Matthew McConaughey, Pete Holmes, Martellus Bennett, and George Raveling on How to Be a Modern Leader

Today’s episode features clips from some of the best interviews in 2020. Ryan talks to Matthew McConaughey, Pete Holmes, Martellus Bennett, and George Raveling about focusing on what’s in your control, finding growth in suffering, the Stoic virtue of justice, and why all leaders are readers. This episode is brought to you by GiveWell, the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. GiveWell’s team of researchers works countless hours to determine which charities make the most effective dollar-for-dollar contributions to the causes they support. Since 2010, GiveWell has helped over 50,000 donors donate over 500 million dollars to the most effective charities, leading to over 75,000 lives saved and millions more improved. Visit GiveWell.org/stoic and your first donation will be matched up to 100 dollars. This episode is also brought to you by Trends. Trends is the ultimate online community for entrepreneurs and business aficionados who want to know the latest news about business trends and analysis. It features articles from the most knowledgeable people, interviews with movers and shakers, and a private community of like-minded people with whom you can discuss the latest insights from Trends. Visit trends.co/stoic to start your two-week trial for just one dollar. This episode is also brought to you by HelloFresh, the meal-kit subscription that gets you healthy and delicious home-cooked meals, right to your doorstep. HelloFresh sends you meal kits in a way that fits in with your schedule and dietary preferences. Meals are seasonal and delicious, and save you and your family time and money on grocery shopping. Visit HelloFresh.com/stoic80 and use code STOIC80 to get $80 off, including free shipping.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We're doing sort of a best of episode today with some of our best clips from our best guests of the year. We're going to be talking to Matthew McConaughey about how we do that famous thing what the Stoics say, the dichotomy of control, how we accept things that are out of our control, how we fight for the things that are in control. He also told me this fascinating story about decision in his life, similar to one in my life, about the decision to sort of scale things back and focus, as Mark Sereali says, on what's essential.

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  We talked to my friend Pete Holmes, one of the funniest people alive, also has a great podcast called You Made It Weird. We talked about some of our similar struggles with our parents. As he jokes, "Nothing will challenge you philosophically from a Zen perspective, from a Stoic perspective, quite like family, especially during the middle of the pandemic." Then we talked to Super Bowl-winning tight end Martellus Bennett, not just about race, but about the sort of challenges to this Stoic idea of justice, which is really important. And then we talked to one of my heroes, one of my mentors, the great George Raveling, civil rights activist, reader, coach, mentor to some of the best names in college and professional basketball.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  And we talk really about what it means to be a reader. George probably reads more than anyone I know. I like to joke George is one of my oldest friends. He's well into his eighties and, and yet he has this insatiable desire to read. The last time I saw him, he, in person, this was in 2019, he showed up with a huge stack of books that he'd bought for me at Book People. He is a, a supporter of bookstores, to say the least, particularly independent retail. Just a great man, great human being. You're going to love that interview. So anyways, here we go. Some best of moments, applying Stoicism, applying the philosophy to real life from some real practitioners, whether they know it or not, whether they're explicitly following

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  Stoicism or not. I think there's a lot you can learn here. So we'll get into it and then we'll be back to new guests here very soon. I've got a whole bunch of great episodes in the can. I've been recording all week and can't wait to show them to you. Here's me talking to author, writer, and as I said in my blurb about him, outlaw philosopher, Matthew McConaughey.

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  I've always wanted to ask this question to an actor. There's this great line from Epictetus. He says, you know, life is like being an actor. He says, you don't get to choose your lines, you just choose how you deliver them. He's, he's basically saying that sort of life is written that, you know, that there's a, a higher power who's mostly in control. And then we have this sort of circumscribed role where we do the best we can. It's always struck me as, as a weird profession, your, your line of work in that you have so little actual control of what you do. You get to choose your movies at, at this point in your career, but you don't control what the other actors do. You don't control what the director does. You don't control the marketing budget.

• 4:04Matthew McConaughey?

  No. I mean, it's so like the the the bar stool whiskey version of that is how you play the hand you're dealt. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it's part of the reason that I did write a book and I'm going to go back into the the acting. So there's four filters from my first raw expression as an actor. There's what I do, or what I'm doing, someone else's script is being directed by someone else is being lensed in the camera by someone else and edited by someone else before it's presented in the final form, which you see in the theater on TV. You know, it's a little bit of what I do in my class at UT with the script to screen. It's the original script is so different from the final product. Things change, you know, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, sometimes it's just completely different.

• 4:50Matthew McConaughey?

  My job as an actor, and I and I only learned this in the last 15 years from the great Penny Allen, my mentor, who really taught me what acting was. She's like, you have to own your man, your character. You have to be the sole owner of that. You have to know your man upside down, backwards, forwards, better than anybody else. It's not the directors anymore. It's not the writers who wrote it anymore. You're the bloodline, you're the expression, the baton has been handled. Now, to do that, that takes a lot of the work of my version is I want to come in with four versions of the truth in every scene. So, like you said, when every actor goes off script or changes something up or the director is completely wants to surprise you, I'm calling audibles, I'm ready. And I'm not having to think about it.

• 5:34Matthew McConaughey?

  It's instinctually coming out of me. Now, if I can do that, like I've always said this, my ideal place when I really get to know my man as an actor is put a blindfold on me. Take me, I don't care if you take me to Mars, wherever, be rolling camera, be video, press record as soon as I walk off and take the take the blindfold off. And I should be able to behave as my man would in any situation. I don't always get there, but that's the place. And again, I gotta have the dialogue to have the monologue. But every character, every actor should know the monologue of his man or his woman.

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  So was that frustrating early on in your career? Cause you seem like a sort of an ambitious guy, a guy who wants to, has a lot of artistic expression that you want to get out. Was it hard for you to sort of see your role as like, especially I guess in movies that maybe you didn't like as much? How do you sort of go in and go, I can only focus on what I do here? I think one of the nice parts about being a writer, as I'm sure you found is you do have so much more control over the artistic expression.

