Of Strength and Soul — Exploring the Philosophy of Physical Fitness
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Summary
When you re lifting weights, you might be thinking about setting a new PR or doing your curls for the girls. But throughout history, philosophers have thought about physical fitness on a deeper level and considered how exercise shapes not only the body but the mind and the soul. My guest today, Joe Lombardo, is a strength enthusiast who follows in this tradition and has explored the philosophy of bodily exercise in his writing.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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When you're lifting weights, you might be thinking about setting a new PR or doing your
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curls for the girls. But throughout history, philosophers have thought about physical fitness
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on a deeper level and considered how exercise shapes not only the body, but also the mind and
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the soul. My guest today, Joe Lombardo, is a strength enthusiast who follows in this tradition
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and has explored the philosophy of bodily exercise in his writing. Today on the show, Joe and
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I discuss several different ways the philosophy of strength has been expressed over time.
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We begin our conversation with how the ancient Greeks thought of physical training as a way
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to develop personal as well as social virtues, and why they thought you were an idiot, in
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their particular sense of the word, if you didn't take care of your body. We then discuss
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early Christianity's relationship with physical exercise and the development of the muscular
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Christianity movement in the 19th century. We end our conversation by looking at the philosophy
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of physicality espoused by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and what he had to say as to
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how strength training moves us out of the life of the night and towards the light of the
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sun. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Lombardo.
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So you are a writer and a strength enthusiast who explores the philosophy behind strength
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training, bodybuilding, and fitness in general. Tell us about your history and your relationship
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Sure. So I just turned 40. I grew up in North Jersey in a fairly pleasant suburb outside of
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New York City. Good childhood. I remember it being filled with biking everywhere, playing
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a lot of pickup games of basketball, football, never joined the team sport, never really was
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into it. But I just enjoyed kind of, you know, using my body in that way. And so in some ways,
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physical fitness was kind of instinctive. And I think that's something that's definitely
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there when you're a kid. You just sort of use your body and you can like wake up from a dead
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sleep and run three miles. I remember that in like high school and stuff. And definitely at 40,
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that's not the case at all. So I sort of began to realize even during the process that as I was
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getting older and I went to college, went to grad school throughout my 20s and 30s, that some of
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that was starting to kind of disappear. Some of the kind of physicality of my body, I was finding
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myself sitting a lot more, whether it's studying or working or anything like that. And I think the
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seriousness of adulthood, unfortunately, eclipsed the kind of the joys of childhood activity.
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And to the point where really it was in my early 30s, I suppose, where I just looked and felt like
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garbage, to be quite honest. I put on a lot of weight. I started, I was always a cigar guy,
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but I was smoking way too many cigars, definitely drinking a lot and just becoming very kind of
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irascible, not very pleasant to be around. I was doing my dissertation, just not a really good
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person or human being. And I think a lot of that was just due to the fact that I wasn't paying
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attention to kind of a long-term goal that I had for myself, both maybe spiritually as well as
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physically, if you will. And I remember being a PhD student living in New York and being around all
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sorts of guys who also really didn't care to lift or do anything. And they were very saturated with
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kind of the ironies of life, always making very self-deprecating comments or even deprecating
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comments towards others. You know, if there was a guy at the bar, it looked like he was jacked or
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something. Someone would make some sort of joke about it. You know, there was just sort of this
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bitter acid, acidity, if you will, I guess, towards people like that. And it just sort of felt very
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bizarre. And I don't know, it didn't really leave me with a very good feeling about kind of
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who I was becoming in that crowd, I suppose. And so at one point, you know, I was engaged to this
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woman. I'd broken it off. I was doing my research abroad. I was doing research in the Middle East.
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And I came back to Jersey, got a job, quit that, moved back with my parents and realized that I just
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was not doing very well. And I remember there were kind of two instances. One of my mom was
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pretty disappointed. I remember one day she sort of looked at me and she just had this kind of
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sigh of despair, like, what have I become, you know? And that kind of hurt, you know, when your
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parents see you like that. The second one, though, was I was working on third shift at UPS at a storage
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facility outside of New York. And I remember there was like this guy, he must have been in his like
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early 60s or so, big tall guy. I remember I like accidentally crashed the high-low into like all
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these sacks of dye and they just like went everywhere. It was like that Indian celebration with all the
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colors, except it was at work and it wasn't supposed to be like that. And so, you know,
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this guy kind of like, you know, palm to forehead says, oh my God, what an idiot. So he helps me like
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pick up these, I don't know, 30, 45 pound sacks of dye to reload onto the high-low. And I was just
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having a hard time lifting them. You know, here it was at the time I was, I think, 33. And this guy was
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just, you know, taking one sack after another, just walloping them right out back onto the high-low,
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like it was nothing. And he just kind of goes over me and he says, you know, how old are you?
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And I said, oh, I'm 33. It's like, you are one weak 33-year-old. You really got to go to the gym.
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I mean, this guy was unfiltered. And you know, honestly, that was probably, although I didn't
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like to hear it at the time, that was the best thing someone could have ever said to me
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in my state. Because that really stuck with me. And soon thereafter, I really did some thinking and,
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you know, I had this dissertation. I wanted to finish it. I did not want to be one of these grad
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students who, you know, had a dissertation for years and years. I wanted to get this thing over
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with. And I wanted to do it in like a semester, which is unheard of typically, although it can
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be done. But that's how desperate I wanted to be out of school and to really turn my life around.
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So after that, I started going back to the gym and probably like first time in, I don't know,
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maybe eight, seven, eight years. In doing so, I started to kind of, you know, cut down on some
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of the habits. I had no idea what nutrition was or dieting or anything like that. I just started
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lifting. And of course, I had no technique. I had no idea what I was doing. And so that's when I
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kind of started to, you know, go online and look up stuff in these different communities.
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And I very quickly realized that the people that were into stuff like bodybuilding or powerlifting
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were, they just seemed to be like, I had this almost like saccharine sense of happiness,
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which I found so irritating at the time. They almost seemed too happy and positive. And at the time,
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you know, like I said, I was sort of in this crowd where it was sort of the brooding
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intellectual type. And I just didn't like it. It didn't really speak to me. But at the
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same token, the more I was exposed to it, the more I kind of read up on their protocols
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and stuff, the more I realized, you know, I can kind of see why they have this sense
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of mirth. And so when I would go back to class or I'd go to some place where I was writing
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and maybe a friend was there, that sense of excitement just wasn't echoed, I suppose.
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You know, it's kind of like you pick up a new hobby and you're excited about it, but your
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friend's like, okay, cool, man. Like, that's great. You know, they don't really share
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the same excitement. That was kind of like with me and lifting. But it felt like it was
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more than a hobby. It felt as if I was transformed with my life. And I think a lot of guys feel
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that way when they start seriously lifting. They feel like they're making this, they're
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on this precipice of change in their selves. And I remember one point, you know, I was
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picking up some papers in my department in the city and this one friend, young woman, you
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know, saw me and she says, oh, you know, I heard you start working out. And she kind of
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rolled her eyes and she said something to the effect of, oh, that's so hyper-masculine.
