Dr. Kara Cooney on the Power Strategies of the Ancient World | This Is The Secret To Stoicism

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to author and Egyptologist Dr. Kara Cooney about her new book The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World, the use of short term thinking and long term thinking as tools to gain power, ancient strategies that were used to gain and maintain power, and more. Dr. Kara Cooney is a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA. Specializing in craft production, coffin studies, and economies in the ancient world, Cooney received her PhD in Egyptology from Johns Hopkins University. She has released several books including The Woman Who Would Be King and When Women Ruled the World. She is also the host of the Afterlives Podcast. Check out the new perennial Daily Stoic Page A Day Calendar: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/daily-stoic-page-a-day-desk-calendarCometeer partners with the best locally owned roasters in the world and through their breakthrough brewing technology, provides a delicious, high-quality, balanced cup of coffee for a fraction of the price. For a limited time, you can save 20 Dollars off your first order - that’s 10 free cups on your first order, and shipping is always free - but only when you visit cometeer.com/STOICTalkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Kara Cooney: Homepage, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTubeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  This is the secret to Stoicism. Just one thing every day. That's it. Seneca said that the path to wisdom was best traveled by acquiring one thing per day, something that fortifies you against adversity, he said, poverty, death, or whatever else life might throw at you. So one might assume that Seneca is talking about some physical or spiritual object of tremendous weight. But we can see from his letters to his friend Lucilius that what he was mostly talking about was quotes. "One quote a day," he was saying, and sharing with his friend, "was all we needed to get better and wiser and stronger and more resilient." It's a bit of advice that has persisted through the centuries

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  with websites and Instagram posts and inspirational posters and tattoos and the like. And here we are in the 21st century, doing the same thing. And we're excited to continue that tradition with the Daily Stoic Page a Day Calendar, which is now back in stock. Not only that, but unlike the past versions of the calendar, this year, we've made it perennial. It doesn't matter when you purchase the calendar, it'll work. We want you to stop thinking of wisdom as something you get via epiphany, or even just a couple of years of study. No, it's something you accumulate day by day, action by action, as Marcus Aurelius put it, over the course of a lifetime.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  The perennial page a day calendar is designed to help you do just that. It's one page with one Stoic quote per day, perfect for your nightstand, your desk, your kitchen counter, or your bathroom mirror. This calendar is now back in stock on the Daily Stoic Stoic. If you want one for yourself, or a gift to a loved one during the fast approaching holidays, don't wait. Check it out in the Daily Stoic Stoic and get your page a day calendar. Just go to store.dailystoic.com.

• 2:43Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am fascinated by this question of like, is it possible to be great, like to be truly successful, something to reach the highest level of a profession, and not be corrupted or destroyed by it? And I remain fascinated by Marcus Aurelius for this reason. Antoninus Pius, two of the only examples of what you might call philosopher kings, people who are the exceptions to that idea of absolute power corrupts, absolutely. And so when I had a chance to talk to today's

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  guest, I was really excited because obviously I focus on Roman history, Greek history, but there's a whole other part of the world, although eventually they come to overlap. But Dr. Kara Cooney is a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA. She's specializing in craft production, coffin studies, talking about memento mori, and economies in the ancient world. She has a PhD from John Hopkins University. She's the author of The Woman Who Would Be King, and a new book out November 2nd called The Good King's Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt. And the modern world. So she is looking at the Egyptian rulers and asking herself

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  some of those same questions. Her other book, When Women Ruled the World, explores the reigns of six powerful ancient Egyptian queens and how they changed our perceptions of power. And it's a fascinating interview. I really enjoyed it. I think we get into some interesting philosophical questions, questions of leadership that I am excited to share with you. Dr. Kara Cooney can be found at kara cooney dot Squarespace dot com. And you can, of course, check out her new book, Good Kings, and her other books, The Woman Who Would Be King. Remember, I have a book called The Boy Who Would Be King. So this is a nice little trope we're both relying

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  on. And then her other book, When Women Ruled the World. Enjoy this interview.

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  It's wonderful to chat. I was actually thinking about your new book this morning because I am writing right now about Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius for the book that I'm writing now. And I am fascinated by this idea, you know, that absolute power is supposed to corrupt absolutely. And it seems like generally that the rule is true. But there are a few exceptions. I don't know if there are exceptions that prove the rule, but that's sort of what you're talking about in the new book is that there are some people who are at least not as corrupted by absolute power as others.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't really focus too much on those individuals because I'm talking about Khufu, Senwos the Third, we have Zeus the Second.

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  A little bit before these guys, yes.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, not those guys, not those guys. But, you know, I begin it and end it with, is this the power we want? We get the power we deserve. And then, you know, the last chapter is looking forward to a post patriarchal world and what that could potentially mean. So it's kind of like we, I saw on a colleague's door. We don't want a bigger piece of the pie. We want a different pie. And I think that's kind of where I'm going with this. And then we throw out the idea of a good ruler or not, because we create a different system that doesn't depend on the mercurial ways of particular rulers.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, I think that's sort of what the founders in America settled on, somewhat imperfectly, but the idea that like, although there are exceptions to the rule, it's just too big of a risk to take.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  So, but so going back to the ancient world where this was the system, what do you find is the difference? Like, what makes someone, you know, go, what makes someone ruined by the power? Or what makes them able to at least not, not, not be destroyed by it?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  I think that it's a word that we talk about quite a lot, which is the word privilege. And privilege grows with the amount of wealth, with the amount of prestige, the amount that's already been done by one's ancestors. And you lose that scrappy ability to try to prove yourself to, on the battlefield or in the political game room. And you just start to think that everything's meant to be yours. And so often in the, the kings that I looked at, and I looked at five of them. And you could argue that if Egypt is a wave of ups and downs, that each time I'm looking at that top, almost the tippy top of the wave as it's about to come crashing down.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  And in each case, when you're talking about Khufu, or some was third, or Akhenaten, or Ramses the second, or Taharka, each of them inherits all of what their ancestors, immediate ancestors, and then the entire state of Egypt, but what they built for them. And they just walk into it and they're like, oh, I'm a legacy Harvard guy. And they just kind of get it all. And that, I think, is the most corrupting. And I think we could compare Trump to that, right? Trump versus his father versus the grandfather. And That kind of, and then now junior, oh my goodness, right? But like, you can see what that does generationally, that kind of privilege. Educationally, economically, in all kinds of ways. And that's where I think it gets super, super dangerous.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  It's why I think we try to take things from our children. Do you have kids?