• 6:39Matthew McConaughey?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  Cause it's a, it's a solo sport. It's golf versus football.

• 6:43Matthew McConaughey?

  Yeah. Well, even though acting, you know, acting, I've learned to understand that yes, while it's a football, while it's a team sport, I get pretty selfish on that. I'm like, I mean, I, I'm a team player. I love collaboration. I've learned that there's more than, though I may not be wrong, there's more than one way to be right. Or a better word for acting is to be true, to go out and just tell the truth. Not about right or wrong. I mean, sometimes I try to get a measure from a director early on on what is our measure of excellence? All right, I did this with Gary Ross from Free State of Jones. We're two weeks into shooting and we're communicating pretty well. And he's given me direction and I'm feeling pretty good about it and what he's got to say. And I feel like his meter of excellence is similar to mine.

• 7:27Matthew McConaughey?

  I'm enjoying his direction and I'm giving stuff back to him and he seems to be receiving it. But I want to check it. I want to check our relationship. So we do this one, we do the scene one day and I do 10 takes. So after the 10 takes, I said, Gary, come here. We go and we go into the, the tent and look at the monitor. I said, I'm going to write down what I think is the select best takes. You write down what you think are the best select takes out of the 10. And then we're going to swap papers to see if we're seeing things the same. So I write down first half of take four.

• 7:58Matthew McConaughey?

  Second half of take two. We watch all 10 takes. We swap papers. I open this paper. It says first half of take four, second half of take two. Now, when that happens, now I'm like, here we go. Freedom. You and I are seeing things the same. Doesn't mean we agree on everything, but we have the same measure of excellence. Like you see that, that, that take five, which was really good, but I kind of, I was acting. You see me there? There was a good moment and I anticipated and I tried to put a little cherry on top. It wasn't as true as it was when I did it in take four for the first time. Yes, it's exactly what I saw. So when we meet there on a measure of what we deem excellent or deem the most true, then the relationship becomes much more collaborative for me. Meaning if you're the director and you're telling me what to do, I don't have any sort of defense up.

• 8:43Matthew McConaughey?

  Now, I've had many a films I've done where the director and I are not seeing eye to eye on my character or what the truth is for my character. And boy, they open their mouth and I'm going.

• 8:56Matthew McConaughey?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep. And the other thing is, is to go out there and I'll, if, if, this has been said long before. I'm saying it now, but in Hollywood, they say if the director ever says, well, give me one take my way, just for me. If you do it, that takes what's gonna, they're gonna put that take in the movie. No matter how, no matter if you did it that, that well or not. Most of the time, they're gonna put that in the movie.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  No, and that was one of the, the things I was really interested in in the book is your sort of deliberate decision to change the trajectory or the arc of your career. So yeah, on the one hand, an actor doesn't have a ton of control over what happens in the movie, but you do have some control over what movies you choose to be in or not.

• 9:37Matthew McConaughey?

  Sure.

• 9:38Ryan Holiday?

  And so, yeah, your, your decision to say like, hey, I'm going to be a different kind of actor, then allowed you to say yes and no to certain movies that probably seemed totally crazy to other people, to your peers, to your management team, but you knew where you wanted to go. So actually being offered, you know, X amount for this movie, no amount of money made it the right decision.

• 10:01Matthew McConaughey?

  No, because I had hit a red light with my soul and myself. I had hit a red light where it wasn't about how much money that was given me. It was about. Wow, these, I'm going to work. It's easy. It's fun. Nothing wrong with that. Let's not be, you know, okay, I remember telling myself, hey, nothing wrong with that. Let's not just, again, let's not trip ourselves running downhill here. I said, but man, I, I think there's a way, and I, I want to find a way where my work is challenging me, where I'm having an experience in the work, where I'm growing in the work, where it's challenging the vitality I have in my life, which was feeling very vital and has been feeling very

• 10:42Matthew McConaughey?

  vital. So that was a red light for me, is that when I would go to work, I'd feel like, well, I didn't feel as much in, in life as I do in real life. And it felt like, oh, okay, I'm going off to work. This is too easy. And it's supposed to be easy, but is that really what I want? So I had a red light in my life. I was not growing through my work at that time. And so that's why I stopped doing what I was doing and did turn down. And it wouldn't have mattered. You know, people go like, well, look, you know, that big offer you got for 14, whatever, if that had been 20, would you have done it? I was like, no, I mean, I really wasn't. I would have probably rewritten again, just to say, I think I should. That would be the responsible thing, just to consider it. But I was never, that, that check, my check was, I'd already cashed that check with my soul saying, I'm

• 11:27Matthew McConaughey?

  not going back.

• 11:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's a champagne problem, certainly, but it's not easy to do, right? To say no to, when people, when, it's hard to say no to socially acceptable things.

• 11:39Matthew McConaughey?

  Yes. And socially acceptable when they are the best champagne in the world. I mean, as far as the, the taste, it's a very shiny gold things were in front of me. And they weren't the devil. They weren't, they weren't evil. They weren't tyrannical. They were, I felt they would be tyrannical to me in doing them and to spend my time there. And so it was difficult. And it is difficult to say no sometimes, but you know this, you talk about it all the time. There's, there was, that was the great power, the, in the no. I mean, I had, look, could I have made that decision 10 years prior? No, obviously. And I didn't make that decision 10 years prior. Remember, I come in, you come into

• 12:21Matthew McConaughey?

  something, and this goes along with the line I bring up about being less impressed and more involved. Look, I'm still impressed with this industry and impressed that, wow, I get to do this? I would do it for free. There's not one film that I've done that I would not do for free because I love the work. But you can't roll through going, I'm still just so happy to be here. You're offering me that work, of course. You have to be discerning. There's only 24 hours in a day and we've got to schedule through a year. You can't do everything you want to do. If you're in a fortunate position, which I am, so I had to make choices.

• 12:57Ryan Holiday?

  And life is short.

• 12:58Matthew McConaughey?

  It's so short.

• 13:01Matthew McConaughey?

