Roosevelt Montás on Socrates and the Universality of the Classics

Ryan talks to Roosevelt Montás about his new book "Rescuing Socrates," how his life changed at 16 when he discovered a copy of Socrates in his neighbors trash, how the universality of the ancient texts blur the lines between our conceptions of race and class, and more. Roosevelt Montás is Director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program. He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York as a teenager. He attended public schools in Queens and was admitted to Columbia College in 1991 through its Opportunity Programs. In 2003, he completed a Ph. D. in English, also at Columbia. From 2008 to 2018, he served as Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia College. Roosevelt is the author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.”Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50. The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Terms and conditions apply. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Obviously, this is a podcast about philosophy, about the classics, about reading, about studying, about the Western canon. So I was excited to have today's guest on to talk about what that is, right? It's easy to sort of dismiss the classics as a bunch of old, dead white guys. It's not uncommon for the classics to get dragged into the culture wars. And people have come to criticize the classics, especially lately. Are they part of white supremacy?

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  Are they holding us down with antiquated assumptions? Who are these people? What did they believe?

• 1:47Ryan Holiday?

  You know, who chose these books? Are these the books we should be reading? What should we read instead? But today's guest, I think, has some interesting answers to those questions because of his own unique exposure to the classics. He discovered Socrates literally in a pile of trash. His neighbors had thrown out a bunch of books and he found them on the steps near his apartment in New York City as a young boy. That's the story he tells in Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. He attended public schools in Queens. He was admitted to Columbia College in 1991.

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  And then where he got a PhD in English, also at Columbia. From 2008 to 2018, he served as the Director for the Center of Core Curriculum and the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia College. He specializes in antebellum American literature and culture with a particular interest in American national identity. And he also regularly teaches moral and political philosophy in their core curriculum, as well as seminars in American Studies. But what I loved about Roosevelt Montes and why I wanted to have him on is that we both loved the classics and we came to them in totally different circumstances, and yet the same circumstances. We didn't fit in, we were confused about who we were, what we wanted, what we should know.

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  And there, these books from the past, you know, sort of open up a whole new world to us. And as I think about this with my young kids, how I want them to become interested in the classics, when I think about what my mission is here with this podcast and with my writings, it's to make these ancient ideas accessible, as we say, ancient philosophy for modern life. And Roosevelt Montes has written a wonderful book about this, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. I encourage you to read it. You can also follow him on Twitter, @RooseveltMontes. That's Roosevelt, like Theodore Roosevelt, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and then M-O-N-T-A-S. You can also just click the link in today's show notes. I really appreciate him coming on the podcast. I think this was an important conversation, and I hope you enjoy it.

• 4:01Ryan Holiday?

  So you found Socrates in a pile of garbage, basically? Is that your introduction to the classics?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  It is, although I didn't know them then as the classics. I mean, the name Socrates was familiar, but I didn't know anything about him. And didn't know, same with Plato, the name was, I had heard the name, but didn't know anything about the name or that the two were connected. So yes, that was my introduction.

• 4:31Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know how it ended up there? Was it a neighbors or was it just a random, just the universe picked it out just for you and dropped it on your doorstep?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  No, it was a neighbors. They threw out a bunch, they must have done a spring cleaning or something, although it was winter. But they threw out a bunch of stuff, including a lot of books. There were a big pile of books plus other household miscellany that they threw out.

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  And so obviously you could have gone to any of the books in the pile. What do you think drew you to Socrates?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Frankly, what drew me is that they were beautiful books. They were hardcover, gilded, edged pages. You know, the kind of books that you see in like wood paneled libraries and bookshelves. They just, they were beautiful.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  So that's really what attracted me to them. And if there had been, you know, some different books that were also beautiful, those are the ones I could have taken. And I remember wanting, I wish, wishing I could have taken more, but in the world in English, my English was still pretty rusty, pretty kind of shaky. And we didn't have bookshelves at home.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  But I remember kind of regretting that I only took two.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, when I was reading your story about that, it brought me back to the founding story in Stoicism. You might be familiar with it, but Zeno, the philosopher, he's a merchant and he's, he basically suffers a shipwreck and he washes up penniless in Athens. And he makes his way to this bookstore, you know, has nothing in the world. And he had heard Socrates before, he'd heard of Socrates before. They think maybe his father had brought home one of Socrates' books, or you know, one of Plato's books about Socrates. And but but as he walks into the bookstore, he hears the bookseller reading one of one of the dialogues.

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  I think he's actually, it's a, so it would have been Xenophon. He's reading Socrates' discussion on the choice of Hercules.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  And it, you know, he's like, what is this? Right? It's probably exactly the reaction that you had, the exact reaction I had. You know, my first introduction to the ancients. And he walked up to the bookseller after and he said, where can I find a man like that? And and he pointed him across the street to a philosopher named Kretes who was walking by, who became his his philosophy mentor. And so I was thinking of that because not only does your story involve you discovering Socrates, you know, in the street, but then somebody saw you reading Socrates, and then that became your philosophy mentor.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Another Greek, John Philippi.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  Ah, perfect.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  I did not know that story about Zeno. Zeno, that's amazing. Yeah, you know, Socrates was a big believer that that philosophic education happens from person to person. That's why he was kind of like against writing things down. But it's absolutely true. It requires a really personal mentorship because ultimately, the questions that Socrates is interested in are questions about how to live your life. They're not theoretical questions. I mean, there's a lot of theoretical knowledge that goes into that inquiry, but fundamentally, it's a kind of ethical inquiry about how you live.

• 8:06Ryan Holiday?

