Author Catherine Baab-Muguira on Creating Lasting Work and Edgar Allen Poe

On today’s episode of the podcast Ryan talks to Catherine Baab-Muguira about the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, the difference between fleeting fads and sustained appreciation, how to find the balance between accepting feedback and being impervious to criticism, and more. Catherine Baab-Muguira is a writer and journalist who has contributed to, among others, Slate, Quartz, CNBC and NBC News. A frequent podcast and radio guest, with appearances on NPR and Lifehacker’s Upgrade. She has a M. A. in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland, New Zealand she lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and baby son. Her new book Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History's Least Likely Self-Help Guru came out in September. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $250 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org and pick podcast and enter DAILY STOIC at checkout. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase. Competitive Cyclist is THE online specialty retailer of road and mountain bikes, components, apparel, and accessories. Go to competitivecyclist.com/DAILYSTOIC and enter promo code DAILYSTOIC to get fifteen percent off your first full-priced purchase plus FREE SHIPPING on orders of $50 or more. Some exclusions apply. DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping. 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, FacebookFollow Catherine Baab-Muguira: Homepage, Instagram, Twitter See 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?

  Bienvenidos a la edición de fin de semana del Día Stoico. Cada viernes, te traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, algo que te ayude a vivir los cuatro virtudes estoicas de coraje, justicia, temperance y sabiduría. Y aquí en el fin de semana, nos enteramos de los mismos temas. Intervemos a filósofos estoicos. Exploramos a largo plazo cómo estas ideas estoicas pueden ser aplicadas a nuestras vidas reales y a los problemas desafiantes de nuestro tiempo. Aquí, en el fin de semana, cuando tienes un poco más de espacio, cuando las cosas se han detenido, asegúrate de tomar un tiempo para pensar, para ir a caminar, para sentarte con tu diario

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  y, lo más importante, para prepararte para lo que pueda traer la semana que viene.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  “Sé ese word, our sign of parting bird, or fiend,” grité, comenzando. “Get thee back into the tempest and the night's plutonian shore. Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken. Leave my loneliness unbroken, quit the bust above my door. Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door,” citó el río, “nevermore.” “And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, on the pallid bust of palace just above my chamber door; and his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming;

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  and the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; and my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted nevermore.”

• 1:52Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You hopefully maybe just a quiver of recognition of those last two stanzas of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, which is one of them we'll be talking about a little bit in today's episode. My guest, Catherine, or Kat Bab Magera, is the author of a really funny, awesome illustrative new book called Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History's Least Likely Self-Help Guru, Edgar Allan Poe. It's a fascinating book. It draws on Poe's work and life, what he can

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  teach us both to do and not to do. If you might have heard, his life was a bit of a mess, and how we can use like the tough situations, the tough breaks, the bad luck, all the things that Poe experienced, all the things we all experience, to make great work and to hopefully carve out an interesting life for ourselves. Kat is a great writer. She's written everywhere from Slate, Quartz, CNBC, NBC News. She's appeared on NPR and many, many other places. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and a new baby.

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  I really like this book. I almost never blur books. I have a rule against it. And this was a place I made an exception for a friend. I said that books about people's successes are common. Books where you can learn from someone's painful demons and failures are rare, but far more meaningful. And this writing on Poe is insightful, funny, and important. It was a fun book to read. It was a fun conversation to have. And my first interactions with Poe go back to I remember reading the great illustrated classics as a kid and they had a collection of Poe's stories. And I remember, as we talked about in the thing,

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  in the interview, the story of the guy they seal up in the wall. But I think the one that haunted me the most was The Tell-Tale Heart. Poe was just a complete master of the short story and of the poem. I personally like Ambrose Bierce a little bit better, slightly, I guess, more modern than and feels accessible than Poe. But nerding out, but but going through this book gave me a deeper appreciation of Poe. And then, of course, nerding out about it on this episode was great. Click the show notes for her homepage. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter. Sign up for her email list. And of course, check out her new book, Poe for Your Problems, and enjoy this interview.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  I saw this funny meme the other day that was, there was like this hole in a brick wall. And it was saying like, we need someone to help us like, find out what's back here. And it was like, you must be small, willing to get dirty, and not have read the story, The Cask of Amontillado.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  I thought it was so funny. And I thought it was funny, just that, like, how many writers from that era can people make memes about that most people would get?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, the sheer amount of Tumblr posts about Poe, unreal. I remember Vox doing a story on the Cask of Amontillado memes a couple of years ago.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  And and what, like, why did he cross over? Like, like, I mean, I guess, maybe there's like, some Moby Dick jokes or whatever, but like, almost no writers crossed over the way that Poe has crossed over, nor had the had the staying power that he's had.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  That's true, and it's hardly the case that he was the only person writing Gothic short fiction. It was a very popular form, especially in the decades before he came along. So he grew up reading it, but then as an adult sort of perfected it to the point where the, I mean, that's a big question, but I think the psychological insight, the, the amount of levels that are in a single story and the way that you can, like a child can read them, and academics are kept busy by them, and the fact that one writer is able to do both those things. I don't know. I, I think it probably comes down to the psychological insight of those stories. There's also like a great being of humor in Poe that people