  You know, even though it does seem to last a while sometimes, overall, it's very short. So, you know, yeah, to say no to those things was hard, but I had a hunch that there was a joker in the deck at the end of the line somewhere. I didn't know when the end of the line was, was gonna come, but it did about two years later.

• 13:19Ryan Holiday?

  Mark Suriel says this, he goes, "You gotta ask yourself every minute, is this essential? Is the thing I'm doing essential?" And the upshot of that question is a lot of the things you're doing are not essential, and therefore you don't need to do them.

• 13:32Matthew McConaughey?

  Right.

• 13:32Ryan Holiday?

  It says the double benefit is that you do the fewer things better. And I think that's where you want to get, is you say no to most things, and then the things you say yes to, you either actually like doing them, or you don't like doing them, but you do them like they matter.

• 13:48Matthew McConaughey?

  Right. Look, I've had to, you know, I'm a great over-leverager.

• 13:54Matthew McConaughey?

  You know, put me in, I got a great work ethic. I'm like, what I have to watch is taking on too much stuff.

• 13:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 14:00Matthew McConaughey?

  Because I'm like, I can do it. I can do it. You don't have that, give it to me, I'll take care of it. Yep, come on, I'll line it up. And I'm good at it. I've got resilience, I've got endurance. I'll outlast a lot of people and outwork them. I did have a time, though, probably 15, right around that time where I took off the rom-coms and decided to take two years off, where my phone rang. I had a production company, I had a music label, I was an actor, I had a foundation, I was a family man. My phone rang, and as I went to pick it up, I saw it was a number from my office, where I have five, six employees, and I pay the rent, in a beautiful office. As I went to pick up the phone, my hand paused, mid-reach. I didn't want to pick up the phone. And in one second, I went... What is that? Why did your hand just, what?

• 14:44Matthew McConaughey?

  And I backed my hand off, I let it ring. And I remember telling myself in my mind, I was like, why would your hand pause to pick up the phone from people that you pay salaries to, who you like in an office that you pay for your production company? I let the phone quit ringing, soon as it quit ringing. I picked it up, called my lawyer. I said, shut down the production company, shut down the music label. I'm making Bs in five things. I want to make As in three things. I want to be an actor for hire, have my foundation, be a family man, boom. And that was a great decision. I cleared two things off my desk. It was hard to do. Those people, there were five people that relied, were making a living off the salary I was paying them. So I gave them fair severance, but it was, I needed to do that for myself. And I did feel like I did start making much better grades,

• 15:27Matthew McConaughey?

  so to speak, in those three things than I was making when I had five. And this is a constant recalibration and calibration because what we value changes over time, you know? I mean, I have a few, you know, it's nice to have a few non-negotiable ones that I put up top that you go, no matter how confused you are, McConaughey, this is always of the greatest import. Family, that's up there. Just put that up there and go, nothing needs to ever take that. If you always go to that, you can't lose. I mean, sometimes you just go, you can't be in the debit if you just invest in that. The other thing is, you know, needs and wants. Jeez, man, I mean, what's really necessary? I'm in a position where I don't have to work today to pay my rent tomorrow. I only have one home. I don't have two, but still, it's a big, nice home.

• 16:11Matthew McConaughey?

  Just a couple of rooms that no one sleeps in.

• 16:13Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 16:13Matthew McConaughey?

  I don't need, I don't need that big of a house. I don't need it. I mean, there's questions of like, why, if you really want to break it down, get rid of all of it and go get, you know, and go get a three-bedroom house. The kids sleep in one room and mom actually sleeps in another and you and Camilla sleep in the other one and you pay their rent and they're out of the house and that's it. And I would be just as happy, I know, once that decision was made to do that.

• 16:39Ryan Holiday?

  In the book, when you're talking about living in your, in your airstream, we bought a, we bought an RV in the middle of the pandemic. We're like, all right, we're not getting on an airplane in a while. If we want to go anywhere. You're gonna have to do this old school and we bought like a little RV with bunks in the back and whatever. And I remember sitting, the first time we took it out, we were in, maybe it was Marfa, maybe it was in Las Cruces, we were on our way to California. And I'm sitting in an RV park, you know, that costs 30 bucks a night, sitting in a camp chair that costs 20 bucks, you know, cooking hot dogs in the microwave. And I was like, man, this is nice. This is really nice. And you're like, it's high living. This is all it, this is, when you have

• 17:19Ryan Holiday?

  that sense of a baseline, it then allows you to turn down a big check or say no, or cut stuff down because you know how little is actually needed to, for you to be happy.

• 17:31Matthew McConaughey?

  Yes. And you and I've talked about this offline today now with 5G all over the world. That's more of a reality now. Go live where you want, in small place, wherever you want. You can be wherever you want in the world. We're seeing that works right now with what we're doing, remotely talking.

• 17:46Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 17:53Ryan Holiday?

  And here's me talking to one of the funniest people on the planet, Pete Holmes. I actually think one of the things you and I connected over is our somewhat strange parents. It sounds like we had a similar dynamic between the two of them and then between, you know, us and them and us and our siblings and so on and so forth. I find that place of the like, you know, that I'm special. This is a really hard thing. You don't know what it took to do this. Like you don't understand the economics. Like this is a tight rope. To me, part of that logic, if one, I think it's ego, but if I try to place that ego, it's, it's very sort of misunderstood teenager, like kid who is special, but parents don't think

• 18:35Ryan Holiday?

  is special or don't fully appreciate how special the kid is. And so it's like, oh, that makes complete sense. That was my childhood. And so there's a, I'm curious, one of my favorite things that you've talked about is that Ram Dass quote where it's like, you think you're enlightened, go spend a weekend with your family. How, how, how are you managing that? Cause I remember you telling me there was some, some stress, was this like February or something? You were telling me you were going through something. I'm just sort of curious how you are.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, my parents are really, really tricky and difficult for me. My pro- my good boy programming, if you ever hear me talk about my parents on my podcast, I'm always very careful to be like, I love them. I'll say it a million times. They'll be talking about some traumatic story or some difficult misunderstanding. And I keep, my therapist used to call them pop-ups, like those ads that used to pop up in the early days of the internet. Like they're these pop-ups where I'm getting too close to a true emotion, so I better say like, I love them and they sure did everything they could. They did the best they could. So like, I'm just gonna say it once, hopefully, I love them. They did the best they could. And honestly, if this is helpful to you, Ryan,