  When even if you think about Socrates in his life, right? He wasn't reaching people through these books that he wrote. It was he was literally in the streets, you know, schooling people in philosophy, one on one, in these discussions. And and then the only reason he survives to us is because he so influenced Zeno and, or sorry, Xenophon and Plato that they that they recorded what they learned from them.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. His hangout places were the marketplace, the gym, the streets.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yeah, he took, he took it to the, took it to the streets. Well, no, and I was thinking too, when, when Zeno was a young man, he visited the oracle of Delphi, not, not unlike Socrates. And the Delphi told him, you will become wise when you begin to have conversations with the dead, which he took to mean was reading. And so as he goes into this bookstore and Socrates is long dead by this point, and can hear the works of Socrates being read aloud, the dialogues as if they were happening, he realizes that he's, he's having a dialogue with the guy who's been

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  dead for a long time, which is the same ongoing conversation that you picked up all these centuries later, it feels like.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Which is so extraordinary, you know, if you, if you stop and think about it for a second, just how miraculous that technology of writing is, the fact that I can have, I can have a direct contact with the man, the mind of a man that lived 2,500 years ago in a different world, a different language, a different culture, and yet I can, I can touch that mind and I can have that mind speak directly to mine. It's, it's unbelievable, unbelievable that we can do this.

• 10:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, because it's, it's not just the written word, but even that the form of the dialogue being, you know, if it was, if it would have been in a poem or some even, you know, expansive work of philosophy, I don't think it would hit. I mean, because think about it, it, how old were you when you, when you found Socrates?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Uh, 16, 16.

• 10:22Ryan Holiday?

  So, so that, that the dialogue is so stripped down and so distilled that you as a 16 year old with no training in philosophy could get anything out of it. You know what I mean? That's, that's really the brilliance of, of Socrates' approach is that you didn't need a philosophy degree to know what the hell he was talking about.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Right. And it's something quite special.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  And especially the dialogues that I found, right? So the collection I picked up had the Apology of Socrates, where he's defending himself before an Athenian jury on charges of corrupting the youth. Then there is like this little dialogue about

• 11:05Speaker 01

  where he's in jail and his friend is trying to convince him to break out and escape. And then the last dialogue takes place on the day of his death. And he is talking to his friends and making an argument for the immortality of the soul. And then dies, then, you know, takes the hemlock, takes the poison, his friends watch him die. And it's just so moving, so compelling. And as a young person, those questions are really urgent to you. You know, the idea of, first of all, like corrupting the youth, that's always, you know, as a young person, you're always sensitive to that because people are always saying the world is going to hell because of you people who are like losing all moral bearings. And so you're kind of sensitive to that.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  And then this notion of like defending the truth, defending the inquiry and the honest search for truth at every expense, you know, it's a generalization. But young people tend to have so little tolerance for like hypocrisy and like the compromises that you make as a pragmatic adult dealing with different competing demands. They have so little tolerance for that. They want the real, real thing. So it really speaks to a person, but I think it especially speaks to a young person. And that's why Socrates followers were young people.

• 12:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And to me, what is also, I think, striking about those dialogues, but then Socrates in general, although not everyone sees him this way, is how high the stakes were, right? So these aren't just like Socrates, you know, asking questions about this or that, you know, as he does, you know, how do you know what's good or not? Or, you know, how do you know what's this or that? He asks a lot of those questions, but you found Socrates at the end. Socrates thinking about life and death and, you know, courage in the face of that. And what is worth, you know, what is more important than one's life? You know, in this case, principle.

• 13:02Ryan Holiday?

  You know, that's so, so much of what you read as a kid is like, you have to learn chemistry because we say you have to learn chemistry. And not only do you not get why it would matter to your life, it feels like even if it did matter to your life, it would only be to like, help you make money or do something. You know, to, to read philosophy, the philosophy of a guy facing a death sentence, it just feels very urgent.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And he says in that, in that, in that final dialogue, that that's the whole point of philosophy, the whole point of philosophy is to teach you how to die.

• 13:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Is to equip you to face that moment in the most, you know, honest, direct and prepared way. Um, just, that's really good stuff. That's not what happens in philosophy departments at universities today in general.

• 13:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, we don't even talk to kids about death at all, right? Like, you, you know, you're supposed to be too young to think about that stuff. And, and so to, yeah, to come out and be like, no, the point of life is to learn how to die is just, uh, it's as transgressive as anything a rock star has ever said.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 14:13Ryan Holiday?

  I feel like too, Socrates, you know, of the philosophers is so interesting too. I mean, this guy was a soldier. This guy lived in the time of, you know, uh, uh, the thirty tyrants, you know, then he gets brought up on these false charges, you know? Again, he's not, he's not like your teachers, you know, sort of, uh, you know, out of, he's in the arena, I guess. You get the sense that he's in the arena of life.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he is in this very peculiar position. So he, um, you know, he fights in the Peloponnesian War. He sees this regime changes in Athens. Athens lose, Athens, which fights the Peloponnesian War under a democratic form of government, loses the war. And it has this series of, um, kind of back and forth dictators, tyrants, democracy is eventually restored. And it's that democracy that puts, that puts Socrates to death. And Socrates says in the Apology, I never got into politics. I've always.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Remain outside of politics so that I can ask the tough questions that will lead me to truth. And if I had gone into politics, I would have gotten killed even sooner because they wouldn't tolerate the kind of activity he is in. So he is in the world, right? He's in the politics, in the conversation, he's in the marketplace, but somehow standing outside of it. That is, he is operating under a set of values, a set of pursuits that kind of cut against the grain of the overall society, where people are pursuing power, they're pursuing wealth, reputation, glory. He's out to pursue something else that challenges, cuts against that kind of overall pursuit.

• 15:53Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think about another book that I read at that age about an outsider that seemed to have a lot less redeeming value. I think about something like Catcher in the Rye, right? You know, you have the outsider who thinks that everyone's a phony, thinks that he... But it's, there's no payoff like there is with Socrates, you know? I feel like there's... So it's interesting, the literature that we put in front of kids.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you know, I remember reading Catcher in the Rye too, and it had a big impression. I must have read that not long after, probably, yeah, the next year I read it in my English class in high school. And I didn't even notice it then, but it really captured some of my own anxieties, some of my own kind of questions, some of my own sense of isolation and displacement and loneliness. There's, I think, just the experience of adolescence can be so lonely, even if you're popular. And if you're not very popular, like I wasn't very popular, it's probably even worse. But I found Holden Caulfield really kind of got me in some sense.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  And that's very strange because I, we could not have been living more different lives. You know, he's like, this verified kind of WASP-y world of prep schools and New England kind of beauty or something, you know? And that's, I live, I'm in an urban school in New York City. I'm an immigrant, I'm a second language speaker, but I was also a teenager. And I guess that's what makes great literature, that great literature is able to draw those links between very profoundly different subjectivities into some basic ground of humanity. That's extraordinary.

