The Fall Of The Roman Republic Was A Warning | Barry Strauss

What destroyed the Roman Republic was not one man or one moment, but a slow collapse of trust, duty, and shared values. In this episode, Ryan and ancient historian Barry Strauss discuss the broken civic bargain, economic strain, political violence, and personal ambition that pushed Rome toward civil war. They also talk about Cato’s refusal to compromise, Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon, and the warning the fall of the Roman Republic still holds for us today. Barry Strauss https://barrystrauss.com/ is a bestselling author, classicist, military and naval historian, and one of the leading authorities on leadership lessons from the ancient world. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University, and a leading expert on ancient military history. Barry is the author of ten books on ancient history, translated into twenty languages, including The War That Made the Roman Empire https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-war-that-made-the-roman-empire-antony-cleopatra-and-octavian-at-actium?_pos=2&_sid=327efc85c&_ss=r, Ten Caesars https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Caesars-Emperors-Augustus-Constantine/dp/145166883X?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1687285732&sr=1-2&linkCode=sl1&tag=daedco-20&linkId=b350c18e7336e3dad8f9e716d4d3e741&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl, The Death of Caesar https://www.amazon.com/The-Death-of-Caesar-Barry-Strauss-audiobook/dp/B00U2T23D6/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_aufs_ap_sc_dsk_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=E99Fo&content-id=amzn1.sym.9c9a049f-252a-49d9-a8c2-e300a1663200&pf_rd_p=9c9a049f-252a-49d9-a8c2-e300a1663200&pf_rd_r=139-8118888-5645531&pd_rd_wg=gaC6c&pd_rd_r=00886b41-eeaa-49d6-8c7f-fe9a71b8fb60, and his latest book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/jews-vs-rome-two-centuries-of-rebellion-against-the-worlds-mightiest-empire?_pos=1&_sid=327efc85c&_ss=r. Follow Barry on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/barrystrauss/ | @barrystrauss https://www.instagram.com/barrystrauss/ 📚 Barry Strauss' Books: Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/jews-vs-rome-two-centuries-of-rebellion-against-the-worlds-mightiest-empire?_pos=1&_sid=327efc85c&_ss=r The War That Made the Roman Empire https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-war-that-made-the-roman-empire-antony-cleopatra-and-octavian-at-actium?_pos=2&_sid=327efc85c&_ss=r Ten Caesars https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Caesars-Emperors-Augustus-Constantine/dp/145166883X?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1687285732&sr=1-2&linkCode=sl1&tag=daedco-20&linkId=b350c18e7336e3dad8f9e716d4d3e741&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl The Death of Caesar https://www.amazon.com/The-Death-of-Caesar-Barry-Strauss-audiobook/dp/B00U2T23D6/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_aufs_ap_sc_dsk_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=E99Fo&content-id=amzn1.sym.9c9a049f-252a-49d9-a8c2-e300a1663200&pf_rd_p=9c9a049f-252a-49d9-a8c2-e300a1663200&pf_rd_r=139-8118888-5645531&pd_rd_wg=gaC6c&pd_rd_r=00886b41-eeaa-49d6-8c7f-fe9a71b8fb60 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome back to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So, whole family just got back from Rome. We spent about two weeks in Italy. We were in Rome and we're at Rento, we're at Capri and Ischia. But the chunk of the trip, the big chunk of the trip, the trip I was excited about, that my two boys were excited about was, was the Rome part. We did Greece last year, we did Rome this year. I'll get into all that in another episode. But the thing about Rome is not that it feels ancient. It doesn't. It feels familiar. It's timely and timeless, right? A republic, it becomes powerful, becomes wealthy, becomes successful. It's filled with great and brilliant and fascinating characters.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  But then slowly, the very things that made it strong begin to weaken it. Ambition and competence. Ambition replaces service. Careerism replaces competence. Luxury replaces discipline. The institutions are still there in paper. The power is there, the, it's still the center of the world. But the character and the trust and the values that made those institutions work begin to wane or finally disappear, right? This is the story of Rome, but it's also a warning. You know, it's fascinating, just walking through Rome, looking at it from different vantage points and just thinking about what's happening on the news. It both puts it in perspective and then it also makes it urgent.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  And it brings so many of the questions that we're asking ourselves right now. It makes them like painfully real. Like, what, what does courage look like when the crowd is wrong? What does duty and responsibility look like in a time of corruption and decay? What are you supposed to do when power and ambition and luxury and fear begin to pull your society apart? Well, today's guest, Barry Strauss, is one of the great historians of the ancient world. He's a classicist, a military and naval historian. He's a professor emeritus at Cornell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. He's written 10 books on ancient history, including his latest, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire,

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  which came up, we ran into some friends of ours in Rome. We're Jewish and we were talking about this very book as we stood on the roof of their hotel, looking down over Colosseum, the Forum, St. Peter's, talking about all of this, right? And, and I love this episode. This is one of my favorite episodes of the podcast. Barry and I nerded out about why the Roman Republic fell. Who was better, Cicero or Cato? The decision to assassinate Caesar, which I thought about as I stood there. I convinced my kids to go see this spot because I told them there's a, a colony of stray cats there, which they were very excited about. So as I was looking at the ins and outs of it, they were running around counting how many cats they could see. Talk about the rise of Octavian, AKA Augustus. Why a republic requires debate and conversation

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  and why democracy is never just a piece of paper. But it's about education, it's about value, it's about institution and character. This episode is going to be a crash course on Rome, but really it's a crash course on, on what happens when a society forgets what made it work in the first place. And you're really going to like this episode. Barry is a bestselling author, as I said. Barry is someone whose work, if you don't start with Jews vs. Rome, maybe The War That Made the Roman Empire, Ten Caesars, The Death of Caesar. He's got plenty to choose from. He's also got a great podcast, Antiquitas: Leaders and Legends of the Ancient World. You can follow him on Instagram, at Barry Strauss. And you can grab signed copies of the new book, which he signed when he was here, Jews vs. Rome, and of course, The War That Made the Roman Empire. Let's get into it.

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  It was interesting, the thing I was at yesterday, they were all very worried about the state of Western civilization.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 4:04Ryan Holiday?

  How worried are you?

• 4:06Speaker 01

  About the state of Western civilization? I'm not worried. I think we face challenges, but I'm not worried.

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  It must be interesting, though, being a historian effectively of Western civilization.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  Because that's kind of what everyone's always been worried about.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, and you sort of, obviously you know when it was really imperiled.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:28Ryan Holiday?

  It's not like it's a smooth, pleasant history.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Yes, good point. There are always challenges.

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, like I was reading, um, have you ever read Walker Percy's The Moviegoer?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yes, but a long, long time ago.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  I was rereading it recently and there's this line in it where, you know, she says like, "The age of Cato's is gone," or something, or the, you know, and, or the last of the Cato's. Anyways, I was thinking about it because what was so funny to me about that is like, I mean, Cato, it's not like he lived in a shining moment in the Roman Empire. Like, he's literally the last of, of that, right? Like, he literally watches the Republic fall.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  But also, I just took a special humor in it in that Cato the Elder was concerned that the end of Rome was the introduction of philosophy, the thing we now celebrate as the defining achievement of these civilizations.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I hate to confess it, but I'm not the world's biggest fan of Cato the Younger.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  Tell me why.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Because I think that he didn't understand the need for compromise.

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  And he did not have the strain of pragmatism, which was one of the things that made the Romans great.

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  And, you know, Caesar had a lot to do with bringing on the civil war, but Cato had a lot to do with it as well.