• 19:48Speaker 02

  whenever I think of them now, because I'm trying to make a new neural pathway, I say, I forgive you. Every time I think of them and I get a bad, I'm faking it till I make it. I do forgive them, but I'm really trying to get like a deep, like, you guys did everything you did and everything you're doing because you want love, because you were afraid, because you were confused, or whatever it was. You know what I mean? Like, I'm trying to give them the same benefit of the doubt that I give myself. When I make a mistake, I'm like, well, Pete, you were scared, or you were confused, or you were whatever, you were doing your best. I'm trying to give that to them. So I really am working on that, so much so that whenever I think of them, I say sometimes out loud, like, I forgive you, I forgive

• 20:33Speaker 02

  you. And by the way, this sounds, this is a pop-up. It sounds like they did something horrible. This is pretty standard, non-abusive, it wasn't even verbally abusive. This is just like, people that- This is like emotional issues shit. Yeah, that's right. And I say that not as a pop-up. I say that just so people know what we're talking about here. I'm talking about, whenever I introduce my parents to people, I say, just so you know, they're not people.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  That's like, it's the only, it's the, I've, you know, I've known them my whole life. It's the only phrase that I've found that is at all helpful in prepping someone to meet them. Because usually people are like, oh, give them a break, you know, you probably, you should try and find some common ground or this or that. I'm like, everything you're saying makes sense for people. I know what you're talking about, like kooky parents. That's not what we're dealing with. We're dealing with like a species of human that I just haven't seen anywhere else. So when you, something that you just said, this is where I would tell you that I love them. When we write and when I create, so the forgiveness and my accepting and trying to turn the

• 21:45Speaker 02

  volume down on my drive are related. I got in a fight. It was not even, it was like a weird, horrible, like a bad play or something. We, I remember I ordered pizza. Val was out of town. So it was me and the baby. And I remember being like, oh, this is perfect. I can, I can sort of frankly, like spare Val. Like it's not always easy to hang out with my whole family. And I was like, she'll be with friends. I think she, I don't know if she was in New York or somewhere else, but she was out of town. I was like, that, that works. Part of me was like, that works. I'll, I'll deal with it. You know what I mean? Like, I got it. Terrible idea.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  After that visit, I was like, we need to do it together. She said, we need to do it together. And my whole life, I've had this, maybe people can relate. It's like, you gotta feed my family. Like, we're, we're sort of like reverse gremlins. You, you have to feed us after midnight. You have to keep feeding us. Like, the best times we've had, and I figured this out, is like, go get ice cream. Like, when they come, go get ice cream. Everyone will be like, sugar high, fat, comfortable. We'll have something to do. When we get hungry, we're so bad, and I'm so bad. And I ordered, this is obviously pre-quarantine, I ordered from a pizza place I've ordered

• 23:10Speaker 02

  from a thousand times. It took three hours. It never came. Like, so we were starving, blood sugar was so low, it was just me, my mom, my dad, and my baby. And I got real mother bear. The energy started to feel like it felt when I was growing up. I couldn't even believe what a David Lynchian nightmare it was, that like, voices were starting to get raised, and like, the frequency that only they can create. And frankly, only the three of us can create. Like, I'm participating in this. I'm, I'm, I'm something to them,

• 23:52Speaker 02

  they're something to me, and it's just creating this thick, horrible, shadowy nightmare of tension. And we're so hungry. And I had, I have, on my mantelpiece, there's a little statue I have of Christ meditating, which I just thought was fun. So I got a little Jesus who's meditating. And then next to him is Hanuman. Hanuman is sort of the Jesus of Hinduism, meaning he's, he's not the son of God, but he's similar. He's sort of like God's faithful servant. I just like both of those stories, and they're in similar positions, so I put them back to back. Almost just like action figures. It's not like

• 24:32Speaker 02

  super thoughtful. I mean, I like both of them, but I'm not like, isn't this perfect? I mean, do you get it? You know, it's not like, like fan fiction. It's just like, I like the way these look, and I like what they make me think of. And, and frankly, they are, you know, seen from the rational mind, these are opposing religions. Seen from the heart, you go, these are exactly the same thing. How beautiful to put them together. It's literally what the mystics would call third way thinking. It's not exclusionary, it's, it's inclusive, it's, it doesn't make literal sense, it's, it's mythical, it's, it's something special. It, does that make sense? It's, it's like, It's putting two things that don't make sense together, together, and somehow they make

• 25:17Speaker 02

  sense and you can't quite, you couldn't even articulate it. So my mom, who raised me evangelical, and we really bonded over that, was like, and I'm so hungry and I'm holding the baby and it's now at 7:30, which is the baby's bedtime and they're still there. You know what I'm saying? Like, they should have. Yeah. One of the things, and I would say this if they were in the room, not that they'll ever hear this, but it's just like, they don't have that like, oh, okay, well, the pizza's not, here's my fantasy. Peter, we're so happy to see you. Thank you for having us over. Obviously, it's the baby's bedtime. It stinks that the pizza didn't come. We're gonna go. You know what I mean? Sure.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  We love you. This is clearly stressful. I'm sorry it didn't work out, but we got three hours together. We're gonna go. Good night to the baby. I hope you do okay with the baby. Good night. But instead, they're just sort of like waiting to be fed. I made a joke on, I forget if it was Colbert or Corden or one of them, whereas like, they said, are your parents helpful with the baby? And I'm like, no, it's like three babies. I just have three, three things I have to feed. So my mom, at the worst moment, the baby is starting to like, need to go to bed. I'm feeling very protective of the baby