• 6:32Speaker 01

  just don't tend to talk about too much.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  Is it, is it that he's actually a genius, or is it like a freak of circumstances that like, I don't know, like, nobody looks at E.L. James and goes like, "The Fifty Shades of Grey is so good because it's such a work of genius." We sort of, it's, it's weird, right? Like, sometimes when something is very popular, we use that as an indicator that the creator is not particularly talented, and that the work is not of particular significance or seriousness. And then, it's like, if they're popular over a really long period of time, then the exact opposite is true.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, people call Poe a bad writer, I mean, all the time. A lot of academics have that opinion of him. And it's not that he wasn't, he wrote some bad stuff. Some of his sentences just make you wince. But when he was good, he was really good. I don't think he was just the E.L. James of his era that ended up getting so much publicity. In a way, you could almost say that it's kind of the case that, as a writer, his books ended up getting a ton of promo. Beyond his reputation and his own era, just because of the controversy that resulted almost immediately from his death that continues to this day. So in a way, he has benefited from that, but I don't think you could have had an empty product to begin with that could have had that kind of staying power.

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and he wasn't super appreciated in his own time, right? It's not like Agatha Christie or E. O. James, where you're wildly successful in your own life and then sort of like as the years pass, the shine wears off. With the Melvilles and the Poes and, you know, other writers, it's more of a like, we're almost making up for their lack of appreciation. And so the popularity is, isn't a fad. It's probably more a result of like sustained appreciation for the quality of the work.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  I think that's true. I mean, he didn't have a, he wasn't really a book writer in his own time, but he didn't have a single book go into a second edition, except for this one about seashells that was essentially a scam and wasn't his real creative work.

• 8:48Ryan Holiday?

  So how does someone, how does someone deal with being massively underappreciated? That would like, that feels like it would crush a lesser person, right? You work so hard on something. I mean, you're just going through this, not, not at this scale. I'm not saying your book's a failure. What I'm saying is like, you, you put so much into a creative work, or a company, or a business, or a play, or, you know, whatever the thing you do is. And then even though you know it's really good, people are like, meh. You know, how, how does that not crush a person?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I think this is where you kind of come into like the perverse lessons of Poe's life and that having a gigantic ego that almost can't be reached from the outside can be useful. Because if Poe had been sensitive to criticism, he would have given up. He, you know, would have just crawled in a sewer line or something. But he was impervious to it to a very great degree and almost pathological degree, convinced of the greatness of his own work. And he wasn't wrong either. So while this could have bad manifestations, you could have someone with an utterly impervious ego who was producing bad work. This was the rare circumstance where the work was both great and the ego was strong

• 10:04Speaker 01

  enough to give him the wherewithal and fortitude to keep going.

• 10:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I remember when I was working in Hollywood, I was talking to this sort of very experienced agent manager type. And he was like, look, the reason ego exists in Hollywood is you have to understand where like an actress is at the beginning of her career, which is that they go to audition after audition after audition after audition, meeting after meeting after meeting. And people are like, no, no, you're not good enough. You're not this. They're just hearing no all the time. And somehow they have to leave each one of these meetings convinced the world wants to hear my name.

• 10:46Ryan Holiday?

  So it's this paradox of like, the, the, the mechanism that allows you to succeed in this irrational, insane, often wrong industry, uh, is also like a nightmarish set of personality traits.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:08Ryan Holiday?

  You know what I mean?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it can work for you. I mean, to the extent that I've learned from Poe's life, I'm not a person who comes to the playing field that way. I tend to be very self questioning and maybe too open to criticism. But picking up just 10% from Poe in that way, it can be enormously useful as a person in any line of creative pursuit.

• 11:35Ryan Holiday?

  So what is, how, how does one get the right balance of it where you're sort of impervious to the criticism that would make you stop, but then not deaf to the feedback that would make you better?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  I mean, I know in my own life, it's like, if my husband tells me something's not working, then I tend to believe him because he knows me and he has my best interests at heart. So maybe it's just listening to the right people. Whereas if someone just does something mean to me on Twitter, then I'm less inclined to believe them. I mean, sometimes you look at the motivations of people who are saying things to you, right? And try to judge. Whether, you know, this is criticism that's coming from a place that could be helpful or not.

• 12:21Ryan Holiday?

  But like, I, I think about your book, which I read and I think is awesome. The paradox of your book and all books is that like, the vast majority of agents and editors that saw it, passed on it, like by definition.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:35Ryan Holiday?

  Like, like, like every project, even the ones that go into like a bidding war, there were still a bunch of people that were like, no, that's not good. That won't work. So it's this weird, they're like, the people who are supposedly the experts on the thing that you're trying to do, you are having to defy a majority of them and that all creative work that's successful had to defy that. It's kind, it's like, if you think about it too much, you're, it, it, I think gets you back to that line from the screenwriter William Goldman, where it's basically just like, nobody knows anything.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I can think of an example, but, okay, so the first round of submissions with my book, we, I was with a different agent and she had this kind of highfalutin vision for the book that we were gonna go to a big imprint somewhere prestigious and this was going to be a very literary title. And one of the things we heard, so all 16 of those folks that we approached rejected it. That was the first set of rejections. Anyway, one of the people who, oh, amazing. Definitely, it was good for my mental health.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  The, I don't want to say which press it is, someone who is in a very powerful position over like a legacy set of books at Viking,

• 13:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  said about my idea, simply, that's not legitimate. It's not legitimate to see Poe as an existential hero. And I'm sorry, that's just ignorant. The French have seen him this way for 150 years. So in some cases, you're, you're able to be impervious to it because you know that, I mean, it's historically inaccurate.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Like that's that view has not been forward in America necessarily, certainly not in a pop self-help book, but it's been around since Baudelaire was writing obituaries about.