• 17:42Ryan Holiday?

  What do you think your unique perspective that you were just saying, like, what had everything you brought to that pile of books and then you pick up Socrates, what do you think that maybe you saw in him or learned from him that maybe, I don't know, another 16-year-old from different circumstances wouldn't have seen?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think I brought two significant things. One was, I was in the middle at that time of a kind of religious awakening. I had gotten involved in an evangelical church. I had had an experience that they called born again. I had a born again experience, a very powerful, kind of transformative experience. And I was, you know, I had the seal of a newcomer. I had the big questions in my mind. I wanted to figure this out. So that was one thing that I brought. The other thing I brought was having grown up with my atheist father in the Dominican Republic, who was a Marxist kind of revolutionary.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  He was a radical, left-wing, armed movement that he was part of to overthrow the right-wing authoritarian government in the Dominican Republic. And he, that was my political consciousness. I had kind of a thirst for justice, a sense of sensitivity for the abuses of power, and a sense that my voice mattered in the world, that I had somehow, that there were injustices out there in the world, and that it was my opportunity, my responsibility to engage with them and try to make them better. Now, those two things, you might imagine,

• 19:25Speaker 01

  don't fit well, don't fit very well together, being a born-again Christian and a Marxist revolutionary. But both of those had, I think, put me in the frame of mind where I was reading this stuff with a kind of earnestness and seriousness. Then, of course, there is, you know, another thing, it's not quite something that I brought, but where I was, that I was in this moment of profound dislocation. I was really trying to, desperately grasping for something, some anchor, something I could hold on to. And that, you know, that's what had led me to religion. And it had, I had the disposition to be open to the kinds of ideas that Socrates was proposing.

• 20:10Ryan Holiday?

  And did you find he reflected something back to you? Or that he helped you answer those questions? Or did he address the dislocation? Like, what do you think spoke to you when you actually sat down and read those pages?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  You know, I think, and this might be kind of the distillation. I could not have told you that this is what was happening when I was reading it. But in retrospect, what I saw was a way of life that was driven by a rational search for truth. That is, you know, and eventually I walked away from evangelical Christianity and from Christianity in any conventional sense. Because I discovered a way of living that was intellectually honest, that was driven by a search for truth, a rational search for truth.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  And what Socrates presented to me was a life of kind of dignity and depth and authenticity organized around the search for truth, asking questions and talking. And that proved to be just an extraordinary gift, probably the most important, the most important aspect of, that has shaped my life. The most important probably force that has shaped my life is that disposition.

• 21:32Ryan Holiday?

  That, that search for truth. And to get it at 16, or to sort of be directed towards that at 16, that's, that's, that's pretty wonderful, I feel like.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  You know, and I, I do feel that it's wonderful, but I feel that I was extraordinarily lucky, but I am not exceptional for that. I think, I think lots and lots and lots of young people, if they are exposed to this, will have a similar response than I had. And I see this, you know, every summer, about, I don't know, 12, 13 years ago, I started a program at Columbia, the school where I teach, a summer program for low-income, high school students, who are the first in their families who hope to go to college. And they spend a month living on campus at Columbia and take this course with me, in which we read Plato and a bunch of other philosophers. We begin with Plato, with these same books that I read.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  And what I see year after year is these young people, this same light goes on, goes off in their head. What I see over and over again is them.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Experiencing something quite profound about the way that they understand themselves, the way they understand what school is about, the way, the kind of life that is available for them to live. So even though I was extraordinarily lucky and I had kind of the right, I was fertile ground, I don't think that I was exceptional merely because these works spoke to me. I think that that's quite common among young people.

• 23:03Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think it's very common. I mean, so I was telling you about Zeno and then your story, and I feel like from the books I've written about philosophy, you hear from people who are like, I was introduced to insert philosopher at insert age, and basically it, things were never the same. It's like this club, right? And the club is trans, it's universal, like it crosses religions, it crosses ages, it crosses socioeconomic boundaries, it crosses nationalities, it crosses races, and, and yet it's that same sort of epiphany, eye-opening experience where you are introduced to this

• 23:48Ryan Holiday?

  way of thinking and being that is like the sort of philosophical life, or the, the examined life, as Socrates would call it.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. There's this passage in The Republic where Socrates says to his interlocutors, "Education is not what people really think, what people think it is. People think of education as putting knowledge into people's souls, like putting, putting sight in eyes that are blind." He says, "No, education actually takes for granted that the student has eyesight and sees, but is not looking in the right direction. And education is this whole turning around and how it can best accomplish it so that the, so that the eyes are facing the light." That's, that's a really beautiful image, and it totally accords with this, with this thing that we're describing, right, that at some point, something turns your vision

• 24:41Speaker 01

  in the right direction and it changes everything.

• 24:45Ryan Holiday?

  I remember I was reading the closing of The American Mind several years ago, and there was a passage in it where Bloom was saying that he was, you know, speaking to some college freshman or something about some, one of the philosophers or one of the great books, and they said something like, "That's not my history." Right? They were sort of making the argument that sort of racially, like, these old dead white guys, that was not their people. Right?

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:11Ryan Holiday?