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Do you think that he was a mediocre politician? Or do you think he was too principled and clean for the world of politics? Or is it somewhere in the middle?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  I lean towards too principled and clean for the world of politics, but that makes him a mediocre politician.

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  You know, he wasn't good at the job. He thought that all the problems could go away. All they had to do was get rid of Caesar and everything would be fine.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  But that wasn't true.

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  I mean, Rome faced some fundamental problems. And the thing about the Caesars and Pompeys of this world is that although the, their solutions for these problems were not the solutions that were ideal, at least they recognized the problems.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like he didn't understand that actually the job of the politician is to compromise on your principles.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Yes. So my big line, which I repeat ad nauseam, comes from this great novel, The Leopard. You know, it's a novel about revolution in Sicily in 1860. And the main character is this old aristocrat who doesn't want to change.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  And he doesn't have any children of his own, but he's very devoted to his nephew. And his nephew comes and shocks him and says, "I'm going to join the revolution." And the old guy says, "How can you do that?" And he says, "Uncle, you have to understand, if we want things to stay the same, everything has to change."

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. This is an Italian novelist, right?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 7:02Ryan Holiday?

  This is Queen Elizabeth's motto. Queen Elizabeth II.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  You're kidding.

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  That is her motto in the royal household, that if things are going to stay the same, things are going to have to change.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  She was a wise woman.

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. I knew there was a reason I liked her. But I think that's absolutely true. I mean, it's a little bit cynical, uh, but I think it's, it's absolutely true. I mean, I, I think that what a politician has to do is to, first of all, assess his or her society and say, what are the strengths? What are the things that, what are the core values that we really have to keep? And then say, okay, but we can't have everything we want.

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  What are the things we're going to compromise on? And we can't have everything we want because the world is always changing. And so I think that a wise politician understands that.

• 7:46Ryan Holiday?

  And isn't there also a difference, which I feel like Cato maybe failed to understand, which is the job of the politician in, in the doing of politics is to compromise on principles.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Because not everyone gets what they want.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:59Ryan Holiday?

  But then the job of the public official is to be, uh, unsayable from their personal opinion, their, their personal principles. So Cato refusing to take bribes or to decide to run the treasury, you know, honestly.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  That's good principles.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:18Ryan Holiday?

  And then, hey, Pompey coming to you and proposing an alliance, even if you find him personally distasteful. If that prevents Caesar from, uh, bringing him into his clutches.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  That's a great compromise.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  I agree. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really good example. And so that, that tells us both the strengths of Cato.

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  What's admirable about him and the weaknesses of Cato.

• 8:41Ryan Holiday?

  If we have Caesar on one end, Cato on the other, is Cicero in the middle? Is he getting the mean right? Or is he too principled or not principled enough to be a good politician?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  I think he's a better politician than than Cato. But I think that where he fails is that he too didn't understand the impossibility of keeping the Republic the way that it was. I mean, the way I see it, here we have Rome, which has is now ruling somewhat like 50 million people.

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  And the idea that you can have a charm circle of a few families in and around the city of Rome ruling this permanently.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Without opening the doors to outsiders, that's a nonstarter.

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  That's a no go. And Pompey and Caesar both understood that, whereas Cato and Cicero did not. And I think that's that's what's so problematic about them.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, when I read about them, I at least admire Cato, even if he's frustrating.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:40Ryan Holiday?

  And then with Cicero there, I always have had this sense it's like he he knew better. He could have done better. Like there, there's something disappointing about Cicero in a different way. You know, he's sort of always checking the checking the wind. You wish he was more heroic and then he just sort of, it's almost like he wastes himself on the wrong crisis.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know what you mean, but he was not made that way. He was a man of courage and a man of principle. Certainly it took a lot of courage for him to stand up to Antony the way that he did. But he was in a way, he was too clever by half.

• 10:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  And he was vain. I mean, he allowed Octavian to take him in. He thought that he was using Octavian, yet Octavian was using him. And he also made the mistake of not being able to keep his mouth shut. And the word got back to Octavian. So, I mean, what a wonderful speaker, what a fantastic orator, what eloquence.

• 10:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  And a wonderful thinker as well.

• 10:37Ryan Holiday?

  And how timeless the themes are, right?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:40Ryan Holiday?

  The politician who compromises too much, the politician who doesn't compromise, the ambitions getting in the way, the telling themselves that they're using the figure when actually the figure is using them, like just the themes are torn from today's headlines.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  I agree. And Cicero's letters, I mean, they're my favorite. I mean, just some amazing, amazing documents they are.

• 11:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:06Ryan Holiday?

  My favorite story about Cicero is, I forget who it was, but some, some person had just sort of performed this artistic fuck you to Caesar's face. And Cicero, you know, congratulating him after says, um, you know, come sit next to me, you know? And, uh, and, and the man says, oh, I'm surprised there's room. You always take up two stools.

• 11:32Ryan Holiday?

  Meaning that he, he never picks a side and that, that he had trouble drawing the line, which obviously Cato did not.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:39Ryan Holiday?

  But there's sort of a vice in both directions.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  My favorite story from Cicero is from the letter to Atticus, where he describes Caesar's visit to his villa. And he says at the end, he's not the kind of guy to whom you'd say, come back again soon.

• 11:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, in Cicero, at least there was a consistency for Cato with the principles.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:02Ryan Holiday?

  Except for that whole weird thing with his wife.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:06Ryan Holiday?

  But Cicero seems to like the philosophy and like the, the image of the Stoic, but then also really likes being rich and powerful and important.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Right, yes.

• 12:17Ryan Holiday?

  So maybe for people who have no idea what we're talking about, walk us through in broad strokes, how it goes sideways. The, the, why does the Republic fall? And sort of who are the players there?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, it's a long story, first of all, as you know, and it takes about a century for the Republic to fall.

• 12:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  But long story short, I think it has to do with the rupture in what colleagues of mine call the civic bargain. And the civic bargain is that Roman citizens would serve in the military. They defend the country, then they go back to their farm and they would enjoy a middle class existence on a modest sized farm. And they would also be able to participate in politics. It wasn't a democracy, but there were elections and ordinary people had a vote. And it all starts to go sideways as a result of the wars that Rome fought in the third and second centuries. The wars that really, you know, squeeze these people to the pipsqueak. Many of them die, many of them lose their farms.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  At the same time, Rome is becoming a major, major slave power and Italy is becoming a slave society. And the fat cats are grabbing up all the public land that ordinary Romans would need to pasture their herds on. So we see people moving to the city of Rome because they can't make it on the farm anymore. We see people losing their farms. We see people going into debt. And the net, net, it just really affects the Roman military because the Romans staunchly believed that you could not arm poor people. Cause if you armed poor people, they could turn on you. And they also thought that poor people were poor. I mean, unfairly, they thought that poor people were poor because they lacked virtue and they just didn't have the right stuff.

• 14:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  So suddenly there's not enough people who can meet the military, the property qualification to go into the military. And two Roman politicians, the Gracchi brothers, try to do something about it by redistributing public land and getting the wealthy to give up this land and to share it with the poor so that you can bring potential Roman soldiers back up to speed where they can meet the property qualification.

• 14:30Ryan Holiday?

  The first moral panic about socialism.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  In a way, yes, you could say that. So this leads to a violent opposition. I mean, literally violent opposition. And there are lynch squads put together by senators to kill each of these brothers in turn and to make these reforms moribund. They were also afraid, the, the old guard was afraid that as a result of this, that the Gracchi brothers would have unassailable political popularity. So Rome's in a dither about what to do or in a tizzy about what to do. And ultimately, when they face a challenge from Celtic invaders at the end of the second century,

• 15:15Speaker 01

  they also have a crisis in the war in North Africa. What they're forced to do, they constantly have to lower the property qualification, accepting poorer and poorer men into the military. And finally, they say, no more property qualification. Any citizen can become a Roman soldier. And so you have these poor people who go in the military and their commanders say, you know, fight for me, fight for Rome. And they're saying, well, why? And they're saying, because at the end of the rainbow, there will be a pot of gold. And the pot of gold will be that we will, I will, I'll get you land.