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And, you know, it just, at the time, I mean, at the time I was annoyed, but I sort of laugh
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now because it's such a silly term. I mean, who wouldn't want to be more masculine than
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they are? But at the time it was seen as kind of a derisive remark. And I thought, this
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is, you know, I realized I was sort of coming to the point where these weren't really my
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people. And I really wanted to unmoor myself from that particular coast of thought and
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to really start to explore this other side. Even if I didn't necessarily jive with the
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kind of happy-go-lucky sort of attitude of the online bodybuilder community, I felt like
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it was a lot better than being miserable and being this kind of, you know, arrogant intellectual
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Okay. So this experience you've had, you started feeling better, not just physically, but also,
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you can say, spiritually, emotionally. That caused you to start exploring, like, what's
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going on there? Maybe philosophy can help me explain, like, why I feel better in my soul
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Yeah. You know, it's interesting. There's a quote I remember reading a while ago by Emerson.
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It goes to the effect of, like, God offers to everyone his choice between truth and repose.
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Take what you please. You can never have both. And so I began to kind of think, well, that's
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interesting. You know, when I was kind of reading and writing and studying and all that stuff,
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right, you always want to get to the truth of things. And that was a very active sense
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of exploration. It gave me a lot of pleasure. It still does. But at the same token, isn't
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that physical fitness, right? Isn't that also in some ways tending towards something that
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we could consider as, you know, the truth of the body or somatic truth, if you want to
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be like, I don't know, fancy about it. And the more I kind of looked into it, I saw sort
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of two camps at play. One was the kind of, you know, antibody body camp within academia.
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So these are people that are interested in, you know, the body, calling it stuff like
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the meat, for example, is a term sometimes they use in academia instead of the body,
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which is, again, kind of weird and derogatory. And they just see the body as something that's
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just there. And, you know, we can change it as we please. And we're always kind of reinventing
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ourselves. And it just seemed to me very banal. You know, it was also a discussion mostly
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revolved around the sexualization of the body. It didn't really have much to do with the
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active body, which was what I was interested in. On the other hand, the place where I felt
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as though the body was being spoken of in terms that I can understand was Greek philosophy.
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What's sort of interesting about the Greeks, and in particular, you know, Plato and Socrates
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and folks of that nature, Aristotle, of course, is that they never really wrote long treaties
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the way philosophers typically do on a certain subject. I mean, if you read the Socratic
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dialogues, most of the time it's about what is the law, what is it to be brave, or what
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is courage? You know, what is the truth, you know, or what is the best form of government
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like the republic and so on. But there's only snippets or glances of what physical activity
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is and the importance of it. So it's interesting, you read about it, you know, Pythagoras, for example,
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was a trained boxer. Socrates was someone who trained every day. He was also a military veteran.
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You know, Plato's Academy was not just a bunch of guys in togas reading books or scrolls, maybe.
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They were actively engaging in wrestling and sports, sprinting, throwing javelin, you know,
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Of the writing that we do have from Greek philosophers on fitness, what were some of their underlying
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ideas? I mean, let's take Socrates. For him, what role did fitness or training play
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in living a virtuous life? Yeah. So Socrates was, again, he didn't write a whole lot about
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it. There are snippets in The Republic. Xenophon's memorabilia probably is where he talks about it a
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little bit more. Although, again, that was more of a secondary source from his student, Xenophon.
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But really, it was, physical fitness sort of boils down to an ethical imperative or an ethical
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problem. To not train your body, to not purposefully exercise it with a goal of getting stronger or to
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even just look better is, you know, not just a problem where it is sort of an immoral problem.
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It's actually, in some ways, Socrates is very blunt about it. It's to be an idiot.
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The term idiot, of course, in English is, you know, people immediately bristle at that because
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it just basically means you're a moron. But actually, in the Greek context, idiocy is very
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particular to a definition of being excessively interested in your individuality. And so people
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who are idiots are people who are not interested in helping others. They're not interested in being
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kind of good citizens. They're not interested in helping their neighbor. They're strictly concerned
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within the parameters and confines of their immediate pleasure. That's what an idiot is. And
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everybody has these tendencies. I mean, an idiot can be the person who, you know, sits on the couch
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all day, whatever, eating chips and watching, you know, videos. An idiot also could be, you know,
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a person who moves out into the woods and decides to say, you know, to hell with society. I mean,
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these are both categories of idiots. So the body physical training is to not make yourself into an idiot
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for others, is to be useful towards others. And that's kind of where physical fitness tends towards
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virtue or wisdom or knowledge. Now, that said, in the final Socratic dialogue in Phaedo, for example,
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you know, Socrates is about to, you know, drink his own death, basically exhorts the body, chastises,
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saying, oh, you know, the body is nothing but the prison house of the soul. You know, the flesh is
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something that, you know, guides the soul by the nose, dragging around, you know, into, you know,
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overly sexual activities or into sloveliness or gluttony or excessive predilection towards
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luxurious living. But if you really do look at the entire corpus of works, no pun intended,
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you do start to see a much richer detail and relationship between the body and soul in the
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Greeks, where the soul is obviously the more important one, but the body is expressive of the
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soul. I mean, it's to be kind of not very politically correct. It's like when we see
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someone who's obese, and I speak as someone who was obese, by the way, unfortunately, the first
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thing in our minds is, oh, that poor guy, you know, there must be something wrong. I mean, that's
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basically what it is, because it's an expression of the soul. So that's, for Socrates, that's kind of
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what that, why physical training is so important within his line of thought.
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Okay, so just to unpack that, so there is a personal element to physical fitness, how it can
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help you achieve personal virtue, and then there's a social element. And to unpack that first part,
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how fitness or physical training can help you develop personal virtue, you talk about in the
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memorabilia, so this is written by Xenophon, he said this about physical fitness, I'm going to quote it,
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when you aren't physically fit, this is what Socrates says happens, he says,
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who does not know that even here, many greatly falter because their body is not healthy.
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And he says, and forgetfulness, dispiritedness, peevishness, and madness frequently attack the
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thought of many due to the bad condition of their body. And it sounds like you experienced that when
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you were, you know, a grad student, you felt that peevishness, dispiritedness, and that changed once
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you started physically training the body. Yeah, the body is not really meant to be a subject of ironic
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mockery or observation. The body really is meant to be something that we train, that we condition,
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that we discipline. In academia, I think, writ large, I mean, of course, yeah, sure, there's going
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to be the physicist out there who's a PhD student who's like, Jack, okay, I'm not talking about that
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guy. I'm talking about your kind of run-of-the-mill, maybe a little socially awkward PhD student,
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which was me, maybe I still am, that, you know, doesn't really feel very confident in the flesh.
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And of course, it's not just a body problem, it's a mind problem. I mean, I think of like Jay Cutler,
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the, I think he's four or five times, Mr. Olympia bodybuilder. And he said, you know,
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people always said to him, it's like, oh, wow, look at this body. He says, you know,
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the problem for me wasn't the body per se, it started with the mind. I had to train my mind in
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order to train the body. And I think that that really speaks by and large to cultivating a sense of
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personal ethic or personal virtue there, is that you want to, you could be very intellectually
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disciplined, for example, you could be, you know, very smart at, you know, calculating certain
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theorems, reading over certain methodologies, whatever discipline you happen to be practicing.