• 26:42Speaker 02

  and we're all starving and I'm basically a baby holding a baby at this point because they've made me revert to my child self, which is a very scared, small version of myself. Doesn't even make sense that I'm holding this baby. Like, if we shot this as a movie, it should be a 12-year-old holding a baby. Like, that's what it should be. And... Without getting any more into it, I could talk about this night for a million years. My mom starts grilling me about the Jesus and the Hanuman. Yikes. And I'm just like, it's, I know, isn't this the worst story? This is like, one of the worst nights of my life, for sure.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  And that, what a great thing that it's just psychological trauma, but it, my shit is my shit, and this is my shit. So she just goes, I just don't understand. Like, how do these make sense? And I thought I was being loving. I really tried my best. I said, it's okay to me that it doesn't make sense to you. That's what I said. Yeah, sure. I was like, that's, it's not important to me that you get that and that you like it. And I really meant it. I thought I was really being very zen about it. I was like, she's like, but it doesn't make sense to me. I was like, that's okay with me. Like, that's all right. Like, instead of walking you through the seven hour lecture of like, why I can appreciate

• 28:09Speaker 02

  the two faiths at the same time, I'm just gonna say, I was trying to be loving. I was like, that's okay. Like, I don't need you to be me, basically, is what I was trying to say. I don't need you to believe what I believe. I don't need you to think how I think. If that's confusing to you, that's okay. But the, the, the real rub of this, by the way, Ryan, is that I've explained and talked about those things to my mom a million times. The thing that's so frustrating about my mom is that we've had these moments of, of two-person enlightenment. I'll send her a Richard Rohr CD and, and we talk. And there she is. I, I mean, like, the real her.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Like, not, not neuroses, not fear, but like, we meet as souls and we're there together. And it's like the clouds part, and we're both free together. We've dropped the role of son and mother. We're just two pieces of the mystery and we can breathe fresh air together. And it's been- So wonderful. It happened when I sent her Rob Bell's book, Love Wins. The punchline of that is then I took her to meet Rob and the first thing she said to Rob was, "I loved your book, but it's not biblical." I mean, like, she just went away.

• 29:29Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Like, the mom that I, maybe you've had experiences like that, the converted mom, the free mom, always kind of gets sucked back in by her, I don't know what it is, by her fear, by her church friends, by her community. What I happen to think it might be her, her fear, but she goes away. So the next time I talk to her, there's no continuation. It's not like, "Well, we made it to that rung of the ladder last time. So next time we talk, even if it's two, three days later, we should still be on that rung, right?"

• 30:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you want to build and you're, you're sort of craving a connection and you're having expectations and then it's like Groundhog Day.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  It's, it's beyond Groundhog Day because not only, let's say when we talked, she was on rung three and then we got to rung six. Oh, my God, how the, how did we get to rung six? We're having like a real conversation about a loving presence and, and, and grace and mercy and everything being okay. That, that's what, like a lot of enlightenment, you can say, you feel one with everything, right? An easier way to say that is, "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt," which I believe is Vonnegut, or just, "Everything is okay. I'm okay. You're okay. The world is okay. Everything is forgiven, including reality itself is forgiven for being as horrible as it can be. We are forgiven, everything, and we're just in the moment and everything's in sunlight

• 31:00Speaker 02

  and it's great." But then the next time you talk, you go from six, now you're on, you're on the ground. You're not even on the ladder. Like, you go lower than you were the last time you talked and got to six. Now you're on rung zero. And so there's that pain. And as I'm talking about that, you're helping me get in touch with how much that hurts me. It's not that I don't like explaining to my mom how I've grown. But you have to keep in mind, this is the mom that comes over and I have a Buddha in my garden. She knocked it over. She went over and toppled it. The first time she came over, she toppled it. And she was kind of half kidding, but she said, I

• 31:39Speaker 02

  cast you out in the name of Jesus. And she pushed Buddha onto his face. Like, and I'm just like, no, why do you like this? What is it about Buddhism that you like? It would just, so like, I've tried. And in my mind, there have been moments where I'm not even going to say I did the impossible. It really did feel like a moment of grace, like something happened where we both opened, just like, you know, a flower doesn't open itself. The sunlight opens the flower, gives the prompt, open the flower. So the sunlight opened us both. But then, like I said, it always reverts. So she's asking me about Hanuman and Christ.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  And buddy, this goes back to exactly what we were talking about. And forgive me, I've been talking so much. But in that moment, I felt so hurt. I remembered that I wrote a book about it.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  And Ryan, I hope this is of some use to you, because this was a breakthrough for me. Just like all the great moments of suffering afterwards are these great moments. I realized how much me writing books, writing TV shows, I just had the episodes of The Simpsons air that I wrote. So much of what I'm doing is trying to get my parents to understand who I really am. So it's not even just religion. That happens to be this area that we disagree on. But like, that's, that's when I kind of snapped. And when I say snapped, I mean that in a very WASPy way. We're, meaning we're not like a, we're not colorful.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  People, we're not having like a screaming match. Maybe it would be healthier if we did. But my heart just broke when I thought I wrote a book about it and she read it. And I realized in that moment, it doesn't work. So we're back.

• 33:39Ryan Holiday?

  It's never gonna happen.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  We're back to surrender. Weren't we saying just 10 minutes ago, I was like, surrender is a huge part of it. So is suffering is a huge part of it. And in that moment, I really had my nose rubbed in it, just how badly I need both of those. Like, fucking stop it. Don't write a book so your parents will read it and go, there you are, Peter. Like fucking hook. There you are. I see you now. There, i- it's sad, but like, whether or not they ever update the file on 15 year old me, 14 year old me, and see me as 41 year old, this, that, and the other, that is so out of my control.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  And brain science is not in my favor when it comes to the neuroplasticity of minds as we age. Like, there comes a time to go like, you know what? I have a, I have a post it on my desk here that says, because joy matters. You're a big why guy. Like, why do we do things? I'm trying to do things now for a more pure reason. What, what would happen if we didn't do it for money? If we didn't do it for power? If we didn't do it to get our parents to understand us? What if we did it because joy matters? Like, your joy and me sharing truth and joy and light and what's helped me with you?