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  I do, yes, yes.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you try to withhold, you can't give them everything, they'll become monsters, they'll become assholes. So you, you try to remove things to give them some sense of what work is. We do so so imperfectly in this world of easy access to all kinds of things. And where privilege is, is very binary, depending on what kind of a person or what color of a person you are.

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, you look at, at America right now, you go from the, the so-called greatest generation to the boomer generation. And that's probably the same version of that up and down cycle where you inherit. You know, American boomers basically inherit a global empire unparalleled in human history. And uh,

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And look what they did with it. The greatest military industrial complex that isn't needed to fight just wars. It's just needed for wars so that we can create the jobs for these people, these people, these people. And that's the biggest part of our budget. And you can compare that to Rome, which I'm sure you, you do and can. Look at how much of their GDP goes to, to military output.

• 9:37Ryan Holiday?

  So I think it's Robert Caro in his books on Lyndon Johnson. He was saying something like, it's not that power corrupts, it's that power reveals. Right? And, and is that something you found as you looked at these people? Is it, is it that just inherently the privilege and the power and the, the ability to thumbs up, thumbs down someone's life? That that destroys a person? Or is it, it's really just revealing what was underneath? And a, and a fundamentally good or decent person might not be so corrupted by it.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  No, I don't know if it's, it reveals certainly, but it's also the ability to implement, I would say. So I would argue that Akhenaten had an easier, or Amenhotep the fourth, as he started out, right, had an easier time implementing his crazy, whereas somebody like Achmos at the beginning of a dynasty not quite settled, he couldn't implement. So it's whether or not you've created a situation in which you're surrounded by sycophants who are so rewarded by a system that continues to give them more, you just say, yes, my liege, yes, my liege, you want to do what? Okay, yes, my liege. And you continue to do that, where you get

• 10:53Speaker 01

  more of a strong push and pull, and an elite, and maybe even a middle class, it's a tough word for ancient Egypt, but we can think about it, an urban empowered status group, whether or not they can push back against the people in power or not, or whether or not they want to push back against the people in power, I think that's where it gets the most interesting. So Akhenaten with, I mean, the riches that Amenhotep the third had, the amount of shit that he was able to build, and the lake for tea, and this, you know, the lion hunts, and all of the things that he was able to do, Akhenaten inherited all

• 11:31Speaker 01

  of that without critical pushback from really anybody, and he was able to execute plans that others before him would not have been allowed to do, certainly not Amenhotep the second, the child king, if it was the third, not if it was the third, this son of a nobody queen, and not Hatshepsut, the female king, and so on and so forth. But when you get to Amenhotep the third, you're like, oh goodness, you know, raised from childhood as king to be king, but became king young and had all this privilege, Akhenaten, same deal. And you could argue that with less information for others in our lineup. So it's a tricky

• 12:15Speaker 01

  one. Then it is absolute power corrupts. It is.

• 12:19Ryan Holiday?

  It's sort of like the saving grace of a lot of these absolute rulers is that no matter how wicked they tended to be, it was almost like

• 12:31Ryan Holiday?

  Their lack of competence was a check. I mean, certainly, this happens with Trump as well. But Nero is a good example where it's like their ego or their vanity, their easily distractableness or whatever is almost like, God forbid. And I guess maybe Stalin is one of the few examples where you get someone who is both deeply evil, wields unlimited power and then seems to be effective is the wrong word. Because, but I just mean that he's actually able to bring about his horrendous, heinous plans.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  He is effective. He is effective and was effective. And Putin is effective. So whatever their plans are, Hitler for a short period of time, and it's a short term effectiveness. But he was effective, short term. Not a good long term thinker. Very good in the short term and in moving things around. But, you know, you, oh, what was I gonna say? I went into short term, long term thinking.

• 13:31Ryan Holiday?

  Competence.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Did you hear the question? Competence. Ah, yes. Yeah. So I would argue that competence, when you start to see rulers of great incompetence chosen, I would argue that that is a system of elites that willfully want the incompetence. Because it allows them to skim from the top, to self deal and to get what it is they want. And incompetence is useful. Where that can then hit you back is, as you say, you have some incompetence and then you have Stalin come in and go, oh, my God, what have we created? And now you've created the perfect system for that to come back and bite you. Incompetence is very useful.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  And it's almost, I would say that modern political incompetence, if you've ever read David Graeber and Marshall Solins on kings, you know that there's a difference between divinized and sacralized. And that the more sacralized you are, you could argue in today's political system, the more incompetent you are. The less competent we need you to be. You're just there as a figurehead and it doesn't really matter. And so that, that, that works for me. Competence is important. And it's hard to study for ancient Egypt because you don't know the reality. You only have the perfected story. But, you know, Kufu is a great case in point. Was he a good leader? We have no idea. Was he remembered as a good leader? Hells no.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  So, you know, remembered as grabby, selfish, not very clever, asking for things he shouldn't ask from priests and people who know better than he does, who tell him as much. And he listens and goes, oh, okay, it's fine. But he gets the biggest pyramid. And so how much competence is there there? It doesn't really matter. He's already empowered an elite class beyond anything that he can put back in the bottle, to use the genie metaphor.