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But at the same token, shouldn't that discipline extend into your very mortal being? Like what allows
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you to be on planet Earth in this moment is your body. I mean, Martin Heidegger, infamous,
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I would say probably philosopher, German philosopher of 20th century, you know, once said, you know,
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we don't have bodies, we are bodily. And I think that that's kind of the way to look at it is that
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we exist in this body. We're not just, as one of my friends once said, we're not a brain driving the
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meat robot. You know, we're the entire sum of our being there operating. So I think the discipline that
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we lack for our bodies is obviously going to be a certain lack of discipline that we cultivate in
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our souls or our, you know, intellectual capabilities, I would say.
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I want to quote some more because you have some essays where you quote from Xenophon that I think
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Talking about this idea of how exercise and physical health can help you attain personal
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For those who maintain their bodies well are both healthy and strong. And many due to this are saved
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in a seemly manner in the contest of war and escape all the terrible things. Many bring aid to their
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friends and do good deeds for their fatherland. And due to this are deemed worthy of gratitude,
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acquire a great reputation, and obtain most noble honors. And due to these, live the rest of their
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life in a more pleasant and more noble manner and leave their children with more noble resources for
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life. So exercise is nobility. It's how you gain nobility.
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I agree. I mean, it comes down to an extension of, you know, the coward is the one who dies a thousand
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deaths. I think lack of training, lack of that initiative echoes.
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Yeah. I love that. And then also, you know, the opposite of that, if you don't keep your body
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in good shape, there's this famous quote, I'm sure people have, it gets posted on Instagram and
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the internet a lot by Socrates. He says this, it is also shameful to do to neglect, to grow old before
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seeing oneself in the most beautiful and strongest bodily state one might attain. So I think it's
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interesting, this idea that it's noble to want your body to look beautiful. That was a very Greek
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ideal. And we kind of lost that today. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the sort of Western
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mentality or Western civilization is something that's not necessarily strictly in the geographic
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parameters of Greece or Rome or Europe or the United States. I mean, I think one of the greatest
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exponents on what I would imagine is probably the best philosophy track on the active bodies by a
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Japanese man and author, his pen name was Yukio Mishima. He was the person who I think in The
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Sun and Steel, this sort of long essay short book, depending upon what your definition of either, I
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suppose, is, was thoroughly Western and Greek in his conception of the body in spite of being from
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East Asia. And I think the Greeks really spoke to this very kind of biologically rooted instinct,
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at least in men, I can't speak to women, but at least in men to kind of excel in their bodies, to be
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dynamic in their flesh, and, you know, to look good, regardless of their abilities or how they happen to
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have been born. I think that that instinct is there for each of us. And it's something that the Greeks were
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maybe a little bit more successful than others that I'm sort of unpacking and exploring.
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And Socrates also talked about as you train physically, it's going to help develop this more, I would say,
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call them abstract virtues, conscientiousness, fortitude, discipline, moderation. By doing the
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physical act, it allows you to enact these sort of abstract virtues that can play out in other parts
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of our lives. Yeah. One article that I had written last year or so was on this man, Ryan Belker,
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probably still alive, I imagine he's not that old, but he was a sort of elite level power lifter from
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Michigan. I can't quite recall where. But anyway, there's an interesting story that was picked up in the
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news maybe about five or six years ago. And that was around the time I started seriously training. And, you
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know, this guy's going to pick up his kids. It's, you know, late afternoon, it's Valentine's Day, it's
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probably utterly freezing in Michigan at that point, I have no idea. And he passes by a car accident, I guess
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there's a Cherokee that flipped over and there's another car. And the man who had been in the
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flipped over Cherokee was sort of pinned between a stop sign and the car itself. And, you know, like
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everybody, we have this sort of pedestrian instinct to, you know, say, hey, look, I'm going to keep
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moving on. You know, it's kind of like the parable of the Good Samaritan, you know, before the
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Samaritan, all these other folks, even the Holy Ones, just walked on by. Belker didn't, he stopped and
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he realized the man's position. And, you know, he managed to effectively partially deadlift
00:21:00.680
a two or three ton vehicle off of this man to basically save his life. Now, of course, that's
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an extreme example of strength that, you know, fractions and fractions upon a percentage of a
00:21:13.860
population even possess. But I think that there's something ethical and very Greek, quote unquote,
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about that is to use the body and the service to others to build that virtue, to express it, to not
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be an idiot, basically, in your flesh. I think Belker exemplifies that almost perfectly.
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Yeah. And so this goes to this idea that physical fitness allows you to develop those social
00:21:35.880
virtues that were vitally important to Greek life. You talk about to be an idiot in Greek life was to
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be a very private person. And for the Greeks, the polis was the main social, that's how you organize
00:21:49.140
yourself. And, you know, Aristotle talked about the only way you can actually develop yourself fully
00:21:52.780
as a human being, is to be actively engaged in polis life. And so Socrates says, in order to be
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a useful, active participant in polis life, which is vital to our very existence as a Greek,
00:22:06.160
you had to be physically fit. Yeah. It's something that nobody today wants to hear.
00:22:10.420
Yeah. I mean, we don't, we talk about, when we talk about fitness, we think about it just for
00:22:14.080
ourselves. You never hear people think, well, I'm being physically fit so I can be a better
00:22:18.620
citizen of the country. Sure. And I mean, I think everybody in modern society, and maybe this is
00:22:24.580
more of a commentary about modern secular society than anything else, but you know, it's, it's sex
00:22:29.640
appeal. First of all, we want to look good, attract and meet, you know, maybe there's a health aspect
00:22:34.020
too, but I think first and foremost, a lot of guys want to live because, Hey, I want to look good for
00:22:37.480
girls, you know, and that's fine. We all start from there. I'm not necessarily against that, but I think
00:22:42.040
that there are higher iterations of thought the more and more you get into it. And I think that there is an
00:22:47.200
interesting cleavage in sort of between modern fitness or secular fitness where it is about
00:22:52.020
discipline, but it's a very kind of warped discipline of being antisocial. Oh, you know,
00:22:56.700
sorry, I can't help you today. I'm training or I have to get to bed at eight o'clock and I wake up
00:23:00.320
and six and I go to work and I train and I don't really care about my family and I don't really care
00:23:03.840
much else. Oh, maybe I should, you know, look into this drug now, this enhancement, you know, that's
00:23:09.300
kind of a form of sort of decadence that I, that I think is not particularly healthy and doesn't
00:23:14.100
really breed the kind of virtue that I think the classical Greek or even for that matter,
00:23:19.140
sort of theological Christian virtue would have the body prepared for.