• 35:05Speaker 02

  And if that lights your candle, that's a beautiful thing. We can get some, some real shit going. Instead of playing this, there's, I'm sorry, I'm really ranting here. But Eckhart Tolle has this great thing. Eckhart Tolle is one of my great teachers. Obviously, The Power of Now is, is one of the greatest books ever written. If the people listening, read one book, don't read mine, read The Power of Now, absolutely, hands down, that's not false humility. He says in it something like, People say, I need my parents to understand me to be happy. And he goes, really? He just like, he says, really? Almost like Seinfeld or something is like, you need your parents to understand you to be happy? Like, what are we doing?

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Like, wake up from the dream. You do not need that. That is, that is something that you've come to believe that you need. When really, the surrender and the suffering can take you in and drop your anchor into the perfect present, where that story is irrelevant to your general contentment.

• 36:13Ryan Holiday?

  And here's me talking to Super Bowl champion, but in his eyes, much more importantly, artist and author, Martellus Bennett. I know you, you wrote like a really beautiful, although it's also tragic. When, when, when your brother got, you know, arrested and there was that, that thing in, in Vegas in, was that 2017? I remember your Instagram post. It like, it really hit me like, so I grew up, my father was a police officer. So it always sort of had, you know, like, you hear things and you go, oh, okay. I assume this is what's happening. I assume this is what's happening. But I remember when I read that, it was eye opening. You were, you were basically saying like, look, this could happen to anyone and it could happen to you.

• 36:57Ryan Holiday?

  I'm just, I'm just curious, like, what are you feeling about everything that's happening in the world right now?

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Well, I just think that is like, people always be like, they associate black or they associate with, associate, I don't know, the struggle, right? With blackness, right? So like, if you have money, it's almost like they don't see you as black as someone that's poor and black, right? Like, cause they think, when they think of black, they think of poor. But if you have money, but well, you're not black and poor. You're like a whole different type of black, right? It's like, no. Right? You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm just as, I'm just as black as everybody else. I had, like, one person told me, like, why do you care about this thing? I have friends who are blacker than you.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  It's just Spanish, but it's like, white dude, I was like, bro, like, how could you have somebody that is blacker than me? What does that even fucking mean? Like, you know what I'm saying?

• 37:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Because he, because he associated with it because they didn't have the things that I have in my life. My thing is that like, when you're black, I don't care how much money you have, or how much money you don't have, your blackness is the same in the world, right? Like, when the police see my black, he doesn't see my black as any different than anyone else's black, until he reads the ID, right? Until he reads the driver's license or something, then they'll treat you differently in that situation. But if there's a chance, opportunity where they don't have your license, and something is going down, right? They treat you as they would treat you if they thought you were the other black to them, right?

• 38:40Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  And so I just feel like everybody is a suspect. No matter how much money you have as black, you are the suspect. I mean, you have it where, you have the Milwaukee Bucks player in, in Milwaukee getting, you know, tased for parking in a handicap spot.

• 39:01Ryan Holiday?

  Every time I talk to you, you manage to say something that, and I think this is, this is what's special about you, is you, you have such a unique perspective, that, and, and you manage to always, and this is the artist in you, you manage to always pick a really vivid, either analogy, or metaphor, or like, way of expressing it, and it always hits me in a weird way, which I, I wrote down, I wanted to talk to you about, we were, we were texting, and we were, we were talking about, I forget what it was, but your point was, you were like, you were, you were talking about your goals with your, your animation studio and your art, and you were just like, look, like Disney is the most successful animation, you know, sort of movie studio of all time. You were like, look, that was founded in 1923,

• 39:46Ryan Holiday?

  and then you said something to me like, like, think about what it was like to be a black person in America in 1923, and that's why Walt Disney is owned by a white person and not owned by a black person.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, because if if the competition, if the playing field was even, who knows if Walt Disney would be as popular as he is? He could have got beat out and some black media company could have been the biggest media company in the world. Right? Like, or just as equal, like, there could be two side by side, like, right? Like, serving two groups of people, like, you know, in a way that, like, I think about that about most media, right? I'll watch, like, we didn't have the opportunity to start businesses, and then when you did start businesses a hundred years ago, they burnt them down.

• 40:31Ryan Holiday?

  I was reading, I I've been reading a lot about reconstruction and about the Jim Crow years. And I I think it's just hard for people to wrap their head around, like, it it wasn't that people were racist back then. It it was as if society was ruled, but not in all of America, but definitely in the South. It was as if America was ruled by a series of gangsters who would murder you if you did, if you stepped out of line in some way, like, Jim Crow wasn't just like, hey, you got a drink at this water fountain, and then we'll give you a nice water fountain. Jim Crow was like, we will literally murder you and your family if you try to approach this ballot box.

• 41:13Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, it was viciously and ferociously aggressive. And I don't, I think that's hard for people to wrap their heads around.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  I mean, I I tell people like that, like, it's, it is like, it's crazy because it wasn't that long ago either. Like, I think my dad was born a year after the Jim Crow ended, like, you know, that's just crazy. Like, that's my father, like, and it's not that many generations removed. But the thing is, like, some households want to talk about their family's experience during that generation, right? Because they may be embarrassed about it, or they may not be embarrassed about it. They may feel like that's the way things should be, right? So there's like this whole space of where these conversations are happening with children in in these households, right? Like, if the parents, the grandparents are racist, and then the kids are racist, then racism is taught, right?

• 42:03Speaker 03

  It's like, and people don't think that they're teaching it, but the number one thing that we learn is by seeing, seeing the behavior, right? We see racism, like, when they used to hang people, it used to be like a family gathering. Like, it was a damn football game, everyone just goes around and like, let's go see who hangs the niggas. Like, it's the craziest thing ever, like, everyone stands around, like, kids are there, right? Parents are there, they eat sandwiches, they're picnicking and lynching.

• 42:30Ryan Holiday?

