Ted Simon on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Adventure Rider Radio – Motorcycle Podcast
Adventure Rider Radio | Adventure Motorcycling
4.9 • 961 Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why Robert Pirsig’s Famous Motorcycle Book Mattered to Him — And Why it Didn’t
Ted Simon is best known as the author of Jupiter’s Travels, one of the most influential motorcycle travel books ever written. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is another book that has long held a strange place in motorcycling culture: widely known, often recommended, and perhaps just as often left unfinished. In this conversation, Ted talks about finally reading Pirsig’s famous book and why it matters to him in a way listeners might not expect. Is it really a motorcycle book? Why has it stayed in the minds of riders for so many years? And what does motorcycle maintenance mean when the machine beneath you is not just a symbol, but the thing that determines whether the journey continues? What begins with one famous motorcycle book soon opens into Ted’s own memories of travel, breakdowns, repair, and the very practical reality of keeping a journey alive when there is no easy answer and no one else to do the work.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The last time I had Ted Simon on the show, we got talking one point about books. |
| 0:05.9 | You know, Ted Simon, Jupiter's Travels, one of the most famous, maybe the most famous |
| 0:10.0 | and influential motorcycle travel book ever written. Certainly one of the books that helped |
| 0:13.8 | to find Adventure Motorcycle Travel for a lot of people. Maybe the industry itself, the |
| 0:18.6 | adventure motorcycle industry itself. But there's another famous book out there, Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. |
| 0:26.8 | Now, that's one of the books that seems to sit on a lot of rider's shelves. |
| 0:30.3 | There's a lot of people that know that title. |
| 0:32.1 | A lot of people recommend it. |
| 0:33.8 | And from what I found over the years, there's a lot of people, me included, that have started reading it and never could finish it. |
| 0:41.2 | Ted Simon, when we were talking about books that time, told me the same thing. |
| 0:44.7 | He'd tried to read it more than once and he could never make it all the way through. |
| 0:49.0 | At the time, he said he would go back, well, he promised me he would go back and finish it and that afterwards we could get together and talk about it. Well, that's what he did. He read the book. And that's |
| 0:58.8 | sort of where we begin. One thing that I was really taken by is that Zen and the art of motorcycle |
| 1:04.4 | maintenance matters to Ted Simon in a way that I did not expect. You're going to hear that. |
| 1:09.7 | This is one of the most famous books ever |
| 1:12.3 | connected to motorcycling, but it's also a book that many writers seem to struggle with. So I was |
| 1:17.2 | curious what Ted made of it after reading it, why it became so well known, why so many people |
| 1:22.6 | have trouble reading it, and maybe what, if anything, that riders should be trying to take from it, if we should |
| 1:28.4 | go read it. Ted is 95 years old now, and that sort of changes the weight, hearing him talk |
| 1:34.4 | about books and motorcycles and travel and everything at this point, because when he looks |
| 1:39.0 | back, he's got a long life of doing a lot of things, a lot of experience, a lot of mistakes, a lot of answers, |
| 1:46.4 | hopefully that he's figured out as he goes through life. Now, he doesn't offer a grand theory. |
... |
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