00:23:26.920
Yeah. I think there have been periods in at least American culture where this idea of physical
00:23:32.540
fitness was seen as part of being a good citizen, you know, back in the sixties, you know, JFK,
00:23:37.700
that whole, we got to get fit, you know, the soft American. And usually that happens during times of
00:23:43.200
war where there's like this idea, okay, we're going to, we might have to go to war against
00:23:46.040
the Soviets. So we need to have a citizenry that's able to do that. And then you see that
00:23:50.920
kind of, you know, marshalling of we're going to get fit. We've had, we talked about on the podcast,
00:23:55.180
the La Sierra high school, a physical education program in the sixties was a response to that call
00:24:01.580
for physical fitness as to be better citizens, but typically it fizzles out and we just go back to
00:24:06.580
the, just focusing on the self. So the Greeks, a physical fitness was a way you can develop your
00:24:11.140
personal virtue, your social virtue, the mind and body were not separated. The Greeks thought they
00:24:17.240
were connected, you know, healthy mind and healthy body. What about the Romans? Did the Romans have
00:24:22.440
a philosophy of physical fitness? The Romans, I think, well, it's interesting. I think when you
00:24:28.500
talk to people who are, and I'm not an expert in like Greek philosophy or something, but I think when
00:24:32.620
you talk to people who are, they kind of, the Romans are sort of like the, at the bottom of the
00:24:36.640
ladder there, the Romans didn't have, I think a real complex understanding of just even an approach
00:24:42.700
to philosophy relative to the Greeks. And I say that by the way, it's like someone who's of Italian
00:24:46.520
descent. So I hate to say it, but the Greeks were far superior than, than Romans were. For them,
00:24:52.600
physical fitness was military training. That's what it was tended towards. Yes, of course, there were
00:24:57.860
some that did become fascinated with, you know, the kind of Grecian ideal of aesthetics and beauty and
00:25:03.080
all that stuff. And they were often kind of taunted or made fun of in Roman society. Romans saw the
00:25:07.740
Greek understanding of fitness as effeminate and Romans thought it was more proper to war, to become
00:25:14.520
proficient in javelin throwing and sword play and that kind of thing. I think in some ways it's
00:25:19.740
unfortunate because I think really the Greeks stand out amongst really all civilizations as being
00:25:24.740
those who tended to take play and sports seriously. I mean, think of the Olympic games,
00:25:30.220
the Olympic games, united the entire Hellenic world. In fact, they induced peace treaties and
00:25:35.200
ceasefires. If they knew that one warring sitting state had athletes from another come over, they
00:25:39.760
would stop battle. They would ceasefire. They would let them pass the enemies. Athletes pass through
00:25:45.080
unharmed. So it's a real interesting ancient civilization that way, where I think you see it in
00:25:50.680
probably most other civilizations, maybe East Asian, Aztec, where yeah, there was always sports and
00:25:56.260
games, but the Greeks just, or Romans for that matter, but the Greeks just had a much more intense
00:26:01.160
philosophical explication of that. So I, for me, the Romans never really impressed me. I know that
00:26:07.180
there are probably a lot of Ryan Holiday fans out there. I just can't get into them. I think also
00:26:11.460
too, because I tend to get my sense of ethics and purpose and stuff. I tend to see that more in my
00:26:17.500
Christian faith, I guess. So for me, I'm not interested so much in what the Stoics felt is how we should
00:26:23.760
approach life in so much as I feel I should be doing sort of God's will for my life and what
00:26:29.080
he wants me to do. But again, I'm sure there are people who are Christians who love the Stoics and
00:26:33.220
I'm happy to stand corrected, but I tend to see them as a little bit distant from my interests,
00:26:39.020
I suppose. The Stoics would use fitness analogies to explain philosophy. You know, they talk about you
00:26:45.180
have to be like a wrestler or a runner training. You have to take that same approach to your own
00:26:50.540
philosophical development and training the soul. But yeah, they don't say too much about
00:26:55.080
exercise itself. And I like that idea that you talked about how the Greeks injected this idea of
00:26:59.380
play into their fitness or their exercise. And Edith Hamilton wrote a really good book about the
00:27:05.740
Greeks where she captures this, I think, really beautifully. It's just, she describes a culture
00:27:10.140
that's vital. It's effervescent. It's fun, but also serious at the same time. It's just alive.
00:27:16.360
For sure. Yeah. No, there's something unique about, I think, the Greek experience and their
00:27:22.860
natural curiosity that is really unparalleled. They didn't look around the world and just adapt
00:27:28.920
themselves to it. I think they tried to really see the world as a means to propel themselves
00:27:34.280
to become better and more virtuous. So I think that's fairly unique.
00:27:39.720
We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:27:46.360
And now back to the show. So in a couple of essays, you've talked about how you return to your
00:27:52.260
Catholic faith and you mentioned how you've been thinking about fitness and faith together.
00:27:57.940
Let's talk about that. Like what was the early church's view on physical fitness and taking care
00:28:03.680
of the body? Yeah, pretty negative. Unfortunately, I will have to say that when the Greeks were becoming
00:28:12.860
Christianized under the Byzantines, one of the things that I think was maybe Theodosius II,
00:28:18.680
someone maybe could verify that, he basically had outlawed and banned the Olympic Games because it
00:28:23.680
was a form of pagan worship. And it was, it had pagan rituals to it. So anybody kind of associated with
00:28:29.460
the Olympic Games or training and stuff like that, also like, even though, you know, Paul writes,
00:28:33.520
for example, the Testament about, you know, faith is like running a race and, you know, talks about the
00:28:38.640
body as the temple of the Holy Spirit, all these things. Obviously, they knew of athleticism in
00:28:43.240
similar ways that the Stoics were quoting about, you know, comparing training to training the soul.
00:28:48.520
There was some of that a little bit to a less extent, certainly in the New Testament, but the
00:28:52.980
early church was not really much of a fan of that, to my disappointment, I think, initially. Maybe
00:28:59.300
there were some exceptions. Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of Paul, I know, you know, Paul, before he was Paul,
00:29:05.100
he was Saul and he was a Roman citizen and he was trained in Roman philosophy. So, I mean,
00:29:09.980
he knew Stoicism and I'm sure he took these Stoic lessons he took and these analogies of
00:29:14.140
physical fitness and training the soul and brought that into his epistles. Another thing that was going
00:29:18.840
on too with early Christianity, highly influenced by Platonism, particularly Augustine. So this idea
00:29:25.140
that, you know, the soul is the most important thing, the body, not so much. And that probably got
00:29:30.400
mixed into that as well. I think too, what's important though, is that very earlier on,
00:29:35.740
and even today, some would say, you know, the Gnostic tendencies were very strong in the ancient
00:29:42.040
world. These were, this was one of the first heresies in the first century that the early
00:29:46.420
church had to sort of combat. I'm basically thinking that the material world was inherently
00:29:50.420
sinful. The flesh was kind of a sinful punishment. It's all about kind of liberating the soul from the
00:29:55.480
flesh. And so the church did have to very strongly rebuke this line of thinking that was coming out
00:30:01.340
of Egypt at the time. And so they had to kind of posit the bodies. You know, the, you know,
00:30:06.660
to be, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, to be is good. To have a body is great. We have to sanctify the body.