• 14:32Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah, it's it. I think it's like, if this is just something that you pulled out of your ass and you're like, that's what I think. And then everyone tells you you're wrong, you should probably stop and reconsider. But it's like, we've really done the work and it's based on something. I think then you can be a little bit more confident about it. And the thing I always, I always think about is like, well, what am I trying to do? So when the person says like, oh, that won't work. Or what about this? Or, you know, they give you all this, you're like, but are we trying to get to the same place? You know, and some, so sometimes the feedback, obviously rejections are a little bit different than feedback. But like, when you really know what you're trying to do and you have a really good theory as to why you think it can work. You realize like a lot of the people who are rejecting you or giving you feedback.

• 15:17Ryan Holiday?

  It's because they're, they're holding you to a totally different standard and saying you're not going to meet that. And you're like, well, I wasn't trying to do that to begin with.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one thing I ran into again and again, was trying to articulate the degree to which the book is satire and yet serious. And I kept hitting people who were willing to see it as one or the other, but not both. Which is funny because that's like the tension in Poe's own work. And maybe you just spent enough time with him and you pick up traits. But the thing about his story is you can't often tell like how satirical he's being versus how serious he's being. But I like that tension. It keeps me coming back to him. It keeps me rereading him. Maybe it's not for everyone, but trying to file it in a single slot, you're just mistaking the whole enterprise. But that was my going into it.

• 16:13Ryan Holiday?

  I remember when I was writing my book Conspiracy, like my editor and I kept sort of going back and forth. And I finally had to go like, look, let's put all this aside. I'm going to tell you the book that I am going to write, right? Like, this is what the book will be. This is what my goal is for it, right? So when you give me notes, they better get me closer to this thing or like, I don't need them, right? And that can feel, I probably felt a little egotistical. And I know it was like hard for me to get to a place where I felt confident enough saying that. But I was like, you know what? I've done this enough times. I know why I agreed to take on this project.

• 16:51Ryan Holiday?

  And I also know, this is more humility, I won't be able to get there if like, I'm having a hard time remembering the directions already. If somebody's shouting out conflicting or incorrect directions on top of that, I'm definitely going to get lost. So I think what it sounds like you were trying to do is something that not a lot of people understood. And then you had to, when you're doing that, as Poe did as well, you have to remember what that is always. Because the people who don't understand, don't keep quiet about it. And then they sort of mess you up by going like, well, what about this?

• 17:30Ryan Holiday?

  Or this isn't working or it's too, and you're like, I'm trying to do something that's a little contradictory by definition. So you pointing out that I contradict myself here or that, or whatever, like that's a feature, not a bug.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard. I mean, I admire that stance in the face of the issue you were having with your editor. I haven't always been like clear in my resolve. It was when the final product was happening earlier, when we were more in the proposal stage, I was being swayed. Kind of my feedback that I was getting and trying to take it in various directions. And I think one reason it didn't sell and it didn't work is because it wasn't really true to my vision of the project. But it's hard to.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Insist on that when it doesn't exist yet. I mean, in a sense, it's a tough creative brief to write. I'm not saying that it's better for that reason, but it's a tough creative brief to write a self-help book based on someone who's famously perverse and a drunk and kind of a horrible person at moments.

• 18:37Ryan Holiday?

  And not particularly successful.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  No, certainly not in his lifetime, you know.

• 18:42Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  But I also think that that's precisely the meat of the project. That's where you start to hit gold when you are turning over stones that folks maybe haven't, at least not in the US. I mean, the question of whether you can harness your perversity and make it work for you on some level, that's a question I want to hear more about. That's worth a buck to me.

• 19:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, right. And look, like, I think there's also something about creative projects that maybe goes a little bit undiscussed, but like, there's a certain amount, like Stephen Pressfield believes in the muses and I think Elizabeth Gilbert calls it the sort of the big magic or whatever. But there is kind of like a mystical, like, uh, mist to it where it's like, look, I didn't choose this. This is what it, this is what came to me. I can't really do anything else. Like, you know, like, it might be more commercially viable to do a takedown of Poe, or to do, you know, a total celebration of Poe, or a different author, but like,

• 19:48Ryan Holiday?

  this is the one that hit you over the head when you were walking down the street and for better or for worse, you're stuck with it.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, sometimes the sheer amount of intellectual energy you feel in response to an idea is a really good gauge. Not just of like the viability of the project altogether, but whether you can stick with it. And I mean, every, like, so I first experienced this in my own life, that Poe was cheering me up. And then I was trying to understand my reaction of why it was happening. And I was having trouble articulating it myself. And to kind of steer into that skid proved really useful. To, it's kind of like driving when you don't know exactly where you're going or how exactly you're going to get there. I don't know. That's so much more intriguing to me and such a more enjoyable process than that. Like, if it's

• 20:41Speaker 01

  paint by numbers, what's the point? At least for me.

• 20:45Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  I don't know, maybe you found it. Sorry, go on.

• 20:51Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, go ahead.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  I was going to say, do you find that if you're given, you're probably not often given assignments these days, but if you're given an assignment and someone says to execute on their idea, you just find it almost impossible, or at least not a joy to do, whereas if you're executing on your own?