• 15:51Ryan Holiday?

  It would settle the soldiers in these different kind of colonies and areas that they'd conquered, right?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Eventually.

• 15:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  But not quite yet. In this period, they're settling them in Italy, which means they have to get land for them. And which often means they have to take land away from somebody else.

• 16:08Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  So they're sowing the seeds for civil war. And what's happening is now ordinary Romans, instead of being loyal to SPQgar, instead of being loyal to Senatus Populus Quae Romanus, the Senate and the Roman people, they're now loyal to their commander. I know, I'm Marius's guy, I'm Sulla's guy. So they're not really loyal to the Republic per se anymore, but, but to the guy who represents the Republic to them. So citizenship has really changed its meaning. And Rome is in danger of becoming a military dictatorship. So as you know, there's a long and complicated civil war, a set of civil wars between Marius and Sulla.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  And when Marius dies, between his partisans, Sulla's, and Sulla wins. Very brutal war. He is on the side of the conservatives, the old guard, the people who call themselves the best men, whereas the other side are the people who call themselves the men of the people. We might call them populists, it's a little misleading, but it's close.

• 17:11Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  To what they are. And Sulla comes in and makes himself dictator, kind of twisting the meaning of an old Roman institution that's supposed to be temporary. He's dictator with, without any time limit on it. And he reforms the constitution to try to turn the clock back. Before you had all these populists, to try to make Rome back to the conservative way it was before. But he steps down after a year, probably he was ill because he dies shortly after that. And the Republic is back in business, but slowly it devolves into what it had been.

• 17:47Ryan Holiday?

  And this gets us, because Sulla and Cato overlap, right? So like Cato's a young boy during Sulla's reign.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  So is Caesar.

• 17:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, right.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  And so is Pompey, Pompey. So we're now in the seventies, around the seventies B.C. So here's the Republic and it's very lively. There's a lot of debates. It's very active, but there's also a lot of tension because the Republic is depending on these big guys, the big men.

• 18:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Who are going to represent it. Pompey and Caesar come to the fore. There's also a third one, as you know, Crassus, who also wants to be one of the big boys and one of the great military leaders. And the other thing that we have to factor in is that in a way, success has spoiled Rome. And the old fashioned Romans who were afraid of the Senate and who respected the power of the Senate are being replaced by new generations who think, you know, I'm really hot stuff.

• 18:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  And I should be ruling the world. So you get that with Pompey, you get that with Caesar. Crassus would have liked to do that, but he fails, of course. And that's part of the story as well. These are people who don't respect the old rules. Rules are for suckers.

• 18:59Ryan Holiday?

  The institutions are slow and ineffective and holding us back.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  And don't you know how great I am? So there's part of that as well. So on the one hand, it's a society that's still playing by the old rules. But on the other hand, there are people who won't play by these old rules.

• 19:15Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  They're populists as well, who are, you know, roiling the system. They're whiling things up. There's a lot of tensions going on. I mean, scholars disagree. I mean, one of the great scholars of Rome, Eric Ruin, argues that the Republic could have survived just fine. It was assassinated. You know, he did not commit suicide. It was assassinated and it could have gone on. I think it could have gone on, but only if it had been willing to make compromises with reality. And in the end, it wasn't willing to make those compromises with reality. In fairness, it was really being pushed to the limit by Pompey and Caesar.

• 19:55Ryan Holiday?

  It's like they're driving a car too fast and it's starting to shake under, because it's hitting, it's hitting up against the limits of what it's capable of withstanding.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 20:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And so it's unclear how they're going to solve this problem. And in the end, led by Cato, they say, we're going to solve this problem by going for the jugular. We're going to get Caesar, you know, we're going to strip him of his command and gall. We're going to put him on trial and he's going to be condemned to death. So what he's going to do is he's going to go into exile.

• 20:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  And that'll be the end to him, end of problem.

• 20:32Ryan Holiday?

  Get rid of the guy who's putting the most pressure and strain on the system.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 20:36Ryan Holiday?

  Bumping up against its limits.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:38Ryan Holiday?

  And then things can all go back to normal.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  That's right. And in the meantime, Pompey, who was allied with Caesar for a while, realizes that his star is going into eclipse and Caesar's is rising. And he decides, what do you know? I was a conservative after all. Who knew? So now I'm on the side of the Senate and I will, I will fight Caesar on their behalf.

• 20:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Ryan Holiday?

  So a couple of things I'm taking from your version of this story. Number one, you know, we go like the fall of the Republic and we think about it as like Caesar, Cato, Pompey, whatever. But like, first off, you're dating it back almost 100 plus years. And then, and then this isn't getting into, sometimes people conflate the fall of the Republic with the fall of Rome itself, which is hundreds of years after that.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yes. I think there's a, there's a common thread, by the way, between the two of them. But yes, it's 100 years after that.

• 21:40Ryan Holiday?

  And the common thread is just compressing an immensely complicated bit of history down into a, a single thing? Or what's the thread?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  I think the thread is citizenship. I mean, I think the thing about republics is almost what Churchill said about democracy. It's the worst form of government, except every other form of government. Republics have this, have debate. They have citizen activists. They are unruly, but they're also incredibly good at mobilizing the people

• 22:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  behind a cause. When you have politicians who know how to do that.

• 22:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  It breaks down in the Republic, but by the time you get to the later Roman Empire, citizenship has, it hardly exists. The Senate doesn't really do anything anymore. It doesn't have any real power. There haven't been assemblies for a very long time. The people of Italy live a privileged life. After around the year 200, there are no soldiers who come from Italy anymore. All the soldiering is being done by people from the frontier provinces.

• 22:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  And it doesn't mean they're bad or disloyal to Rome. It just means there's no way to mobilize

• 22:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  the citizenry. There's no way to turn the ship around very easily. And so Rome is at the mercy of a few leaders and, and unable to make the kind of changes that would have been needed. It would have been very difficult, but not impossible to keep the empire going.

• 23:05Ryan Holiday?

  So I also wonder, like from, there's obviously there's sort of the, the systemic explanation of history, economic causes.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:14Ryan Holiday?

  Historical forces, et cetera. And then there's the sort of great man of history theory, which is like individuals are responsible.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:20Ryan Holiday?

  Everything would have been different if this person didn't. What's interesting about the, the fall of the Republic is it's kind of those two things intersecting with each other.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Intersect.

• 23:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's like the answer is both.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  This is the Strauss version of history.

• 23:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  It's messy. There's not just one answer. Society and economics matter. Culture matters, but individuals matter as well. You know, if you hadn't had Caesar, and then if you hadn't had the incredibly cunning, clever, unscrupulous, ruthless, murderous, but visionary Octavian.

• 23:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  You know, it wouldn't have ended up as the way it ended up, but it might have ended up as an Egyptian empire, which could have been totally different.

• 24:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Or the events and the trends give rise to the opportunity to the individual. And then the, the individual has the choice. Are they going to be a Caesar or a Cincinnatus?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 24:11Ryan Holiday?