00:30:13.020
Of course, we have to do things with it. We don't just have a body and then that's it. There are things
00:30:17.700
that Christians, you know, have to do with their body. And of course, a lot of it tends to be,
00:30:21.800
you know, not just sort of, you know, sort of ritualism, but also, you know, sexual purity and
00:30:25.120
things of that nature. But I think as an extension of that, certainly physical fitness being helpful,
00:30:31.400
being, you know, you know, carrying one's cross, for example, if you will, all these kinds of like
00:30:36.400
physical and spiritual tasks. I think that you can easily draw from that a whole corpus of ideas
00:30:42.820
that are pretty interesting to go down. So yeah, I mean, Christ was in his earthly ministry, you know,
00:30:47.400
saying, hey, you got to start lifting here, nor were the apostles per se. But I,
00:30:51.500
I do think at the same token that a lot of the importance of the body that the Christians really
00:30:56.080
used and fought against the Gnostics, not just in Egypt, but also against the Albigensians in the,
00:31:01.960
I think the 13th century in France, the Waldensians in Switzerland. I mean, there were a lot of kind of
00:31:06.960
heretical movements that cropped up that did kind of put the body or position the body as this just
00:31:13.300
sinful carcass that we have and we're sort of carrying around. From a Catholic point of view,
00:31:18.320
even the kind of the development of the rosary, for example, by St. Dominic, was supposed to remind
00:31:24.220
people of Christ's incarnate earthly ministry, you know, the crucifixion, the kind of corporeal sense
00:31:31.080
that he was here and is, you know, on earth doing these things, this is earthly ministry. Those were
00:31:36.360
reminders and they were purposely used in some ways to counter the Gnostic effects and heretical
00:31:42.100
viewpoints that were spreading in Bulgaria, Egypt, and France and parts of Switzerland at the time
00:31:48.280
too. So I think that there's a lot that Christianity says of the body. It's just like, you know, it's
00:31:52.700
just not in the sense of Socrates saying, hey, bro, maybe it's time to live, you know?
00:31:56.280
Yeah. You know, Christianity, it's, it's a incarnate religion. So yeah, God comes, takes on a physical
00:32:00.260
body. He dies, takes up his body again, and it glorifies it, resurrects and promises disciples,
00:32:06.440
the same will happen to you. Yeah. Okay. So for, you know, early Christianity, physical fitness
00:32:10.960
exercise, kind of like, well, body's not, you know, body's good and bad. We have to use it for
00:32:15.440
good purposes, but you don't need to spend any time training it specifically. When do you see that
00:32:21.480
change in Christianity? So I can't speak to like a long breadth of history. I will say that I think
00:32:30.640
one of the more noteworthy periods that some folks know, Brett, I'm sure you're aware of too,
00:32:35.540
is this whole muscular Christian movement that was sort of emerging in the latter half of the
00:32:40.240
19th century, particularly in the Anglophonic world in England. So, you know, at that point,
00:32:45.320
you're kind of at the sort of high golden arc of industrialization. Anglicans in England were
00:32:50.720
noticing that the men populating their pews were fairly sallow, looking kind of exhausted,
00:32:56.460
just didn't seem very virile, if you will. And so there was this big discussion within kind of
00:33:01.160
like high church Anglicanism about, well, like, what do we do about this? Like men are kind of
00:33:05.900
losing the very, you know, physical aspects or attributes that it is to be a man. And so there's
00:33:11.820
a lot of heady debate, I'd say mostly amongst the Protestant world. Interestingly enough, the kind of
00:33:17.240
Catholic iteration comes from a man, St. John Henry Newman, who is Anglican, he converts to Catholicism,
00:33:22.440
and he wrote a book on university and education. And one of the things he does is he picks up on these
00:33:28.260
debates. And he says, you know, part of a proper education is to have physical fitness and the kind
00:33:33.880
of spiritual importance of that. So the 19th century was a time of kind of spiritual and religious
00:33:40.240
zeal. Of course, that's when you have a Cupertine who starts to resurrect. In his idea, the Olympic
00:33:45.620
Games, you start to have all these like, you know, old timey health clubs and strongman stuff. You know,
00:33:50.660
Eugene Sando is around at the time, all these kinds of, in some ways, critiques of the effects of
00:33:57.540
industrialization on man's spirit and body. I think fitness is there, or that industry comes
00:34:03.440
as sort of an answer to that. And also to, you know, make a buck off of it too, for that, you know,
00:34:07.640
no doubt. Yeah, so we did a whole sort of mini book about the muscular Christianity movement. It's a
00:34:14.060
really fascinating period. So yeah, you said late 19th century, it reached America, and it kind of went
00:34:19.340
on to the early 20th century. But a lot of things going on, a lot of different cultural currents just
00:34:24.300
crisscrossing. And so yeah, muscular Christianity movement, that's what gave rise to the YMCA,
00:34:30.200
the Young Men's Christian Association. What was developed in the YMCA? Basketball was developed
00:34:34.600
there. Volleyball was developed there. You see churches starting church leagues, not just Protestant
00:34:40.300
churches, but Catholic churches. You all see this in Judaism. A lot of synagogues were starting
00:34:45.240
basketball leagues. Boxing gyms would be at these places. And they were seen as a way not only to
00:34:50.460
inject some more virility in the church, but it was like a missionary arm of the church. It's how
00:34:55.740
you could get young urban men who might've been, you know, committing crime. Well, let's get them
00:35:02.400
to church boxing and maybe they'll come to the pew as well. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's an
00:35:08.800
incredible part of history. Even, I think there was one Canadian Presbyterian missionary out in the
00:35:14.880
Prairie area of Canada. And as he was going about, he'd see these prairie towns and these guys were,
00:35:20.020
you know, hard drinking, that kind of stuff, that lifestyle. And it really started to kind of
00:35:24.000
develop an athletic program for them. You know, it wasn't anything complicated, but it was similar
00:35:29.040
to what you were saying. It was echoing the fact of, hey, let's, you know, get you off the street,
00:35:32.420
get you off the bottle. Let's do this and closely tie it to a sense of faith. Not just like, hey,
00:35:37.860
lift and look good, but this is important. Yeah. You were supposed to exercise so you could be a
00:35:42.240
better servant in the kingdom of God. Right. And you started seeing these books come out. There's
00:35:46.940
like this one book that I read, The Manliness of Christ, written in 1903. And it just talked about
00:35:51.840
how, you know, Jesus was actually this really manly, manly dude. He wasn't this sort of effeminate
00:35:56.280
kind of wavy looking guy you see in stained glass. He was actually really manly. And they'd look at the
00:36:01.020
Bible and the New Testament stories and say, look how Jesus, he fasted for 40 days and then was able
00:36:05.780
to battle the devil. And then he was able to just walk all over Judea and, you know, deal with
00:36:11.420
thousands of people and healing them. And he had the stamina to do that. And so we need to be like
00:36:16.160
that. And in order to do that, we have to exercise so that we can go forth and spread the gospel.