• 15:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's it's sort of, it's it's almost like when you see these really incompetent leaders. That's when your pockets being picked, like they're distracting and disruptive and chaotic and causing all sorts of problems. But for an elite group or a small group of society, business is is operating not just as usual, but they're actually able to get things done that perhaps under ordinary circumstances, they they would they would not be able to do.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's an incompetent thing to slash and burn all of the environmental protections that we've had in the United States.

• 15:59Ryan Holiday?

  But it benefits someone.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Oh, it's gonna benefit a whole lot of, well, a minimum number of very wealthy people who in the short term are going to be able to line their pockets very very readily, very easily. Long term, obviously, it's a different, the long term, short term is always a part of these discussions because most of the people we're talking about. Including maybe somebody like Stalin, who was a better long term thinker. Short term, as soon as he's done, you know, the repercussions and the pushback were real. Most of these guys are short term thinkers. They're there for the here and now. They don't give a shit that they're gonna cut down the forest and that they only see value in its lumber. Even although the deforestation will harm their own children and grandchildren, that is not of interest.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And but that's exactly where you can let those things go, that short term thinking go. If you have enough resources to let it go. You have a whole new world and a manifest destiny. The short term thinking can go on a whole lot longer and you don't even see it as short term thinking. But as the world shrinks and as the resources shrink and as all the rainforests are cut down, that short term thinking is it becomes much more visible, to use your other analogy, than it ever was before.

• 17:10Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and I guess you could argue that the short term thinking is endemic in sort of all the strong man characters, whether you're talking about a Putin or a Kim Jong Un, or just your your sort of ordinary drug dealer or gangster. There's this attraction to the life. There's this idea that it will be short term, quite lucrative, but but there's clearly no real conception of like, what's the X's strategy? What's the end game? Because if you look at the end game, it never ends well. Or it's like, there's no way out, right? And and so it's probably attracts inherently people who have a blind spot towards, well, what am I going to do once I get this?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. I completely agree. And, you know, in Egypt, I think there's actually many systems in place to push back against that as a whole compared to the Northern Mediterranean, compared to Mesopotamia, even compared to China, one could say, that there is more of a communal agreement amongst people that a king has to be a certain thing. He can't push too far, too hard. And and you don't get a lot of megalomaniacal rulers, or at least stories thereof, right? They're limited by what they can do with the divine kingship that is a weight upon them. And other parts of the world seem to allow their leaders a lot more freedom to be megalomaniacal

• 18:36Speaker 01

  or wise or whatever. And Egypt has certain strictures in place, and Egypt still has certain strictures in place. You know, you look at, it's amazing, and then I get obsessed with with new materialism and how geography can help not determine, but can help form a society. And you see that same cultural agreement within Egypt today, where Sisi has to work in a certain way and show piety in a certain way. And there's expectations. That's that's really interesting.

• 19:04Ryan Holiday?

  I've written a little bit about this period in Rome, which they call the five good emperors, which is so interesting to me, the way sort of random fate can determine or random luck can determine whether something goes well or bad. You basically get these five emperors in a row who don't have male, who don't have a male heir. And then as soon as Marcus Aurelius, who I write a lot about, does have one, that's the end of it, right? Like it's almost as if, I think for the Romans, it was this period where sure, it's a, it's a, an emperor, but it's not a hereditary emperor. So there's some, the elites are at least contributing to

• 19:44Ryan Holiday?

  choosing who this person will be. And because there, there is, you know, it's not about, you know, your, your family's basically not wedded into this system forever. It does seem to be like it works for, you know, a few hundred years or 150 or so years, we have this decently benign system that's, you know, not filled with Nero after Nero after Nero.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, that's super interesting. And I want to think a little more about that because something I've been working on lately is the harem. And the harem, and a lot of people push back against that word and say it's orientalizing. And I say, hell's yes, it's, it's misogynistic as a system. And if you, if you see a harem, it likely is a harem. And we should call it what it is. And the women who were exploited within it deserve nothing less. So there's my little, but within a harem, a harem is an interesting way of connecting elites with the king, one step removed in a bodily fashion and organizing hierarchically, all of those different elites, and also pushing back and saying, oh, no, you know, your, your family's being difficult. We're

• 20:54Speaker 01

  not picking that son as crown prince. We're not even going to imagine it. We're going to pick this other kid who's disconnected completely from any of you people. And he's the king's beauty and he is favorite right now. And we're going to bypass all of you. There, or within the harem, you could decide king's sister is where it's at. And we're going to pick a large headed Charles, the second kind of mess of a man, a future man. And that's going to be the next king. And incest can often rule in these situations. But I see the negotiation arena of how these decisions are made. In a court, in a harem, the two combined as a kind of what you're talking about, like, how do you create a good king? How do you choose who's next? It's not always the eldest son.

• 21:38Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  There's always like, you gotta keep people on their toes, right? Like a Saudi Arabian system, you know, you could go to Bin Salman, you could go skip a generation and then everyone else is in jail in the Four Seasons and everyone's off balance and doesn't know exactly what's going to happen. So that kind of social mechanism where you have a communal decision, even though they don't say it outright, even though the gods are the ones deciding, gods are never the ones deciding.

• 22:03Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  But you're, you know, you're creating a pushback and a real way of, the oracle is a wonderful way of understanding it.

• 22:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  The oracle was this statue hidden inside a little thing held up by priests on their shoulders. We don't know exactly how it works, but imagine you've got, say you've got like as many as 20 priests holding a big oracle during the Ramesse period. And how do they decide which way to go or to kneel or to not? It's a communal decision and the Egyptians are visually ideologically reifying that in a, in a super interesting way.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's hard to compare directly to Rome, obviously, but, you know, humans have all kinds of really interesting ways of creating social buy-in,

• 22:47Speaker 01

  incentives, paybacks, without calling them those things.

• 22:54Ryan Holiday?

