David Roll on What We Can Learn from General George Marshall

On today’s podcast, Ryan and historian David Roll discuss his most recent book George Marshall: Defender of the Republic, the most magnificent moment in American history, the moral obligation to remove confederate statues, and more. David Roll is the author of several books and is the founder of the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation, an organization that provides free legal services to social entrepreneurs around the world. This episode is brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. LMNT was developed by co-founder Robb Wolf, a former research biochemist and 2X NY Times best seller. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. This deal is only valid for the month of January. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked. This episode is also brought to you by GiveWell, the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. GiveWell’s team of researchers works countless hours to determine which charities make the most effective dollar-for-dollar contributions to the causes they support. Since 2010, GiveWell has helped over 50,000 donors donate over 500 million dollars to the most effective charities, leading to over 75,000 lives saved and millions more improved. Visit GiveWell.org/stoic and your first donation will be matched up to 100 dollars. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN, the #1 worldwide VPN. ExpressVPN has super-fast connection speeds and keeps your data safe. No more advertisers selling your info for a quick buck, no more downloads at a snail’s pace. Sign up now at ExpressVPN.com/STOIC and get an extra three months on your one-year package, absolutely free.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow David Roll:Twitter: https://twitter.com/misterroll 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So this would have been 2016. I was on book tour for Ego is the Enemy, and I was giving a talk in DC. This would have been at Politics and Prose. I had dinner next door with Cal Newport first, and then I went over and did my talk. And after you give a talk, people come up and say hello. And a guy came up and was telling me that he enjoyed the story that I told about George Marshall, because he himself was working on a biography of George Marshall. And so we immediately nerded out, because I love George Marshall. And only like halfway through the conversation, did the man, today's guest, David Rohl, offer

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  that he was Rich Rohl's father, also podcast guest, great friend to me, and supporter of my work over the years. So obviously, that's how David had found out about the book. But I was so looking forward to this book. He gave me an early copy. I read it when it came out. I guess this would have been last July, July 2019. When I was writing Ego is the Enemy, I read all the books there were about Marshall. And unfortunately, there's not a lot of them. Famously, Marshall doesn't write an autobiography. He's offered a million dollars for it, 1950s dollars, and turns it down because he's not an egotistical man. So this great human being, his legacy has suffered because of his egolessness. That's

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  sort of the contradiction, the paradox of George Marshall, and why I wanted to focus on Ego is the Enemy. So this is a very necessary, very important, and riveting biography. And I was so excited to have Dave on. I texted Rich. I said, hey, would your dad want to come on the podcast? I don't know why I didn't ask him earlier. And he said, I think he would. And so he came on. And actually, I would also highly recommend, Rich had David on, and it was a fascinating interview to have a son interview a father. They get into all sorts of very vulnerable stuff. It's a great interview. Anyways. David and I nerd out about one of, I think, the great Stoic leaders of the 20th century, George Marshall. We connect him to the present day, talk about the art of biographizing,

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  and of course, the real purpose of reading and writing biography, which is to learn real lessons we can apply to our lives. Look, this is a great book. Seriously, just go on Amazon and check out the blurbs of this book. I mean, it's nuts. Walter Isaacson, General Stanley McChrystal, Evan Thomas, the Washington Review of Books, Susan Page, I mean, all the reviews you could possibly want. This book is shamefully not as well-known as it should be. It deserves a wide audience, just as George Marshall deserves a huge audience. If you're looking for a great book to read to kick 2021 off, you can't go wrong with this thing. Check it out. David is not just an author, I would say. He is, although he wrote another book called The Hopkins Touch, and he wrote a biography

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  of Louis Johnson, Harry Truman's Defense Secretary, but he's Senior Counsel at Steptoe and Johnson, an international law firm, and he's now a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He is the real deal, a great guy, and I think you'll like this interview. I wanted to start with what I think is maybe the most magnificent moment in American history, one of the most magnificent moments in leadership, certainly, and that's the moment where FDR is trying to-

• 3:58Speaker 01

  I'm guessing.

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  The FDR is trying to decide who will command the invasion of Normandy, and I thought maybe you could-

• 4:06Speaker 01

  That's the moment. It was a conversation in Cairo, December 1943, December 5th, actually, 1943. Conversation between George Marshall and President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt began, this was in his villa in Cairo, after they got back from the Tehran conference. And at that conference, Stalin bluntly opened the second plenary, saying, "Who will command, Overlord?"

