Ryan Holiday

I don't remember all of the books on the list.

I do tend to find that most modern fiction is disappointing.

And I think what I was struck by rereading The Road is how much it felt like a book not published in this time.

Like if you told me the publication date was...

1971 or 1941 i'd probably buy most of it like uh i mean certainly there's not much in the way of technology that that dates the book one way or another but it does have the feel of a novel that's been with us a lot longer than 20 years i sometimes talk about like uh

I don't believe that Free Fallen by Tom Petty was written in 1989.

It's much older than that.

And The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is obviously a song from the Civil War, right?

Like it could not have been written as recently as it was.

And very rarely do I have the experience where I read something new and I feel like this has been around forever.

And that's the feeling that I get reading The Road.

I thought some parenting books generally that I thought people would love if you were struck by the road as a kind of a parenting book.

Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves about the sort of male crisis, why young men are struggling.

There is something about...

sort of traditional masculinity that Cormac McCarthy embraces, I think, in most of his books that I do think is positive in the sense that it can inspire men to be the best of themselves.

So I thought that book was relevant.

We were talking about the sort of practical...

independence, craftiness, survivability skills.

Steve Rinella, he wrote a parenting book called Outdoor Kids in an Inside World that I've been raving about.

And one of my favorite lines in the book, he says, you want to raise kids that don't say ew a lot.