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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. My guest this week is someone I'm really excited to talk to you about because actually about two weeks ago, she and I had a really long time ago.

I had a conversation on her podcast, pretty intense, and I would say it was a pretty intense conversation. I would say I'm a pretty intense person as I'm sure you've picked up from my writing and podcasts over the years.

It was awesome to chat. Danica Patrick is one of the all-time greats, one of the pioneers of women in professional racing. She is the most successful woman in the history of American Open Wheel Racing.

Personally, I know next to nothing about NASCAR or IndyCar Racing or F1 or any of that, but there are these figures when someone is so good that they transcend their sport.

Danica is one of those people. Obviously Lance Armstrong with biking was one of those people. Paul Raeble is one of those people who I had on the podcast recently.

Sometimes, even if you don't know anything about the sport, you recognize greatness or you recognize a mad brick or you recognize someone who just is breaking a new ground in a sport.

I think it's definitely Danica, is that I've seen her stuff everywhere as have you, but I was really fascinated with her philosophical inclinations and I think you'll see in this conversation.

Not only do we go really deep, it's very clear that she's gone very deep and done a lot of work on herself, which of course is the purpose of philosophy, whether it's stoicism or Buddhism or Christianity.

The purpose of the work is internal. As Seneca says, the purpose of philosophy is to be a brush that scrubs off our own faults, not the faults of other people.

And so it's very clear that she has spent the time sort of post-racing and I've got to imagine this has been a lifelong journey, a sort of looking inwards, working on herself.

I think that comes through. There's one thing I wanted to add a little background in the interview that I think is interesting. I'm always, I always like when something gets to me like a quick bit of perspective opens my eyes, makes me get something, you know, Plutarch talks about, I think I quote this in ego, he talks about how sometimes it's not words that teach you something it's experience suddenly matching with the words.

We live in times where this concept of privilege is talked about all the time, about the sort of intersection of different identities and experiences and how, you know, sort of not everyone's going through the world as you are.

And we don't need to get into any of that and I promise you what I'm about to say is not political in any way. But anyways, I record most of these podcasts using a software called Zencaster.

We don't do video on most of them just because it's sort of a pain and there's always bandwidth issues here in Texas. So it's just an audio only and then you sort of log in and it records their track and you record your track.

That's just sort of how it works. And so anyways, you know, I had my assistants and the link over to Danica's people and then she pulled it up and then she said, hey, I'm here and I said, hey, great to see you.

And she said, so are we doing video or is this just audio and it's it, oh, it's just audio. She was like, oh, I didn't know. So I just got finished doing my hair and makeup and it struck me how rude that had been of me and just how different the expectations of men and women are as far as media goes as far as walking through the world.

And of course, I know this intellectually, but sometimes something just hits you and you're like, oh, man, right, like I was assuming everyone was going through the world is my experience. And by that, I don't just mean as a man. I just mean as a writer, which no one really cares what you look like. And you know, I sort of I get up.

I get up. I take a shower in the morning and I go to work. And if I have to record a podcast, I have to record a podcast. That's not really, you know, I, the appearances don't matter because no one's going to criticize my appearance. And I don't have to worry about people reading into my appearance or making snarky comments online about my appearance and go through this with my wife sometimes where it's like, oh, we're going. And so I'm ready to go. And then it doesn't, you know, as a man, you forget that different people have different obligations.

Self-imposed or societally imposed that we're all carrying different loads. I guess this is what I'm saying. And this struck me even more so because immediately after finishing the interview, I then had to do a video interview with a local news station.

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