  It's very primal, right? And I don't mean to say that it's somehow natural, but it's very primal in the way that you have this sort of group of people. And then obviously there's this sexual component and this biological related component. And then it's like, I imagine part of the function of say the harem and the women inside the harem is like, well, this person can really talk to him when he's angry or she can really convince him to think maybe a little bit more big picture than he wanted. I, I worked at a very dysfunctional company that was sort of operated this way. And, and it was always interesting to see the way, it gave me these flashbacks, but you, you're watching the way that these sort of girlfriends and motherly figures are playing this role inside this company

• 23:36Ryan Holiday?

  that's not codified in their salary or in their position. But I have to imagine that's what these court of nobles, you know, whether it's. 200 years ago, or 1,200 years ago, or 12,000 years ago.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Or the Trump White House, the more we find out, it's exactly that.

• 23:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's this sort of, it's like this informal structure that's designed to impose a tad bit of rationality on a fundamentally irrational, uh, subjective, whimsical system.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree. It's, it's, um, and I, and I don't want to be just Trump bashing. You could say the JFK White House has similar elements to it.

• 24:19Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, he puts his brother in there.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, Srebabiyan, exactly.

• 24:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  To get him to, to do certain things and, and listen to other, you know, civil rights leaders or whatever. But, um, yeah, it's, um, it's interesting how influences happen. Yeah.

• 24:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And, and then this would be like Senenmut during the reign of the female King Hatshepsut, who is a, is a perfect foil. And of course we simplify it and romanticize it and make it into her lover and all of these other things. It doesn't need to be that. It's just a way of influencing a leader vis a vis elite and nascent middle-class groups, if, if those things exist in Egypt. And, um, yeah, there, there's all kinds of ways for people to try to get this one dude to do what they want.

• 25:02Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's such a, I, I imagine it's such a lonely position, right? And so fundamentally unnatural and disorienting. Uh, just imagine whether you're an Egyptian king or a Roman king and you're, you're told that you're a god, but you know, you know, deep down you will die, right? Like, so you're a god, but then you would know you're just a human, but you'd also come to believe you're a god and you're treated like one and isolated from society. It would be so fundamentally disorienting that you would need these sort of stabilizing voices around you, people that you could trust. But then how can you trust this person? So you have to have another person to balance out this person. And I think it's, you could almost see them sort of reaching out for some kind of stability,

• 25:45Ryan Holiday?

  try to negotiate this inherently unnegotiable position. And, uh, and then if you add in there that, yeah, they're entitled or stupid or inbred. I got to imagine it's, uh, it's, uh, there's a lot of variables.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And the more you look at the Egyptian kingship and you can see by reign lengths, we don't have ages, of course, but you can see when a king comes to power or when the privilege starts, one could say. And the earlier these guys come to power, the more they are able to surround themselves with sycophants. So they're controlled, but they're not. And that's when things can really flare up and get extraordinarily dangerous. So a situation like Ramses II, who knows from early childhood that he's going to run the whole thing. His ability to create a populism that Egypt had never seen before, I argue that in The Good Kings, is extraordinary.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  And you could say the same thing about Amenhotep III. Akhenaten, it doesn't work, he's the second son, but the privilege is there all around him nonetheless. Yeah.

• 26:54Ryan Holiday?

  I am fascinated too by the process of educating a person or preparing them for a role that no singular person should ever have. You know, at least a US president is sort of accidental. We're sort of going like, well, who has life potentially prepared for this role? And we can select them at age 40 or 50 or 60, or now in their late 70s.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 27:21Ryan Holiday?

  What are the problems? The only upside I would say about choosing the older leaders we've been choosing is that they do have a lot of life experience, hopefully. But I did this kid's book about Marcus Aurelius. I just fell in love with this story of like, here you have a guy, he's just a kid, and somebody says, "You should be king." And what were they looking for? But then, that whatever educational process Hadrian puts in place, and he has this weird sort of system where he adopts a person who adopts a person. But that it's one of the few instances where it worked. It didn't go terribly wrong. It wasn't perfect, and certainly the Christians at the time would have disagreed.

• 28:03Ryan Holiday?

  But there was, it's an interesting example where it didn't go terribly wrong.

• 28:10Ryan Holiday?

  The idea of preparing someone for this role, I just find that process fascinating. How did the Egyptians think about preparing someone for a king? Or did they just assume that God prepared you for this role? And we don't have to do anything?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it's a it's a big deal. And this is where my last book comes in, When Women Ruled the World. Because Egypt, unlike other places that are geographically set up, one could argue for much more internal and external warlording as a constant. Egypt is rather protected internally and externally. So you don't need an able military leader to lead this whole show right away. So in fact, the elites seem to not want that older guy, that able military leader. They seem to push back against that, which is why so many kings come to the throne as children. And those children, I have an 11 and a half year old. I don't want him making, he's drumming in the garage. I do not want him to make any decisions about my household.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  And my neighbor is going to knock on my door and be like, the drumming is too loud. Oh, my God, please make this stop. So the the younger somebody comes to the throne, the more you need others to make decisions. That creates an interesting and precarious situation about whom you shall pick to make those decisions. And the Egyptians are ingenious in understanding their patriarchy well enough that if they pick an educated, high-placed female to make those decisions, who doesn't have a foundation within this patriarchy of profession, or in some cases, even the education she will need, certainly not the military backing she will need to take the throne from her son. Plus, there's an emotional component. She doesn't want to take it from her own child.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  It's a it's a brilliant authoritarian strategy of training up a child that can be controlled for a decade or even more. So that the elites can come in and grab all kinds of stuff, keep the system going, keep the dynasties going over a long periods of time, as long as 200, 250 ptolemaics, three ptolemaic dynasties, 300 years, the longest one. And and the female power is then used as A prop of the authoritarianism as a short-term placeholder to keep this whole thing going. So a woman's making the decisions, but she she is it is imposed upon her to think long term. Because she's not going to be in this position forever. She's going to give it up. She's going to move out of this position.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  She it is imposed upon her to think long term to set up her son so that he does well. And it's um, just that regency situation where you see it working so well and not just a couple of times, not six, not seven, like dozens of times. These women were were used as the best leaders of the Egyptian state, often in quiet, often and certainly not given a formal title. Almost never. It's it's an informal job that we can see it. Um, that's and and whether one argues, and this is still up for debate, right? Whether women are inherently and genetically and whatever prone to less militarism than men. I mean, our prisons seem to, American prisons seem to bear that out.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  But it also could be in a patriarchal society, you don't have the foundations to meet out that kind of violent will upon other people and their sexual dimorphism. This is a whole problem, right? But the Egyptians understood that choosing the female within the society was the best risk averse way. And I bet other people would have done it more, but you know, you you've got somebody like Zimri Lim of Mari, who was on the throne for 10 years. There's nothing for an Egyptian rule. They're like, oh, your little 10 years. How cute. That's so cute and sweet. But that's what he's got to work with and Hammurabi takes him out. And that's the reality in that in when the West Asian part of the world, you cannot rely on a child