00:36:20.620
And then like you brought in the progressive movement into this in the social gospel, where
00:36:25.180
we had to not only develop ourselves spiritually, but the goal was to develop. It was to go out and
00:36:30.880
change the world, like bring the kingdom of God here on earth through missionary work,
00:36:34.600
through eliminating poverty, increasing literacy, and improving health. And it sought not only to
00:36:41.200
improve the health of people in society in general, there was also this idea that you as an individual
00:36:48.620
needed to be healthy in order to do all this good work.
00:36:54.460
Yeah. Okay. So I want to move on. You mentioned this guy, Yukio Mishima. You mentioned him earlier.
00:36:59.840
You've written some essays about him. This is a controversial figure, but if you're in the bodybuilding
00:37:04.400
world, you'll probably come around to some Mishima quote, or you're going to see some guy be like,
00:37:10.760
Sun and Steel. He wrote this treatise called Sun and Steel, and he explores his own journey into
00:37:16.420
bodybuilding. Give us some background on Yukio Mishima.
00:37:20.240
Sure, sure. So Mishima was a very interesting guy. He was in some ways born a little bit too young to
00:37:28.820
participate fully in World War II as a Japanese. And that's something that I don't think he ever really
00:37:34.000
let himself. He didn't really forgive himself for that. I think he wanted to fight. Instead,
00:37:39.360
he was a student. I think he was working at some sort of munitions factory in Japan and basically
00:37:44.680
saw his country's defeat. I think for him, one of the turning points was when he noticed that on the
00:37:52.440
day of defeat, it was a very sunny day. It happened to be beautiful outside. And in some ways, he became
00:37:58.460
kind of angry at that because he felt like, well, you know, how cruel it is, you know, the empire's
00:38:02.180
fallen and yet it's so beautiful out. And I think that really stuck with him, this theme of dark and
00:38:07.060
light, the nighttime and the daytime. These are, you know, certain themes that are very prevalent
00:38:13.160
in his book, The Sun and Steel. Mishima was a complicated guy. He was a samurai enthusiast,
00:38:21.160
although I think that's kind of putting in a very hobby-like way. I think he was in fact a very
00:38:25.100
brilliant supporter of Japanese imperialism and the kind of pre-Megi modernization. A lot of his
00:38:31.600
books often touched upon kind of mocking the ways that Japanese would attempt to mimic the West or
00:38:36.360
bring Western traditions in. So he really held close to his heart the kind of samurai tradition.
00:38:42.000
And I guess he at one point maybe claimed some sort of lineage to them. I'm not particularly certain
00:38:47.120
if that is true or not, if he's just saying that. He was a man of pretty small stature. I think he
00:38:52.400
might've been like five foot or five one and he was very thin. And so he was also sort of mocked for
00:38:58.260
being so small. And so I think there was a lot, there was sort of building up into his interest in
00:39:05.280
lifting and weights. I don't think it was a pure intellectual adventure. I think it was also
00:39:10.960
a confidence building exercise, but he was first and foremost a writer and poet. He was also
00:39:16.900
gay. He was someone who certainly struggled, I think, with that in some of his books that becomes
00:39:22.120
evident. And all this kind of transpires for him, maybe in his thirties or so, probably around the
00:39:29.000
same time I started lifting and maybe a lot of people do often, when he realized that he sort of
00:39:33.540
become a man of the night. He was up late night reading, burning the midnight oil. This is all things
00:39:39.960
that he documents in the sun and steel. And, you know, for me, I think to be self-referential,
00:39:47.520
I suppose, I saw a lot of that when I was doing my PhD. It's just a lot of burning the midnight oil,
00:39:53.920
not really getting good sleep up until three. I'm writing, you know, drinking coffee, maybe having a
00:39:59.060
cigarette or a cigar or whatever have you. And, you know, not really wanting to go into, you know,
00:40:04.860
the daytime, really to more enjoy the night and to kind of find a lot of intellectual productive
00:40:09.360
activities then. So I think for him, he was very much a creature of the night there. Eventually, I think
00:40:16.220
he comes to a point where he wonders to himself in the essay, you know, why is it that with words
00:40:21.700
they can soar to the greatest heights? And yet here my body still remains, as it were, you know,
00:40:26.920
in a room, not going anywhere. And I think he saw this sort of dissonance between, you know,
00:40:32.360
poetic flourish or metaphorical flourish against that of his body, which was just this very skinny
00:40:38.660
thing. And I think he wanted to make that commensurate. I think he wanted to kind of
00:40:42.880
rebalance himself in that way. So for him, he was already very fluent, obviously, in writing prose,
00:40:50.560
but he was not very fluent in what he would call learning the language of the flesh. And that is to train
00:40:55.860
the body with steel or what, obviously, in America, we would call the iron.
00:40:59.600
So there's a lot of things there. So just to talk about, he was a good writer. He was actually
00:41:03.360
considered for the Nobel Prize in literature, I think, five times for some of the stuff he was.
00:41:07.920
He was a very good writer. This idea of the nocturnal life, I mean, I think that perfectly
00:41:12.340
describes this, like, it was like the life of the mind. He talks about this, like, I was just inside
00:41:15.920
my head. And it sounds like when you were a grad student, you were there and, like, your other
00:41:20.740
grad students were just, like, inside their heads. And that's as far as it went. Like you said,
00:41:25.300
you could do these amazing lofty things with words. But then when you actually looked at your
00:41:29.900
lived experience, it was like, ah, something's not matching here. Something's off.
00:41:36.240
Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think for Mishima, there was something very noble. As I mentioned
00:41:44.500
before, he was a very, he's very thoroughly Greek thinker when it came to the body. And a lot of his
00:41:48.780
books, which are fantastic, I think he actually might be my favorite author, at least close to it.
00:41:53.520
Just incredible writer, or he's just got very good translators. It could be both.
00:41:58.040
But he talks a lot about the Greek understanding of the body. He has an incredible grasp on Western
00:42:04.440
literature and culture. He's East Asian, obviously, but he doesn't really have a lot of reference to
00:42:08.840
what Buddhism or Eastern thought might say to it. In fact, he even characterizes learning the language
00:42:16.140
of the flesh as almost kind of revivifying a dead language like ancient Greek or Latin.
00:42:21.920
And he talks about sculpture. Of course, that's the eternal metaphor that every guy who lives uses,
00:42:27.060
you know, is to like be a self-sculptor, is to carve yourself out of the flesh that you're the fat
00:42:31.780
and all that stuff. So he has a very kind of interesting outlook. The sun is something that
00:42:37.940
at first presents itself kind of as an enemy. It's very merciless. The sun comes up. It doesn't
00:42:43.040
matter what happens or what is happening. It's still out. It's still a gorgeous day, whether it's
00:42:47.480
your country's defeat or whether you're just this kind of, you know, slovenly grad student or writer.
00:42:53.140
There's something that he wants to bear himself towards to kind of ascend to the heights. And I
00:42:57.900
think that that's kind of the metaphor of the sun. It reveals all. In one of my essays that I write
00:43:03.360
about it, there's something interesting about kind of fashion, even athletic fashion or athleisure,
00:43:07.940
they call it, where there's kind of a sleight of hand going on with some of these kind of trends.