• 21:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course. I mean, I think the whole point of the creative life is that you're trying to get to some kind of autonomy, where you're sort of in control of what you do and say and think. And very few of us get there. But like, if we were good at taking directions, we'd probably be textbook writers or, you know, advertising executives or something, right? Like, this is part of, part of why we got into this is because we really can't do it any other way.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  I definitely think that's true. It's kind of, both the barrier to get permission to do those things is very tough. But then without it, where are you?

• 21:58Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's one of the things I liked in the book is you sort of, you sort of go into the idea like, look, pose just like a freelancer grinding it out like the rest of us. And, you know, you see these, even like when you read Walter Isaacson's biography of Da Vinci, you're like, the greatest artist of all time is like being bossed around by these patrons. And it's like finding subtle ways to spite them or assert his independence. And he feels like he's underpaid and he feels like they're rushing him. You're just like, this is a very old journey that we're on. The like, I'm trying to make ends meet, do work that doesn't make me want to kill myself. And, you know, also survive.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  And I think that's in a sense, I'm not glad that folks have suffered, not at all. It's not fair that they had such difficult lives, but also the fact that it is a very old struggle. And maybe this has kind of always been the territory. I find that enormously comforting. It means you're not alone in it. It means you're not necessarily going about it the wrong way. Maybe this is just what it's like. And I also think that one of the lessons of Poe's life for me, and especially his freelance career, was that sometimes responding to the market or just simply getting information from the marketplace can be enormously valuable, whether you follow it or not, whether you act on it in a straightforward way or you don't.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  It's this entire source of information and feedback that a lot of artists tend to ignore or try to ignore. Say if you're a trust funder, you can ignore it. But if you're a struggling freelancer like Poe was, you're not allowed to divorce yourself from the market. And it ends up shaping you and you end up shaping it back.

• 23:42Ryan Holiday?

  But why are so many incredibly talented people? Why do they seem to just generally be super bad at the politics and details and like logistics of their profession?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  I mean, people are described as well-rounded on a fairly regular basis, but there are very few people I've ever met who truly are and who also have a kind of superpower. You know, where you have developed your craft to the level of like a Poe or a Melville. It puts you out of balance. The hours that you have to put in to be good, the kind of dedication and obsession that often goes into that to reach like a true genius level. And I'm not claiming I don't have to be there or near there. But having read a lot of literary biographies, you do kind of see what goes into it. And it's not at all characterized by well-rounded, functional personalities

• 24:46Speaker 01

  or a lot of work-life balance. It's just about how the sausage gets made.

• 24:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, like, I wonder if you met, like Fitzgerald or Poe or whatever, you'd just be like, "Come on, man, this isn't that hard." You know, like, you just see, like, historically, it feels like the decks were stacked against them, or they had their demons, or whatever. I wonder if you were like friends with them, like, if you read some of like Hemingway's correspondence with Fitzgerald, he's just like, you can just feel him just like putting his hand over his face, just like so frustrated that his friend has all the talent in the world and just like keeps sabotaging himself.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of, I'm not giving folks a pass for being nightmares, even if they're geniuses, but the rate at which people are also nightmares and also geniuses, like, it tends to coincide, and you do notice that without necessarily endorsing it.

• 25:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, well, I think people go like, "Oh, Poe is a nightmare and a genius, therefore, if I want to be a genius, I should be a nightmare." And it's like, first off, you know, there were a lot of nightmares who didn't become geniuses. But I think when you're also, and this is what I like about your book, but also sort of hovers along the lives of all of these people, whether we're talking about Kanye West or S. F. Pichot, you're just sort of like, what work it cost them, you know? Like, if they weren't like grinding themselves into dust, making constant enemies, drinking themselves into oblivion, or whatever, like,

• 26:29Ryan Holiday?

  could there have been another Great Gatsby, or, you know, could there have been another The Raven? Like, what, what work? In the way that, you know, Steve Jobs lost control of Apple and almost didn't get it back, right? Like, the whole future of humanity would have turned out differently. Like, it is, it is, um, it's kind of harrowing to think about, like, what got lost or left on the table with some of these talents.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think Poe dying at forty, when in eighteen forty-nine, he was doing some of his most incredible work. I think that's the year, The Dream Within a Dream, it's Annabel Lee. You know, some of the masterful, mature works where he's where they function on so many levels. They suit a popular audience, they suit a critical audience. You could spend, you know, a decade with each of them. So if there had been more of those, that would be amazing. I have this recurring dream where I find Poe's journals. They don't actually exist. But I constantly imagine that I am going to discover more.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  But also, I don't know the shape of his life now. It's hard to divorce what work we do have from the way things went. Like the horrible death, the horrible loss and tragedy that went into it.

• 27:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so let's talk about that. For people who don't know, what is, how does Poe go out? It's sort of almost fitting for a Poe story.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, people refer to it as like the greater mystery than anything he came up with in texts. So the last year of his life is very troubled. His wife died in early eighteen forty-seven, and Poe kind of went off a cliff for a good year. And by the time eighteen forty-nine rolled around, he's in these strange relationships with various women that aren't really, they're not sexual, they're bizarre romantic entanglements where no one's really available emotionally or otherwise. But he's in these and he's drinking a lot and he's leaving at home and he never really did well when he was on the road. So anyway, it's a train of bizarre behavior that whole year.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  And then in early October, he leaves Richmond, where he's been hanging out with people who knew him in his youth. And he, the next thing we know, he shows up in Baltimore and he's found by someone who knows him. He's wearing someone else's clothes. He's in a ditch outside a tavern. And he's not coherent. It's not clear that he was necessarily drunk at that stage. He definitely seems to be ill. And he never recovers consciousness to the point where he can explain what's happened to him, where he's been in the last few days, how he came to be wearing someone else's clothes. You know, what's wrong essentially? And then he dies just a few days later. He died October 7th.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  And he was being cared for by doctors and nurses, but all of them changed their story so many times about what exactly seemed to be going on. Plus, it's hard to parse the 19th century science, so figuring out what he actually

• 29:38Ryan Holiday?