  And I think that's so, it's interesting. Certainly, you always want to empathize with someone's point of view. But I think, I think what we're talking about is that you, you miss the point if you think it's about culture or race. It's a way of living to which, just like, there's all different types of gay people, there's all different types of, of all different types of people. Right? And that this has nothing to do with who they are and where they came from. It's who they became when someone pointed their eyes in the right direction.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and if you ask, who, who are the people today who are Socrates' people? I mean, think of, think of this. I have, I'm married to a white woman, a white woman from the Midwest, from Michigan. You know, is Socrates more her people than my people? Not really. It's like, modern Greeks, contemporary Greek youth, they are Socrates' people? I mean, in a, in a, in some kind of loose historical national sense, it is. But actually, Socrates is no closer as a thinker, as a philosopher, is no closer to young Greek people today than to young Americans today. Perhaps the language is a little bit closer because modern Greek has evolved from, from ancient Greek.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  But it is, it is a, just a profound fallacy to think that the significance, the connection, their capacity to illuminate your human experience is derived from some kind of cultural, ethnic...

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Historical continuity, a kind of link that you have that's cultural and historical. The link that you have is that you're both human beings and are facing the same existential questions. That reality is the same.

• 26:53Ryan Holiday?

  Right, because even if the race was aligned, you know, most of the philosophers were of totally different classes than us, or had totally different experiences, you know, probably would have looked at, you know, people who think, you know, when you get like white nationalists who are like, these are our people, and it's like, I don't think they would have hung out with you, you know?

• 27:11Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 27:12Ryan Holiday?

  They would, they would have looked at you as part of the rabble, you know?

• 27:16Speaker 01

  You know what I say, I always say that white supremacists are their own worst argument.

• 27:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Well, I love, Seneca has a line where he says, "We cannot choose our parents, but we can choose whose children we would like to be." And to me, that's, that's the philosophical tradition that we're talking about is, you get to choose who your culture is. Obviously, there, you know, it's slightly more complicated than that, I would, I guess, so I don't want to make light of anyone's experience, but the point is like, you can decide who your intellectual ancestors were, and what culture you have decided to be a continuation of.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You know, Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, during his presidency, he makes this, this statement where he says, you know, who are the, when we think of the founding fathers, you know, who are, who are the descendants today? And he says he has nothing to do with, with race, with blood. Anybody who embraces these ideals can claim them as their ancestors and can claim to be their descendants. And that's, that kind of cosmopolitan, non-tribal, non-sanguineal idea of lineage, very powerful. And, you know, it's there, like in Christianity, like, you know, Christianity is all about, you don't need to be a Jew to have this relationship with the Jewish God, right? The God of Abraham. Okay, you don't need to be Jewish anymore, anybody.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  You can be Greek, you can be Italian, you can be African, you can be Chinese, doesn't matter. You can, it, there is a kind of, a sense that there is something more profound than the historical peculiarities of our upbringing that we can connect to.

• 29:00Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think that's totally right. And this is a little bit of a political digression. But I've always found that we got that insanely wrong as Americans too. Where like, you know, being American has nothing to do with where you were born. Or even what your citizenship status is, in my view. Like, America, as they say, the only country formed around an idea is really whether you ascribe to the idea/ideals or not. So, you know, whether you came here from Honduras, or Ireland, or, you know, maybe you've never even stepped foot in America, but if you ascribe to those ideals, you could

• 29:43Ryan Holiday?

  be more American than some blue-blood Bostonian, you know, whose relatives came here on the Mayflower.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, and that is true of America. And I know America, you know, there are a lot of ways in which America has failed and continues to fail to live up to its ideals. And it's a fight, it's a struggle, and you can spend a lot of time just thinking about all the terrible ways in which you have failed. Yet, there is no other place on earth that I, for example, could have come as a 12-year-old and not speaking the language, you know, from a rural mountain town in Dominican Republic, never before having been close to an airplane, and landed in New York City, and now, today, I'm an American. Nobody even, that question doesn't even come up.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  There is no other place in the world where I could have gone and become, you know, I couldn't have become French, I couldn't have become German, I couldn't have become Japanese, I couldn't have become Italian, I could become American. And so it's not just propaganda, or it's not just like wishful thinking. It is actually a place where that can happen, and does happen every day.

• 30:52Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I was gonna ask you about your first name. How did you come to be named Roosevelt?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  It's an interesting story. So my father in the Dominican Republic, he was born in 1943.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  In 1943, the US was in the middle of, well, was was deep in the fight in the fight against Hitler and Second World War led by Franklin Roosevelt. So my grandmother in the Dominican Republic, again, this is a really rural town up in the mountains. There was, I mean, it was all of my, all of my, my father was one of 12. They were all born in that same house. They all went to the same school that went up to the fourth grade, et cetera, just just a very, very underdeveloped area. But somehow my grandmother was a fan of Franklin Roosevelt. She just thought this man

• 31:45Speaker 01

  was doing the right thing. This this guy is admirable. So she insisted over my grandfather's objections to name my father Roosevelt. So I was named after my father. And it's a curious thing, because I, when I, growing up, I was just named after my father. And I had, I knew that there had been some American political figure by that name, but it was not really a reality. Then coming here to the United States, one of the many kind of, I don't know, transitions, cultural assimilation that I experienced was that that name gradually begun to acquire this new dimension of meaning. Like, the name Roosevelt means something

• 32:29Speaker 01

  different to me now than than it used to mean when I was growing up.

• 32:34Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, I was, you were talking about sort of, you know, anyone can join that club. It's sort of like, that's the statement that your grandparents were making. They weren't like legally Americans, but sort of identified with or approved of the idea of what sort of America stood for as personified by one man and chose to be part of the tradition, not knowing that, you know, you would one day come here, but but maybe hinting at that.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a, some years ago, maybe, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago, I was at some fundraiser. And I met Frank Roosevelt, the grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

• 33:21Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  You know, they're like, I tell a New York family, so they're still in your family. And it was such a weird thing to meet this man who has my name as his last name. And after his grandfather, in a way, I've been named. It was just a very, very strange, like a very American moment.

• 33:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Isn't that weird? How history seems like it was a really, really, really long time ago. And then it's like its descendants are still here and still with us. Like, John Tyler still has grandchildren that are alive.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  That's amazing. Yeah.

• 33:59Ryan Holiday?