  And it was this kind of convergence of right man, right time, or wrong man, wrong time. And, and that's what changes the arc of history.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at the founding, if you look at the American independence, how amazing that was. I wouldn't say it was totally unexpected. The British Foreign Office, or whatever, the colonial office, whatever it's called at the time, certainly had totally the idea, gee, if we defeat the French, that'll be great. But there's one problem. The colonies won't need us anymore.

• 24:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Still, the fact that the rebels were able to pull this off is kind of amazing.

• 24:45Ryan Holiday?

  And then that Washington makes the choices that he makes, right? He could have, he could have fought a more traditional war. That would have been different. He also could have decided to make himself king, or any number of the founders could have decided to go in a different direction. And it's this remarkable set of choices.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:04Ryan Holiday?

  And they had the benefit of obviously looking back at the previous choices and going, hey, how did it go last time?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Washington, of course, was a huge fan of Cato, but the Cato that he loved was the Cato of Addison's play.

• 25:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  From the early 18th century, who's not really the real Cato, not the historical Cato.

• 25:21Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Imaginary Cato.

• 25:22Ryan Holiday?

  He's Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, not actual Hamilton.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Yeah. Imagine, yeah. Imagine if our leaders used the Broadway version of Hamilton.

• 25:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  There could be worse things.

• 25:34Ryan Holiday?

  No, in a way, it was perfect, right? I mean, he is a tragic figure in the play, but, but it's a play celebrating primarily the virtues of the person.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  It is.

• 25:42Ryan Holiday?

  And, and the Addison version of Cato is the, the virtues of Cato, not the frustrating, obnoxious, ineffective version of Cato.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah.

• 25:53Ryan Holiday?

  And yeah, they make these choices and, and then it works out the way that it does, but it, it always could have gone otherwise.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely. History is contingent.

• 26:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Are there a handful of choices when you look at the fall of the Republic that you go, man, that was really a pivot point? Or you're like, I really hoped he would go in this direction? Or is there anything that stands out at you?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Well, certainly, of course, the most famous one is the crossing of the Rubicon.

• 26:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  You know, the fact that Caesar decides to start a civil war rather than giving in, you know, a less determined and less selfish person might have said, look, you know, I love myself, but I love my republic, country more, and I don't want to put the Republic through this. Caesar doesn't say that.

• 26:38Ryan Holiday?

  Right. He could have been more of a MacArthur figure who was done an injustice and some, I mean, sort of deserved to get fired, in my view. But, but like, he could have crossed, when MacArthur is called back from Korea, he could have made himself a more Caesar-esque figure than he did.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, William Manchester wrote this book, I think, American Caesar.

• 26:58Ryan Holiday?

  We have it in the bookstore next door. Yes.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  It's a really interesting book, but in the end, he wasn't a Caesar.

• 27:03Ryan Holiday?

  Right. He makes the choice.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. He makes the choice. Caesar decides differently. You know, he says famously, "My dignitas is dearer to me than life itself." My dignity, my rank, my status.

• 27:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  I mean, what, that's a very un-American thing to say, but it's a very Roman thing to say.

• 27:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Although an American might say, "My reputation is, I live or die on my reputation."

• 27:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Quite the same thing.

• 27:27Ryan Holiday?

  But the, but sort of built into the American story up until relatively recently was always country over self.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:37Ryan Holiday?

  Right? And that was a powerful norm.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:40Ryan Holiday?

  That, that saved us in some, some narrow run moments.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yes. And I don't want to get off topic, but we could talk about why we don't have that anymore.

• 27:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Okay. I mean, I think the Romans and Greeks would have said, it's very simple. Success spoiled America.

• 27:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Luxury. The ancients believed that luxury was the greatest enemy of republics and that to have a republic, you need to have just a little bit of want, desire, need. You got to keep people hungry.

• 28:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And you got to have people, you can't have people thinking the most important thing in life is getting rich and being able to afford $7 lattes every morning.

• 28:22Ryan Holiday?

  Don't you think part of it is also though, like, and this is why Cato the elder was concerned and Cato the younger was concerned, which is like, the norms persist as long as people continue to believe in them and the story is told and retold and each subsequent generation is inspired and steeped in the conditions that make the norm logical and celebratory?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yes, but you have to educate people.

• 28:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's what I mean. And you lose the ability to do that perhaps in prosperity, but also because you so take it for granted that everyone understands.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  You take it for granted.

• 28:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  You know, so when I was growing up during Vietnam, people would sneer at patriotism.

• 29:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  You know, I'm not saying we had to support the Vietnam War, but I think that people went beyond that and say, there's just something wrong with being

• 29:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  a super patriot, as they would have said, and that can lead people too far in the other direction and just challenging everything.

• 29:22Ryan Holiday?

  When it's a feedback loop, right? Because you start to question the idea of patriotism exactly at the moment that your government is proving itself to be not worthy of the trust or faith. And then it's this downward spiral that they experienced in Rome too.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. I mean, you have to give citizens, you have to fulfill your part of the bargain.

• 29:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  And give citizens the thought that this is the way to go. It's not, it's something they should love, but there's a reason why they should love it.

• 29:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  It's hard to sell to people, even if it doesn't work for you, you should still love it, which is true, but it's hard to get people to see that.

• 30:00Ryan Holiday?

  You should fight in the war that even your average citizen sees is a bad idea and not going well.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:06Ryan Holiday?

  Because that's, but that is the Roman way. Like, there was this kind of unquestioned obedience. I think of that story, I forget who it was, what's the famous Roman myth of like the hole opens up in the ground and Rome will only be saved if its most valuable things are thrown into it and that Roman gets on his horse and he dives into the hole. Do you know this myth?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  I'm vaguely, I'm afraid I'm drawing a bit of a blank.

• 30:34Ryan Holiday?

  But the point is, like unquestionably, I'll kill myself to save Rome.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Well, Decius Mus, I mean, he's the guy who engages in self sacrifice for the sake of Rome.

• 30:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  I mean, yes, that is a Roman story that the Romans told themselves and they had to believe that it was worth, worth doing that for their society.

• 30:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  You know, the other thing about it is it's easier in a way when you have an external enemy and you feel that you have to, you have to make sacrifices because of the cause.

• 31:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I think one of the things about the Cold War and even more after the Cold War was we felt we weren't really at risk. I mean, I think maybe people had felt in the 50s they were, but as things started to calm down a bit, I think less and less people thought, no, it's going to start a nuclear war. We're not really at risk. And then after the Cold War, we thought, oh, we're number one.

• 31:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  You know, it's a unipolar moment, as they said.

• 31:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and then also, I mean, this is getting a little too modern, but like the idea of an existential godless enemy.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:34Ryan Holiday?

  Did I think bind the sort of conservative movement

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:40Ryan Holiday?

  into the sort of, well, we're not going to be opposed to everything. We do understand there are some things more important, like it kind of brought everyone on this team of like, hey,

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:50Ryan Holiday?

  we at least agree on foreign policy that we all hate the Russians.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, or the Soviets.

• 31:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And I mean, I think many, many liberals felt the same way.

• 31:58Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  You know, they said, they're not, we're not down with conservatism, but we don't want communism.

• 32:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. So another pivot point that I think a lot about, again, Stoicism is at the center, the decision to assassinate Caesar.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:11Ryan Holiday?

  Right, we have, we have Brutus.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:12Ryan Holiday?

  We have Cato's daughter.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:16Ryan Holiday?

  So obviously there's the decision to do it, which is a pivot point.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:20Ryan Holiday?

  But then there's also this sort of, it strikes me as similarly naive in that they just thought, well, strike at the king.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:28Ryan Holiday?