  They were basically quacks.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Right. I once asked a neuroscientist, like, what did brain fever mean in the 19th century? And he said it was applied to so many things that you couldn't possibly figure out what it might have been.

• 29:52Ryan Holiday?

  Right, yeah, they were probably talking about bleeding him or, you know, like, the tools at their disposal were probably preposterously bad.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Right, and to the degree to which people have read into bad information that we've got about the death, I mean, people have supposed it was rabies or gas poisoning or alcoholism or epilepsy or, I mean, it kind of just goes on and on. People have assumed that he was, and like, it was called cooping, where people were got very, they were made very drunk and then made to vote many times. There was an election going on about the time Pope collapsed, so that's one theory that's, right? I don't know if I buy it, but I see how they got there.

• 30:41Ryan Holiday?

  What is your guess?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  I think he was ill with some kind of disease that was, that figured mentally and physically from the very beginning of 1849. I don't know what it was, but I don't think that it was necessarily induced by alcohol. I think kind of too much is made sometimes of post-drinking, which was more episodic than studied.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  I don't know that we can know either, which is, it's not the most satisfying answer, but I also think it's better than supposing some, like, coming up with some bullshit and pasting it in the spot.

• 31:21Ryan Holiday?

  My, I think that's my second favorite literary death story. My first is, do you know the story about who's a similar writer, sort of both brilliant, underappreciated, famous, not famous enough? Do you know about the death of Ambrose Bierce?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  No, but I love him.

• 31:39Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, he's incredible. So Ambrose Bierce, again, similar thing, towards the end of his life, although he lives to be much older, sort of becomes bitter and more bitter than he already was, disillusioned, irrational. He sells all of his possessions. He goes through a tour of the Southern United States, visiting all the Civil War battlefields that he fought on. Then he sends a letter to his, and he tells people he's going to go meet Pancho Villa and write about it, who's like, at the time, sort of ravaging the southern border. And his like, last known communication is a letter to his niece, or his daughter-in-law,

• 32:24Ryan Holiday?

  something like that, that basically just goes like, "I don't know what's going to happen to me. I could get lost. I could get stood up against a wall and shot somewhere. Who knows? But if I make it, I'll let you know." And then that's the last he's communicated that anyone ever hears from him again. And the, there is, from what I've read, significant evidence that he may have been captured and executed by Pancho Villa. So you have this sort of guy notorious for like, twists and unexpected surprises in his short stories. Also, stories about executions, accidentally or deliberately predicting his own death,

• 33:08Ryan Holiday?

  and then no one ever finds the body or hears from him ever again.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  That's an amazing, amazing story. It makes me worry that what you're into is a kind of destiny.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Which I hope isn't true for my own life, but I don't know, both Poe and Beer seem to have this in common and that the death is emblematic of the work and the life.

• 33:34Ryan Holiday?

  I think so. I mean, one of the, I've read a lot, I've read a lot more about beers than Poe, but one of the things that I heard about beers, and I wonder if it applies to Poe, I'd be curious for your take, but they basically said, you know, you take these people who like, I mean, Beer's nickname is bitter beers, right? They think he's this sort of bitter, disaffected, angry person, and that that means he's like cynical and negative. And, and they, they, they said the people who knew him said it was actually the opposite. He was very idealistic, very hopeful, had very high standards for himself and other people. And it was the constant disappointment of these standards that eventually sort of drives him, not insane,

• 34:17Ryan Holiday?

  but drives him down this dark place. So it's like, he, it wasn't that he was cynical, it's that he had impossible expectations that were, that were constantly going unmet, that made him ultimately seem very cynical. And I, I wonder how much of that is a result of, I, I wonder how much that sort of sensitive thing that artists bring into the world, did Poe have that? Is that what made him drink and, you know, sort of go to this egotistical place, like as a form of self-protection?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that was one of the ways it functioned in his life. I mean, I think you, A, people often underestimate the role of initial earnestness and cynicism. I mean, Jonathan Swift. Was incredibly earnest and he meant his satires in some senses. I mean, it was driven by his anger at the conditions in the world and finding it so far afield from what he thought it should be. I mean, how else would people get there? Of course, that's how they get there. We've posed specifically, I think, right, trauma might be a word that we use too much now. But if you look at the specific timeline, especially of post early childhood.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Uh, so when he was between two and three years old, he likely witnessed his mother's decline and death from tuberculosis, which is a horrible, drawn out death where you are gasping and gasping for air over a period of time. And then you essentially just drown in your own body. So for someone between two and three to witness this, he's already born sensitive. Uh, it's a time in child development where you're able to perceive so much more than you're able to say, because you're not really able to say much of anything. And then you have post-career, which is, he said mournful and never-ending remembrance was his great subject.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  So mourning and grief, um, I don't think it's a coincidence that he had this early, almost pre-language experience. And then he spends his whole life articulating grief, you know, writing some of the greatest, they call it trees, like the Raven and the refrain of nevermore. I don't think those things are unrelated.