• 32:00Speaker 01

  and a woman telling him what to do and training somebody up. Uh-uh. There's no way. No way.

• 32:05Ryan Holiday?

  It's kind of an interesting parallel there, I guess, with the Stoicism and the Romans, which is that Seneca is called to advise and tutor Nero by Nero's mother, Agrippa. Um, who who sort of has this sort of longer term view. She she, I think, uh, very clearly grasps that her son is uh incompetent or deranged. But but she, you know, sort of. Rules through him. And yeah, that is an interesting check, the idea of like the sort of wise woman behind the throne, making the decisions, bringing in, in this case, the advisors or the tutors are setting up the court around the young person or the person that's being prepared for power. So that when they eventually have it, it doesn't ruin them.

• 32:51Ryan Holiday?

  And for a while it works with Nero, the first several years of Nero's regime are not so terrible.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Who better to scold Nero than his own mother Agrippina?

• 33:00Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Then, and she can continue to do that and have that power, but then he's gonna have her killed.

• 33:06Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  He's gonna get annoyed after a while. And while a mother is less liable to kill her own child, Ptolemy's may be an exception, but the mother is less likely to kill her own child. The the son has no problem. The privileged son has no problem taking out mama.

• 33:23Ryan Holiday?

  Right. At a certain point, when you go, I'm the most powerful person in the world, why do I still have to listen to my mother? That becomes untenable, but it lasts for, it probably lasts longer than you would be willing to listen to your father.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  I I think you're right. I think you're right. Yeah.

• 33:37Ryan Holiday?

  The the way that these courts have to bring in the philosophers, whether it's Athena Doris and Ares Didymus, who advised Augustus, these are the Stoics, and then Nero and Seneca, Marcus really says this guy Junius Rusticus, who introduces him to Stoicism. Were there sort of philosophers in the Egyptian courts that, or is it more astrologers? Like, who's advising the ruler on, or tutoring them in the art of leadership and power?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  This is a wonderful question, and I haven't ever thought about it in that way. So now I'm going to come up with some ideas on the fly, but it's, you know, we, when we think of the Egyptians, you always think of a priestly

• 34:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  class, right?

• 34:23Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  And so you have this group of priests who have a secret and sacred knowledge that is restricted, that they keep restricted because it gives them more power. And then they're, they connect with the king, but that priestly class. Is not, it can come from the royal family, right? Some surmise that Akhenaten may have been a solar priest and then became king and then was pulled out of that priesthood and then into the kingship. And what were the, there are no firm boundaries sometimes between priesthood and political life, or economic life for that matter. But I think you can talk about this more carefully during a time period when there are firmer boundaries, Old Kingdom, it gets tough.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  But you know, in the Old Kingdom, you could say that an engineer able to build the pyramids and able to figure out how to build a 50-story mountain of stone and get all those blocks up there. And we still don't know how they did it, right?

• 35:22Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Hence the alien conspiracies, which is exactly what the Egyptian kings want you to believe.

• 35:28Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Still working on our simple minds today, right?

• 35:31Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. I didn't think about that, but that's very interesting. Yes. It was, if it inspires awe to us today, imagine the statement that it would have made to a person who can't even think about how they don't understand it.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 35:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  That is magic. That engineering is magic. The ability to use water level to sight the stars, to get a perfect 90-degree to go right to cardinal north. That is magic. And we still don't completely understand it today. So the way I would understand, so just, and then I write about this in that first chapter of The Good Kings, that to create his own superhuman kingship, Khufu must empower his magician priest engineers, what I call the mortuary industrial complex, and empower them to such a degree that it ends up taking over his kingship entirely. But, but so, and Khufu is remembered as this king that doesn't like to listen to his spiritual advisors.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  And there's all of these stories where he's talking with a spiritual advisor or a magician, and they're like, No, my lord, we can't do things that way. Like, there's one magician who's like, I know how to cut off the head and reattach it. And Kufu's like, whoa, that's awesome. Get a prisoner and let's do it. And the magician's like, my lord, not to one of God's sacred cattle. And Kufu's like, god damn it, fine, get a goose. And so they get a goose, and there is that constant push and pull between the ones that hold the restricted knowledge and study it, the academics, the intellectuals, and the king who's just all power all the time. But sometimes the kings try to get in that mix.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  And I end the chapter by arguing that, and others have argued this before, that the Fifth Dynasty is a pushback against that kind of more, I don't know, Putin-esque, military, Stalin-esque kind of power. And the pushback of the Fifth Dynasty, the reaction, is that the kings are saying, we are not kings, we are priests and kings, we are priest-kings. We are pious. We're, we know this restricted knowledge too, we will show you. And here are temples and that look completely different, and we have the first stone temples built where people can visit and it's in celebration of solar worship. And so the kings are trying to get in on that game because it is so very powerful and because it takes the, the power from them. So they try to identify with it. And you could argue that's a constant push and pull