  And then the movement evaporates. Like, there was effectively no plan as to the day after.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yes, they did not, I think they underestimated the military. They had thought it through some and they thought that, you know, what we need to do is to say to Caesar's soldiers, we know Caesar has given you this enormous amount of wealth. He's rewarded with enormous amount of wealth and you can keep it.

• 32:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  But what they didn't realize is that in order to win over Caesar's soldiers, they need to say, and we're doubling it. We're giving you more, which in fact is exactly what Octavian does a bit later. That was their mistake. I mean, just think of, I imagine this assembly a few days after the assassination where Brutus is addressing the crowd and he says, you guys don't have to worry, you can keep what Caesar promised you. I imagine them thinking, that's it?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  We want more.

• 33:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  He killed our leader.

• 33:21Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  We gotta pay, you gotta pay up.

• 33:23Ryan Holiday?

  They knew they, they were in the catbird seat and that they were the swing vote.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yes, they were the swing vote and it was just a matter of a leader arising who could, who could organize them.

• 33:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  In the end, two leaders arise, Antony and Octavian, and Octavian just turns out to be infinitely more cunning and ruthless than Antony. Not that Antony was a slouch, he wasn't.

• 33:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  But Octavian could, could outfight him.

• 33:49Ryan Holiday?

  If he wanted it more, don't you think?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he, he wanted it more, but he was willing to just do sleazy stuff more than Antony was.

• 34:01Ryan Holiday?

  I just meant Antony wanted to party a little bit.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Yes, but remember, we're only getting the version that Octavian wants us to have because Antony didn't live to tell his side of the story.

• 34:13Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  So the version we get was this guy was just a drunkard, you know? But I'm confident that the real Antony had a lot more on the balls on that.

• 34:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he couldn't have, he's obviously very savvy and

• 34:25Speaker 01

  He's very savvy.

• 34:26Ryan Holiday?

  and adept and driven and ambitious, but he does Terry there in Egypt for a bit in a way that I don't know if Octavian would have.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Again, we're getting Octavian's version of the story.

• 34:37Ryan Holiday?

  Fair enough.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  I mean, Cleopatra is not just, you know, a fabulous lover.

• 34:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  She also is herself, she's a very cunning strategist and she's the richest person in the world.

• 34:48Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  So, and she has access to all the savvy of the Ptolema, Ptolema kingdom when it comes to naval stuff in particular.

• 34:55Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  So there's a lot of reasons to want to be with Cleopatra. And also finally, she's Caesar's girlfriend.

• 35:01Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  She's Caesar's woman.

• 35:02Ryan Holiday?

  That's the link to the past.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  She's the link. And also she comes from the family of Alexander the Great's general.

• 35:08Ryan Holiday?

  Right, sure.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  It's tremendous propaganda, PR advantage for, for being with her. She's also a goddess.

• 35:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  She's Isis on earth and as her consort, Antony is Osiris and he's also, she's Aphrodite and he's Dionysus. And we might think, oh, who cared about that? But they did in the ancient world.

• 35:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's like finding out you could be Pope or something, like in addition to a head of state.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  In addition to being

• 35:34Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  So, um, yes, he did Terry in Egypt some, but again, we're getting this propaganda from, Octavian Augustus is one of the masters of propaganda in all of history, you know?

• 35:46Ryan Holiday?

  So as far as lessons, okay, so citizenship matters, the bargain with, with your people matters, obviously the individual choices and the character of the leaders matters.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:57Ryan Holiday?

  Any other big lessons you feel like we draw from this story?

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Well, the economy matters, you know, it's the economy, stupid. You know, one of the things that I hear from young people all the time nowadays is we can't have the American dream.

• 36:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  You selfish baby boomers took all the money and we can't have it. We can't, we can't buy a house. We're not going to be, we can't have kids because it's just too expensive.

• 36:21Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. Also you wreck the environment.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  You wreck the environment.

• 36:24Ryan Holiday?

  Everything is a mess and you're expecting us, that goes back to the bargain, right? Everything's a mess and you're expecting us to play by the rules and have faith.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:35Ryan Holiday?

  And that's looking like a bad bet.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  It's looking like a bad bet. Plus we have to spend all this money to go to college and then we come out and we can't have a job because it turns out that all the stuff we were promised with a college degree turns out to not be true, as you know very well.

• 36:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  So they have a point. They have, they absolutely have a point.

• 36:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  So, I mean, when you have a system that's Due for change, the question's going to be, well, is it going to have to be violent change? You don't want it to be violent change. How can you evolve the system?

• 37:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  How can you make changes in the system? So I would say, we want to throw into the hopper compromise.

• 37:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Compromise being a value. And I think that's really important in republics, because republics depend on debate.

• 37:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  And they depend on people vigorously disagreeing with each other, but it can go overboard.

• 37:22Ryan Holiday?

  Isn't that the genius of, say, like, an FDR? In that he, there is a moment, it's clear the thing is not working, it's clear the bargain has gone bad. And then there are the people for whom, you know, the system has worked, or they are really principled in the sense that they believe in, hey, this is what the founders wanted. Sometimes it goes like this. And they don't want to change.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:45Ryan Holiday?

  And he says, sorry, guys, it's this or revolution.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:50Ryan Holiday?

  And he figures out how to change within the system without violence.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:55Ryan Holiday?

  And sort of mitigate some of those impulses.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  It is the genius of FDR, and I'd say even more so the genius of Lincoln.

• 38:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  You know, the ability to compromise, but also to understand there's some things you can't compromise on.

• 38:07Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  So, you know, getting that right, and then keeping your head and keeping together during this terrible, terrible crisis, I mean.

• 38:16Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah, it is interesting, with both FDR and Lincoln, they could have been a Caesar figure. And there were people who accused them of being that at the time.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 38:25Ryan Holiday?

  And obviously, they both shattered norms, whether you're talking about habeas corpus with Lincoln, or you're talking about the decision to run for a third and then a fourth term with FDR.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:35Ryan Holiday?

  But it was within some self-imposed limits.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  It was. It was within some self-imposed limits. Absolutely. Yeah.

• 38:44Ryan Holiday?

  Although maybe Caesar would have said, hey, I could have been, I could have, I could have gone further. I chose to stop here. And then you stopped me before I, you know, was able to sort of turn this thing around.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  But becoming dictator in perpetuity is pretty far.

• 38:58Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, sure, sure, sure. But it is interesting how, at some level, it ultimately does come down to the character of the person who finds themselves in that moment, and what they're willing to do and not willing to do, what they believe and what they don't believe.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  I mean, Caesar did not have to bed the queen of Egypt and produce the next king of Egypt as his illegitimate son.

• 39:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  And he did not have to tolerate her being stashed in his villa on the other side of the Tiber River while he's living with his wife in Dantana, Rome. I mean, that, I think, is one of the untold reasons. It's an unsung story, because it's not in Shakespeare for assassination.

• 39:36Ryan Holiday?

  That made the Romans very nervous.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  It made the Romans very, very nervous.

• 39:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Very, very nervous.

• 39:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think it's, I think it's so interesting, again, the Stoics not being pragmatic, but the first thing is, it's either Athenodorus or Ariesthenes. I forget, one of the teachers of Caesar, or sorry, of Octavian, he goes, you know, one cannot have too many Caesars. And, and that's the, that's the, you know, the indirect way of saying, you got to get rid of Caesarian.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Caesarian.

• 40:07Ryan Holiday?

  Of Caesarian.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:07Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so there was, the Stoics do learn a little bit late, that, you know, power requires a certain amount of ruthlessness.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:16Ryan Holiday?

  And pragmatism.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, Caesar, of course, was an Epicurean.

• 40:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. And sort of got along with the others, but at some level.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:25Ryan Holiday?