• 36:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like, once you like, you sort of read some of these things as a kid or as a creator, and then you have kids and you're just like, no one should go through that. Of course that would screw you up so terribly. How, how did you even get out of bed? Like, it's insane.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I've read all this child development theory, you know, this is, I started the project before I had my own kid. But my little one's now sixteen months old and I can see it, I can observe it in him that he is able to perceive and absorb and take on so much color that he's not able to articulate. And it makes me angry, frankly, at how often people underestimate children, especially very young children. You know, psychologists thought for a hundred years that children couldn't grieve, which is so ludicrous to me. If anything, they're probably grieving harder because they don't have any precedent or, you know, adult balance. To somehow address it within themselves and brace themselves.

• 37:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, or what's that idea that like, um, I forget what the age, but you know what object impermanence is?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:46Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, imagine if you didn't know where stuff disappeared, when stuff disappeared, where it went. You would be grieving constantly. Like, I thought about this to go to the point of like where some of the terror thing goes from. It's like, let's say you're sixteen months, right? Not to freak you out about your son, but like you put your son down for a nap or for bed. You're, you're, you're holding him, you're singing him to sleep. It's this peaceful, wonderful, wonderful thing. You lay him down in the crib, turn off the lights, they go to sleep. And then they just wake up, all their senses have been deprived. It's pitch black. They don't know that they were asleep. They don't know where the hell you went. Uh, they don't know if they're still alive or like, they don't know anything.

• 38:31Ryan Holiday?

  That would be the most ungodly terrifying thing in the entire world. And we just like, uh, we just brush over it like it's, like it's nothing.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, the way we expect them to have some grip on things that they have no sense of, it's unreal. It's almost, I mean, in some cases like bordering on cruelty.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  I mean, particularly, I don't know. I just don't think that we give them at all enough credit. I think they have way more self-control than they're allowed, you know, just in popular discourse or whatever.

• 39:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, we go like, oh, this kid cries a lot. And then you're like, um, no, they, if they should be crying, like, if you think about how terrifying and uncertain and inexplicable life was, it's kind of a, uh, it's, it's kind of, uh, impressive that they're not crying literally every second that they're awake.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  So I mean, I don't, we shouldn't give some shit about tantrums or, you know, occasionally screaming with something like night terrors. It's an awful thing to do. I mean, obviously, there are limits of some sleepless parents sympathy, but I think we ought to have more sympathy for them.

• 39:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I was, I was thinking, it does seem like we should, with time, begin to go back. As, as we're sort of writing, we're sort of rewriting history with our better understanding of race and sort of this idea of white supremacy. As we're, it also seems like we should rewrite history with a better understanding of trauma as we, as we, as we begin to understand it. Like, I was thinking about this with Marcus Aurelius specifically. So Marcus Aurelius has like 11 children. And eight of them died. Eight children. Like, if, if, if somebody lost one child, and then they became an alcoholic, we'd be like, of course, like, obviously, we wouldn't excuse the alcoholism, but we'd be like,

• 40:32Ryan Holiday?

  you became an alcoholic because you lost your child. That must have been very hard, right? Like, like, there's, there's almost nothing, like, no life change or event that would not be explained or rationalized by the loss of a child, right? And then you're like, oh, he only lost eight, eight children. He, he buried eight of his children. You're like, how, how did you, how did you wake up? Like, how did you get up, not give up entirely on other people in the world? And I, I mean, it's, it's unfathomable, like, to think about the trauma

• 41:15Ryan Holiday?

  that people went through not that long ago and just had to accept as a function of, of existence. And then we, then, of course, we're, we're also shocked they're like, they treated other people horribly. Imagine if you lost eight, eight children, what that would do for your empathy? Or your, like, your ability to just give a shit about what anyone else is going through at any moment as you're walking through the, the, the, the world.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I can't imagine the degree to which you would have to be like to become hardened even to survive. But one thing that occurs to me in it is the sheer awfulness of those things makes, at least to me, makes the achievements more impressive. Like for Poe, that he went on to articulate his grief in the wig he did and these works that have survived time. Poe, you know, seventeen decades after his death. Or Marcus Aurelius for that matter, that he went on to become this very effective and admirable leader. Wow, it's all the more an achievement because you've survived those things. Or somehow managed to incorporate them in any, in any kind of existence that is productive in any way.

• 42:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, like, so people go like, what happened with Commodus, Marcus Aurelius's son? And it's like, maybe it was his dad and mom losing their children. Or maybe it was just him losing eight brothers and sisters. Like, that would fuck a person up a little bit.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I can't believe that anybody managed that. I really can't. I don't know that I have that kind of wherewithal at all. I mean, you know, you're a parent.

• 42:54Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's, it's, it's unfathomable to me. Like, it's unfathomable. I, I even think there's part of this, we're veering a little bit into political incorrect territory. But like, we sometimes like, we'll look at like slavery or some of the, like, some of the stuff, the terrible stuff of history. And we're like, um, you know, we judge like, uh, Thomas Jefferson, like, sort of very harshly, a- as we should. But we don't, we don't put it in the context, not of like, everyone was doing it. But we don't put it in the context of like, okay, here's a fact about Thomas Jefferson. When Thomas Jefferson was president, someone gave him a pet goat, like as an official gift. And it was kept on the, at the White House.

• 43:35Ryan Holiday?

