33:31.620 of troubles and a lot of people had found eastern spirituality and didn't quite know what to do with

00:33:38.580 that eastern spirituality and zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance gave them a sort of a

00:33:43.900 metaphysics gave them the basic principles that bonded the practical reasoning of the greeks to the

00:33:52.000 if you will the airy fairy spirituality of the east and gave them a grounding to show them look this is

00:33:59.160 what you want this is the way that you feel so this is the way to make it happen so you picked up the

00:34:04.340 book when you're 15 because you're into motorcycles read a few pages like i don't like this and then a

00:34:09.740 while later you finished it and before the conversation you between you and i i was talking about i had the

00:34:14.360 same thing i actually bought this book back in 2013 started reading it and i was like i don't know about

00:34:20.340 this and i stopped reading it finally got around to reading the whole thing in preparation for our

00:34:26.020 conversation why after you read this book why did you feel like you had to go on this pilgrimage where

00:34:32.600 you recreated persigs was something going on in your life where you you felt like you needed to do this

00:34:38.540 yeah very much i was 41 years old and i can date that exactly because i went on vacation with my

00:34:47.880 family i have two sons who are quite young they would have been three and four years old that sort

00:34:52.360 of age at the time and they were a handful for my wife and i and i had a busy job and i went on

00:35:01.560 vacation and i was going to stay at a cottage by a lake i just literally looked at my bookshelf

00:35:07.080 to figure out well i got to take some books and i thought i might as well try and take zen in the art

00:35:11.860 because it's got to be a good book i've just been missing something i don't know everybody seems to

00:35:17.300 like this book uh let me give it a try so i i lay in a hammock while my kids played on the beach around

00:35:24.440 me at this lake and uh read the book and this time when i get hung up on all this sort of aristotle and

00:35:32.340 plato and socrates and stuff that i really wasn't familiar with i just sort of skip ahead and say yeah

00:35:37.920 yeah yeah anyway and get back to the motorcycly bits or the travel loggy bits and i finished it

00:35:43.860 actually on my 41st birthday lying in a hammock beside that lake and i thought oh that's who

00:35:52.600 phaedrus was that's why this makes sense now so i literally didn't pause didn't miss a beat i turned

00:35:59.720 back to page one read it again read all the philosophy and it all suddenly made sense now because i had a

00:36:06.760 context in which to put this book and then when i finished that i thought well that that has a lot

00:36:13.280 to say and what's more it's a pretty good road trip and it's the sort of road trip that most people

00:36:17.460 wouldn't do because as i said at the beginning it's kind of like the road less traveled and i'd

00:36:23.360 kind of like to do that and i'd like to get away for a bit i need some me time some mark time i need

00:36:29.020 i hate to say it but i i just want to just have some time on my own to get my head in the

00:36:34.620 in the right place very much as persig did why don't i recreate this ride why don't i follow

00:36:39.840 this it did him some good so maybe it'll do me some good too and it'll other than anything else

00:36:45.020 it'll be a damn good motorcycle ride and also if i can persuade my wife that i might be able to write

00:36:50.500 a book out of this then she'll give me the time off because it took like a month it's a two-week

00:36:55.940 trip out there and a couple of weeks back and so she did she went along with that and i determined

00:37:02.280 that if i was to do this trip then i would do it the following summer at around about the same time

00:37:06.500 that persig did and i would end on my birthday in san francisco the day i turned 42 which is what

00:37:13.980 happened and then i sat down to write the book and that took another four years how did you figure out

00:37:19.240 the route that persig took because in the book he gives mentions of some towns you went through

00:37:23.740 but you actually somehow were able to figure out like he took this road and you stopped at this

00:37:28.500 particular gas station how did you figure that stuff out well i we we mentioned at the beginning

00:37:33.260 the guidebook to zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance there is actually a list at the

00:37:37.980 beginning of that book that shows the names of the towns that he mentions sometimes persig is very

00:37:43.940 detailed and he's always detailed in his description he's not always detailed about where he is so you

00:37:51.500 don't quite know which town this one is but you know some of the towns around because he mentions them

00:37:56.240 anyway i got a rough route from that book so i could sort of trace it across on probably a paper

00:38:01.800 map at the time and then there were other people as i discovered as i started chipping away at this

00:38:07.100 before i would take the ride there were persig pilgrims there were people who had done this before me