• 4:53Speaker 01

  And Roosevelt was not ready. He had not made his decision. This was later on in December. So back in Cairo, they'd left Tehran. They got to Cairo. They had the conversation in Roosevelt's villa. And Roosevelt beat around the bush, as he usually did, when, before he got to the point. And he said to Marshall, "Do you want to command Operation Overlord? Do you really want that?" And Marshall said,

• 5:36Speaker 01

  "Mr. President, that's a decision for you to make, according to your view, in the best interest of the country. And you should not consider my feelings at all when you make that decision." And so Roosevelt couldn't get him to tell him. And if Marshall had asked for the command, all historians have said he would have given it to Marshall. And so, obviously, Marshall did not ask for the command. He demurred. And so Roosevelt sat back and said,

• 6:18Speaker 01

  "Well, I could not sleep at ease with you out of Washington." Which meant, the command of Overlord, probably the decisive battle of World War II, which meant that the command of Overlord was going to go to General Dwight Eisenhower, which was his springboard to the President. Now, whether Marshall coveted the command of Overlord, and some of his close associates, namely Henry Stimson, believed he did really want it. Or whether Marshall really felt that it would be in the best interest of the country for him to remain in Washington

• 7:03Speaker 01

  as Chief of Staff, as the dominant voice in the Chiefs of Staff. Whether it would really be in the interest of the country for him to remain in Washington, where he could continue to influence the course of the entire global war.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  There's no answer to that. We don't know what he said, what he said to others or what he felt. We know what some of the others thought he must have felt, but we don't really know the answer to that. No historian does. But the point of it all is that this was, his refusal to express his desire, one way or the other, was utterly selfless. And it was the code. It was the moral code that he lived by. And Secretary Henry Stimson, who was a lifelong Presbyterian, he was Secretary of War. He found an apt proverb

• 8:05Speaker 01

  to express Marshall's act of selflessness, self mastery. "He that ruleth his own spirit better than he that taketh a city." That was a quintessential moment, in my view, and perhaps yours as well, when Marshall's character was defined.

• 8:33Ryan Holiday?

  And even in the subsequent moments after FDR makes his decision, you see, you see what must have, like, the self-discipline required not to sort of call for the ball and to let the coach decide where it goes. That's sort of, you know, impressive in and of itself. And then when, when the shot does go to somebody else, I thought what was so amazing is Marshall's, you know, Marshall's response after that.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  There's a great story on that, you know. Marshall thought he was gonna be a five rose. And so he, his wife Catherine was moving stuff out of the Portis One at Fort Meyer into their country house. But instead of coming back from Cairo to Washington, Marshall flew eastward, 10,000, more than 10,000 miles, several plane hops across, some of it across Japanese-held territory.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  He wanted to meet with MacArthur to show him that the United States was behind him, because MacArthur was complaining about loss of resources and so forth. But during that trip, his closest aide Frank McCarthy sat with him on a plane. You know, it was two weeks. And he said, if, McCarthy later said that if Marshall had talked about the Roosevelt's decision to anyone other than his wife, it would have been me.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  And he said that Marshall never mentioned the incident during that entire trip. He, he, he, the only thing he did, it was another, another aspect of his, his character was magnanimity. When Roosevelt made the decision in Cairo, he asked Marshall to draft the order to Eisenhower and to Stalin, saying that Eisenhower was in command of Overlord.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  And so Marshall was charged with writing out the order that he possibly, he possibly coveted that command, we don't know. Anyway, he, he, he wrote out the, the order and then at the bottom of one of the copies that went out, the one to Eisenhower, he said, "Dear, dear Eisenhower," he always called him that, "Dear Eisenhower, I, I thought you would like this as a memento." And Eisenhower cherished that note in Marshall's handwriting for the rest of his life.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  He thought it was such a gracious thing for Marshall to have done.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  So this, so many aspects of Martha Marshall's character grew out of this, this one incident.

• 11:52Ryan Holiday?