• 37:55Speaker 01

  in Egypt, the king, priest, priest, king, um, and how that works. You move a thousand years forward and go to the Ramesses period. And then you have an institution that is of priesthood and, and temple power, economic power, even military power, that is competing with the kings. And the king then has to send his sons in to be high priests of the Temple of Ptolemy and send his son in to be high priest of that and try to get into that institutional system. And you see tons of people trying to connect to Um, this temple institution to get jobs, to get favors. It is no surprise in that institutional rise of priestly power

• 38:38Speaker 01

  that the king, Ramses the second in this context, would present himself as more divinized than ever before. Because he needs to be in that game. He needs to be on the receiving end or centralized within that temple institution. So there are philosophers, but the Egyptians are, you know, it's, it's, um, it's much more about restricted knowledge, I think, than it is about

• 39:03Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  hacks and psychology and morality. It's more about, um, the machine of the universe and, and how one, um, works it. And as for divinization, which you mentioned, this is so very interesting. You see divinization six ways to Sunday from West Asia. Everyone's taken apart the, you know, the liver and you've got even the liver preserved in an iron thing with little directions about how to read the liver from, from, uh, first millennium West Asia. And in Egypt, you have almost none of it. That restricted knowledge is kept so close to the vest that you get like a star chart from the ceiling of the tomb of Senenmut.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  You get astrological charts with decans starting, um, in king's tombs, the Valley of the Kings burial chambers. And then you get those more in places like Ptolemaic temples, like Edfu, Denver, places like that. But, but they don't talk about the divinization. The king would never let people know that he was vulnerably asking the gods, what do I do? You see it sometimes, like you'll see Hatshepsut say, should I send to Amen-Ra? Should I send, uh, uh, an expedition to Punt? And the god says, yes, and it comes back and she's like, see, I told you so. Um, is that vulnerability? Is it strength? It's, oracles are there if that's your divinization.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  But oracles are more a marker of a fait accompli, telling people what they should already know. And who already has the power does have the power. There's less, should I invade here or there? Um, much less of that than, than you would see in other places.

• 40:49Ryan Holiday?

  I was just thinking of sort of how universal it is. You're talking about the priests and then, you know, you have Alexander the Great and Aristotle, but then you have Confucius as an advisor to princes and kings. And maybe that was more, you know, back then, the philosopher was also a scientist or, you know, Da Vinci's an expert on war defense. Like, you're just like, we need smart people around. And who can I get for advice? And then those people are thrust in the unenviable position of both giving advice and then oftentimes trying to sort of informally rein in the insane impulses of these people.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Here's the other problem with Egypt. And I'm sure those people existed and were needed and were innovators and created awesome shit. But they're not going to share that stuff. It's not going to be shared within the highly restrictive, highly unequal, less competitive, risk averse place of ancient Egypt. So let me give you an example. In the Ramesid period, so starting with Seti the first, you get what we see as an explosion of intellectual thought about the underworld. And you get new books that you had not seen before, where before there was only the Amduat, that which is in the underworld. You now have the Book of Earth,

• 42:09Speaker 01

  the Book of Caverns, the Book of the Heavenly Cow, the Book of Gates, and on and on, Book of Day and Night. And you can look at that and say, oh, my goodness, Seti the first must have had amazing counselors and philosophers who came up with all of these things. But you would have to check yourself and say, wait a minute. I know that the pyramid texts were older than the time they were published in the tomb of Unas at the end of the fifth dynasty. This is going back to the Old Kingdom, right? And you know that the pyramid texts were in use. Some of them are philologically proven to be very, very archaic in their grammar and their words. They're maybe even 500 years old or 1,000 years older from the time they were first incised into stone. So the Egyptians create these things, but they keep them very

• 42:53Speaker 01

  close to the vest, that restricted knowledge stays secret. No one can even write letters. Or diaries, no one gets to write home about this stuff like in Rome, right? And it's all like Kim Jong Un, you don't talk about it, you don't get to see it at all until you see it.

• 43:07Ryan Holiday?

  And so There's not a famous, like, there's not a, a, a class of famous intellectuals whose work also survives to us throughout history in, in, in that, in the way that we know Alexander the Great and Aristotle, the independents.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you have people talking about them and discussing them. Well, the Egyptians weren't part of this globalized world. They could close themselves off and create this hermetically sealed North Korean type place. Where people, you know, you have Amarna letters and you're like, the insight that those letters give you about what was going on in the courts of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten are astounding. You're gonna let my guys stay in the sun all day? Get, get my guys out of the sun. This is ridiculous, crazy religious shit you guys are doing. And so you get, you get that push and pull. If we had more of those things preserved, we could say more. But given the information that we've got and given that every Egyptologist is studying an authoritarian regime and must behave so, but most do not. Oh, they really don't.

• 44:04Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  You have to, you have to then say, okay, this explosion of underworld texts that Seti the first is showing. He feels he needs to show something that has already been around arguably for centuries. That was innovated some centuries before and were very useful within a closed, powered society. A hegemonic society before, and then they came out, they came out, they came out and Seti the first is like, I'm putting this stuff up on my walls. And why? It, it has smacked of power to Egyptologists in generations past. And to me, it smacks of weakness. The first time a king publishes this restricted knowledge. He is trying to get a short-term bump out of it. As soon as he does it, it's, it's the cat's out of the bag, it's done, the power is lost.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  They must invent something new.

• 44:52Ryan Holiday?

