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much. My

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guest today, Joe Lombardo, is a strength enthusiast who follows in this tradition.

2:00

and has explored the philosophy of bodily exercise

2:02

in his writing. Today on the

2:04

show, Joe and I discuss several different ways that philosophy

2:06

of strength has been expressed over time. We

2:09

begin our conversation with how the ancient Greeks thought of

2:11

physical training as a way to develop personal as well

2:13

as social virtues and why they thought you were an

2:15

idiot, in their particular sense of the word, if you

2:17

didn't take care of your body. We

2:19

then discuss early Christianity's relationship with physical

2:21

exercise and the development of the muscular

2:23

Christianity movement in the 19th century. We

2:26

end our conversation by looking at the philosophy of

2:28

physicality espoused by the Japanese writer Yukio

2:30

Mishima. What he had to say

2:32

as to how strength training moves us out of the life of

2:34

the night and towards the light of the sun. After

2:37

the show is over, check out our show

2:39

notes at aom.is.limbardo. All

2:51

right, Joe Lombardo, welcome to the show. Hey,

2:54

thanks so much, Brett. So you are

2:56

a writer and a strength enthusiast who

2:58

explores the philosophy behind strength training, bodybuilding,

3:00

and fitness in general. Tell

3:03

us about your history and your relationship with physical fitness.

3:06

Sure. So I just

3:08

turned 40. I grew up

3:11

in North Jersey in a fairly

3:13

pleasant suburb outside of New York

3:15

City. Good childhood.

3:17

I remember it being filled with, you

3:19

know, biking everywhere, playing a

3:21

lot of pickup games of basketball, football, never

3:23

joined the team sport, never really was into

3:26

it. But I just enjoy

3:28

kind of, you know, using my body in that way.

3:31

And so in some ways, physical fitness was kind of instinctive.

3:33

And I think that's something that's definitely

3:36

there when you're a kid, you just sort of

3:38

use your body and you can like, wake

3:40

up from a dead sleep and run three miles. I remember

3:42

that in like high school and stuff and definitely at 40.

3:44

That's not the case at all. So

3:48

I sort of began to realize,

3:50

even during the process that as I was getting older,

3:52

I went to college, went to

3:54

grad school, throughout my 20s and 30s, that

3:57

some of that was starting to kind of

3:59

disappear. some of the kind of physicality of

4:01

my body. I was finding myself sitting a lot more, whether

4:04

it's studying or working or anything like

4:06

that. And I think the seriousness of

4:08

adulthood, unfortunately eclipsed the

4:11

kind of the joys of

4:13

childhood activity. And to the

4:15

point where really it was in my early 30s, I

4:18

suppose, where I just looked and felt

4:20

like garbage, to be quite honest. I

4:23

put on a lot of weight. I started, I

4:25

was always a cigar guy, but I was smoking

4:27

way too many cigars. Definitely drinking

4:29

a lot. And just becoming very

4:31

kind of irascible. Not very

4:33

pleasant to be around. I was doing my dissertation. Just

4:36

not a really good person or human being.

4:38

And I think a lot of that was

4:40

just due to the fact that I wasn't

4:42

paying attention to kind of a

4:45

long-term goal that I had for myself, both

4:47

maybe spiritually as well as physically, if you

4:49

will. And I remember

4:52

being a PhD student living in New York

4:55

and being around all sorts of guys

4:58

who also really didn't care to lift or

5:00

do anything. And they were very saturated with

5:02

kind of the ironies of life. Always

5:05

making very self-deprecating comments or even

5:07

deprecating comments towards others. If

5:10

there was a guy at the bar, it looked like

5:13

he was jacked or something. Someone would make some sort

5:15

of joke about it. There was just sort of this

5:17

bitter acid acidity, if you will, I guess,

5:19

towards people like that. And it just

5:22

sort of felt very bizarre and

5:24

I don't know, it didn't really lead me with

5:26

a very good feeling about kind of who

5:28

I was becoming in that crowd,

5:31

I suppose. And so at one point,

5:33

I was engaged to this woman. I'd

5:36

broken it off. I was doing my research abroad.

5:38

I was doing research in the Middle East. And

5:40

I came back to

5:42

Jersey, got a job, quit that, moved

5:44

back with my parents and

5:47

realized that I

5:49

just was not doing very well. And I remember there were

5:51

kind of two instances. One of my mom was pretty

5:54

disappointed. I remember one day she sort of looked at me and she

5:56

just had this kind of sigh of despair, like what have I become?

6:00

And that kind of hurt when you were parents to you like that.

6:03

The second one though was I was working

6:05

on third shift at UPS at a storage

6:07

facility outside of New York. And

6:09

I remember there was this guy, he must have been in his early 60s

6:11

or so, big tall guy.

6:15

I remember I accidentally crashed the Hylo

6:17

into all these sacks of dye and

6:19

they just went everywhere. It was like

6:22

that Indian celebration with all the colors,

6:24

except it was at work and it wasn't supposed to be like that.

6:27

And so this guy kind of like

6:29

pumped a forehead, says, oh my God, what an idiot. So

6:32

he helps me like pick up these, I

6:34

don't know, 30, 45 pound sacks of dye

6:37

to reload onto the Hylo. And

6:39

I was just having a hard time lifting them. Here

6:43

it was at the time I was, I think 33. And

6:46

this guy was just taking one sack after another,

6:49

just walping them right up back onto the Hylo

6:51

like it was nothing. And he just kind of

6:53

goes over me and he says, how old are

6:55

you? I said, I'm 33. It's

6:58

like you are one week 33 year old. You

7:00

really got to go to the gym. I mean,

7:02

this guy was unfiltered. And honestly, that was probably, although

7:04

I didn't like to hear it at the time,

7:06

that was the best thing someone could

7:08

have ever said to me in my state because

7:11

that really stuck with me. And

7:13

soon thereafter, I really did some thinking

7:15

and I had

7:18

this dissertation, I wanted to finish it.

7:21

I did not want to be one of these grad students who

7:23

had a dissertation for years and years. I wanted to get this

7:25

thing over with. And I wanted to do it in like a

7:28

semester, which is unheard

7:30

of typically, although it can be done. But that's how

7:32

desperate I wanted to be out of school and to

7:34

really turn my life around. So after that, I started

7:37

going back to gym and probably like first time in,

7:40

I don't know, maybe eight, seven, eight years. In

7:42

doing so I started to kind of, you know, cut

7:45

down on some of the habits. I had no idea

7:47

what nutrition was or dieting or anything like that. I

7:49

just started lifting. And of course, I had no

7:51

technique. I had no idea what I was doing. So

7:53

that's when I kind of started to go online

7:55

and look up stuff in these different communities. And

7:58

I very quickly started to do that. quickly

8:01

realize that the people that were into stuff

8:03

like bodybuilding or powerlifting were, they just seemed

8:05

to be like, I

8:07

had this almost like saccharin sense of happiness, which

8:09

I found so irritating at the time, they almost seemed

8:11

too happy and positive. And at the time, you know,

8:13

like I said, I was sort of in this crowd

8:15

where it was sort of the brooding intellectual type

8:18

and I just didn't like it. It didn't really speak to

8:20

me, but at the same token, the more I was exposed

8:23

to it, the more I kind of read up on their

8:25

protocols and stuff, the more it was, you know, I can

8:27

kind of see why they have this sense of mirth. And

8:29

so when I would go back to class or

8:32

I'd go to some place where I

8:34

was writing and maybe your friend was there, that

8:36

sense of excitement just wasn't echoed, I suppose. You know,

8:38

it's kind of like you pick up a new hobby

8:40

and you're excited about, but your friend's like, okay, cool,

8:42

man. Like that's great. You know, they don't really share

8:45

the same excitement. That was kind of like with me

8:47

and lifting, but it felt like it

8:49

was more than a hobby. It felt as if I was transforming

8:51

my life. And I think a lot of guys

8:53

feel that way when they start seriously lifting, they

8:56

feel like they're making this, they're on this precipice

8:58

of change in their cells. And

9:01

I remember at one point, you

9:03

know, I was picking up some papers in

9:05

my department in the city and

9:07

this one friend, young

9:09

woman, you know, and saw me and she says,

9:11

Oh, you know, I heard you start working out

9:13

and she kind of rolled her eyes and she

9:16

said, something to the effect of, Oh, that's so

9:18

hyper masculine. And you know, it, it just, at

9:20

the time, I mean, at the time I was

9:22

annoyed, but I sort of laugh now because it's

9:24

such a silly term. I mean, who wouldn't want

9:26

to be more masculine than they are. But

9:28

at the time it was seen as kind of a derisive

9:30

remark. And I thought this is, you know, I realized I

9:32

was sort of coming to the point

9:34

where these weren't really my people and

9:37

I really wanted to unmore myself from

9:39

that particular coast of thought

9:42

and to really start to explore this other

9:45

side, even if I didn't

9:47

necessarily jive with that, the kind of

9:49

happy go lucky sort of attitude of

9:51

the online bodybuilder community. I

9:53

felt like it was a lot better than being

9:55

miserable and being this kind of, you know, arrogant

9:57

intellectual type, I suppose. Okay.