  There, there's so much to unpack there. I sort of want to do all of it. I would say sort of first, before we get into Marshall, it's one of the things that strikes me, the more I read about Roosevelt, is you, on the one hand, you can't help but really grasp his political genius, his insights, his brilliance. And the other, it's hard not to get the sense that he was a very self-absorbed man who was completely oblivious to the feelings of others. And in the sense of, first off, you know, making Marshall, sort of forcing Marshall to choose whether he's going to break his own code and ask for the job that

• 12:35Ryan Holiday?

  he deserves. There's part of that. There's also just the making Marshall right hand right out the order, giving the job to his former protege. There's just, I think there was a great line from maybe Churchill's daughter about the way that FDR had taught Churchill, where he said something like, you know, FDR's behavior hurt my father, but it didn't unman him. There's a little bit of that, I think, in Marshall, where, where FDR kind of had this kind of condescending, oblivious, mystical way of treating people. And, and Marshall, it contained, it's easy to overlook in that story, just what a completely unfair position Marshall was forced into.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Right. You know, for all his charm and way in which he handled people, managed men, as they said, Roosevelt was cold. It was, that was a cold decision. The reason, one reason why he decided Eisenhower rather than Marshall, is because in an earlier conversation with Churchill.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Roosevelt threw out the idea, "Well, you know, I want Marshall to be the commander of Overlord, but that means a commander of all the theaters in Europe. That is the Mediterranean, which Churchill was desperate to hang on to because he wanted to thwart Overlord, even then, by controlling the Mediterranean." And Churchill told Roosevelt, "Look, I'm allowing you to have an American commander in charge of Overlord, but no way is an American commander going to be a commander in the Mediterranean theater. That's British." And he put his foot

• 14:33Speaker 01

  down on that. And so Roosevelt went along with that. And once he did that, Marshall's stature as commander of Overlord was diminished. He was a tactical commander if Roosevelt gave him the Overlord command, whereas as chief of staff back in Washington, you know, he was a commander of the deployment of troops across the globe in a broad sense. So it would have been a demotion if Roosevelt had appointed Marshall to just be, it sounds like this is a decisive battle of the war, but it would have been a demotion in terms of the military hierarchy.

• 15:20Ryan Holiday?

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

• 15:27Ryan Holiday?

  Those sort of moments of coldness from FDR are quite strange. There's sort of a coldness, like I was struck in the Ken Burns documentary about the Roosevelts where it's like Roosevelt's last decision on earth was to spend like a weekend trip with the woman he swore to his wife he would never see again. You know, there's this sort of, for all of his ability to see other people's suffering, you know, to be this sort of great leader at this moment of incredible difficulty and fear, there was an inability to empathize on a one-to-one level that I've always found striking.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  And you know that Churchill had the same quality. He had promised the command of Overlord to Alan Brooke. He had promised him. And when it became apparent at the Quebec conference in the fall of 1943, that the command had to go to an American because they had preeminent forces. They had two to three, two to three times more men than the British had to fight at Overlord. So Churchill took Brooke out on the great scene, overlooking the plains of Abraham

• 16:59Speaker 01

  and Quebec City, and informed him, "Well, you're not going to command Overlord." And Brooke wrote about that in his diary and said, "The man had no, had no sense of how I felt." And he just casually said, "Well, you're not going to command Overlord." And this was, this was something that Brooke coveted. So it's interesting that, that those two leaders shared that quality of, you know, no empathy with regard to these people who were, you know, devoting their life to serving

• 17:43Speaker 01

  those two extremely, extremely good politicians.

• 17:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I, that, now that you bring that up, it reminds me of, I think it was Churchill, he was saying that when he took over some governmental position, his predecessor had given him the advice, maybe it was Chancellor of the Achequer or something. It was something to the effect of like, "You're going to have to be a good butcher." But basically, at that level, part of leadership is making really hard decisions that inflicts sort of pain on other people and that, that maybe to do that job, there is a little bit of unfeeling brutality required.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  And with, with Roosevelt, it's so interesting.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  The way he treated the people that were closest to him, beginning with, well, beginning in the war with Hopkins. And then, you know, when Hopkins was living in the White House for two or three years, got married there and, you know, suddenly he's out. He's on the outs, partly because of Eleanor Roosevelt. They wanted him out of there. And so, but Roosevelt had to get a replacement right away. So it was his, it was oldest daughter, Anna Badiger, Anna Roosevelt, who moved right in as Hopkins left.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  And it's, and then Missy Lahand was one of the most important persons in his life. She had a stroke and was banished to the third floor and eventually out of the White House. And he just totally, completely forgot about her. And when Hopkins got sick after leaving the White House, they were, you know, he was not, he was, he was not part of Roosevelt's life. And, and, and the way in which Hopkins and Roosevelt parted was brutal because Hopkins was very sick on the trip back from Yalta. And, and he said, I gotta get off this boat.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  I've got, I can't, I can't take a sea trip across the Atlantic with you. And Roosevelt was, was, you know, again, cold. He, he barely looked up from his papers and that was his last goodbye with Harry Hopkins. And they never saw each other again. It, it's another aspect of his, his handling of, of, of these people who, again, just laid down their life for him. Is that, is that a feature or a bug of leadership?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  I think that's such an interesting question.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  You know, I think it's, I think it's essential when you're dealing with