  I, I always love to, I, I feel like when you zoom out from history and, and suddenly the, the big gaps in time disappear. You see how, uh, as a Stoic say, history is basically the same thing happening over and over again, and that we're not that different. You know, obviously now we have a better system, we have certain things, but then it's like. Well, our mystic class is the lawyers. They say, "You can't do this, you can't do this." Or the polling expert is now the version of the oracle at Delphi that says, "Well, here's why you can't do this." You know, we still have this sort of mumbo jumbo that is kind of putting up guardrails and telling us what we can and can't do. I find that to be both humbling and terrifying at the same time.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  I think that that's another point of my book, and I say explicitly that the modern exceptionalism that we have lived with for the last 100 years, most especially, despite those two world wars, whatever, that modern exceptionalism, I think in the light of this pandemic and our reaction to it, our bumbling, ridiculous, stupid reaction to it continuously, on all counts, I think we can seriously prove that while we may have superhuman computers that we can put in the palm of our hand that are better than anything that was on the space shuttle, or many satellites that are up in the sky, it doesn't matter, we still have these brains. And we still function.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  One of my main points is, Egyptologists and the public loves to look at Egypt as this place of great mystery, they love to separate it, they love to say that we have to only study them within their context, that we must particularize them, that they are not like us, we are not like them, and I push back against that most strongly and say that we are just like them. The reason we must study them is because they learned how to package authoritarianism better than anyone else I've ever seen, so that we can't even see it. We don't even see that it's Kim Jong-un's North Korea hermetically sealed, we just see beauty and monumentalism and a kingship that was moral and good. We see our good fathers taking care of us, we are attracted to that kind of power, and

• 47:06Speaker 01

  that is what we need to rip down and be highly critical of.

• 47:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's when you start to believe that this wasn't all just made up by someone and that it's somehow magical or guaranteed. I was talking to Steven Pinker about this, you know, his work where you're sort of looking at the steady decrease in violence over time. People look at that, both his critics and the fans, and they're just like, oh, this is just what happens. And it's like, no, this isn't what happens. This was the result of millions of people sacrificing and fighting and insisting on certain things. That this is, as they say, an experiment, and the experiment can go away if you abandon some of the principles that at least got us to be slightly better than where we were

• 47:53Ryan Holiday?

  100 years ago or 200 years ago. But we're still fundamentally the same irrational crazy people at the whim of the same irrational crazy leaders.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  And as for the Pinker argument, I mean, I agree that in warfare, we don't allow the slaughter that we used to allow and accept. We don't. We don't want to see it. But what we do instead is we allow invisible suffering and invisible deaths in a way that is rather astounding. So.

• 48:20Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. Sure.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  But anyway.

• 48:22Ryan Holiday?

  No, we didn't.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  We just move it. We just shift it to something else.

• 48:26Ryan Holiday?

  Right. We didn't. We didn't go to war, but 700,000 people just died of a pandemic, right? That didn't need to happen, right? And so, right, the deaths are incidental byproduct instead of carnage on the battlefield.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or the decisions of a small group of wealthy white men working in cooperation with one another can actually impoverish and threaten the lives of billions like that today. And that's where, you know, warfare is an interesting one. It's, and we don't do it for warfare now. It's all about the complex. And I think everyone can see that. And when we talk about budget numbers and how in the United States right now, what's the analogy that two years of our defense budget is 10 years of this trillion dollar budget that the Biden team is pushing?

• 49:21Speaker 01

  It's kind of astounding, right?

• 49:22Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  But, but, you know, it's about jobs and putting up satellites and making sure that all the bases are covered and by base, I mean bases like Fort Bragg.

• 49:33Ryan Holiday?

  Right, military base.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, it's, um, it's become something that's too big to fail, like so many other things. And, and then how many lives are harmed in that process through the opioid epidemic? And I just read this horrific and, and slightly old, three-year-old Atlantic article about the new methamphetamines out there.

• 49:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Holy crap. Um, I did not understand this new methamphetamine and it explains to me now why Los Angeles is covered with tents of homeless people. Um, I, I didn't.

• 50:02Ryan Holiday?

  We're, we're acting like this is a social policy issue when it's really, there's this sort of slow burning underground fire that's caught, like, we're like, where are all these people coming from? And it's like, I was thinking about.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  They're us. But then, but then it goes back to your generational discussion of privilege.

• 50:17Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  And if the boomers were the top of that privilege, and I think you're right, then it, then now we're sliding down and we have all of these people who, who are just opting out of society, opting out of its pain and overwork and demands. And the opioid crisis is part of that, this meth crisis and all of the homelessness is part of it. It's a, it's an interesting slow decay to be a part of.

• 50:42Ryan Holiday?

  I had this little theory, I'd be curious of what your thought about it as a, as an Asian historian, but one of the things the pandemic helped me with, I'm fascinated by the Civil War, I'm fascinated by, by different moments of American history in particular, but the way that, um, even, you could even argue a majority of Americans are on the same page with the pandemic, right? Or you, you look at California, right? The actual policy, the response, mostly, uh, mostly correct, but still, I mean, tens, tens of thousands of people, like 50,000 people or whatever in California died of the pandemic. Um, it was fascinating to me to see the way that. History like can be hijacked by a small minority, right?

• 51:23Ryan Holiday?

  So you look at the Civil War and you go, oh, it must have been 50 50, 50 people, 50% of people wanted slavery, 50 didn't, and then they battled it out. And you're like, no, it's probably like 10% or like 15, a 15% radicalization of society can tear the whole thing apart in the way that even if most people in California are on the same page about COVID, even if 5% of the people aren't, they'll get it, spread it to each other and then spread it to other people and then everyone's stuck with the consequences. Interesting to see, it just brought home even the debate amongst the founders about factions, just how at the mercy, the majority can be, one dedicated, if not irrational or radicalized

• 52:07Ryan Holiday?

  faction can make everyone be at their mercy, or at least stick everyone with the consequences of their actions.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  And nothing radicalizes a faction more than the privilege of having had something, easy life, easy riches, and then seeing it slip away and losing it. And one could argue, and this is where I go in the last chapter, that this faction is 15, 20%, let's make it 25, of white America that benefited from this manifest destiny, taken, stolen land and enslaved peoples, right, enslaved labor, they benefited from that so much. And now that is being exposed and it's being open. So that faction must fight on multiple fronts, but they do so. They fight on the front of every baby must be born because you have to have all of that labor and you need to put the women back into the kitchen in the home and having a

• 52:59Speaker 01

  baby, let me tell you, is the best way to do it. You fight it on the faction of the world is flat, you know, the world is not what you think, with the mother, all of this stuff of climate change, you must deny the realities of earth entirely, even

• 53:11Ryan Holiday?