10:00

this experience you had, you started feeling

10:02

better, not just physically, but also spiritually,

10:05

emotionally, that caused you

10:07

to start exploring like, what's going on

10:09

there? Maybe philosophy can help me explain

10:11

like why I feel better in my

10:14

soul when I started exercise. Yeah,

10:17

you know, it's interesting. There's, there's a

10:19

quote I remember reading a while ago

10:21

by Emerson, it goes to the

10:23

effect of like, God offers to everyone his

10:25

choice between truth and repose, take

10:27

what you please, you can never have both. And

10:31

so I began to kind of think, well,

10:33

that's interesting, you know, when I was kind of reading and

10:35

writing and studying and all that stuff, right, you always want

10:37

to get to the truth of things. And that was a

10:39

very active sense of exploration, it gave

10:41

me a lot of pleasure, it still does. But

10:44

at the same token, isn't that physical

10:46

fitness, right? Isn't that also in some ways,

10:49

tending towards something that we could consider as, you

10:52

know, the truth of the body or somatic truths, if you want

10:54

to be like, I don't know,

10:56

fancy about it. And the

10:58

more I kind of looked into it, I saw

11:00

sort of two camps at play. One was the

11:03

kind of, you know, antibody, body camp

11:05

within academia. So these

11:08

are people that are interested in, you

11:10

know, the body calling it stuff

11:12

like the meat, for example, is a term

11:14

sometimes they use in academia instead of the

11:16

body, which is again, kind of weird

11:19

and derogatory. And they just see the body

11:21

as something that's just there. And you know,

11:23

we can change it as we please. And

11:25

we're always kind of reinventing ourselves. And it

11:27

just seemed to me very banal. You

11:30

know, it was also a discussion mostly revolved around

11:32

the sexualization of the body didn't really have much

11:34

to do with the active body, which was what

11:36

I was interested in. On the other

11:39

hand, the place where I

11:41

felt as though the body was

11:43

being spoken of in terms that I can

11:45

understand as

11:47

Greek philosophy, what's sort of

11:49

interesting about the Greeks, and in particular, you

11:51

know, Plato and Socrates and folks of that

11:53

nature, Aristotle, of course, is

11:56

that they never really wrote long

11:58

treaties, the way philosophy is. is

12:00

typically due on a certain subject. If

12:03

you read the Socratic dialogues, most of

12:05

the time it's about what is the law, what

12:07

is it to be brave, or what is courage,

12:10

what is the truth, or what is the best form

12:12

of government like the republic and so on. But

12:15

there's only snippets or

12:17

glances of what physical activity

12:19

is and the importance of it. So

12:22

it's interesting, you read about it, Pythagoras, for example, was

12:24

a trained boxer. Socrates was someone

12:26

who trained every day. He was also a military veteran.

12:29

Plato's Academy was not just a bunch of

12:31

guys in togas reading books or scrolls maybe. They

12:34

were actively engaging in wrestling and

12:37

sports, sprinting, throwing, javelin, all those

12:39

kinds of activities. Of

12:41

the writing that we do have from

12:43

Greek philosophers on fitness, what were

12:45

some of their underlying ideas? I mean,

12:47

let's take Socrates. For him, what role

12:49

did fitness or training play in living

12:52

a virtuous life? Yeah. So

12:55

Socrates was, again, he

12:57

didn't write a whole lot about it. There

12:59

are snippets in the republic. Xenophon's

13:02

memorabilia probably is where he talks about it

13:04

a little bit more, although again, that was

13:06

more of a secondary source from his student

13:09

Xenophon. But really,

13:11

it was, physical fitness

13:13

sort of boils down to an ethical imperative or

13:15

an ethical problem. To not

13:17

train your body, to not purposely exercise

13:19

it with a goal of getting stronger

13:22

or to even just look better is

13:25

not just a

13:28

problem where it is sort of an immoral problem.

13:30

It's actually, in some ways, Socrates

13:32

is very blunt about it. It's to be an idiot. The

13:36

term idiot, of course, in English is

13:38

people immediately bristle at that because it just basically

13:40

means you're a moron. But actually, in the Greek

13:43

context, idiocy is

13:45

very particular to a definition of being

13:48

excessively interested in your individuality.

13:51

And so people who are idiots or people who are

13:53

not interested in helping others, they're

13:56

not interested in being kind of good citizens, they're

13:58

not interested in helping their neighbor. They're

14:00

strictly concerned within the parameters and

14:02

confines of their immediate pleasure. That's

14:05

when an idiot is. And everybody has

14:07

these tendencies. I mean, an idiot can be

14:09

the person who sits on the couch all

14:11

day, whatever, eating chips and watching videos.

14:14

An idiot also could be a person who moves out

14:16

into the woods and decides to say,

14:18

you know, the hell with society. I mean, these are

14:21

both categories of idiots. So

14:23

the body physical training is to not

14:26

make yourself into an idiot for others.

14:28

It's to be useful towards

14:30

others. And that's kind of where physical

14:32

fitness tends towards virtue

14:34

or wisdom or knowledge. Now

14:37

that said, in the final

14:39

Socratic dialogue in Thedo, for example,

14:41

you know, Socrates is about to,

14:44

you know, drink his own death,

14:46

basically, exhorts

14:48

the body, chastises it, saying, oh, the, you know,

14:50

the body is nothing but the prison house of

14:53

the soul. You know, the flesh is the something

14:55

that, you know, guides

14:57

the soul by the nose

14:59

dragging around, you know, into,

15:01

you know, sexual overly sexual

15:03

activities or into slovenliness or

15:05

gluttony or excessive predilection towards

15:07

luxurious living. But if

15:09

you really do look at the entire corpus of

15:11

works, no pun intended, you do start

15:14

to see a much richer detail

15:16

in relationship between the body and soul in

15:18

the Greeks, where the soul is obviously the

15:20

more important one. But

15:22

the body is expressive of the

15:24

soul. I mean, it's to be kind

15:26

of not very politically correct.

15:28

It's like when we see someone who's obese, and I

15:31

speak as someone who was obese, by the way. Unfortunately,

15:34

the first thing our minds is, oh, that that poor

15:36

guy, you know, there must be some

15:38

something wrong. I mean, that's basically

15:40

what it is because it's an expression of the

15:42

soul. So that's for Socrates,

15:45

that's kind of what that why physical

15:47

training is so important within

15:49

his line of thought. Okay, so

15:51

just to unpack that. So there is

15:53

a personal element to physical fitness, how

15:55

it can help you achieve personal virtue.