  You know?

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:26Ryan Holiday?

  He probably thought Cato was a sucker at some level.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah. You know, Caesar is quoted as saying, we don't know if he really said it or not, because it came from an enemy, "The Republic is a mere name, all form without substance."

• 40:41Ryan Holiday?

  Oof.

• 40:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's, I mean, at the center of Caesar is Caesar.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:49Ryan Holiday?

  And at the center of Cato is these principles and ideals and, and something more abstract and theoretical.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Yes, but let me defend Caesar a little bit.

• 41:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  I mean, Caesar really does believe in the Roman people. And both in the rights of the Roman people, and also in taking care of the Roman people.

• 41:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  And making sure they had prosperity. I mean, there's an Italian scholar who wrote a book called Caesar, The Democratic Dictator. And I think that's going too far. I don't think he's a Democrat, but he did care about the people in the way that a Cato did not, really.

• 41:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that is, that is something that you find both in the ancient world and in the modern world. There is this, okay, sure, the principle is important.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:36Ryan Holiday?

  You are right, but people are starving in the streets. And like, if the government is failing to do its job, it doesn't matter that, I think Lincoln said this, he's like, the Constitution's not a suicide pact, okay? You know, like, like, you can't expect me to stay true to these things if it means people could just leave the compact of states at any time or whatever.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:58Ryan Holiday?

  And Cato, I think, I mean, he does famously commit suicide, he probably didn't have a problem with principles being a suicide pact. I think he kind of thought.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  That's really well said.

• 42:07Ryan Holiday?

  At some level, thought that was the highest expression of their value.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true. And he was ahead of his time, because suicide hadn't become as highly regarded as it would be in the next century under the Stoics.

• 42:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's highly regarded. No, but it, it was a dramatic act of devotion, he thought, not cowardice or weakness, but like, it was like the monk in Vietnam lighting it's himself on fire.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  It's funny, I'm reviewing a book about Carthage, and I realized that one of the things we remember about Carthage, and he's the ones who committed suicide.

• 42:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Like Hannibal and Dido.

• 42:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I was reading Andrew Roberts's biography of Napoleon a few years ago.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:48Ryan Holiday?

  And he has this great section, which came out, I don't know, where Napoleon is just shitting on Cato. He's like, you know, Cato, he committed suicide. And who did it help? Caesar. What did it accomplish? Nothing, you know? And, and like, on the one level, he's right. And then on the other level, you're like, well, of course Napoleon doesn't understand, Napoleon is a Caesar, of course he doesn't respect a Cato.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 43:13Ryan Holiday?

  It's almost like these figures are just speaking totally different languages, and they can't understand each other, and they think the other one is the crazy person.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  I think that's true.

• 43:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And ideally, you have an institute, the purpose of institutions, I guess, and this is what the founders, I think, did well, although it's clearly under strain these days. It's like, how do you create systems or structures that channel some of that energy, allow it to dissipate? You know, and, and we've managed to head it off for 250 years, but the pressures remain.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're absolutely right. And the thing about institutions, though, is that you need to have the societal underpinnings that make them work, and that make people say, yes, this is the right way to do things.

• 43:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  If it's just a piece of paper, you know, it doesn't mean anything. I mean, Adam, John Adams famously said, "Our Constitution will only work for religious people."

• 44:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  It's not, not suitable for anyone else. And maybe we could substitute religion for principles.

• 44:13Ryan Holiday?

  He means like, yeah, because it is funny, because I was just reading something the other day, where he was reassuring in that treaty against the Tripoli Pirates or whatever. He was like, "We're not going to wage a war against the Muslims, because we're not, we're by no means a Christian nation."

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, interesting.

• 44:29Ryan Holiday?

  So he said that, but I think his point is, the Constitution only works, and he said this more explicitly somewhere else, like, if the people are virtuous.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 44:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  And, you know, the Constitution doesn't say much about that, and that was left to the states. And it does, some of the state constitutions do talk about that.

• 44:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  But education is an unspoken thing.

• 44:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  And it's enormously important. Tocqueville, of course, does talk about that more and does get it.

• 44:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  That you don't have democracy in America because you have a piece of paper. You have democracy in America because it lives in people's hearts.

• 45:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  And it lives in their hearts, because that's their way of life. So, I mean, I think that is a challenge for us today, is, it is in any generation. You can't rest on your laurels, you have to come up with mores.

• 45:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 45:30Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you also, I think, were realizing today just how, as explicit as the Constitution is, and then they made it more explicit with the Bill of Rights, that it is primarily a system of government centered around a bunch of unwritten norms. Like, it's more British than we thought it was.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  That's a good way to put it.

• 45:47Ryan Holiday?

  And then it's very hard to continue those norms if you get to a point where suddenly everyone, there, what's that thing, the Chesterton fence thing, where it's like, we don't know why the fence is here. Like, we don't know what, why is there a norm that this can't happen or that can't happen? Why does the president have to voluntarily leave after two terms?

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:09Ryan Holiday?

  Or like, all these norms, like, the pardon power was in, obviously, you can't pardon yourself.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:15Ryan Holiday?

  And you can't preemptively pardon people for crimes they haven't committed.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:18Ryan Holiday?

  And you can't dangle pardons in front of people for committing crimes. That's not explicitly set out anywhere, but, but George Washington would have barely conceived of someone conceiving of doing such a thing.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Right. I agree with you. But you can't enforce norms by saying, we're going to enforce norms, darn it, you know?

• 46:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  You've got, it's really got to be in people's hearts, and they have to be educated this way. I mean, Aristotle talks about the importance of habit.

• 46:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  And habituating people in education. And I think that's, that's just so important. I think one of the reasons our society's in the trouble it's in today is because of the educational system.

• 46:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  And, and the way we. Don't raise people, the things we do teach them and the things we don't teach them.

• 46:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and, and the way it was for the founders is they're so steeped in the stories that, the characters that you write about in the books, and not just like, they're signing the Federalist Papers with your fake Roman names.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:10Ryan Holiday?

  But like, if you had called someone a Catiline or whatever, they'd, they'd all have known. And then if you, if you called Trump a Catiline, like, what percentage of the population is like, what are you talking about?

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:22Ryan Holiday?

  You know?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  I know.

• 47:23Ryan Holiday?

  They just don't, it's like, we're only able to say someone's like a Hitler or Martin Luther King, like, we have like five people we can name, we don't have the sort of historical narrative that, that is so rooted in why we have certain systems and what certain norms are.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Well, Americans have often devalued history. I mean, it's not an accident that it was Henry Ford who said history is bunk. I mean, you know, Americans live for the present and live for the future.

• 47:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  We, we don't really live in the past, but we need to

• 47:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  study history. I mean, we really do.

• 47:56Ryan Holiday?

  It was funny, so this thing I was at yesterday, they were, the guy was talking about, he'd taken his kids to New York City and they, they were at this museum, they were looking at all these classical sculptures and history. And that was all very impressive. And then they went to this play and it was full of woke garbage, you know, or what, he was ranting about this, you know, there was transgenderism and it was like, okay, first off, the Romans that you're celebrating, they had a lot of sex with guys, okay? I think you would be, I think you'd be horrified at, at what Roman culture, Greek culture was actually like.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:27Ryan Holiday?

  But that's neither here nor there. There is this sense that those civilizational values are in retreat or decay. And what do you think you do about it? What do you do about it?

• 48:39Speaker 01

  I think you have to, I mean, I'm very platonic about this. I mean, I think you have to educate the young.

• 48:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  I mean, you're not going to have the society you want unless you educate the young in the way that they need to be educated.