• 20:51Speaker 01

  this, with these matters.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  But, you know,

• 20:56Speaker 01

  it's one thing to do it with Marshall.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  But it's another thing to do it with people who, you know, he wants to have a drink every night with Hopkins. He wants, he wants to spend every, every, you know, social hour with Missy Lahand.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  So that, you know, that's, that's, that's a bug. You know, so it's,

• 21:25Speaker 01

  it's, it's, it's one thing to make these hard decisions, but then again, just, you know, the, the people that surround him, you know, or his pleasure, or his relaxation. And then bang, it's cut him off.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  So

• 21:46Speaker 01

  I'm not entirely sure where the.

• 21:50Ryan Holiday?

  Go back to Marshall. I think the, the other thing that that story that it's easy to overlook in that story about the job going to Eisenhower is that, you know, Eisenhower was Marshall's protege. I mean, the only reason he's even, even in the position to, to, to snake the job from, from Marshall is because Marshall, you know, continually promoted him and put him in a position to succeed. And I think what's so, what's so fascinating about Marshall is sort of true sign of his greatness was, and, and I gave a talk to, at the NFL owners meeting, maybe two years ago. And I told this Marshall story, the one you were just told.

• 22:31Ryan Holiday?

  And and I likened it to, you know, the way we evaluate like a truly great football coach is by their coaching tree, you know, where, you know, you look at someone like Belichick, and you see what the coaches underneath him have gone on to do. You look at someone like Bill Walsh, you see what the coaches underneath him have gone on to do. One of the ways you truly judge a great coach is by, you know, are they sort of the selfish tyrannical autocrat? Or are they the kind of person that builds an organization that, you know, ultimately ends up putting its fingerprints all over the NFL or college football? That's really a sign of greatness. And I think Marshall has maybe the greatest coaching tree in,

• 23:15Ryan Holiday?

  you know, American political and military life.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, with not only Eisenhower Bradley, Lucian Truscott, one of the great commanders in World War II that doesn't get a lot of press. And the way he managed, the way he treated MacArthur as a management problem, you know, and was showed magnanimity to the nth degree with with MacArthur. That relationship is really interesting.

• 23:46Ryan Holiday?

  Because because at one point, MacArthur was Marshall's boss.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 23:52Ryan Holiday?

  Did not act the same way at all.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, and it's, it's so interesting. Maybe this is far afield from what you want to focus on right now, but his decision to finally be the last one before Truman to decide that MacArthur had to had to be relieved or fired, famously fired.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  And it kind of kind of reminds me of the debate today about.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Waving the law. So at the time, Marshall was Secretary of Defense. He was supposed to be a civilian, but they'd waived the law. You know, he really, you know, they waived the law just as they did with Mattis. And they're probably going to do with Austin as Secretary of Defense. But Marshall was very reluctant to, to let MacArthur be fired publicly. And he was the last man after all the Joint Chiefs had said, yeah, he's got to go. And it was pretty obvious he had to go. He was undermining the president's foreign policy. Marshall, you know, had to read the papers.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  He took forever. And the reason, at least as I wrote in my book, he was, he was afraid of the, the, the tarnishment of the Army. His beloved institution was the Army. Here he was, Secretary of Defense, the law was waived. He was supposed to be the civilian, you know, head of the War Department. Yet he was really worried about his institution, his beloved institution. It was my view, and that's why he, and he did not want to harm, harm the US Army. But he finally did it. And that's the reason why they have this law.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  They have this law that says you, you, you can't be in the, in the Army. You have to have resigned, you know.

• 26:04Ryan Holiday?

  For seven years or something, right?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Ten or seven years, they changed it. And even Marshall was tempted. But in the end, his character, you know, prevailed, said, no, no, he's got to go. No, is, is Austin going to be able to do the same thing? Or, and Mattis didn't last long enough to be really tested in that regard. And Mattis, you know, Mattis was probably, they did the waiver for Mattis because they wanted to find somebody that would have some influence and control over Trump.

• 26:40Ryan Holiday?