15:57

And then there's a social element. To

16:00

unpack that first part, how fitness or

16:02

physical training can help you develop personal

16:05

virtue, you talk about in the

16:08

memorabilia, this is written by Xenophon. He

16:11

said this about physical fitness, I'm going to

16:13

quote it, when you aren't physically

16:15

fit, this is what Socrates says happens. He

16:17

says, who does not know that even here many

16:19

greatly falter because their body is not healthy? And

16:22

he says, and forgetfulness, dispiritedness, peevishness, and

16:24

madness frequently attack the thought of many

16:27

due to the bad condition of their

16:29

body. It sounds like you experienced that

16:31

when you were, you know, a grad

16:33

student, you felt that peevishness, dispiritedness, and

16:36

that changed once you started physically training

16:38

the body. Yeah,

16:41

the body is not really meant

16:43

to be a subject of ironic

16:45

mockery or observation. The

16:48

body really is meant to be

16:50

something that we train, that we

16:52

condition, that we discipline. In

16:55

academia, I think writ large, I mean, of

16:57

course, there are, yeah, sure, there's gonna be

16:59

the physicist out there who's a PhD student

17:01

who's like, Jack, okay, I'm not talking about

17:03

that guy. I'm talking about your kind of

17:06

run of the mill, maybe a little socially

17:08

awkward PhD student, which was me, maybe I

17:10

still am, that, you

17:13

know, doesn't really feel very confident in

17:15

the flesh. And of course, it's not

17:17

just a body problem. It's a mind problem. I mean,

17:19

I think of like Jay Cutler, the, he's four or

17:21

five times Mr. Olympia, a bodybuilder. And he said, you

17:23

know, people always said to him, it's like, Oh, wow,

17:25

look at this body says, you know, the problem for

17:27

me wasn't the body, per se, it started with the

17:30

mind, I had to train my mind in order to

17:32

train the body. And I think that that really speaks

17:34

by and large to cultivating

17:36

a sense of personal ethic or personal

17:39

virtue there, is that you want

17:41

to, you could be very intellectually disciplined, for

17:43

example, you could be very smart

17:45

at, you know, calculating certain theorems,

17:47

reading over certain methodologies, whatever

17:50

discipline you happen to be practicing.

17:53

But at the same token, shouldn't

17:55

that discipline extend into your

17:57

very mortal being like what allows you to

17:59

be on. planet earth in this moment is

18:01

your body. I mean, Martin Heidegger infamous,

18:03

I would say, probably philosopher, German

18:06

philosopher of the 20th century, once

18:08

said, we don't have bodies, we

18:10

are bodily. And I think

18:12

that that's kind of the way to look at it,

18:14

is that we exist in this body. We're not just, as

18:16

one of my friends once said, we're not a

18:19

brain driving the meat robot. We're

18:21

the entire sum of our being there operating.

18:23

So I think the discipline that we lack

18:26

for our bodies is obviously going to be a certain

18:29

lack of discipline that we cultivate in

18:31

our souls or our intellectual capabilities,

18:34

I would say. I want to quote some

18:36

more because you have some essays where you quote from Xenophon that I

18:38

think are really interesting from Socrates. Talking about

18:40

this idea of how exercise and physical health

18:42

can help you attain personal

18:45

virtue. It says this, for those

18:47

who maintain their bodies well are both healthy and

18:49

strong. And many, due to this,

18:51

are saved in a seemingly manner in the contest

18:53

of war and escape all the terrible things. Many

18:56

bring aid to their friends and do good

18:58

deeds for their fatherland. And due to this,

19:00

are deemed worthy of gratitude, acquire a great

19:03

reputation, and obtain most noble honors. And due

19:05

to these, live the rest of their life

19:07

in a more pleasant and more noble manner,

19:09

and leave their children with more noble resources

19:11

for life. So exercise is nobility.

19:13

It's how you gain nobility. I

19:15

agree. I mean, it comes down to an extension of

19:18

the coward is the one who dies 1,000

19:20

deaths. I think

19:22

lack of training, lack of that initiative

19:24

echoes. Yeah, I love that. And

19:26

then also, the opposite of that, if you don't

19:28

keep your body in good shape, there's this famous

19:30

quote. I'm sure people, it gets posted on Instagram

19:33

and the internet a lot by Socrates. He says

19:35

this, it is also shameful

19:37

to do it in neglect, to grow old

19:39

before seeing oneself in the most beautiful and

19:41

strongest bodily state one might attain. I

19:44

think it's interesting, the idea that it's noble

19:46

to want your body to look beautiful. That

19:48

was a very Greek ideal. And we kind

19:51

of lost that today. Yeah,

19:53

it's interesting. The

19:56

sort of Western mentality of restricivization is something

19:58

that's not a good idea. not necessarily

20:00

strictly in the geographic parameters

20:03

of Greece or Rome or Europe or

20:05

the United States. I mean, I think

20:08

one of the greatest exponents on what

20:10

I would imagine is probably the best

20:12

philosophy track on the active

20:14

bodies by a Japanese man, an author,

20:16

his pen name was Yuthyo Mishima. He

20:19

was the person who I think in The Sun and

20:21

Steel, the sort of long essay short

20:24

book depending upon what your definition

20:26

of either I suppose is, was

20:29

thoroughly Western and Greek in his

20:31

conception of the body in spite

20:33

of being from East Asia. And I think

20:35

the Greeks really spoke to this

20:38

very kind of biologically rooted instinct, at least

20:40

in men, I can't speak to women, but

20:42

at least in men to kind of excel

20:44

in their bodies to be dynamic in their

20:47

flesh and to

20:49

look good regardless of their abilities or how

20:51

they happen to have been born. I think

20:53

that that instinct is there for each of

20:55

us and it's something that the Greeks were

20:58

maybe a little more successful than others that

21:00

I'm sort of unpacking and exploring. And

21:04

Socrates always talks about as

21:06

you train physically, it's going

21:08

to help develop this more

21:10

I would say called abstract

21:12

virtues, conscientiousness, fortitude, discipline, moderation.

21:16

By doing the physical act, it allows

21:18

you to enact these sort of abstract

21:20

virtues that can play out in other

21:22

parts of our lives. Yeah,

21:25

one article that I had written last

21:28

year or so was on this

21:30

man Ryan Belker, he probably is

21:32

still alive, I imagine he's not that old,

21:34

but he was a sort of

21:37

elite level power lifter from Michigan. I

21:40

can't quite recall where but anyway, there's an interesting story

21:42

that was picked up in the news maybe about five

21:44

or six years ago. And that was around

21:46

the time I started seriously training. And

21:49

the sky is going to pick up his

21:51

kids, it's late afternoon, it's Valentine's Day, it's

21:53

probably utterly freezing in Michigan at that point,

21:55

I have no idea. And

21:57

he passes by a car accident, I guess

21:59

there's There's a Cherokee that flipped over and

22:01

there's another car and the man who had

22:03

been in the flipped over Cherokee was sort

22:05

of pinned between a stop sign and the

22:07

car itself. And you

22:10

know, like everybody, we have this sort of pedestrian

22:12

instinct to, you know, say, hey, look, I'm going

22:14

to keep moving on. You know, it's kind of

22:16

like the parable of the Samaritan, you know, before

22:18

the Samaritan, all these other folks, even the Holy

22:20

Ones, just walked on by. Belker

22:23

didn't. He stopped and

22:26

he realized the man's position and,

22:29

you know, he managed to effectively

22:31

partially deadlift a two

22:33

or three ton vehicle off of

22:35

this man to basically save his life. Now,

22:37

of course, that's an extreme example

22:40

of strength that, you

22:42

know, fractions and fractions upon percentage

22:44

of a population even possess. But

22:47

I think that there's something ethical and

22:49

very Greek, quote unquote, about that is

22:51

to use the body and the service

22:53

to others to build that virtue, to

22:55

express it, to not be an idiot,

22:57

basically, in your flesh. I

22:59

think Belker exemplifies that almost perfectly.