• 48:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  And, you know, Plato gets that a hundred percent right. So I think that's what we have to do. I mean, that's my job is to educate them about how we're going to educate young people. What are the stories we're going to tell them? What are the books we're going to have them read? What are the ideas that we want them to have? What are the practices we want them to engage in? And I think as a society, we've been kind of laissez faire about this and not taking it as seriously as we need to do. You know, the American thing, those who can do, those who can't teach.

• 49:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  I mean, okay, yeah, I get it to a degree, but those teachers are really important. And what we teach our kids and how we teach our kids is some of the most, one of the most important things that we can do.

• 49:36Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's like this STEM stuff is really important, right?

• 49:39Speaker 01

  It is.

• 49:39Ryan Holiday?

  And at the same time, if you, if you go, no, get an engineering degree, or you gotta learn how to do something, I hope you get a job. What are you studying a bunch of, it's like, it's like the, the humanities and these stories got taken out by both ends. It's like, this isn't practical, I'm not paying you to go to school to be a philosopher.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:56Ryan Holiday?

  And then also, it's just a bunch of old dead white guys who, who were slave owners.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:01Ryan Holiday?

  Screw them, what do they, what can they teach us? And so we, we end up cutting down our sort of shared consensus and understanding of the, those values.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:12Ryan Holiday?

  In both directions. And then we're like, why don't people believe in this stuff anymore?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:16Ryan Holiday?

  They don't, it's not they don't believe it, they don't even know it.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  They don't even know it.

• 50:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  They don't even know it. And that's the problem. We really have to put it back on the agenda that young people are learning about this.

• 50:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  And tackling these ideas and thinking they're important. I mean, so I'm visiting the School of Civic Leadership at Texas, and one of the things I like is the fact that you can do a minor, I don't know what they call it, but taking, I believe it's six courses in civic leadership. And they've got engineers who are doing this. I think that's great, you know? I think that's the kind of thing that we need to be doing in, in our universities. And we have to say to people, you really do have to read the great books.

• 50:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  And you really do have to join the great debate and be part of the great ideas. Of course you can be an engineer, we want, we need more engineers in fact, but we also want you to have some sense of this. And of course, it's not, it's almost too late if it just starts in university.

• 51:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, my nine year old's obsessed with Greek history and, you know, we're having these discussions about the Odyssey. Should, should Odysseus have done this?

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Fabulous.

• 51:16Ryan Holiday?

  Was it right to not tell the men as they're going through Silent Rubitus that, that six of them are going to die? Or, you know, should he have shouted out who he was to Polyphemus? And, and you're talking about these things and, and you realize like, did the Greeks and the Romans really think Odysseus was real and that this happened? I don't know. And, and I, I would suspect, no. I think they knew that this is all myth, but the purpose of history to them was not always to be factually correct in the way that we have to root everything in primary sources. Like Plutarch's a great biographer, even though he's not super accurate, because he's getting to the essence of these figures.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  You know, he's not bad, by the way, as a historical source.

• 51:55Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  You, you can't really trust any of the speeches that he gives.

• 51:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Because ancient historians didn't think it was their job to tell what people really said is what they should have said.

• 52:03Ryan Holiday?

  Like he had a recording.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  No. But I think he's not bad on historical facts, but whether they believed in their myth or not, even Aristotle quotes the Iliad.

• 52:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  So.

• 52:12Ryan Holiday?

  But I mean, the, the primary purpose of that history was to teach the value, not even the values, but to, to bring up the moral debates that the incidents in the, the story forces to wrestle with, you know? And, and the idea of, yes, Caesar crossing the Rubicon is both a historical event and then a moral question for all of us in our own Rubicons.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:38Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what you would study and debate and talk about.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Right, yes, yes.

• 52:43Ryan Holiday?

  It's not just a, a saying, the die is cast. Like, it's not just this little historical fact that you get quizzed on, like, and then, yeah, now with AI or whatever, it's like, the purpose isn't to have ChatGPT write you an essay on whether Caesar should have done this or that, it's to really sit down and think about what you think about, whether he should have done this or that.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  That's why most of us in the academic business don't assign essays anymore.

• 53:06Ryan Holiday?

  Really?

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Because, yeah, we know the students can get it from ChatGPT. So we either have them write blue books, or

• 53:12Ryan Holiday?

  In the room?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  In the room.

• 53:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Or we give them oral exams. I did both, I taught with a colleague last quarter. Stanford and Hoover has this great program called the Stanford Civics Initiative.

• 53:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  And so we taught this course on classical leadership, which was just wonderful. And the students were out of this world, but they had one blue book exam and they had one oral exam.

• 53:33Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  You know, I think you need to do stuff like that, unfortunately, in the age of AI, until we figure out

• 53:39Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  this AI thing and come up with new ways to test people.

• 53:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, although, you know, we've been, my, my son will be like, I have this question, you know, why, he was like, why, if Odysseus's father is still alive.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:52Ryan Holiday?

  Why didn't he just step in temporarily as king? Like, and I was like, I never thought about that. Like, the whole thing is she's weaving this funeral shroud for a guy that's still alive, seems like it would solve the king problem.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  But he's too old and weak, that's the problem.

• 54:06Ryan Holiday?

  Right, but, but it was like, okay, let's have, let's have ChatGPT tell us what are the five perspectives on that thing? Because I, I'm not currently in a university, I can't call you.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:16Ryan Holiday?

  You know, but it is interesting that like, these tools can maybe enable us to continue thinking about these questions from different angles, but it can't do the, the questioning for us.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  No, it can't. I mean, it's, they're, they're limited and as you know, they make big mistakes.

• 54:30Ryan Holiday?

  They make a lot of shit up too.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do, hallucinations. I, for instance, I was doing a paper about nineteenth century Americans' use of classical oratory.

• 54:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  And I thought, what about Frederick Douglass? Hmm, I don't think he used Greek and Roman oratory, but maybe he did.

• 54:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  So I asked ChatGPT and it told me this whole story and I thought, could you give me some quotations, please?

• 54:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  And a few minutes later it said, no, actually, I think I was wrong. I don't have any quotations for you. I don't think he actually said those things at all.

• 54:56Ryan Holiday?

  But isn't that the real skill? Like, I've been thinking a lot about this, right? Because it is this kind of ma, it seems like it's this magical tool, which does have access to ungodly amounts of information.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  It does.

• 55:07Ryan Holiday?

  And so really, the ability to use it is, one, can you type a good question?

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:12Ryan Holiday?

  And, and like, do you have the ability to ask insightful questions and curiosity? But then, do you have a good bullshit detector? You had to know enough about Frederick Douglass

• 55:21Speaker 01

  I did.

• 55:22Ryan Holiday?

  to push back on the, the answer.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So you, you can't trust it, but the more you know, the better off you are.

• 55:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  So I also use these things to tell me about all sorts of things I don't know about. For instance, I commute by bike and I wanted to get a, a good summer biking vest.

• 55:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  And so I asked it, so what are the, the best ones? And it gave me some, some I'd never heard of these companies and I had to look them up and I emailed some of them and whatnot. In the end, I got something really good and it was thanks to AI that I did, but not simply because of AI, it's because I pushed back and said, okay, what about this one?

• 55:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a, yeah, and, and it's, it's also like, I'm doing this book on Stockdale right now.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 56:03Ryan Holiday?

  And, and by the way, talk about being introduced to the classics, like his introduction to, to philosophy with Professor Rhinelander at Stanford changes the course of his life.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 56:13Ryan Holiday?