  Isn't that insane?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it is a young country. It's a very young country.

• 34:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's a, yes, it's a, it's a very young country. But even, even in the ancient world, you know, the idea, like, it struck me that, like Plutarch, his grandson was Marcus Aurelius's philosophy teacher.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

• 34:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Or his grandson or his nephew, or, or even that, you know, like,

• 34:35Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius is introduced to the works of Epictetus through his philosophy teacher,

• 34:43Ryan Holiday?

  Junius Rusticus, who attended Epictetus's lectures. You know, so it's like one guy separates a slave from the emperor. And that, like, how small of a place the ancient world also was.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how small of a place, or how universal, timeless of a place like the world of ideas is. I guess, as you were saying, that I thought of this passage, the famous line from the passage from W. E. B. Du Bois, "Soul of Black Folk," the famous line is, "I sit with Shakespeare, and he wince his not."

• 35:22Speaker 01

  You know, amazing. And this is, he's talking about this thing that he, and Shakespeare's not a racist. You know, Shakespeare doesn't wince at seeing this black man. But the passage continues with something like, "Across the gilded halls of time, figures like Marcus Aurelius come walking by." That's how the passage continues.

• 35:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. And that's what strikes me as being so fundamentally misguided about some of these efforts to either disband classics departments or sort of add a racial element to the classics when not only were they universal, but that they had been so profoundly influential to some of the greatest activists and thinkers of all time that have got us to this place where we're even thinking about these issues.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, if you are, if you're an African American today, for example, who lives in an America that has enacted in significant ways, a long way in enacting towards its black citizens, the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, right? And has done that through fights, through like a bloody tough struggle led by African Americans. If you look at that tradition of struggle that has delivered to us the modern day civil rights, at least legislation, right, on the books, you have to align yourself

• 37:03Speaker 01

  with this lineage of classical thinkers, whether it's Frederick Douglass, or W. E. B. Du Bois, or Martin Luther King Jr., or Malcolm X. It just, all of them are rooted in this classical tradition and are arguing and fighting in their own view as an extension of that tradition, as bringing down those ideals and that commitment to a certain kind of world, a certain kind of vision, bringing that into action in America. So.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  It's very, very obvious that the African-American tradition of letters, of philosophy, of political activism is absolutely an outgrowth of the classical tradition. Obviously, there's a lot going on besides the classical tradition, but you can't make any sense of it without taking into account the classical tradition.

• 37:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, like when I look at Martin Luther King or Frederick Douglass, it's not just that they were familiar with the classics. It's that they actually went back and read the classics and realized that generations of people had been misinterpreting the classics or abusing the classics to argue, in many cases, for a society that was the exact opposite of what the classics wanted or ought to be seen as advocating for.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, Martin Luther King Jr., I actually, just by accident, just this past weekend, I had an essay in the Financial Times about this. But Martin Luther King taught a course at Morehouse College in 1861, in the fall of 1861, the only college course he ever taught. And the name of the class was "Social Philosophy First Semester." And this is what he read. I'm just going to read you what's on his syllabus. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. That's what he thought. He taught.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  And then, you know, a year after he taught that class, he found himself in a Birmingham jail, having been arrested for organizing a mass protest. And he sits down in the Birmingham jail and grabs whatever pieces of paper he can find, pack of envelopes, scrap papers, and starts writing this thing that we have come to know as the "Letter from Birmingham Jail." That's a major statement in American political philosophy, political thought. And that letter is full of quotations from Aquinas, from Augustine, from Socrates.

• 39:38Ryan Holiday?

  From memory.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Absolutely from memory. I mean, that's very serious.

• 39:47Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and I love the jujitsu of it, too, right? Taking the greatest white thinkers and using them against the people who were trying to perpetuate an injustice.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, the notion that these are white ideas or that they are somehow racially circumscribed, first of all, is wrong, but secondly, is tremendously damaging to the cause. I think it's tremendously damaging to our fight to continue to enact, continue to realize those ideals, continue to ferret out and resolve the lingering and still significant ways in which racial thinking and discrimination pervades our society. Our fight to continue to eradicate that is hampered, is hobbled by this notion that that tradition is for white people, that tradition is white.

• 40:45Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think, I think we're also, this is maybe because we live in America and not in Europe, but we are very deceived by Athens and Rome, because these are cities, right? We see them as cities, when in reality, they were enormous multicultural empires, right? So when I was doing my book, Lives of the Stoics, I opened each chapter with where that particular stoic was born. And so it'd be some city I'd never heard of, so I'd have to go look on Google Maps and see where that city is, and it's like, oh, this person was born in southeastern Turkey, and this person was born in Spain, you know, and this person was born in modern day Iraq, and this person was born in Africa, you know, or whatever.

• 41:28Ryan Holiday?

  You're like, wow, okay, like, you know, we think Rome is this dot on the Italian peninsula, and in fact, it was an enormous empire that stretched over almost all of Europe. You know, Seneca and Jesus, born in the same time, hundreds of miles apart from each other in different climates, essentially different ethnicities, different experiences.

• 41:55Ryan Holiday?

  Were they the same race? I mean, kind of, but also not really, right?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:01Ryan Holiday?

  It totally shatters any of our modern notions of what these things mean.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  And you know, some of the work that's being done in classics departments today. I mean, classics department, as you probably know, is going through a kind of dragged out fight for soul to define. But some of the good things that are that are happening is a lot of work that highlights this, a lot of work that highlights because because the classics have been used in kind of imperialist racist projects to maintain a kind of notion of European superiority, etc. And a lot of scholars today are saying, no, no, no, wait a minute. When you talk about the classics, you're talking about this complex cultural, ethnic, religious matrix. So we can't, we have to dislodge this idea that this were just some, you know, really, really old Italians and really, really old Greeks walking around.