23:02

Yeah. And so this goes to this

23:04

idea that physical fitness allows you to

23:06

develop those social virtues that were

23:08

vitally important to Greek life. You

23:11

talk about to be an idiot in Greek life was

23:13

to be a very private person. And

23:16

for the Greeks, the polis was the main

23:18

social. That's how you organize

23:20

yourself. And, you know, Aristotle talked about the

23:22

only way you can actually develop yourself fully

23:24

as a human being is to be actively

23:26

engaged in polis life. And so

23:29

Socrates says in order to be a useful,

23:31

active participant in polis life, which is

23:33

vital to our very existence

23:36

as a Greek, you had to be physically

23:38

fit. Yeah. It's something that nobody today wants

23:40

to hear. Yeah. I mean,

23:42

we don't we talk about when we talk about fitness,

23:44

we think about it just for ourselves. You

23:46

never hear people think, well, I'm being physically fit

23:48

so I can be a better citizen of the

23:50

country. Sure. And I mean,

23:52

I think everybody in modern society and maybe

23:55

this is more of a

23:57

commentary about modern secular society than anything else.

23:59

But, you know, It's sex appeal. First of all,

24:01

we want to look good track and mate Yeah,

24:03

maybe there's a health aspect too But I think first and

24:05

foremost a lot of guys want to live because hey, I

24:07

want to look good for girls You know and and that's

24:10

fine. We all start from there. I'm not a necessarily against

24:12

that But I think that there are higher

24:14

iterations of thought The more and

24:16

more you get into it and I think that there is

24:18

an interesting cleavage in Sort of between

24:20

modern fitness or secular fitness where it

24:22

is about discipline But it's a very

24:24

kind of warped discipline of being antisocial.

24:27

Oh, you know, sorry, I can help you today I'm training or I

24:29

have to get to bed at 8 o'clock and I wake up and

24:31

six and I go to work and I Train and I don't really

24:33

care about my family and I don't really care much else. Oh Maybe

24:36

I should you know look into this drug

24:39

now this enhancement, you know That's kind of

24:41

a form of sort of decadence that I

24:43

think is not particularly healthy and doesn't really

24:45

breed the kind of virtue That

24:47

I think the classical Greek or even

24:49

for that matter sort of theological Christian

24:51

virtue would have the body prepared for

24:54

It's another form of idiocy Exactly.

24:57

Yeah, I think there have

24:59

been periods in at least American

25:01

culture where this idea of physical fitness was

25:04

seen as part of being a good citizen,

25:06

you know back in the 60s You

25:08

know JFK that whole we

25:10

got to get fit You know the soft American

25:12

and usually that happens during times of war where

25:14

there's like this idea Okay, we might have to

25:16

go to war against the Soviets So we need

25:18

to have a citizenry that's able to do that

25:20

and then you see that kind of the a

25:22

marshaling of we're gonna get We've

25:24

had we talked about on the podcast the

25:26

La Sierra High School of physical

25:28

education program in the 60s was a Response

25:31

to that call for physical fitness as to

25:33

be better citizens But typically it fizzles out

25:35

and we just go back to the just

25:38

focusing on the self So the

25:40

Greeks physical fitness was a way you

25:42

can develop your personal virtue your social

25:44

virtue The mind and body

25:46

were not separated the Greeks thought they

25:48

were connected, you know healthy mind and

25:50

healthy body What about the

25:52

Romans did the Romans have a philosophy of

25:54

physical fitness? The Romans

25:56

I think well, it's interesting. I

25:59

think we need talk to people who are, and

26:01

I'm not an expert in Greek philosophy or something,

26:03

but I think when you talk to people who

26:05

are, the Romans are sort of at the bottom

26:07

of the ladder there. The Romans

26:09

didn't have, I think, a real

26:11

complex understanding of just even an approach

26:13

to philosophy relative to the Greeks. And I'd say that,

26:15

by the way, is like someone who's of Italian descent,

26:18

so I hate to say it, but

26:20

the Greeks were far superior than Romans were.

26:23

For them, physical fitness was military training. That's

26:26

what it was tended towards. Yes,

26:28

of course, there were some that did become fascinated

26:30

with the kind of Grecian

26:32

ideal of aesthetics and beauty and all that

26:35

stuff, and they were often kind of taunted

26:37

or made fun of in Roman society. Romans

26:39

saw the Greek understanding of fitness as effeminate,

26:41

and Romans thought it was more proper to

26:44

war, to become proficient in

26:46

javelin throwing and swordplay and that kind

26:48

of thing. I think in

26:50

some ways it's unfortunate because I think really

26:52

the Greeks stand out amongst really all

26:54

civilizations as being those who

26:57

tended to take play and sport seriously.

26:59

I mean, think of the Olympic Games,

27:01

the Olympic Games united the

27:03

entire Hellenic world. In fact, they induced

27:05

peace treaties and ceasefires. If they knew

27:07

that one warring sitting state had athletes

27:09

from another come over, they would stop

27:12

battle, they would cease fire, they would

27:14

let them pass the enemy's athletes pass

27:16

through unharmed. So it's a real interesting

27:19

ancient civilization that way, where I think

27:21

you see it in probably most other

27:23

civilizations, maybe East Asian Aztec. Well,

27:26

yeah, there's always sports and games, but the

27:28

Greeks just, or Romans for that matter, but

27:30

the Greeks just had a much more intense

27:33

philosophical explication of that. So for me, the

27:35

Romans never really impressed me. I know that

27:37

there are probably a lot of Ryan holiday

27:39

fans out there. I just can't get

27:41

into them. I think also too, because I tend

27:44

to get my sense of ethics and purpose

27:46

and stuff. I tend to see that more

27:48

in my Christian faith, I guess. So

27:50

for me, I'm not interested so much in what

27:52

the Stoics felt is how we should approach life

27:54

and so much as I feel I should

27:57

be doing sort of God's will for my

27:59

life. and what he wants me to do. But again,

28:01

I'm sure there are people who are Christians who love the

28:04

Stoics and I'm happy to stand

28:06

corrected, but I tend to see them as

28:08

a little bit distant from my interests, I

28:10

suppose. The Stoics would

28:12

use fitness analogies to explain

28:14

philosophy. They talk about you have

28:16

to be like a wrestler or a runner training.

28:18

You have to take that same approach to

28:21

your own philosophical development and training

28:23

the soul. But yeah, they don't

28:25

say too much about exercise itself. And

28:28

I like that idea that you talk about how the Greeks injected this

28:30

idea of play into their

28:32

fitness or their exercise. And Edith

28:35

Hamilton wrote a really good book

28:37

about the groups where she captures

28:39

this, I think really beautifully. She

28:41

describes a culture that's vital. It's

28:43

effervescent, it's fun, but also

28:45

serious at the same time, it's just alive. For

28:48

sure. Yeah, no, there's something unique

28:51

about, I think, the Greek experience

28:53

and their natural curiosity that

28:56

is really unparalleled. They didn't look around

28:58

the world and just adapt

29:00

themselves to it. I think they tried

29:02

to really see the world as a

29:04

means to propel themselves to

29:06

become better and more virtuous. So I

29:08

think that's fairly unique. We're

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And now back to the show. In

