Sean Carroll

I forget what the race was called, but the race that started in England.

Right, right.

And you picked on – there's several people who were in the race, but you chose three sailors.

These were solo trips literally circumnavigating the oceans.

And these three people you talk about had very different –

attitudes towards maintenance, and it showed.

But my favorite was Moitessier, who was super good at planning ahead and had all the equipment.

And when he was close to getting back to England, said, nope, I'm just going to keep going.

I like this too much.

I don't want to finish this race.

You have to make some choices there.

But I like the idea that maintenance is as much about psychology as it is about mechanics.

Like there's an attitude one has toward it.

And whether or not you're willing to get into it and enjoy it and take pride in it makes a huge difference about how effective you're going to be.

So in other words, in those organizations, it goes right from high-level officers to low-level soldiers, and there's not enough people in the middle to overlap?

Well, this idea of spiritual practice is also appearing in another book that you quote there early in the book, in your book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is one of my favorites from long ago.

And an extended meditation on the motorcycle is a metaphor, obviously, right?

You're fixing the motorcycle, but you're also fixing yourself.

He says this very explicitly, Robert Persig, the author.

Well, one of the things that he does, which you do refer to in your book, is he goes into quite a lot of detail about ways that you can lose the will to maintain your motorcycle or anything else very effectively.