• 42:53Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and also, the classics are just the survivors. Like, it's the survivorship bias, right? Like, this is just what randomly survived. I mean, even of, you know, even of the thinkers that we have, you know, who knows? There could be five other works about Socrates in Tomb de Pompeii, right? That we could, so, so the idea that, that all the classics, and I make this joke, but that the classics are just a bunch of dead old white guys, that's just, not only is that literally not true, but that's just, that may just be randomly what survived of a much more diverse cast of characters.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. And one thing, you know, just, just to, to, I don't know, to name and put out there is that we talk today using these racial categories, black, white, etc. But those are modern day inventions. They don't have a biological reality, like they don't correspond to an actual biological thing. And to apply them back in time before they existed as categories is just nonsensical, right? It just doesn't work. You cannot think of these people, you can't think about Jesus as white, you can't think about Augustine as white, you can't think about Seneca as white. Like, it just doesn't make any sense.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  And we should just name it, that it's like, you know, talking about, I don't know, somebody in antiquity Googling something. Like, nobody in antiquity Googled anything, in the same way that nobody in antiquity was white. Yeah.

• 44:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and that they were just human beings, struggling with human problems that remain essentially unchanged, you know, being the outsider, being the immigrant, being unpopular, being rich or poor, being disabled, or not, you know, or not disabled. All of those things, that's what they were actually really talking about and trying to solve. They weren't, they weren't thinking, it's like when you read a book, I remember, and I love Ron Chernow, but I was, I was reading Ron Chernow's biography of Ulysses S. Grant, and he kept talking about Grant as an alcoholic, but Grant would have had no

• 45:07Ryan Holiday?

  conception of what alcoholism was, because even as a disease, that was not understood. And so, we often push these concepts on them, and if you did it in a way that made them more accessible, perhaps that could be justifiable, but if you put it on them to then say, this is for only some people, or this, you know, is this or that, I just, what service are you providing? You're depriving people of knowledge.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, just to name another very prominent chronological misapplication of anachronism of contemporary categories, is the category of gay, right? Like, oh, where Ulysses, you know, where Achilles and Patroclus gay? Well, it's just, that kind of category doesn't exist there. Like, we have, we have developed this way, very complex historical reasons of creating an identity around sexual preference, or about sexual practice, but that didn't exist back then. There was just different, different, different lines were drawn differently, practices were just not. They were not the basis for personal identity.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  So we can't, we can't, the question doesn't make sense. It's like, you know, what happened before the big bang? The question doesn't make sense because there's no, there's no time before the big bang. So it

• 46:29Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's very well said.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I, I remember there was, um, there was a discussion at Brown University. There's an equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on campus. And that was put up by an industrialist in the early 1900s. And, uh, a, a group of students wanted to remove it because, uh, Marcus, Marcus Aurelius was a colonialist or, you know, it was a statement of colonialism, right? And it's like

• 46:55Speaker 01

  An imperialist.

• 46:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And it's like, yes, literally in that he was the head of Imperial Rome. But when we talk about imperialism, you know, we're talking, we're talking about the, the Belgian Rape of the Congo, not, uh, you know, not literally the establishment of a colony in Sicily or, or whatever. It's not the same thing.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  But wait, are you sure that those, those students at Brown weren't, didn't want him down because he was a persecutor of Christians? You know, he persecuted some Christians too. Maybe that was a problem.

• 47:29Ryan Holiday?

  He did, he did indeed. Cause people have asked me that, and I've talked about Confederate statues. And they said, well, what about Marcus Aurelius? Should his statue come down? And it's like, well, his statue's in the heart of Rome. And so if Christians were upset about it, they probably would have done something over the last 2000 years about it. Instead of multiple popes, uh, uh, you know, one of the popes had Michelangelo repair the bust of Marcus Aurelius's statue. So I think whatever the beef, the beef between the Stoics and the Christians has been settled.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  No, yeah. And, and, and Marcus Aurelius is such a Christian thinker. I mean, that is, there is so, you know, his, his commitment to piety and to goodness. And like, there's so many humility, there's so many virtues that we have come to think of as Christian virtues that are in fact Stoic virtues. But anyway, but that, but that, uh, Marcus Aurelius is an embodiment of so many things that we tend to think of as Christian virtues.

• 48:27Ryan Holiday?

  And don't you think one of the solutions to this idea that perhaps the canon is a little bit too white, or, or whatever you want to call it, is just to add more people to the canon?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Well, yes, but, but the thing is that the canon, the canon is

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Utterly diverse, the moment that you get to a place where diverse people have access to the tools of intellectual production. So if you think of the canon like in the 20th century, it's a totally diverse canon. If you think of a canon in the post-World War II period, then it's utterly diverse in the ways that we value, you know, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, able or differently able, like in all those ways. So the canon, fact of the matter is that the canon is diverse. The contemporary canon is diverse, reflecting the distribution of cultural capital.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  The ancient canon is not diverse. And I think the most important way in which it is not diverse is that it's only the cultural elite, like it's only the 1% or something, it's a canon of the 1% of society, with some exceptions. But again, it reflects the distribution of a certain kind of cultural power that is required for intellectual production. Now, you know, I think that, just to expand a little bit on your question, if we can recover some voices from antiquity, and I think we've done some very good work on this, you know, voices of women, I think that we now realize how important that is in a way

• 50:16Speaker 01

  that we didn't, you know, 100 years ago. So if we can find them, we should uncover them and bring them into the conversation. If we find the voices of non-elites of any sort, we should recover them. But fact of the matter is that there aren't many.

• 50:30Ryan Holiday?

  Just thinking about how we think about the figures that we have. When I interviewed Barry Strauss, who's written a lot of brilliant books about Rome, you know, we were talking about, you know, our understanding of Cleopatra is so often through a sort of a sexist lens of like, oh, she was so pretty and so seductive, as opposed to seeing her as the leader of this enormous, you know, enormous country.

• 50:57Ryan Holiday?