33:44

a couple of essays, you've talked about

33:46

how you return to your Catholic faith

33:48

and you mentioned how you've been thinking

33:51

about fitness and faith together. Let's talk

33:53

about that. What was the early

33:55

church's view on physical fitness and

33:58

taking care of the body? Yeah,

34:00

pretty negative Unfortunately, I

34:03

I will have to say that When

34:06

the Greeks were becoming

34:08

Christianized under the Byzantines One

34:11

of the things that I think was maybe he had

34:13

doshas the second someone maybe could could verify that Basically

34:16

had outlawed and banned the Olympic Games because it was

34:18

a form of pagan worship and it was it had

34:20

pagan rituals to it so anybody kind

34:23

of Associated with the Olympic Games or

34:25

training and stuff like that also like even

34:27

though, you know, Paul writes For example the

34:29

testament about you know, faith is

34:31

like running a race and you

34:33

know Talks with the body is the temple

34:35

Holy Spirit all these things Obviously they knew

34:37

of athleticism in similar ways that the Stoics

34:39

were quoting about, you know Comparing training

34:42

to train the soul there

34:44

was some of that a little bit to a less extent Certainly

34:47

in the New Testament, but the early church was not

34:49

really much of a fan of that

34:52

To my disappointment. I think initially maybe there

34:54

were some exceptions Yeah, yeah,

34:56

so you're speaking of Paul I know you

34:58

know Paul before he was Paul he was

35:00

Saul and he was a Roman citizen and

35:02

he was trained in Roman philosophy So, I

35:04

mean he knew stoicism and I'm sure he

35:06

took these stoic lessons He took and these

35:08

analogies of physical fitness and training the soul

35:10

and brought that into his epistles Another

35:13

thing was going on to with early

35:15

Christianity Highly influenced by

35:17

Platonism really Augustine So this idea

35:19

that you know, the soul is the most important

35:22

thing the body Not so

35:24

much and that probably got mixed into that as

35:26

well I think to

35:28

what's important though, is that very

35:30

early on and even today some

35:32

would say, you know The the

35:34

Gnostic tendencies were very strong in

35:36

the ancient world These were

35:38

those were one of the first heresies in the first

35:40

century that the early church had a sort of combat

35:43

I'm basically thinking that the material world was

35:45

inherently sinful. The flesh was kind of a

35:47

sinful punishment It's all about kind of liberating

35:49

the soul from the flesh And

35:51

so the church did have to very strongly

35:53

rebuke this line of thinking that was coming

35:56

out of Egypt at the time

35:58

and so they had to kind of positive bodies.

36:01

To be as Thomas Aquinas says, to

36:03

be is good. To have a

36:06

body is great. We have to sanctify the body. Of

36:08

course, we have to do things with it. We don't

36:10

just have a body and then that's it. There are

36:12

things that Christians have to do with their body. And

36:14

of course, a lot of it tends to be not

36:17

just sort of ritualism, but also

36:19

sexual purity and things of that nature. But

36:21

I think that as an extension of that, certainly

36:24

physical fitness being helpful, you

36:27

know, carrying one's

36:29

cross, for example, if you will, all these

36:31

kinds of physical and spiritual tasks. I

36:33

think that you can easily draw from that a

36:36

whole corpus of ideas that are pretty interesting

36:38

to go down. So yeah, Christ wasn't in

36:41

his earthly ministry saying, hey,

36:43

you got to start lifting here, nor were the

36:45

apostles per se. But I do think at the

36:47

same token that a lot of the importance of

36:49

the body that the Christians really used

36:52

and fought against the Gnostics, not just

36:54

in Egypt, but also against the Alba

36:56

Jensons in the 13th century in France,

36:59

the Waldensians in Switzerland. I mean, there are

37:01

a lot of kind of heretical movements that

37:03

cropped up that did kind of

37:05

put the body or position the body

37:07

as this just sinful carcass that we

37:09

have and we're sort of carrying around

37:12

from a Catholic point of view, even the kind

37:14

of the development of the rosary, for example, by

37:16

Saint Dominic was supposed to

37:19

remind people of Christ's incarnate earthly

37:21

ministry, the crucifixion, the kind of

37:23

corporeal sense that he was here

37:26

and is on earth doing these

37:29

things, these earthly ministry, those are reminders

37:31

and they were purposely used in some

37:33

ways to counter the Gnostic effects

37:36

and heretical viewpoints that were

37:38

spreading in Bulgaria, Egypt, and

37:40

France and parts of Switzerland at the time, too.

37:42

So I think that there's a lot that Christianity

37:45

says to the body. It's just not in

37:48

the sense of Socrates saying, hey, bro,

37:50

maybe it's time to live. Yeah, Christianity,

37:52

it's an incarnate religion. So, yeah, God

37:54

comes, takes on a physical body. He

37:56

dies, takes up his body again in

37:58

a glorified state resolution. or Rex and

38:00

promises disciples, the same will happen to

38:03

you. Yeah. OK, so for early Christianity,

38:05

physical fitness, exercise, kind of like, well,

38:08

body's not, you know, body's good and bad. We have

38:10

to use it for good purposes. But you don't need

38:12

to be spent any time training

38:14

it specifically. When do you see

38:16

that change in Christianity? So

38:20

I can't speak to like

38:22

a long breadth of history. I will

38:24

say that I think one of the

38:26

more noteworthy periods that some folks know,

38:28

Brad, I'm sure you're aware of too,

38:30

is this whole muscular Christian movement that

38:32

was sort of emerging in

38:34

the latter half of the 19th century, particularly

38:37

in the anglophonic world in England. So

38:39

at that point, you're kind of at

38:41

the sort of high golden arc of

38:43

industrialization. Anglicans in England

38:45

were noticing that the men populating

38:48

their pews were fairly sallow, looking

38:50

kind of exhausted, distancing very

38:52

virile, if you will. And

38:54

so there was this big discussion within kind

38:56

of like high church Anglicanism about, well, like,

38:58

what do we do about this? Like men

39:00

are kind of losing the very physical

39:03

aspects or attributes that is to be a man.

39:05

And so there's a lot of heavy debate, I'd

39:08

say mostly amongst the Protestant world. Interestingly

39:11

enough, the kind of Catholic iteration comes

39:13

from a man, St. John Henry Newman,

39:15

who is Anglican. He converts to Catholicism.

39:18

And he wrote a book on the University

39:20

of Education. And one of the things he

39:22

does is picks up on these debates. And

39:24

he says, part of a proper education is

39:26

to have physical fitness and

39:28

the kind of spiritual importance of that. So

39:31

the 19th century was a time of

39:33

kind of spiritual and religious zeal. Of course,

39:35

that's when you have a Cubertin who starts

39:38

to resurrect. In his idea

39:40

of the Olympic games, you start to

39:42

have all these like old-timey health clubs

39:44

and strongman stuff. Eugene Sandow was around

39:46

at the time. All these kinds of,

39:49

in some ways, critiques of the

39:52

effects of industrialization on man's spirit

39:54

and body. I think fitness

39:56

is there where that industry comes as sort

39:58

of an answer to that. and also to make

40:00

a buck off of it too for that,

40:02

no doubt. Yeah, so we did

40:04

a whole sort of mini book

40:07

about the muscular Christianity movement. It's a really

40:09

fascinating period. So yeah, you said late 19th

40:11

century, it reached America and it kind of

40:13

went on to the early 20th century, but

40:16

a lot of things going on, a lot

40:18

of different cultural currents just crisscrossing. And

40:20

so yeah, muscular Christianity movement, that's what gave rise

40:23

to the YMCA, the

40:25

Young Men's Christian Association, what was developed in the

40:27

YMCA, basketball was developed there,

40:30

volleyball was developed there. You see

40:32

churches starting church leagues, not

40:34

just Protestant churches, but Catholic churches. You all

40:37

see this in Judaism. A lot of synagogues

40:39

were starting basketball leagues, boxing gyms would be

40:42

at these places. And they were seen as

40:44

a way not only to inject some more

40:46

virility in the church, but it was like

40:48

a missionary arm of the churches, how

40:50

you could get young urban men

40:53

who might've been, you know,

40:55

committing crime. Well, let's get them to

40:57

church boxing and maybe they'll come to

41:00

the pew as well. Yeah,

41:02

no, I mean, I think it's an incredible part

41:04

of history. Even, I think there was one Canadian

41:07

Presbyterian missionary out in the

41:09

prairie area of Canada. And

41:12

as he was going about, he'd see these prairie towns

41:14

and these guys were, you know, hard drinking, that kind

41:16

of stuff, that lifestyle. And it really started to kind

41:19

of develop an athletic program for them.

41:21

You know, it wasn't anything complicated, but

41:23

it was similar to what you were saying. It was

41:25

echoing the fact that, hey, let's get you off the

41:27

street, get you off the bottle, let's do this, and

41:30

closely tie it to a sense of faith.

41:32

Not just like, hey, lift and look good, but

41:34

this is important. Yeah, you were supposed to exercise so

41:36

you could be a better servant in the kingdom of

41:38

God. And you started seeing these

41:40

books come out. There's like this one book that

41:43

I read, The Manliness of Christ, written in 1903.