00:38:12.460 lots of people who'd done this before me they hadn't necessarily done the whole ride but they'd done

00:38:17.660 bits of the ride and they'd stayed in touch through you know various means whatever and there was one guy

00:38:23.400 in particular a professor called henry ger and he had done the drive himself in his car a year or so

00:38:32.560 earlier and he hadn't figured out everything but he'd figured out most of it so then i had 95 percent

00:38:39.680 of it 90 percent of it and i sort of winged it from there to figure out as i read the book as i went

00:38:46.360 along and i could see oh well he must have gone this way or that way some of the roads didn't exist

00:38:50.300 anymore but a lot of them almost all of them did and everything was because it's the midwest

00:38:56.480 hadn't really changed very much and was very much like it was in the original book what kind of

00:39:01.940 motorcycle did you take on your trip yeah uh i took the worst possible motorcycle i was actually

00:39:08.740 because because my job i get to ride motorcycles and and drive cars and things and when i mentioned

00:39:14.740 this various manufacturers they all wanted to give me a machine to ride and i said you know what i have

00:39:21.320 to do this on my own bike because my own bike is simple and easy for me to maintain it's not very

00:39:27.760 comfortable but it's a suzuki dr 600 which was actually before even the 650 which is the more common

00:39:35.380 bike now and it's a big dual purpose thumper with a kickstarter and a carburetor and frankly everything

00:39:43.440 started breaking on the bike as soon as i set off and i was never quite sure if i was going to get to

00:39:47.520 the other end or not but it did give me the opportunity to practice a lot of motorcycle

00:39:51.820 maintenance which was a very valuable thing for me for the whole book one of the things that i found

00:39:59.180 arresting in the zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance and as well as in your book is the

00:40:03.500 description of what it's like to drive through these state highways and country roads in the high

00:40:10.100 plains and in the mountains on a motorcycle how did persig describe that and what was your experience

00:40:15.440 like and how is it different from driving a car well can i just quote from the book yeah because

00:40:22.280 motorcyclists use this all the time this quote to try to explain the appeal of riding a motorcycle

00:40:27.860 they may or may not know where it came from but it gets used all the time so this is like on the second

00:40:33.700 page of his book and he says you see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely

00:40:39.860 different from any other in a car you're always in a compartment and because you're used to it you

00:40:45.960 don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more tv you're a passive observer

00:40:53.000 and it's all moving by you boringly in a frame and then he says on a cycle a motorcycle the frame is gone

00:41:01.120 you're completely in contact with it all you're in the scene you're not just watching it anymore

00:41:06.340 and the sense of presence is overwhelming that concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot

00:41:12.180 is the real thing the same stuff you walk on it's right there it's so blurred you can't focus on it

00:41:17.560 yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime and the whole thing the whole experience is never

00:41:24.160 removed from immediate consciousness and i don't think there's i've ever seen any better description of

00:41:30.460 of the appeal of riding a motorcycle than that along your trip you meet a whole bunch of different

00:41:37.500 people and you talk about your experiences with them you actually met some of the characters that

00:41:42.560 were in the original zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance one of them was uh genie deweese

00:41:47.440 she passed away i imagine yes she has so she was alive when you and you got to stay at her place

00:41:53.340 so she knew persig what insights into persig did you get from her well i was lucky when i did my

00:42:00.860 trip in the timing of my trip that obviously a lot of people were getting older at this point

00:42:04.940 but i was able to actually meet people who had been a part of it i met with john sutherland

00:42:10.800 who had been a part of it he's since passed away and i met with jenie deweese her husband

00:42:16.200 um robert had passed away many years earlier but they had hosted robert persig when he stayed with

00:42:24.240 them in bozeman at their um sort of ranch house just south of bozeman this is where he he reached

00:42:31.020 with sutherlands and then the sutherlands stayed a day or two and then they they headed back and

00:42:34.920 he carried on from there and i sat down with jenny and her whole family and she was able to

00:42:41.360 to to let me know that robert persig was the real thing she had known him in bozeman before he had

00:42:49.400 left to go out to to chicago and what he had to say was genuine from his heart that he honestly

00:42:56.980 believed and was searching for the answers when they had this conversation at their ranch house

00:43:04.240 and as you mentioned earlier when they were at the deweeses they were there for about five days

00:43:09.480 during this time him and chris persig and his son chris they went on this backpacking trip into the