  Sort of this brilliant diplomat and, you know, manages to play these powerful figures off of each other. So it, I, yeah, I think it's, it's also just deciding who you're going to zoom in on when you look at the canon to make sure that everyone feels, it's not that they should feel included, but that they should be able to see themselves or some version of themselves in all of them. And it's like, I can see a version, if you look at James Baldwin through the right lens, I can see myself in him. I related more to reading Malcolm X than I did Holden Caulfield, right? And so it's, it's finding about what makes them human?

• 51:37Ryan Holiday?

  What is it that spoke to you as the, as the evangelical immigrant, you know, unpopular kid? What spoke to you in Socrates? That it wasn't, oh, he looks like me. It was, he's like me.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. It wasn't that he was Greek. It wasn't that he was Dominican. It's this, it's this other thing.

• 51:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  And, you know, again, that is the, that's what makes, that's ultimately what makes a classic, a classic. And that's always ultimately what makes a great book, a great book. Um, you know, I like to think of a contemporary great author like Toni Morrison, who is so rooted in the experience and legacy of African-American slavery. The reason why Morrison is a great author is because somebody who has no historical connection to the experience of African-American slavery can, can be there, can experience, can, can, can feel moved and spoken to and illuminated by her reflections on that experience.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  You know, a, a, a contemporary Chinese peasant can read Toni Morrison and be moved by it. Um, so, and again, it's not, it's not that she is African-American. It's not because he's African-American. It's because she is able to articulate that experience in terms that are accessible to somebody who's not African-American.

• 52:57Ryan Holiday?

  No, I'm right. I'm writing a little bit about Toni Morrison in the book that I'm doing now. And I was researching her, sort of her morning routine and she would get up early and write. She'd steal this time. And it was like, yeah, I'm relating to her as a writer. Like our connection as professional human beings.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:17Ryan Holiday?

  Is far more direct and important than any of these other things.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  That's why literature expands you. You know, that's why literature and philosophy is a way for us to explore our humanity, expand our humanity, deepen our humanity in a way that no, you know, no sociological study, no history, no strict philosophical inquiry can do. Literature can really give you, is the most advanced technology we have developed yet in experiencing how somebody else experiences the world.

• 53:56Ryan Holiday?

  There's a really good Fran Lebowitz quote where she was saying, "A good book should be a door, not a mirror." And I thought that that was very well said. It's not supposed to reflect yourself back to you. It's supposed to show you something or someone else.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Right, right. Beautiful.

• 54:17Ryan Holiday?

  So how do you think about this with the course you teach for, I guess this is high school students that are coming out? How do you think about making the classics accessible to young people? Do you have kids?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  I do. I have a four-year-old who just turned four three days ago. So he was a three-year-old until very recently and a five-month-old baby.

• 54:41Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so I have a five-year-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old. So similar bracket.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Just a little bit ahead of me.

• 54:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. So how do you think about teaching all kids, but specifically young kids? How do you think about priming them for the classics?

• 55:01Speaker 01

  You know, I've thought about this, and the thing is that all I need to do is like not get in the way. Like, all I need to do is go along with their curiosity, satisfy, you know, do my best to stimulate, satisfy, and follow their curiosity where it's taking them. It is amazing to me. You know, we're talking about death before. The way that my four-year-old is...

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Putting together what this is, he's very interested and he's not afraid of it. There's no like, ooh, you're, no, there's not this, this, there's no morbidity or, you know, there's no macabre, there's nothing spooky or scary about it, or even sad. It's just, you know, it's just something that happens. But he's very interested in understanding what it is that happens. The other day, I don't know what we were talking about, and he looks up and he asks me, what is mind? And, you know, he's asking, he's asking the real question about what mind is.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  And so I feel like all I need to do is not stunt and suppress this natural curiosity that he has, but feed it, indulge it, enrich it. And then, you know, that will, that will take care of itself. Yeah.

• 56:27Ryan Holiday?

  Are you doing anything now? Like, are there stories you read him now? Because I just found like so many of the kids' books out there, they're like the opposite of the classics, right? There's just like nothing in them, or they're just silly. And it's weird to think that, you know, a kid a thousand years ago, who was five years old, that they weren't reading them books about pizza. They were probably reading them passages from the Odyssey.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  That's true, although, you know, I, I didn't grow up reading books. There were no books in, around, and there were no children's books. I didn't, the few books that there were were not children's books. And, and, and it was just not a reading culture that I, that I was raised in. So now with my children, I'm discovering this whole universe of children's books. And, you know, my wife, again, who did grow up here and grew up around a lot of books, we, we liked like the classics children, classic children's books.

• 57:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  And I think kind of the, I've seen kind of the same logic apply. A, that there are some books that have a kind of mysterious quality, that they are able to speak to kids at different ages, from different cultures and different, like some, they're, they're connected to something that is.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Appealing, illuminating, that connects to kids. And it's hard to name what it is, but it's there. So I've seen that. I've seen like the classic quality being in children's books. And I've also seen how there are some books that kind of keep on giving. The more you read them, the better they get, which is one of the things that classics have. Like there are some books that when you, the more you read them, the less they give you. Like you read, they're books that they lose by rereading and they're books that gain by rereading. And the classics gain by rereading. So I've noticed that with some children's books. So we read, we read a lot of books, but you know, I don't, at least in my experience, it's not like,

• 58:30Speaker 01

  you know, let's read the Odyssey for babies because that will prime you to read Homer when you're grown up. I don't see that. You know, I guess introducing them to myths, myths are wonderful. They're just appealing human stories that kids love. And again, they love it naturally. I'm not doing it so that when they get to college, they have an easier time with Sophocles. I'm reading them because they're great stories and they love them. And they, they like connect to something in our humanity.

• 58:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I've been amazed at how intuitively, you know, as a three, four, or five year old, my son understands Aesop's Fables, let's say.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:08Ryan Holiday?

  You know, and how, and how perfectly they are written to work like a Pixar movie for children and adults at two different levels.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, I, my five year old now, my, I'm sorry, my four year old now has, in the last six months, begun to see, to see films. But until then, we didn't, he didn't do screens. It was all books.