41:46

And it just talked about how, you know, Jesus was

41:48

actually this really manly, manly dude. He wasn't this

41:50

sort of effeminate, kind of wavy looking guy you

41:52

see in stained glass. He was actually really manly.

41:55

They'd look at the Bible and the New Testament

41:57

stories and say, look at Jesus, he fasted for

41:59

40 years. days and then was able to

42:01

battle the devil and then he was able to

42:03

just walk all over Judea and deal

42:06

with thousands of people and healing them and he had

42:08

the stamina to do that and he said, we need

42:10

to be like that. In order to do that, we

42:13

have to exercise so that we can go forth and

42:15

spread the gospel. And then like he brought in the

42:17

progressive movement into this, in the

42:19

social gospel where we had to not

42:21

only develop ourselves spiritually, but the goal

42:24

was to develop, it was to go

42:26

out and change the world, like bring

42:28

the kingdom of God here on earth

42:31

through missionary work, through eliminating poverty, increasing

42:33

literacy and improving health. And

42:35

it's not only to improve the health

42:37

of people in society in general,

42:40

there's also this idea that you

42:42

as an individual needed to be healthy

42:44

in order to do all this good

42:47

work. That's a fascinating time period.

42:49

Yeah. Okay. So

42:51

I want to move on. You mentioned this guy, Yukio Mishima.

42:54

You mentioned him earlier. You've written some

42:56

essays about him. This is a controversial

42:58

figure, but if you're in the bodybuilding

43:00

world, you'll probably come around to some

43:02

Mishima quote, or you're going to see some

43:05

guy be like, son in steel. He

43:07

wrote this treatise called son in steel

43:09

and he explores his own journey into

43:12

bodybuilding. Give us some background on Yukio

43:14

Mishima. Sure. Sure.

43:17

So Mishima was a very

43:19

interesting guy. He was in some

43:21

ways born a little bit too

43:23

young to participate fully in

43:25

World War II as a Japanese. And

43:27

that's something that I don't think he ever really let himself. He

43:31

didn't really forgive himself for that. I think he wanted to fight.

43:33

Instead, he was a student. I think

43:35

he was working at some sort of

43:38

munitions factory in Japan and basically saw

43:41

his country's defeat. I think for

43:43

him, one of the turning points was

43:45

when he noticed that on the day of

43:47

defeat, it was a very sunny

43:50

day. It happened to be beautiful outside. And

43:52

in some ways he became kind of angry at that

43:55

because he felt like, well, how cruel it is, the

43:57

empire has fallen and yet it's so beautiful out. that

44:00

really stuck with him, this theme of dark and

44:02

light, the nighttime and

44:04

the daytime. These are certain

44:06

themes that are very prevalent in his

44:08

book, The Sun and Steel. Mishima

44:11

was a complicated guy. He

44:14

was a samurai enthusiast, although

44:16

I think that's kind of putting in a very

44:18

hobby-like way. I think he

44:20

was in fact a very brilliant supporter of

44:22

Japanese imperialism and the kind of pre-meiji modernization.

44:25

A lot of his books

44:27

often touched upon mocking the ways that Japanese

44:29

would attempt to mimic the West or

44:31

bring Western traditions in. He

44:34

really held close to his heart the samurai

44:36

tradition. I guess he at one point maybe

44:38

claimed some sort of lineage to

44:40

them. I'm not particularly certain if that is true

44:42

or not, if he's just saying that. He

44:45

was a man of pretty small stature. I think he might

44:47

have been like five foot or five one. He

44:50

was very thin. He

44:52

was also mocked for being so

44:54

small. I think there was

44:56

a lot that was building up into

44:58

his interest in lifting and

45:01

weights. I don't think

45:03

it was a pure intellectual adventure. I think it

45:05

was also a confidence-building

45:07

exercise. But he was

45:09

first and foremost a writer and poet. He was

45:11

also gay. He was someone who certainly

45:13

struggled, I think, with that in some of his books

45:16

that becomes evident. All

45:19

this transpires for him

45:21

maybe in his 30s or so, probably around the

45:23

same time I started lifting and maybe a lot

45:25

of people do often, when he realized that he

45:28

sort of become a man of the night. He

45:31

was up late night reading Buried in

45:33

the Midnight Oil. This is all things that he

45:35

documents in The Sun and Steel. For

45:39

me, I think, to

45:41

be self-referential, I suppose, I saw a lot

45:43

of that when I was doing my PhD.

45:46

It's just a lot of Buried in

45:48

the Midnight Oil, not really getting good

45:50

sleep up until 3am, writing, drinking

45:53

coffee, maybe having a cigarette or a cigar, whatever

45:55

have you. I'm not really wanting to go into

45:57

the world. the

46:00

daytime really to more enjoy the night and to

46:02

kind of find a lot of intellectual productive activities

46:04

then. So I think for him he was very

46:07

much a creature of the

46:09

night there. Eventually I think

46:11

he comes to a point where he wonders

46:13

to himself in the essay, you know, why is

46:16

it that with words they can soar to the

46:18

greatest heights and yet here my

46:20

body still remains as it were, you know, in

46:22

a room not going anywhere. And

46:24

I think he saw the sort of

46:26

dissonance between, you know, poetic flourish or

46:29

metaphorical flourish against that of

46:31

his body which was just this very skinny

46:33

thing. And I think he wanted to make

46:35

that commiserate. I think he wanted to kind

46:37

of rebalance himself in that way. So for

46:39

him he was already

46:41

very fluent obviously in

46:44

writing prose but he

46:46

was not very fluent in what he would call learning the

46:48

language of the flesh and that is

46:50

to train the body with steel or what obviously

46:52

in America we call the iron. So

46:54

there's a lot of things there. So just to

46:56

talk about he was a good writer. He was

46:59

actually considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature five

47:01

times for some of the stuff he was. He

47:03

was a very good writer. This idea of the

47:05

nocturnal life, I mean I think

47:07

that perfectly describes this like it was like the life

47:09

of the mind. He talks about it's like I was

47:11

just inside my head and it sounds like when you

47:13

were a grad student you were there

47:15

and like your other grad students were just like

47:17

inside their heads and that's as far as it

47:19

went. Like you said you could do these amazing

47:22

lofty things with words but then when you actually

47:24

looked at your lived experience

47:27

it was like ah something's not matching here something's

47:29

off. Yeah

47:31

for sure for sure. I think

47:34

for Mishima there was

47:36

something very noble

47:39

as I mentioned before he was a very he's very

47:41

thoroughly Greek thinker when it came to the body and

47:43

a lot of his books which are fantastic I

47:45

think he actually might be my favorite author at

47:47

least close to it. Just incredible

47:49

writer or he's just got very good translators it

47:51

could be both but he

47:53

talks a lot about the Greek understanding

47:56

of the body. He has an incredible

47:58

grasp on Western literature. and culture. He's

48:00

East Asian obviously, but he doesn't really have

48:02

a lot of reference to what Buddhism

48:06

or Eastern thought might say to it.

48:09

In fact, he even characterizes his learning

48:11

language of the flesh as almost kind of

48:13

revivifying a dead language like ancient

48:15

Greek or Latin. And he

48:17

talks about sculpture, of course, that's the eternal

48:19

metaphor that every guy in the list uses,

48:22

is to be a self-sculptor, is to carve

48:24

yourself out of the flesh that you're the

48:26

fat and all that stuff. So

48:28

he has a very kind of interesting

48:31

outlook. The sun is something that at

48:33

first presents itself kind of as an

48:35

enemy. It's very merciless. The sun

48:37

comes up, it doesn't matter what happens or what

48:39

is happening. It's still out. It's still a gorgeous

48:41

day, whether it's your country's defeat or whether you're

48:43

just this kind of, you

48:46

know, slovenly grad student or writer. There's

48:48

something that he wants to bear himself towards

48:50

to kind of ascend to the heights. And

48:52

I think that that's kind of the metaphor

48:54

of the sun. It reveals all.