00:43:12.760
For Mishima, it's like, yeah, like exposing your body, its muscles in the sunlight. People will see,
00:43:19.360
you know, the imperfections. They'll see the beauty of it, that which you've wrought from your training.
00:43:24.920
And I think that there's something incredibly invigorating about building your body and being able to
00:43:29.820
kind of look good. So I think that's kind of what he meant by learning the language of the flesh,
00:43:33.240
was to explore the threshold of his body through struggle, through pain, exactly how the Greeks
00:43:40.280
thought of it in their concept, like agon or what we get agony or agonistic, which of course is very
00:43:45.220
negative in an English language. But agon meant struggle. It meant something that you encounter
00:43:50.140
to reach a higher plane, to explore something else. And Mishima's concept of pain is thoroughly
00:43:59.180
All right. So pain is how you learn. It's like, it's a way to reveal who you are.
00:44:04.240
Yeah. Yeah. His idea of this language of the flesh, there's an intelligence inside of our bodies,
00:44:11.080
not just in our head. You talk about how this is similar to what Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke
00:44:16.280
You say I, and you are proud of this word. But greater than this, although you would not believe
00:44:22.120
it, is your body and its intelligence, which does not say I, but performs I.
00:44:27.720
Yeah. I mean, I think this goes back to a very banal truism that we all hear. It's, you know,
00:44:37.560
And then this idea that what Mishima found in the steel or pumping iron and building your muscles,
00:44:43.500
he had this to say about what it can do in kind of training or helping you learn the language of
00:44:50.340
Yeah. What an incredible quote. I mean, talk about the power of words right there.
00:45:20.320
Yeah. I think he's able to really leech a lot of what I think people who lift may not necessarily
00:45:28.320
approach as a clear thought, sometimes maybe peripheral. I think sometimes our sense of
00:45:34.480
talking with the body to go back before about, you know, the kind of online bodybuilding where
00:45:38.440
it just seems to be like a very kind of sugary sense of enthusiasm or optimism or sort of a pop
00:45:43.840
definition of discipline. I think these are our attempts, I think, to get close to what Mishima
00:45:49.180
so brilliantly puts, you know, in that quote about muscles and what they are and what they do,
00:45:55.020
the opposite of language, what the steel does for us. I think all these things are ways of all of our
00:46:00.020
kind of thoughts about the body approximate what I think Mishima puts so brilliantly. And I think
00:46:05.500
that's why he's probably the greatest exponent of a very Greek understanding of the body.
00:46:10.400
Yeah. And I think there is a language of the flesh. Like whenever you exercise, what I've noticed with
00:46:15.060
strength training is that you develop a bodily awareness. Like I know, I know what I'm getting
00:46:21.640
to failure. And a lot of people, they might think they're getting close to failure, but actually
00:46:26.060
they're not to failure because they haven't pushed beyond that initial feeling. But you can train,
00:46:29.780
you can learn, like listen to your body. It's like, okay, it might feel not great right now,
00:46:34.300
but you can actually do three, four or five more reps if you wanted to. You can't get that without
00:46:39.560
training. Yeah. Right. And pushing yourself beyond a self-perceived limitation. I mean,
00:46:45.300
I think that that's the hardest mental barrier because really for a lot of people, it's about
00:46:50.000
safety. You know, it's, um, if I get under the squat rack in this bar, you know, what happens if I
00:46:55.300
can't make the last lift? Let's say, you know, my, the pins aren't adjusted properly. There's no one to
00:46:59.460
spot me. I mean, you know, people immediately think of severe injury or death. And of course that does
00:47:05.220
happen. So I think kind of living on, on that, that edge of life, if you will, just in your garage
00:47:11.960
squatting is an experience that I think very few people will understand maybe short of obviously
00:47:17.880
serving in the military or being a cop or firefighter or something like that, or paramedic, I guess.
00:47:22.220
Yeah, no, there's, when I've, when I was really into powerlifting, I had post videos occasionally of me
00:47:27.220
squatting or something like a PR and people in the comments would ask like, what were you thinking
00:47:32.480
when you're doing that? And like, it's like the only thought that's going through my head is like,
00:47:35.720
don't die. That's, that's all I'm thinking. Don't die. Exactly. Exactly. But also, you know,
00:47:42.440
in that moment of perhaps avoidable pre-death, you are also much more conscious of all the muscles
00:47:48.480
you're using. Like you realize, oh wow, if I'm like, if I'm getting up out of the hole, for example,
00:47:51.940
if my core isn't tight, I'm not going to make it out. So I think this bodily awareness,
00:47:57.220
it expands. You begin to become more fluent, I think, in your body when you're in these situations,
00:48:03.640
which is why I do love powerlifting, even though I've kind of departed from it for
00:48:07.480
past a couple of years now. And Mishima, like the Greeks, he thought that the body,
00:48:12.880
like how the body looked, it also revealed what your mind or your spirit was like as well.
00:48:18.760
Well, yeah, for sure. For sure. And I think that whole beginning part of the essay where he's sort
00:48:25.460
of emerging out of this sort of intellectual cocoon of the night, if you will, I think that
00:48:30.100
that's just extremely apt, not just for, you know, a writer like him or a grad student like me, or was
00:48:36.080
a grad student, but really for anybody who just, you know, has that kind of profession where it's a lot
00:48:40.220
of sitting and thinking. I think a lot of people can identify that with that.
00:48:44.340
So Mishima, he was a Japanese romantic. He loved samurai culture. He was also a nationalist who
00:48:51.460
was extremely critical of the post-war materialism that he saw in Japan and also the democratic
00:48:58.120
government. And then after an unsuccessful coup, he attempted, well, he committed seppuku or, you know,
00:49:06.800
it's a harikari, right? Ritualistic suicide by disembowelment. And then they chop your head off
00:49:12.700
after that. And he was very famous for that death, but he thought a lot about death previous
00:49:17.620
to it. So what role did death play in his philosophy of the body?
00:49:22.540
It goes back to kind of this rejection of the idea of the body as not being an ironic or a properly
00:49:27.900
ironic subject object. There's something that Mishima kind of muses about, you know, it would be so
00:49:33.960
bizarre and strange to have this flabby body upon death. So I think as far as I understand it,
00:49:40.260
through his words, working out the body training was in some ways to prepare oneself for death. It
00:49:45.780
was to fight to the death. There's kind of this idea, I think in some Japanese literature, from what
00:49:51.240
I understand, of kind of like the heroic loser. You know, it's the samurai that fights to last breath
00:49:56.140
and then he dies, you know, by the sword of the enemy or something like that. There's that theme,
00:50:00.240
I think, that's fairly rife in certain literature in Japan, from what I understand. So I think he was
00:50:05.340
sort of tapping into that aspect. You know, it would just be kind of like weird or silly to have
00:50:10.200
like this like big fat guy and he's holding a sword trying to defend himself. Like, I think that
00:50:15.600
there's less of a romantic image versus a guy who's like, you know, jacked or something and he's, you
00:50:19.800
know, fighting to his last breath. I think that's kind of what he's getting there too. So to have a
00:50:24.520
trained body is to prepare oneself for the final fight for effectively to fight to the death.