  No, and if you missed it, you could buy a postcard of it later. And there's postcards that you can fucking buy with, you know, like charred bodies on them or, or, uh, or, you know, like a dangling, uh, you know, a dangling cadaver. Or, I mean, even, I mean, even, you know, you go to college football, like those, those gator bait chants, like that, that is not just, you know, a funny thing. That, that has roots in racist art that, that, you know, comes from, uh, you know, who knows if it was true or not, but comes from a very, very vicious place culturally. It's like, we'll feed your babies to an alligator. That wasn't white babies.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  And you know what, I know it was really fucked up. I never thought about, like, just going back in history, like, I never realized that a master bedroom was called a master bedroom because that's where the master lived in. And it's just like, yo, like, bro, like, that's so fucked up. Like, that's just crazy, and the biggest room in the house, and everyone wants the master bedroom when you get to the house, right? Everyone talks about this. This room was made for the person who ran the plantation.

• 43:44Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's, that's, that's true.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  I say that because racism and these tropes are, these ideals are still entrenched in our society. And my problem with everything that everyone is trying to do, right? This is my issue with everything that's happening right now. Well, it's not my issue with, like, it's just, this is a big part of my thoughts on what's going on right now. I know you're asking that. Well, the problem I see is that everyone is looking for new ways to work within the system that we already live in. When what really should be happening is a new way that people should be designing a new way of life to live. The old system, no matter how you rework a room, the room is still the same size.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  You can move the furniture, you can move things round and round, left and right, all that shit, you can do all that shit, it's cool. But the room is still the same. Just because I decorate it different doesn't mean that the room is a different room. It may have a little different feeling to it, right? You change the color of the paint, right? You get a new piece of art, you add some new carpet. Now, it may feel different, but at the end of the day, it's still the same room.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Right? And the worst thing, what we, the problem with ours is that it, the, the way the system is set up is root, is rotten at the foundation. Cause the foundation was built racism, hate, crime, th- thievery, stolen. Like sometimes like, like, like if you're, if you're, if you're white, and this may sound radical as hell, but I'm just trying to say something. There might be a time where one of your ancestors has stolen something that made your family prosper, prosperous down the line from people that they shouldn't have been still for. And they got away with it because they were white. And the person they stole it from was black.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Who knows how many inventions that people got credit for that were stolen from black people, right? Because those black people didn't have a voice, they couldn't take it to court, there was nothing they could do about it. This is mine now.

• 45:49Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, and look, that's what I think people miss too, right? So they'll go like, okay, you know, uh, whether it's the Michael Brown case, or, or whether it's the George Floyd case, or, or whether it's the, um, uh, was it Jacob Blake case? Uh, the, in Kenosha right now? People are like, well, why are they, you know, why, why are they resisting arrest? Why aren't they going peacefully? It's like, first off, you know, uh, they're resisting arrest because, uh, they still get killed even when they are not resisting arrest, which anyone who watches a George Floyd video will see. But if you have a relationship with law enforcement where law enforcement is essentially an arm

• 46:29Ryan Holiday?

  of the sharecropping store come to collect absurd, unpayable debts from you in the form of, you know, parking tickets and court fees and bail amounts, et cetera. You're gonna have a much more hostile relate, like when I get, if I get pulled over, I'm like, okay, the worst thing that happens is I have to pay this ticket. I don't, I'm not spiraling through in my head if I, you know, I'm already on probation for this charge. And so I could go back to jail for that. If I get this fine and I can't pay the fine, or if I can't miss work to do my court appearance, you know, like the threat of losing my freedom is never there.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  Bro, and why do people, this two things, fuck all that, I don't have any arrests. And I, every time I get pulled up, I hear a siren in a rap song, I get nervous. Right, like, god damn it, like, why do I have to get nervous? Why am I driving? Like, sometimes, like, I had, I was driving a Mercedes Benz, I went to the windows.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Right? Because I'm just like, yo, they gotta see me. My wife, I was jogging, I live in Hollywood, I was jogging through Hollywood and I stopped because I felt like I looked suspicious, running past the sidewalk every damn day. In my neighborhood, my wife wouldn't let me walk at night because, you know, I had to wake up at 6:00 a.m. to walk. And sometimes I gotta gauge what time. If the sun goes down, I can't go for a walk for the day. If I miss my, so I can't walk in the evening unless I bring my poodle with me, you know what I'm saying? Or my dog with me, or whatever, right? Because then it's like, you know, here's a big black man with a poodle, he can't be suspicious, right? Like, you know, so like, in my own neighborhood.

• 48:05Ryan Holiday?

  I hate that, man. That sucks. I hate that.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  And another thing that you touched on too, why do people say that not communicating with the police is resisting arrest? If I'm not under arrest, I don't have to fucking talk to you?

• 48:24Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. And here's me talking to the absolutely wonderful, peerless godfather of basketball, George Ravel.

• 48:40Speaker 04

  The value quotient of reading for me was probably different, obviously, than Truman's, but I, I, I think when I, in the moments that quiet during the day, when I think back about my life and reading and so forth, I, I, I find the early origin about reading came from my grandma. When I was a little boy, my grandma used to make me sit and watch her cook in the kitchen. And my grandma never got past eighth grade, but she had common sense. And so she would make me sit there and watch her cook. And so it turned out, as I realized in my adult life, it was a classroom.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  She was teaching me how to cook by observation. And then she would have conversations with me while I was sitting there. And so one time she said to me, she said, George, she said, you know, back in the days of slavery, the plantation owners used to hide their money in books. And I said, Grandma, why'd they do that? She said, because they knew the slaves couldn't read, so they would never take the books down. And so to me, the moral of that story was, as long as someone can control your mind,

• 50:09Speaker 04

  they can control your body. And so I think that was the early revelation to me of why books had to be more relevant in my life. And then I started to realize, you know, George, you've got a moral obligation to read. That people died, literally died, to get you the right to read. If you remember your history, George, there was a time in America when it was illegal

• 50:50Speaker 04

  for a person to teach a black person how to read. There was a time in America when a black person could not get a library card. The libraries were segregated. And so people died to get me the right to read. So.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  Am I gonna dishonor their deaths by not reading? I I I see it in a broader context than just reading to learn or reading for entertainment. I feel personally, I have an obligation to honor those people's death. They died so that I I could have the opportunity to read. And people ask me, when you were growing up, did you read a lot? Hell, no. The only books I I saw in my young life were school books. That were the only books I knew. Black books, I couldn't afford a book, even though they five dollars. When I was a little kid, what was was a lot of money.