• 59:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  And that was, that was great. He loves narrative, he loves fiction. And that was cultivated, you know, he now loves to watch movies and we're. We are kind of very deliberate about how much and what he watches. But he, I feel like there was such a great foundation for an openness and a love of narrative that was, that was, that was established just on a kind of, on a kind of more elemental form of narrative, like just kind of verbal and visual narrative.

• 1:00:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think the myths are a great place to start. You know, I was telling him the story of Cincinnatus. And, and, and just these sort of little stories that I think used to be taught as history, even though they're not quite accurate, but they, they have a moral component to them are really important. Because, you know, that's what Hercules is about. That's also kind of what Paul Bunyan is about, right? Like, all these sort of myths are about, they're there to, they're there to entertain, but they're also there to deliver some sort of message, or, or, or moral, or, or just like cultural reminder of some kind.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, there, there, obviously, a lot of work has been done in understanding or elucidating why myths are so compelling, why, you know, kind of the archetypal hooks that they have. And it's, it's, it's, it's true. And of course, myths from all cultures do this, right? Every culture has its own mythology, and, and I find them to be just kind of acultural, in a way. Like, you know, the African myths and the Chinese myths, like, they, they all are just as compelling as the Western myths.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Again, they're up to, they're up to something that is, transcends the culture.

• 1:01:37Ryan Holiday?

  Where they, they boil down to some eternal truth that just makes sense with the hardwire of being a human, and so it was discovered independently.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, that's right. Yeah. And, and like, myths are...

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  They are such a rich ground. I mean, we are, we keep interpreting them and reinterpreting them and finding, you know, finding depth to them. You know, you have, you have people reading Oedipus and finding depth in Oedipus forever. You have, you know, Freud's Oedipus is so different than other, than other ways of reading Oedipus, but it's profound. It, you know, he finds something in there that illuminates aspects of the psychic that are very, very tricky and very, very inaccessible otherwise.

• 1:02:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yep. And we need a, we need a Socrates to help us tease them out a little bit.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:02:36Ryan Holiday?

  The, the only last thing I was thinking about, when I think about all the stories from Plato, I, I come back to, and go into this idea of teaching it to our kids, you know, Plato's analogy of allegory of the cave, right? That, that people think they know, but they don't know. And that once you find out, you have some obligation to help other people. Or your, your point about education being pointing people in the right direction. I do feel like those of us who have been blessed by, or changed by the classics, it's not quite the same imperative imperative as a evangelical religion, but I do feel like we have an obligation to pay it forward and to help

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Ryan Holiday?

  point other people in the right direction, or point out the shadows that they've confused on the wall.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. I absolutely agree. And, and the allegory of the cave, again, gets at something that's like so intuitive, like, you know, the world is not as it seems. Like there is more going on that's deeper, that's more real than the appearances that you get. And people, people get that, you can intuit that. And I do believe that we have a, a, an ethical responsibility to go back to the cave, to, to point in, to point towards the light. And I further believe that the possibility of democratic society depends on that. That is, that the kind of human being that is able to participate in a collective

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  project of self-governance is precisely the kind of human being that has been awakened to what the classics awaken you to. So I feel that our democracy, the possibility of democracy depends on that.

• 1:04:22Ryan Holiday?

  I would agree, and then also, as you found, and I found, that as important as education is, and higher education is, that this is also an individual educational journey that we have to continue to go on as individuals. It's not this thing you get taught in school, and now everyone has a liberal education. A liberal education is an ongoing process, and it's one of your obligations as a citizen, is to continue to pursue that.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  That's right, to continue that process of self-cultivation. A liberal education never ends. A liberal education, it only starts. And you've looked at my book, so you know that I don't have a very high opinion of how well universities are doing it. I think that universities are not doing it well at all. And, you know, part of the book is a call to do it better, and some very concrete proposals about how to do it better. But also a recognition that liberal education is not a university thing, is not an academic thing.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Liberal education is something that ought to happen, that needs to happen, and that does happen outside of the university.

• 1:05:44Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and I would rave about specifically, it's funny, you're saying that universities don't do a great job, but then you're published by Princeton University Press, who I think does an incredible job. I have a whole set, I don't know if they're behind me, they have done a whole set of translations of a bunch of the ancient texts, you know, like a collection about Socrates, a collection of Seneca, a selection of how to be a farmer, how to be a good emperor, how to learn about politics. Their Modern Wisdom series, I think, has been fantastic, and that, yeah, perhaps the classroom you pay tuition to go to college, there's a lot of problems with that model.

• 1:06:25Ryan Holiday?

  But the wisdom that has been spun off from this system, and including books like yours, which I think was great, is all part of that collective liberal education umbrella.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  I agree. And in my view, one of the fundamental reasons for being of the university is to do liberal education. And if we can do it well, there is no more powerful institution for doing it. I mean, it is a, it is an institution, it is a whole vehicle that has evolved over centuries to do this. And when it does it well, it does it better than anyone else.

• 1:07:00Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and just a reminder, not, it's not true of all universities, but like where I grew up in California, all the great universities are public universities. It's your university. You can just go there whenever you want. You can sit in the quad. You can have philosophy discussions with people. You can drop in on classes. No one will notice. You can use the library. You know, like, these are, these are obviously a specific institution built for its students, but also it's yours. And you can take advantage of it however you see fit.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I am a believer in the, in private, that is, in the, in the legitimacy and the importance of private institutions. But the fact of the matter is that even private institutions are involved in a public good. That's what it's about.

• 1:07:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yep. But the, but you have to choose to take advantage of the public good.

• 1:07:53Ryan Holiday?

  Just like you got to pick up the book that you see, you know, in the, in the pile in your neighbor's yard, where you can lead a horse to water, but, but no one can make it drink.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep. That is right.

• 1:08:05Ryan Holiday?

  Roosevelt, this was so fun. I loved the book. And it was an honor talking to you. And I hope to do it again sometime.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  It's an honor to be here. I do hope to do it again. And I hope that our paths cross in person at some point.

• 1:08:20Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say, we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's an honor. Please spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say, thank you.