  And it just killed a kid. Like, a kid was, uh, walking around the White House grounds and just killed by a goat. And you're just like, oh, they just didn't value human life like much at all. Like, the world was just a cruel, awful place, you know? And so I think sometimes when we look at something and we try to understand how like a human could own another human. I think we sometimes. Miss what's staring us right in the face, which is that like, life was generally awful. And when people are themselves victims of a cruel, unjust, you know, difficult world, they also become victimizers.

• 44:20Ryan Holiday?

  And I think like, I think we sometimes lose the context of like, what it must have like, you're like, oh, it could for Poe, it could have been that he was just walking down the street and someone drugged him, beat him senseless, and then he died from it a few days later. Because that was a relatively common thing, just like happening. And yeah, and we just like, that just recedes into the past as like, a thing that wouldn't have colored his existence day to day.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a question that I've, like, his perception of the cruelty, I mean grotesque cruelty of his time, I've wondered about it. You know, from the book that one of his first jobs was in a building in Richmond, that it was right by the slave market. So like couple scenes of, you know, family separation and so on. Like the overseers at the lot did try to keep the drama out of it. Yeah, you would hear it, you would see it, like people being dragged around in chains. And Poe wrote so much about horror. You know, body horror, horror at the societal level too. He's more concerned with it than most people realize.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And yet it doesn't appear. If it does, I mean, his, to his, his treatment of race are not what we would hope they would be.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  And that's like, how do you miss those things? But I also think that we're like often when we look at history, when we have no stake in it and it doesn't cost us anything, we're able to like kind of get on a moral high horse and be like, oh, I would have

• 46:08Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  done things so differently. But when people act like that about it's a kind of sending attitude toward it. And I want to say like, well, show me the moral stance that you're taking up right now. That's really costing you something. I'm believe me, I'm not endorsing Poe's inability to recognize those things at all. It's horrifying, but people just treat it so easily.

• 46:36Ryan Holiday?

  Right. It's easy to be very glib about slavery as you sit there in clothes made in a Uyghur sweatshop in China that,

• 46:45Ryan Holiday?

  you know, you could buy for 30% more that don't involve that, but you don't, right? Like, like we sort of forget just the way in which we just accept what's happening in the world around us. Yeah, you walk down the street, you hear a slave market and a human being can just become attuned to it. But I think what Poe does is clearly that affects him in some way because it and it gets sort of channeled, the darkness gets channeled into into the stories. And that's why they're so haunting and and

• 47:23Ryan Holiday?

  challenging.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's probably true. He wasn't a guy who was routinely cruel. People report that he was pretty polite and gentlemanly. And he seems to have cared for people. You can tell it in his letters. I think he loved his wife very deeply. He had friends that were very close. But I also say like, kind of sympathy was a one way street for him, kind of flowed toward him, maybe because of the awfulness of this childhood. Maybe he just couldn't kind of direct it elsewhere except at himself.

• 47:54Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I think when we understand the context of the world, it also, as you said, it allows you to appreciate the greatness. So like, I think about Lincoln, when you read about like Lincoln's childhood, just how horrendously awful it was, right? And then you're like, and he still managed to despite, like despite all that, you know, as a drunk father, as a loser, and, and this hardscrabble existence, this is this ugly, gangly guy, all this stuff that he has against him. And then he still, I mean, he's not perfect, but he still does, more than the people around him, care about what's happening to these other people, right? And, and what, not just how rare that was, but that must

• 48:39Ryan Holiday?

  have, that must have taken work, right? Because it would have been so easy to just be consumed with your own struggle and your own difficulties.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Right. And God knows it wasn't politically expedient for him to care about this thing. Sorry to work that agenda. I don't know. I know it's trendy or kind of against the grain, but I actually believe greatness is a thing. I don't know that it can be achieved, but it doesn't mean that we can't emulate it, or try to, like the habits of people who do those things. I don't know. I think that, and you have to think that Lincoln was a bigger, stronger personality than the ones around him.

• 49:25Ryan Holiday?

  Well, look, it would be weird if you didn't believe in greatness for you to have written this book.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Right. I know it goes against the grain a little bit, like we were kind of moving away from the like big man theory of history, which is, I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

• 49:39Ryan Holiday?

  And yet I It's a terrible thing.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course. I mean, like, obviously, it shouldn't be called the great man of history theory, because, you know, history's been changed just as much by, by women. But it strikes me as a self fulfilling prophecy. Like, if you don't believe that an individual can change the world.

• 50:04Ryan Holiday?

  It certainly won't be changed by you. But like, we look at, like, it's ironic, people, like, the same people who will go like, oh, like, us would be cynical and make fun of people who think that they can like change things for the better, are also the people who are very indignant about the terrible things that bad people are doing. But it cuts both ways. Like, if, if, uh, if a terrible person can change the world for the, the, the worse, why can't a, a, a good person change the world for the better?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Right. And if, I mean, if you want people to disrupt systems that are racist, or whatever, you have to believe in the power of the individual to do those things. If individuals are disempowered, how do we create change? I mean, I know people talk about change at the systemic level. I'm certainly not opposed to that. But how, how's the system get changed?

• 50:59Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's totally right. And I think often, like, as a, as a weird sort of minor political example, like, I think, like, people in Austin are like, we have a huge traffic infrastructure problem. So every time someone goes like, um, we, like, let's expand the freeway. They go, we don't need more freeways. We need systemic, you know, change, like, and it's like, cool, but that's not going to happen. So you're actually choosing your, your sort of, your belief in the need for systemic change is actually preventing incremental change, which is only making it systemically worse, right? And so I think when people don't, uh, believe that an individual can make a difference,

• 51:44Ryan Holiday?

  or that minor, small-term things matter, um, yeah, it's just, it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy, you're, but, but, by your idealism, you are creating

• 52:00Ryan Holiday?