48:56

And one of my essays that I write

48:59

about, there's something interesting about kind of fashion,

49:01

even athletic fashion or athleisure, they call it,

49:03

where there's kind of a sleight of

49:05

hand going on with some of these kind of trends. For

49:08

Mishima, it's like, yeah, like exposing

49:10

your body, its muscles in the

49:12

sunlight. People will see, you

49:15

know, the imperfections, they'll see the beauty of it,

49:17

that which you've wrought from your training.

49:19

And I think that there's something incredibly invigorating

49:21

about building your body and being able to

49:24

kind of look at. So I think that's

49:26

kind of what he meant by learning the

49:28

language of the flesh was to explore the

49:30

threshold of his body through

49:32

struggle, through pain, exactly how the Greeks

49:34

thought of it in their concept, like

49:36

Agon or what we get agony or

49:38

agonistic, which of course is very negative

49:40

in an English language. But

49:42

Agon meant struggle, it meant something that

49:44

you encounter to reach a higher plane

49:46

to explore something else. And Mishima's

49:49

concept of pain is thoroughly

49:52

Greek in that way. All

49:54

right, so pain is how you learn. It's like it's

49:56

a way to reveal who you are. Yeah.

50:00

Yeah, his idea of this language of

50:02

the flesh, there's intelligence inside of our

50:04

bodies, not just in our head. You

50:06

talk about how this is similar to

50:08

what Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke, Zarasutra.

50:10

He says, you say I, and

50:13

you are proud of this word, but greater

50:15

than this, although you would not believe it,

50:18

is your body and its intelligence, which does not

50:20

say I, but performs

50:22

I. Yeah,

50:25

I mean, I think this goes back to

50:27

a very banal truism that we

50:29

all hear. It's actions speak louder

50:31

than words, I suppose. And

50:33

then this idea that what Mishima found in

50:35

the steel or pumping iron and building

50:37

your muscles, he had this to say about what

50:39

it can do and kind of training or helping

50:42

you learn the language of the flesh. It's a

50:44

great quote. He says, the steel gave

50:46

me an utterly new kind of knowledge and

50:49

knowledge that neither books nor worldly experience can

50:51

impart. Muscles, I found, were

50:53

strength as well as form. And

50:55

each complex of muscles was subtly responsible for

50:58

the direction in which its own strength was

51:00

exerted, much as though they were rays of

51:02

light, given the form of the flesh. For

51:04

me, muscles had one of the most desirable

51:06

qualities of all. Their function

51:08

was precisely opposite of that of

51:10

words. Yeah, what an

51:12

incredible quote. I mean, talk about the power of

51:14

words right there, right? Yeah,

51:16

I think he's able to really leech a

51:20

lot of what I think people who lift may

51:23

not necessarily approach as a

51:25

clear thought, sometimes maybe peripheral. I

51:28

think sometimes our sense of talking with the

51:30

body to go back before about, you know,

51:32

kind of online bodybuilding, where it just seems

51:34

to be like a very kind of sugary

51:36

sense of enthusiasm or optimism or sort of

51:38

a pop definition of discipline. I think

51:41

these are our attempts, I think, to

51:43

get close to what Mishima so brilliantly

51:45

puts, you know, in that quote

51:47

about muscles and what they are and what they

51:49

do, the opposite of language, what the steel does

51:52

for us. I think all these

51:54

things are ways of all of our kind

51:56

of thoughts about the body approximate what

51:58

I think Mishima puts so brilliantly. And I

52:00

think that's why he's probably the greatest exponent of a

52:03

very Greek understanding of the body. Yeah.

52:07

And I think there is a language of the flesh.

52:09

Whenever you exercise, what I've noticed with strength training is

52:11

that you develop a

52:13

bodily awareness. Like I know

52:16

what I'm getting to failure. And a

52:18

lot of people, they might think they're getting

52:20

close to failure, but actually they're not to

52:22

failure because they haven't pushed beyond that initial

52:24

feeling. But you can train, you can learn,

52:26

like listen to your body. Like, okay, it

52:28

might feel not great right now, but you

52:30

can actually do three, four, five more reps

52:32

if you wanted to. You can't get that

52:34

without training. Yeah, right. And

52:36

pushing yourself beyond a self-perceived limitation.

52:38

I mean, I think that that's

52:40

the hardest mental barrier because really

52:42

for a lot of people, it's

52:44

about safety. You know, it's,

52:46

um, if I get under the squat

52:49

rack in this bar, you know, what is, if I

52:51

can't make the last lift, let's say, you know, my,

52:53

the pins aren't adjusted properly. There's no one to spot

52:55

me. And you know, people immediately think of severe

52:58

injury or death. And of course that

53:00

does happen. So I think kind

53:02

of living on, on that, that edge of

53:04

life, if you will, just in

53:06

your garage, squatting is an

53:08

experience that I think very few people will

53:10

understand maybe short of obviously serving in the

53:13

military or being a copper firefighter or something

53:15

like that, or paramedic, I guess. Yeah.

53:18

No, there's, when I've, when I was really

53:20

into powerlifting, I had posted videos occasionally of

53:22

me squatting or something like a PR and

53:25

people in the comments would ask like, what were you thinking

53:27

when you're doing that? And like, it's like the only thought

53:29

that's going through my head is like, don't die. That's

53:32

all I'm thinking. Don't

53:34

die. Exactly. Exactly. But also,

53:36

you know, in that moment

53:38

of perhaps avoidable pre-death, you

53:41

are also much more conscious of all the muscles you're

53:43

using. Like you realize, oh wow, if I'm like, if

53:45

I'm getting up out of the hole, for example, if

53:48

my core isn't tight, I'm not going to make it

53:50

out. So I think this bodily

53:52

awareness, it expands, you begin to

53:54

become more fluent, I think, in your

53:56

body when you're in these situations,

53:58

which is why I do. log powerless

54:00

even though I've kind of departed from it for

54:02

past a couple years now and Mishima

54:05

like the Greeks He thought that the

54:07

body like how the body looked it

54:10

also revealed what your mind or

54:12

your spirit was like as well Yeah,

54:15

for sure for sure And I think

54:17

that whole beginning part of the essay

54:19

where he's sort of emerging out of this sort

54:22

of intellectual cocoon of the night if you will

54:24

I think that that's just extremely

54:26

apt not just for you know A writer like

54:28

him or a grad student like me or was

54:30

a grad student But really for anybody who just

54:32

you know has that kind of profession where it's

54:34

a lot of sitting and thinking I think

54:37

a lot of people can identify that with

54:39

that. So Mishima. He

54:41

was a Japanese romantic He loved

54:43

samurai culture. He was also a

54:45

nationalist who was extremely

54:47

critical of the post-war materialism that

54:50

he saw in Japan and also

54:52

the democratic government and

54:54

then after an unsuccessful

54:57

coup He attempted

55:00

he committed seppuku or you know, it's

55:02

a Hari kari right ritualistic suicide by

55:05

Disembowelment and then they chop your head

55:07

off after that and he was very famous for

55:09

that death But he thought a

55:12

lot about death previous to it. So what

55:14

role did death play in his philosophy of

55:16

the body? It goes

55:18

back to kind of this rejection of the

55:20

idea of the body is not being an

55:22

ironic or properly ironic Subject

55:24

object if there's something that Mishima kind of

55:26

muses about, you know, it would be so

55:28

bizarre and strange Have

55:31

this flabby body upon death. So I

55:33

think as far as I understand it

55:35

through his words Working

55:37

out the body training was in some ways to prepare

55:39

one the self for death. It was to Fight

55:42

to the death. There's kind of this idea I

55:44

think in some Japanese literature from what I understand

55:46

of kind of like the heroic loser, you

55:49

know It's the samurai that fights the last breath and then

55:51

he dies You know by the sword

55:53

of the enemy or something like that. There's that

55:55

theme I think that's that's fairly rife in certain

55:57

literature in Japan from what I understand So

56:00

I think he was sort of tapping into that aspect.