  Of a shared, shared thing.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Realities.

• 53:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so the pandemic, it fits into that. If you're denying that rape and pillage of the earth is going to destroy you and you deny that even geographic reality of its roundness, or you deny that every baby should not be born because it will destroy the planet with overpopulation, then you must, you must also deny the pandemic itself. You have to make it a conspiracy. And so now that radicalized faction that used to be in control, those are Nixon's, those are our, um, our Darth Vader, what's his name, Dick Cheney's, right? That's that group, right? So that group now radicalized is, it's their last stand. It's the, the most shells are fired right before the armistice is, is signed.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  And so that's the, what we're going through right now. And we should expect more of such radicalization. Because they, they will fight to deny that they are benefiting from these things. And then to throw in some James Baldwin to, to keep their innocence. People don't like to know that they're benefiting from harming others. And it's easier to deny all of these things entirely. There is no pandemic, there is no climate change. Every baby must be born. Um, because that innocence helps to protect them now. You know, do we have things like this in the ancient world? I suspect, right? You, you always have the haves that are seeing what they've lost. And I would say you look to in ancient Egypt, this, this, um, genre of text.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  It's called pessimistic literature. In which it's kind of like QAnon, if you like. They, they go on and on, say, they wax rhapsodically saying how the people who did not have coffins have all of our coffins. The people who didn't have things before are now wearing our jewels, you know? And kind of like, um, the, the two people outside of St. Louis with their little guns, you know? With the people marching by, that kind of, um.

• 55:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's like that expression, um, when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. And so no, e- even though it's a, it's a very zero sum way of looking at the world. Uh, and this is probably why when you track social movements, they have almost universally come, uh, uh, at the great resistance of the, of the people who are currently on top. Because they saw, they see women getting the right to vote or, uh, black people getting their civil rights as somehow depriving them of those rights. And, you know, in America, like, why were people so resistant to say, the end of segregation, what does it matter? Well, the end of segregation, just like at the end of the civil war, it threatened this nice lock that they had on the levers of democratic power.

• 55:52Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, not Republican Democrat, but the left. It, it basically says, hey, the, the, the, the terms of your oligarchy are now threatened.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. And then you bring long-term, short-term thinking into that again. And you as a historian, you know how long it takes for these cycles to work themselves out. They take centuries. They can take millennia. And you could, you could argue that we, we have, well, we know we have a long way to go to work through these kinds of processes. It's not, it's not just gonna happen overnight. And, and it's kind of an arms race, isn't it? Between that, that small amount of people who are in denial, that, that privileged group. And then the, the people who are trying to change things and are trying to pull power back. Will the earth survive? I think these are the stakes we're talking about. Who will win? And we have hundreds of years to work this out.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Will we be able to cut down all of the forests before we can create a new system, a new pie?

• 56:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, that's a, that's a great point. I think it does all come down to short-term, long-term thing. Because think about it, it's like, uh, in the, uh, uh, you know, a hundred years later, we're all grateful for the national parks, right? A hundred years later, we're glad women have the right to vote. Seventy-odd years later, we're glad that they're in the workplace, right? We're glad that, that, that, uh, segregation ends. In, in the, a long enough timeline, it's always better. But that it's fundamentally, people fear change because they fear that change is coming at the expense of their current comfort. That makes them not willing to trade the short-term discomfort for the long-term gain. And I think this is why people are also so resistant to acronyms. They're like, but I'm comfortable saying things this way.

• 57:33Ryan Holiday?

  And you're telling me, I'm gonna be uncomfortable as I navigate this weird world. Even though in 10 years, no one will give a shit. And, uh, it'll just be part of how we talk and think about things.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  And everything's up for me. You could take the, the instance of gay marriage and how much pushback there was against that. And now it's like, oh, yeah.

• 57:51Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, I was always for that.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Even an evangelical might say, oh, yeah, I have a gay friend.

• 57:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Where before that, you wouldn't see that. And now transgenderism is the boogeyman. So, you know, there's always something.

• 58:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's like this dark, it's like this dark energy that is fun, is consistently anti-change, that it then becomes comfortable with the new change and then just directs itself at whatever the, the next wave coming, and is unable to just, this is why we need the philosophy to zoom out and go, guys, change is the one constant in this universe, you gotta accept it.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  And if you're thinking long-term, and the historians can do this, who especially think long-term, and you understand that the patriarchy, as historians define it, is, you know, 5,000 years old, 6,000, 7, you know, here in California where I sit, 300, not very old, and that, we think of it as ossified, it is the system, we will return to it always, we will not, we are, in my opinion, going through a big revolution, we've had the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, maybe a feminist revolution, you know, we can discuss, I think so, still in process and intertwined with all of these things, but now we're moving

• 59:11Speaker 01

  to a post-patriarchal revolution, to build we know not what, and it's a very painful process, it will take centuries, and let's see if the human species can come out on the other side of it.

• 59:25Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's a lovely place to end, and yeah, we'll just have to see where it goes.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:32Ryan Holiday?

  And not be the person standing athwart history, futilely yelling, "Stop."

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, and as we see, all of us rushing as a human super-species towards the end of the cliff, as my son comes in, and you and I can see that we're rushing to the end of the cliff, and no one can get the humor, the super-species to stop, it would be nice for the system to rebuild itself so that they had to stop.

• 59:57Ryan Holiday?

  Agreed, amazing, I'll let you go, this was so cool, thank you for doing it, and we'll talk soon.

• 1:00:05Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference, and of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out the crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.