  The seeds of your own cynicism to go back to beers.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Right. And I mean, it's not, I don't know, my own feelings are just more pragmatic than that. And it's also ahistorical to think that these things don't come about by a series of kind of shitty, imperfect compromises, like any major change, that's how they happened.

• 52:22Ryan Holiday?

  Totally, totally. And it's like, there are people alive who, like, there was a, there was just a guy who, who died, I'm forgetting his name, but there was one Democratic politician who personally, I think, proposed and passed two of three different constitutional amendments. And you're just like, oh yeah, that feels like it was a really long time ago, but it wasn't, you know? And that, that it's still like, just one person changed the, changed or nearly changed the constitution, this supposedly permanent document, like three times. And it's like, it's only because you're looking at it with a longer view that it seems possible. But it's when we zoom in, we go like, oh, an individual can't make a difference.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Right. And it probably, I mean, there were probably years of horse trading that went into any one of those changes.

• 53:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  And it probably wasn't even executed in the form the guy hoped for in the beginning, because things just don't tend to be.

• 53:23Ryan Holiday?

  No, that, that's, that's totally right. Or just, just that like, um, I don't know, there's still people alive who met Winston Churchill. Like, there is an individual who changed the world, like, not, both, both, uh, you know, in positive ways, if you live in America or England, you know, negative ways, if you live in, India, or, uh, you know, uh, other countries, right? Like, like, of course, an individual can change the world. Like, there's, it, it's, it seems, uh, it seems like all the evidence contradicts that assertion.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  I agree. And I'd just add to you that, and of course, that person is deeply flawed, right?

• 54:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Wasn't Churchill like a pretty sorry father, all things considered? I mean, Terrence Poe, this is true of too. Like, the genius was accompanied by some serious misbehavior as well, and a lot of the attitudes that were not what we would hope they would be.

• 54:24Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, totally, totally. Um, I'm trying to think, is there, is there anything else people should know about Edgar Allan Poe? Uh, or that you have learned, uh, in the course of writing this book?

• 54:37Speaker 01

  He's a hopeful figure. He's not at all. I mean, there's the kind of goth, dark side of Poe. But when you consider the tragedy of his life and the contact and the context of his accomplishment within the tragedy of his life. It's a tremendously hopeful story. I think it's actually quite positive. It's not our typical association with Poe, but I'm not the first person to read it this way. Uh, the French have for a while. Baudelaire wrote the book seriously 150 years ago. So it's not even new. Other people have realized this too.

• 55:10Ryan Holiday?

  Well, my favorite joke in your, in your book is, is the idea that a writer can become so famous that they, that they name an NFL franchise after you.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  I mean, who can you say that of? And the fact that, right, there's not a single other example. I can't think of anything even outside of the NFL. Like, what other sports team in any line of

• 55:35Speaker 01

  has that sort of a connection to literature of all things? You think of these things as opposed, but the power of Poe imposing his personality on the world has shown that they can be related, which is amazing. I mean, that's greatness.

• 55:50Ryan Holiday?

  Although the, the Cleveland Browns are the only NFL team named after like a, a regular person.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Really? Who's, should I, should I know who Brown is?

• 56:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, Paul, Paul Brown, like the, the founder of the team. He just named him.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I see, I see. Oh, okay. Yeah, you know, when I talk about professional sports, I'm really wondering away from my area of expertise, such as it is, so.

• 56:15Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, it is, it is funny though. Until I read that in your book, I, I was, I just, it was like, yeah, of course they're just named after the bird. But you're not like, oh no, Poe, Baltimore, like, uh, like that, they didn't just pick the bird out of nowhere. It's like, it came from something.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, this amazing poem about grief was written in 1845 and it's one of the few poems almost anyone knows.

• 56:41Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah, no, just that there, I mean, just that there's a football team named after a poem, like, is, is pretty unreal as well. And I'm sure almost nobody knows that.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  You wouldn't think it would happen in the US of all places. We're not a nation that really values poetry. But I don't know, this is kind of the miracle of Poe to my mind, that he has that kind of vast influence.

• 57:02Ryan Holiday?

  I think so. And, uh, and he didn't live to, to see any of it, which is sort of the trap, the, the, the perfect Poe irony.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  I don't know if he could have handled success any better than he handled unsuccessful, though, to be honest with you. So.

• 57:18Ryan Holiday?

  That is, uh, that is, that is the perfect way to end this. Catherine, I love the book. I'm so glad we got connected and we'll talk soon.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Thanks. This has been great. Ryan really enjoyed it.

• 57:31Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. If you want to take your study of Stoicism to the next level, I want to invite you to join us over at Daily Stoic Life. We have daily conversations about the podcast episodes, about the daily email. We actually do a special weekend set of emails for everyone. You get all our daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free. That's hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge, which we're going to launch in January. You get a special cloth bound edition of the best of meditations that we've done. You get a bunch of cool stuff. It's an awesome community. I've loved being a part of it. I've loved getting to meet everyone who's trying to take their study of Stoicism to the next level. Love to have you join

• 58:11Ryan Holiday?

  us. Check us out at DailyStoicLife.com. We'd love to have you and join us on this digital Stoa that we, uh, that we've staked out together and get better every day.