• 51:58Speaker 04

  And and so I can tell you that when I grew up, there were there were books in my home. Because if they were, they were school books. That were the only books that I knew. When when I was growing up as as a young kid in in Washington, D.C., seven, eight, nine, ten years old, every day was about survival. When when you got up in the morning, you you were you were happy that you survived for another day. And so you you get up in the morning and you look out the window in a tiptoe stance and you say, I made it, I I made it another day. But it's all about survival.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  And so along the way, I continued to to progress to where I finally get a basketball scholarship to Villanova. It really wasn't until I got to Villanova that that I started to realize the wonder of of reading it and how it could separate you from other people. And you you and I are good buddies. I don't think I've ever told you this, but when I was in class my freshman year, there would be people in the class that someone would say, that guy's really smart. And so as time went on in the class, I would listen to the Persian or Persians. And then I would think to myself,

• 53:21Speaker 04

  Well, I know that. And so then I would say to myself, well, if that guy's smart, maybe I'm smart. And so, a lot of this was just about self-discovery, trying to, I, I, I had no idea at the time, but I, I was in search of myself and who, who, who I was. And, and I'm trying to find an identity for myself as a student at Villanova. So, over the time, once I got out, I really started to get into, to, to reading, I, I, uh, uh, between, I, I used to keep a collage of four people in a frame in my office. And, and

• 54:06Speaker 04

  particularly when I was working at Nike, and it was Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali. So, people would come in the office and they would see this collage, and they would say to me, why do you have that up there? And I said, they're my mentors. Well, most people could only readily identify King. And then, they, they had no idea who Baldwin was. And then some people might figure out Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. So, they say, well, you knew all those guys? I said, no, I only knew one, uh, Martin Luther King. And one that I said to me, but you said they're your mentors. I, I said

• 54:50Speaker 04

  to him, a person doesn't have to be alive to be your mentor, or you don't have to know the person to be your mentor. You just have to know about them.

• 55:00Speaker 05

  And their books.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 55:04Speaker 05

  And books is such a great way to study from someone, because it's a, it's a doorway into their, into their mind and their soul.

• 55:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so, I progressed from having notebooks.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  As a youngster to a library in my home right now that we have over three thousand books. Wow. That that's the evolution of of it. And so now, you know, I've had to develop my own reading style. Uh, I really believe more people would aggressively read if they could create their own style of reading. We we're taught you you you read from front to back, all all the things. But what I've done is I've decided I'm gonna make my own rules for reading. And so I've developed them over the years. And as a result, it's it's helped uh inflame a passion in me a about reading.

• 56:02Speaker 04

  And it's it's not just, God knows you you know this and I learned it from you. Uh, it's it's not enough to read. That that's that's that's just the the first step. You've got to learn and then you've got to understand. So when I pick up a book, I realize I've got three quests. One, to read the book, to learn from the book and to understand what I've learned. And and and then can I make it applicable in my my everyday life? And one of the things that I I'm grappling with now, as I I guess it's about my fifth uh week of house arrest. I haven't been to a bookstore.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  And and and I and I I go to a bookstore on a normal day five times a week. I go in the bookstore and search for good things. I mean, I I one of my real worries is when we get on the other side of this, that will Barnes and Noble still exist? Will bookstores still be present? And a lot of people, when I express this, they say, oh, you don't have to worry. Because Amazon, it's not the same, it's not the same.

• 57:16Speaker 05

  If someone's not a reader and they're listening right now, you're the great example of it's never too late. Obviously, it would be better to pick up a reading early in life, but it doesn't matter when you start. It matters that you get started. And so I love that your story, you know, you didn't come to reading really until you were in college. But the other part, this idea that reading was something that slaves were forbidden from doing. I mean, you know, there's this cliche, we go, knowledge is power. But to me, there's not greater proof of the idea that knowledge is power than the fact that in the vicious power struggle between master and slave for hundreds of years in this country,

• 58:00Speaker 05

  books were considered an important battleground. There's a reason that slave owners didn't want their slaves to read. It's that it would make them harder to control. It would make the moral catastrophe that was slavery more obvious to the slaves and the injustice of it more undeniable. And so, yeah, reading is a powerful thing and we can't just voluntarily relinquish that power, which fortunately is what a lot of people do by deciding not to read.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  And Ryan, one of the things that I've come to realize in the last two or three years is in some ways, we still have a sophisticated form of someone controlling what we can read. In almost all states in the United States, there's a board that has to approve what books are used for curriculums in the schools.

• 58:58Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  And I'm not going to be able to say that all the books right now, but I just read an article in the last forty-eight hours where in Alaska, The Great Gatsby was one of the books. But this panel that approves the books for the state of Alaska had five books on there that they would not approve for use in the school system. So I'm trying to, I'm saying to myself, is it that they don't trust us?

• 59:31Speaker 04

  To read these books, I'm trying to figure out why we even have someone who decides what we can read and what we cannot read as we're, as we're learning and growing as adults. Should not some of that choice be ours? And at some point, you're not going to be able to hide, to hide the truth for us forever.

• 59:58Speaker 05

  No, I think, I think that's right. And, and, and, you know, another example of that is just what books are allowed and not allowed in, in the prison system or, you know, in, in, uh, in, in certain, you know, government buildings. That was one of the things that, you know, Joseph McCarthy focused on, which, which was, you know, uh, what books did, you know, government officials have at, you know, US embassies around the world? And, and yeah, when people are trying to control people, one of the first things that they, they, they go to are the books they're allowed to read.

• 1:00:30Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It's incredible to think that these episodes have been listened to more than 3 million times. If you could do us a huge favor and just leave a quick review of the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or whatever you're listening to this on, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews help with visibility and help bring Stoicism to even more people. Thanks again. Talk soon.