00:50:29.760
Maybe Socrates would get that, right? Didn't Socrates say, or someone said like philosophy
00:50:34.380
is about preparing for death, preparing to die?
00:50:36.720
It is. And this is something that I think too, when you look at, you know, Mishima's writing here,
00:50:42.100
when you look at the Socratic ideas as well, something that Heidegger, Martin Heidegger talks
00:50:46.920
about in various areas of being in time is that we live in a society that avoids talking about death.
00:50:54.500
We live in a society that just assumes that death isn't there, that we're about full,
00:50:59.320
maximal enjoyment. And so what happens is that if we don't have this clear understanding that we
00:51:03.780
will die and that that's something that we should think about, life becomes whatever you want it to
00:51:09.260
become. It doesn't have really a purpose. It becomes very amorphous. And in some ways it becomes
00:51:13.980
very destructive, ironically. So I think for Mishima, having that clear aim of having a body to fight
00:51:21.140
and prepare for death gives him that resolve and discipline to then train, similar to how the Greeks or
00:51:28.660
even the Romans for that matter, to train, to be able to fight the enemy, to go towards death.
00:51:34.460
At one point, I kind of took a lot of these ideas so seriously, I ended up joining a fire and rescue
00:51:38.840
academy in Virginia because I wanted to really test my mettle. And I was probably the oldest guy in the
00:51:46.360
academy at the time. I didn't pass because I actually injured myself doing deadlifts, ironically.
00:51:51.420
But I did notice something, though, that in those kinds of paramilitary or somewhat martial
00:51:57.460
environments, PT or going through evolutions, these were things that, for the most part,
00:52:04.720
were not fun at all. They were extremely taxing on the body. They were exhausting. And it wasn't like
00:52:11.220
when I was training where I can just stop and I can get a glass of water or something like that.
00:52:15.260
You had to keep going on and on. And so oftentimes, I would think about Mishima, most of the time
00:52:20.660
thinking about God because I wanted to just get through the day. But there was something about
00:52:24.680
that martialness of the body that did kind of help push me through until I eventually did get an
00:52:30.540
injury. So I often wonder what that's like for other folks who went through those academies or in
00:52:35.880
the military and what their perspective is. And I think it mirrors closely to what Mishima kind of goes
00:52:40.540
about. So how has looking at exercise through a theological, philosophical lens, how has it
00:52:47.860
changed how you approach your own training? Very, very simply. It's just that the limits that I think
00:52:53.600
I have aren't really limits. They're kind of, you know, reprieve on climbing the mountain. It's to stop
00:53:00.160
temporarily, but realizing that there's more to go. It's to, in some ways, step out of the immediacy of my
00:53:07.760
own comforts of kind of what, like Socrates would say about the flesh, where it kind of just, it's
00:53:13.260
always looking for the next high, if you will. And it's to kind of pick myself up, sort of, well,
00:53:19.880
physically pick myself up, but also spiritually or intellectually pick myself up to kind of keep
00:53:24.340
going a little bit more. And I think the quote that you had passed by Socrates, you know, from Xenophon's
00:53:32.100
durability, it's a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the strength and beauty of which
00:53:36.560
his body is capable. That famous kind of like bro lifting quote. I think it's amazing because I think
00:53:41.460
that also gives me kind of fuel and sustenance to go on there. So it's nothing incredibly worked out
00:53:46.620
in my mind. It just provides norsels of intellectual nourishment on days where I either do not want to
00:53:52.860
lift or if I'm lifting, I want to stay safe and not lift as heavy. I guess that's for me what the
00:53:59.580
importance of how that relates. And in terms of just bodybuilding in general, how that might even
00:54:03.920
working out, I should say, works on the opposite end of my life. I guess my day job, so to speak,
00:54:10.020
is that, yeah, I mean, you have to kind of, it pushes you a little bit more. You're healthier. I
00:54:13.820
see a lot of folks get into just eating garbage food and stuff. And if for me, it kind of trains me to
00:54:21.020
be healthier at work, if you will. For me, it makes training, it just gives another dimension to
00:54:26.600
your training. It makes it more fun. It gives it more texture, I guess. That's what it does for
00:54:30.800
me, at least. I think so, too. I think that it's awesome, too. I have like two friends,
00:54:36.860
Chris and Jason. We're all the same age, all in early 40s, you know, married kids and all that.
00:54:41.040
We go to the gym, train, and honestly, it's better than meeting at any bar or craft brewery or having a
00:54:47.780
cigar even. To me, that's like the most fun I'll have with other guys is lifting with them, joking,
00:54:53.880
and there's just something incredibly uplifting and pleasurable about that that I hope to sort
00:54:59.680
of continue on in my life as I get older. Yeah, you got that Greek element of vital play.
00:55:04.340
Yes. Yes, that's exactly it. Well, Joe, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to
00:55:08.860
learn more about your work? Yeah, sure. So I co-edit an online journal of the active body. It's called
00:55:15.640
Ultra Physical. You can just sort of, I think it's ultraphysical.us, if I recall. We publish infrequently,
00:55:22.560
but often quarterly conversations from people who, you know, think about the bodies in the way that,
00:55:27.660
you know, you, Brett, have been thinking about it, the way I've been thinking about it,
00:55:31.080
adding kind of an intellectual and philosophical capacity. It's heterodox, even though I myself
00:55:36.680
am more conservative. The co-editor is liberal. So we have kind of different perspectives as well,
00:55:42.880
I think, that are in there because we don't feel that talking about the body is necessarily the
00:55:46.680
prominence of the left or right. It's something that as human beings, we all have. So we do that.
00:55:51.720
On a more, I guess, more individual level for me, Quillette, I've written about, I think,
00:55:55.920
three essays for Quillette, an Australian-based journal. Recently in March, I came out with one
00:56:02.400
from the European Conservative. That's another journal. And I think there might be something
00:56:08.460
else, but I'd say Quillette, European Conservative, and of course, ultraphysical.us
00:56:12.440
are the main clearinghouses for all things Lombardo, I suppose.
00:56:17.120
Fantastic. Well, Joe Lombardo, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:56:21.400
My guest here is Joe Lombardo. He's the editor of the online journal,
00:56:26.260
Ultra Physical. You can check that out at ultraphysical.us. Also check out our show notes
00:56:30.980
at aom.is slash Lombardo, where we find links to resources, where we delve deeper into this topic.
00:56:42.480
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. If you'd like to be part of an
00:56:46.220
organization that takes seriously both the practicality and the philosophy of physical
00:56:49.760
fitness, consider joining The Strenuous Life. It's an online, offline program that challenges
00:56:54.340
men to be their best in body, mind, and soul. A new enrollment of The Strenuous Life will be
00:56:58.520
opening up next month. Go to strenuouslife.co and sign up for our email list to receive an
00:57:02.960
announcement letting you know when enrollment has begun. As always, thank you for the continued
00:57:07.120
support. And until next time, I'm Brett McKay. Reminding you to listen to AOM Podcast with put what