00:43:15.480 mountains and it's a very it's a pivotal scene in the book what did this scene teach us about the

00:43:20.440 relationship relationship between persig and his son well i told us that it wasn't very good don't

00:43:26.040 forget that on a motorcycle it's a quite different thing for a passenger the passenger sitting on the

00:43:30.760 back the passenger can't even see the face of the person who's riding the bike and in this case

00:43:36.580 you know the passenger chris can't see the face so he doesn't know if the person is phaedrus or his

00:43:43.540 dad that's that's a different matter finally they get to stop at the deweeses the sutherlands leave

00:43:50.820 and they've got a couple more days before they're going to carry on out west so they go for a hike up

00:43:56.300 into the mountains they're spending time together actually beside each other rather than you know one

00:44:02.900 behind the other and this sort of gives them an opportunity to get to know each other a little

00:44:08.260 better but frankly bob persig was a lousy father i don't think he was a very good father at all

00:44:15.780 he wasn't sympathetic toward his son in a way that i would be or that most people would credit these days

00:44:22.800 and it showed us they they go for this hike to the to the top of the mountain they never quite reach

00:44:28.260 the top of the mountain that's actually very important that they try and get there but they

00:44:33.600 argue or at least he argues with his son his son is being a rambunctious kid and he just can't really

00:44:40.540 take it and he starts to question whether his son should even continue with him on the rest of the

00:44:45.780 journey and it sort of starts to go downhill from there when they're with the sutherlands on the for

00:44:52.220 the first half of the trip and the trip is basically two weeks with in the middle of the two weeks is

00:44:57.600 five days with the dueces the first half of the trip the sutherlands are there to to counteract to

00:45:04.120 to bounce things off there they're there to to keep everything um ticking along but the second half of

00:45:10.460 the trip when they head off into idaho and out to the west coast that's when it's just the father and

00:45:15.620 the son together and that's when everything starts to break down and yeah the hike in the mountains

00:45:23.580 is the beginning of that so yeah there's this tension um between persig and his son yeah and so

00:45:30.300 for the rest of the trip it was just sort of on and off the son would get mad and persig really

00:45:34.440 didn't understand why he was mad and towards the end you see persig you can't tell if it's like it's

00:45:40.200 this is when the two narrators start to blend a lot yeah yeah right this is where you need the two

00:45:45.360 fonts right yeah um i wish i had that in the i read it on the kindle the kindle doesn't have the

00:45:49.980 two fonts oh it's the same font if i remember correctly yeah so it's hard it's like oh is this

00:45:54.580 phaedrus or is this it's technology for you right yeah so they start getting near to san francisco

00:46:01.740 and on this foggy morning in this random field high above the pacific father and son so it's

00:46:10.060 chris and persig have it out and the narrator like the new persig recedes like the post electroshock

00:46:18.560 therapy persig recedes and phaedrus the original persig comes back you know metaphorically the father

00:46:25.720 and the son are finally reunited and i tend to think of it as the father son and holy ghost with the

00:46:31.180 whole spirituality of it all but the book ends with them riding south towards san francisco and saying

00:46:38.640 things are going to get better from now on they don't actually make it all the way to san francisco

00:46:42.680 of course i did and san francisco is pivotal for the whole story of persig because it was in san

00:46:48.800 francisco 11 years later that chris persig was murdered yeah that was it was really incredibly

00:46:56.100 tragic so the reason why chris was in san francisco he's at a zen he's studying at some zen monastery

00:47:01.340 and i in the book i don't know if i'm reading this wrong but it sounds like persig saw in chris

00:47:07.860 some of the same mental illness that he had like this could be a problem and and in fact that's

00:47:13.980 what happened like chris had a lot of a lot of problems in life and so they sent him to the zen

00:47:18.740 monastery to help you know maybe help him out but that's where he ended up getting killed it was just

00:47:23.840 this random murder uh apparently it seems to be i tried to get to the bottom of whether it really was

00:47:29.380 a random murder or whether he owed money or something like that and i i never succeeded and

00:47:34.660 it really wasn't worth it and i didn't really want to know the answer anyway but it does seem to be just

00:47:39.300 a random stabbing outside the zen monastery in the hate district of san francisco and chris died you

00:47:47.920 know right there on on the sidewalk would that do to persig it's it's difficult to say he has one

00:47:57.500 account his wife has another account it shattered the man there's no doubt of that he didn't know