  At the Hoover Institute. And, and anyways, like, I'm writing about this, there's this video of this, the survival school that he goes to. And I, I load it into ChatGPT and I go, tell me all the plants that are appearing in this video, so I don't have to call a plant expert and verify each one. And it does, and then, you know, it gives me the list and then I cross-reference that list against, you know, another list of plants indigenous to San Diego. I go, okay, it's saying this is here, but that actually can't. But the interesting thing is like, if you've ever worked with researchers, or in your case, grad students.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:49Ryan Holiday?

  You can never trust what people give you, period. You, you always have to push back. So in a way, it's, it's actually familiarizing people with a skillset that only a small percentage of the population had to have before, which is

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:00Ryan Holiday?

  how do you scale your brain and research? You know, you can have people go track stuff down for you, but one, you have to have a vague sense of where stuff is.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:10Ryan Holiday?

  And you have to have a good sense of what's too good to be true or not.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  I, I think that's maybe a reason why you still want to have people do old fashioned library research.

• 57:19Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, where they have to, they get into the, get into the weeds.

• 57:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  And have to find their own way out of it, which I think will then help them in dealing with AI.

• 57:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and also serendipity and

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:30Ryan Holiday?

  some stuff is, not everything is digitized.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:32Ryan Holiday?

  You know?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Not everything is digitized and a lot of the stuff that's, a lot of AI is getting a lot of this information from questionable sources.

• 57:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. It's, it's waiting a book in a library and some random blog posts.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 57:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Or, you know, Wikipedia, which can be wonderful, but sometimes it's not so wonderful.

• 57:48Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's questionable sometimes.

• 57:51Ryan Holiday?

  No, I'm trying to teach my kids, it's just the other day, we found a quarter on the ground and it was this quarter I'd never seen. So I said, let's ask ChatGPT what kind of quarter this is. You know, it goes, actually, you're not holding a quarter, you're holding a penny. And I go, I'm pretty sure it's a fucking quarter, okay? It's definitely a quarter, let me show you, but, no, no, that's a, that's definitely a penny. After three or four back and forths of it gaslighting me about whether this is a quarter or a penny or not, I finally get it to understand it's a quarter. And then it promptly tells me, oh, it's this, that's a quarter with Eleanor Roosevelt on. I don't think it is. And then finally, it does kick out a list of some quarter that some series the Mint had done with female figures on them. And then I was able to myself deduce which one it was.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Who was it?

• 58:35Ryan Holiday?

  It was this Mexican-American activist, whose name I'm forgetting, and I don't want to butcher by guessing. But it was like me and this idiot figured it out together, you know, or me and this liar figured it out together. But it took the handful of rounds and not accepting the first answer. In a way, it was kind of a good exercise in my kids. This is like, hey, you just can't trust

• 58:55Speaker 01

  a really good exercise.

• 58:56Ryan Holiday?

  first thing that it kicks back. And then each time it's like, great job by pushing back. You know, it's like, it's also trying to flatter you.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  You know what it reminds me of? Socrates.

• 59:08Ryan Holiday?

  How easily it'll change positions and kind of challenge you. Or not challenge you, but but it's sort of working you along.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Well, you know, he called him compared himself to a stingray and also to a horsefly who's, you know, constantly stinging, what do flies do, but bugging this horse? You know, maybe that's what we all have to be when it comes to AI.

• 59:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I have a joke in the book I just did on wisdom where I was like, for someone so smart, sort of seems like a misreading of the situation to tell the Athenian people that you're a horsefly. Because people don't like flies, like what do they do with flies? They they kill them. And so of course, ultimately, that's what they did. You'd think you would have picked something maybe more more beloved.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things about Socrates is, did he want to die?

• 59:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  You know? Yeah. Did he want to make himself a martyr for philosophy?

• 1:00:00Ryan Holiday?

  Also, there's no, I mean, people don't like spiders or whatever. And you're like, hey, but they're eating mosquitoes and bugs or whatever, you know?

• 1:00:09Ryan Holiday?

  There's not much purpose to a fly. Like, I don't think a fly has a positive. Obviously, every species has some role in the ecosystem.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:17Ryan Holiday?

  But it's also illustrative that the thing that Socrates would pick would be a bug of very little societal value.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  And he compares the people of Athens to a big dumb horse. I mean, it's not.

• 1:00:30Ryan Holiday?

  Not great.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that's why, one of the reasons why Erasmus famously says, pray for us, Saint Socrates. He thought that Socrates was a saintly figure who made himself a martyr on purpose.

• 1:00:42Ryan Holiday?

  Macaulay, I think, said, the more I read about Socrates, the more I understand why they killed him.

• 1:00:50Ryan Holiday?

  That gets closer to it, too.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Well, definitely. I mean, you know, he, he was working hand in glove with the people who became oligarchs. And, you know, and the story that he tells the story, or I forget where it is. I think it's in the apology, that the thirty, the oligarchs, sent him to arrest Leon of Salamis, who they want to bring in and then kill and confiscate his property. And Socrates is proud of the fact that he, he refuses to do it. He just goes home. But as a colleague of mine once said, if Socrates were really great, he would have gone and warned Leon of Salamis. And he doesn't do that.

• 1:01:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, he's a complicated figure.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yes.

• 1:01:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, this has been lovely. I had a question specifically about this book because someone asked it me the other day. They were, I was talking about Stoicism.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:38Ryan Holiday?

  And he is a Jewish person. And he was saying that when he reads some of the ancient Jewish texts, how similar it struck him to some of the Stoic teachings and some of the ideas from from the Romans. So how do you think it is this sad collision course of these two societies?

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:55Ryan Holiday?

  But but then an immense overlap in other ways.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  I think that's true. You know, I think that there's cross fertilization. I mean, if you look at where ancient Israel, Palestine is, it's at a crossroads of civilization. And there's Jewish diaspora that goes westward into the Roman Empire, but eastward into the Parthian and Sassanian Empire. So there's lots of ideas that are going back and forth. And I think that each of these civilizations, particularly the Jewish civilization, I'm Jewish too, so I know a lot about it. Each of these civilizations has its own way of dealing with things. But some of the same questions come up. And in some cases, they wrestle with the other person's ideas and they say, this is why we reject them. But they're aware of them.

• 1:02:41Ryan Holiday?

  And same same with obviously the Christians coming up through Rome. And then also, when it flips, then the then the Christians are sort of

• 1:02:53Ryan Holiday?

  borrowing and taking credit for some basic philosophical ideas that predate them.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's Augustine who says, we have to spoil the Egyptians. And what he means by this is he's talking about the thing in the Book of Exodus, where when the children of Israel leave Egypt, the Egyptians say, please get out of here. You've killed our firstborn here. Take our gold and silver. Just get out of here, please. And so Augustine is using this image of saying, we have to take from classical civilization what's useful for us. And we're not going to take all the horrible, bad things, like all those awful Egyptian gods and goddesses.

• 1:03:34Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, civilizations do take some things from other civilizations, but then they they mold them. They put their own spin on them. They they mold them. I mean, there's this famous book of the Talmud called The Wisdom of the Fathers. And when you read it, sometimes you think, who wrote this? Socrates? I mean, it almost seems Socratic and.

• 1:03:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, when I read Ecclesiastes, I'm like, what Stoic philosopher is this?

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Yes, I know. Yeah. Yeah, it's really fascinating.

• 1:04:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And and what is that idea? Like, the best ideas are common property at some level.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:09Ryan Holiday?

  Like, every cliche was invented by someone at some point and we agreed with it. And that's why we make it sort of into our own practice.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:04:18Ryan Holiday?

  You want to check out some books in the bookstore?

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:04:20Ryan Holiday?

  Let's do it.