56:02

You know, it would just be kind of like weird

56:04

or silly to have like this like big fat guy.

56:07

And he's holding a sword trying to defend himself.

56:09

Like I think that there's less of a romantic

56:11

image versus a guy who's like, you know, jacked

56:13

or something and he's fighting to his last breath.

56:15

I think that's kind of what he's getting there

56:17

too. So to have

56:19

a trained body is to prepare oneself for

56:22

the final fight for effectively to fight to

56:24

the death. Maybe Socrates

56:26

would get that right? Didn't Socrates or someone

56:28

say like philosophy is about preparing for death,

56:30

preparing to die? It is. And

56:33

this is something that I think too, when you

56:35

look at, you know, Mishima is writing here when

56:37

you look at the Socratic ideas as well, something

56:40

that Heidegger, Martin Heidegger talks about

56:43

in various areas being in time is that we

56:45

live in a society that avoids

56:47

talking about death. We

56:50

live in a society that just assumes

56:52

that death isn't there, that we're about

56:54

full maximal enjoyment. And so what

56:56

happens is that if we don't have this clear understanding

56:58

that we will die and that that's something that we

57:00

should think about, life becomes whatever

57:03

you want it to become. It

57:05

doesn't have really a purpose. It becomes very

57:07

amorphous and in some ways it becomes very

57:10

destructive, ironically. So I think

57:12

for Mishima having that clear aim

57:14

of having a body to fight

57:16

and prepare for death gives him that

57:19

resolve and discipline to then train similar

57:21

to how the Greeks or even

57:24

the Romans for that matter to train to

57:26

be able to fight the enemy to go

57:28

towards death. At one point

57:30

I kind of took a lot of these ideas so

57:32

seriously. I ended up joining a fire rescue academy in

57:34

Virginia because I wanted to

57:36

really test my metal and I was

57:39

probably the oldest guy in the academy

57:41

at the time. I didn't

57:43

pass because I actually injured myself

57:45

doing deadlifts ironically. But

57:47

I did notice something though that in

57:50

those kinds of like sort of paramilitary,

57:52

somewhat martial environments, PT

57:54

or going through evolutions,

57:56

these were things that for

57:58

the most part were not fun at

58:01

all. They were extremely taxing on the body.

58:03

They were exhausting. And it

58:05

wasn't like, you know, when I was like training where

58:07

I can just stop and I can get a glass

58:10

of water, something like that, you had to keep going

58:12

on and on. And so oftentimes I would think about

58:14

Mishima most of the time thinking about God

58:16

because I wanted to just get through the day. But

58:18

there was something about that marshallness of

58:21

the body that did kind of help

58:23

push me through until I eventually dig

58:25

an injury. So I often wonder

58:27

what that's like for other folks who, you know,

58:29

went through those academies or in the military and

58:31

what their perspective is. And I think it mirrors

58:34

closely to what Mishima kind of goes about. So

58:37

how has looking at exercise through a theological,

58:40

philosophical lens, how has it changed

58:42

how you approach your own training?

58:45

Very, very simply. It's just that the limits

58:48

that I think I have aren't

58:50

really limits. They're kind of, you

58:52

know, reprieve on climbing the mountain. It's

58:55

to stop temporarily, but

58:57

realizing that there's more to go. It's

59:00

to in some ways step out of the

59:02

immediacy of my own comforts of

59:04

kind of what like Socrates would say about the

59:06

flesh where kind of just it's always looking for

59:09

the next high, if you will. And

59:11

it's to kind of pick myself

59:13

up, sort of physically pick myself up, but

59:16

also spiritually or intellectually pick myself up to

59:18

kind of keep going a little bit more.

59:21

And I think the quote

59:23

that you had passed by

59:25

Socrates from Xenophon's Morabilia, it's a

59:27

shame for a man to grow old without seeing

59:30

the strength and beauty of which his body is capable. That

59:33

famous kind of like bro lifting quote. I

59:35

think it's amazing because I think that also

59:37

gives me kind of fuel and sustenance to

59:40

go on there. So it's nothing incredibly worked

59:42

out in my mind. It just provides norsals

59:44

of intellectual nourishment on days where I either

59:46

do not want to lift or if I'm

59:48

lifting, I want to stay safe

59:51

and not lift as heavy. I guess

59:54

that's for me what the importance of how

59:56

that relates and in terms of just bodybuilding

59:58

in general, how that might even work. I

1:00:00

should say works on the opposite end of

1:00:02

my life. I guess my day job, so to speak,

1:00:04

is that yeah, I mean you have to kind of

1:00:06

it pushes you a little bit more. You're healthier. I

1:00:08

see a lot of folks get

1:00:10

into just eating, you know, garbage food and

1:00:12

stuff. And if for me, it kind of

1:00:15

trains me to be healthier

1:00:17

at work, if you will. For me,

1:00:19

it makes training, it just gives another dimension

1:00:21

to your training. It makes it more fun. It gives

1:00:23

it more texture, I guess. That's what it

1:00:25

does for me at least. I think so

1:00:27

too. I think that it's

1:00:29

awesome too. I have like two friends, Chris and Jason.

1:00:32

We're all the same age, all in the early 40s,

1:00:34

you know, married kids and all that. We

1:00:36

go to the gym train and honestly, it's

1:00:38

better than any that meeting at any bar

1:00:40

or craft brewery or having a cigar even.

1:00:43

It's to me, that's like the most fun

1:00:45

I'll have with other guys

1:00:47

is lifting with them, joking. And

1:00:49

there's just something incredibly uplifting

1:00:52

and pleasurable about that that I help to sort

1:00:54

of continue on in my life as I get

1:00:57

older. You got that Greek element of vital play.

1:01:00

Yes, exactly. Well, Joe, this has been a great

1:01:02

conversation. Where can people go to learn more about

1:01:04

your work? Yeah, sure.

1:01:06

So I co-edit an online journal

1:01:08

of the active body. It's called

1:01:10

ultra physical. It's, you

1:01:12

can just sort of it is ultra physical.us. If

1:01:15

I recall, we publish infrequently,

1:01:17

but often quarterly conversations from people who

1:01:19

think about the bodies in the way

1:01:21

that you've been thinking about it the

1:01:23

way I've been thinking about it, adding

1:01:26

kind of an intellectual and philosophical

1:01:28

capacity. It's heterodox, even

1:01:31

though I myself am more conservative, the co-editor

1:01:33

is liberal. So we have kind of different

1:01:36

perspectives as well, I think that are in there

1:01:38

because we don't feel that talking about the body

1:01:41

is necessarily the prominence of the left or

1:01:43

right. It's something that as human beings, we all

1:01:45

have. So we do that

1:01:47

on a more, I guess, individual level

1:01:49

for me, a colette I've written about,

1:01:51

I think three essays for colette Australian

1:01:53

based journal. Recently in

1:01:55

March, I came out with one

1:01:57

from the European conservative that's a

1:02:00

another journal and I think there

1:02:02

might be something else, but I'd

1:02:04

say cool that you're being conservative

1:02:06

and of course, ultraphysical.us are

1:02:08

the main clearing houses for all things Lombardo,

1:02:10

I suppose. Fantastic. Well, Joe Lombardo, thanks for

1:02:12

your time. It's been a pleasure. Brad,

1:02:15

thanks so much. Appreciate it. My

1:02:18

guest here is Joe Lombardo. He is the editor

1:02:20

of the online journal, Ultra Physical. You can check

1:02:22

that out at ultraphysical.us. Also

1:02:25

check out our show notes at aom.is.lombardo. We

1:02:27

find links to resources. We delve deeper into

1:02:29

this topic. Well,

1:02:38

that wraps up another edition of the AOM

1:02:40

podcast. If you'd like to be part of

1:02:42

an organization that takes seriously both the practicality

1:02:44

and the philosophy of physical fitness, consider joining

1:02:46

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1:02:50

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1:03:01

always, thank you for the continued support and until next time,

1:03:03

this is Brad McKay. Remind you to listen

1:03:05

to our podcast, and be a part of the

1:03:07

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