00:48:04.300 what to do about the whole thing he missed chris terribly he felt guilty about everything i mean

00:48:10.940 chris was out there because he was basically avoiding jail time chris had got into big time

00:48:16.420 trouble with drugs as had his brother ted and they had managed to negotiate that chris would go off to

00:48:23.520 the zen monastery instead of serving any kind of remand time in correctional center and chris was

00:48:30.700 coming through you could see a future here now for chris you could see that it was all actually going to

00:48:36.160 happen chris was 22 years old and he just bought a motorcycle and all of this stuff it was finally

00:48:42.500 coming together and then it was taken away and this broke robert persig as it would break me and i'm sure

00:48:50.440 it would break you and i hope would break practically everybody but he came through it he became even more

00:48:56.980 reclusive for this he had been reclusive before now he was super reclusive and he found his way through

00:49:03.880 it and he was with his second wife at this point a woman named wendy who he had met after the book was

00:49:10.360 published and they had a daughter and he believed that his daughter was kind of like the reincarnation or not

00:49:18.860 not the reincarnation but his daughter was the successor as it were to chris and it made him

00:49:25.900 i believe into a better father for it because he he knew where to better focus his energies this time

00:49:30.860 around did you experience any epiphanies about life when you finished your zen trip well i said earlier that

00:49:38.620 i had all these issues of you know being overwhelmed by my family of being a young dad with just wanting

00:49:45.700 some time for myself and i realized how much i did value my family my own family and that i did want

00:49:52.200 to come back to come back home and i did want to be with them and to spend my life with them and i mean

00:49:58.880 you can you can just say well the grass is always greener on the other side it's a little bit more than

00:50:03.520 that but i realized from having that time it's kind of like having the hang-up right the hang-up with

00:50:09.900 life we just need a break from things i said earlier that that i would go off for a ride on my

00:50:14.180 motorcycle just to to shake my head out this was kind of a month-long shaking out of my head

00:50:19.760 in order to realize where i best belonged which was at home why do you think the book still continues

00:50:27.220 to sell well do you think it's the philosophy is it the motorcycles is it the story about father and

00:50:32.280 son what do you think it is i think it's still i think it has a reputation now it's still got motorcycles

00:50:38.800 in there it's got a father son story and i think that the philosophy itself hasn't changed it at all

00:50:44.080 in fact it's probably even more relevant now than it was back then the philosophy is about

00:50:49.320 balancing technology with spirituality and we need more and more of that as we spend more time on our

00:50:57.860 phones and we spend more time with things that are even more complicated i mean i can't fix my

00:51:03.100 my other motorcycle now i don't know how to do that it's it's a very complicated bike but i can

00:51:09.080 still fix my old bike and this makes me a happier and better person for it i think and i think that

00:51:14.900 the lesson of zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance has never gone away that you need

00:51:19.400 to find that balance between the two and especially now as there's so many more draws on our attention

00:51:25.100 and so much easier to get distracted well mark this has been a great conversation where can people go to

00:51:30.820 learn more about the books we've discussed and your work if you want to know more about zen and

00:51:35.140 the art of motorcycle maintenance probably the best place to go is is is there's a website robert

00:51:40.860 persig.org that's the robert persig association and in fact they're even going to have a gathering

00:51:48.020 because as you mentioned right at the beginning this is the 50th anniversary this year of the publication

00:51:52.360 of the book and there's a gathering in minneapolis at the beginning of july i'm going to be there

00:51:56.940 there's uh they're trying to organize a ride that'll go all the way from minneapolis to

00:52:01.660 san francisco you can just go along for a day like i'll do just that's just the first day or you can

00:52:07.460 do a few days or or go all the way if you want to whatever you can go to to robertpersig.org and

00:52:13.780 find out more about that sort of thing there if you want to know more about me and my book i have my

00:52:19.220 own website i'm up in canada so it's a ca thing and it's mark richardson.ca well mark thanks so much

00:52:25.880 time it's been a pleasure hey brett the pleasure is mine thank you my guest here is mark richardson

00:52:31.220 he's the author of the book zen and now it's available on amazon.com you can find more

00:52:35.060 information about his work at his website mark richardson.ca also check out our show notes at

00:52:39.280 aom.is slash zen where you can find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic

00:52:43.520 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at

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00:53:36.220 you

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

A Guide to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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