  You, go ahead. Maybe tell people about this idea of a coaching tree. And I think I get back to that sort of idea of duty. This idea of a coaching tree. Marshall's famous little black book. It seems like, you know, on the one hand, we sort of think, yeah, of course, the role of a leader is to develop talent. And then anyone who's experienced, you know, being in a big organization and meeting a big, powerful boss, you sort of get the sense that that's not the imperative that most leaders are operating from.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you mean to develop talent?

• 27:19Ryan Holiday?

  No, to sort of selflessly advance, not selflessly, but to actively try to advance the interests of others. Like, there's certainly leaders who develop talent for the good of the organization. They go, you know, they're sort of like moving people around as pieces on a chessboard. But there seems to be in Marshall, kind of this almost moral obligation to help young officers realize the full weight of their potential.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was, and he learned that, you know, at Fort Benning in the late 20s, early 30s. And in fact, that's where many of the generals in World War II came from, out of that Fort Benning Infantry School that Marshall, Marshall was head of the academic program at Fort Benning. He wasn't in charge of the whole 40, and that was what he really wanted to do, was to teach and train Army officers to think for themselves, to be much more independent minded in terms of taking on decisions and responsibility. And he mentored them.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  There were like 200 Army officers that he trained at Benning, who became generals in the Second World War. He built, yeah, he built a huge, he made some mistakes.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And but not that many. And and so the commander in in the now North Africa was a mistake. You know, Patton, of course, it is quite in a completely completely different ball, you know, different place as far as their relationship is concerned. He had known Patton for years and understood Patton. And, you know, of course, in the end, they gave Patton a command after he'd made all those mistakes before Overlord, but they gave him a command in in Europe. Patton was ever grateful for that, and it was an essential decision. It was a great, a great decision to hold on to him. Eisenhower was on the on the wire as to whether to fire Patton.

• 29:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it seems like Marshall had almost kind of a Phil Jackson-y knack for you. You treat a Patton this way, you treat a MacArthur this way, you treat a Bradley this way and an Eisenhower this way. And and it wasn't this sort of what you would maybe expect in the military is sort of like, these are the rules. This is what I expect of a commander, you know, no room for latitude. But he had a pretty remarkable flexibility as far as not just getting what he needed from different people, but also giving those people what they needed to succeed.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you know, he didn't like grandstanders, though. You know, that was just something that, and of course, he had MacArthur and Patton on his hands all the time, but he recognized their brilliance. They were truly brilliant battlefield commanders, MacArthur and Patton. And Patton Patton was because of his, his, you know, his, he'd take huge risks and was flamboyant. MacArthur was was a being a constant being a jerk. He was always asking for more, you know, and always it felt, you know, he felt aggrieved.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  So, yes, he had, he had the room for balancing, balancing the qualities of a good commander.

• 31:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's funny. We have this. I think there's a reason that MacArthur and Patton are probably infinitely more famous than Marshall. In some respects, even more famous than Eisenhower because their personality style naturally lent itself to publicity and attention. And we sort of forget the scandals that would have made them household names. We just remember sort of the echo of it. But it is funny to think that Marshall, in a sense, ends up accomplishing more than all of them.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:39Ryan Holiday?

  You know, precisely by being subdued and disciplined and quiet and really not thinking about himself. I think it was Truman who said, "Never did Marshall think about himself." You could almost, like, if you were to say, "This is a person who never thinks about himself," you might have guessed that that would have not been a successful career strategy.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. Of course, you would never call the Marshall Plan the Marshall Plan.

• 32:13Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Everybody else did. You know, he didn't want to take credit for that. It's interesting. You know, I know you used to, I think, have some relationship with the film business, maybe in the talent area. You know, Frank McCarthy, who was his closest aide, beginning in the Tehran conference and flew with him all the way to the far east to MacArthur. Frank McCarthy became a... He was head of the Motion Picture Film Association. And he wrote... He was the one who produced "Pat" in the early, what was it, early 70s, I think. And I just discovered

• 32:57Speaker 01

  in the archives at the Marshall Foundation library that McCarthy commissioned a screenplay by a well-known screenwriter at the time. And I've read it. A screenplay for Marshall. He wanted to produce... Around the time he produced "Pat," he wanted to produce "Marshall." And it never happened. And McCarthy didn't like the screenplay. I've read it. It's kind of, you know, kind of a lame screenplay, but it's hard to do. It's hard to do Marshall in a film.

• 33:36Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  You know, unless you focus on one particularly incident, like who will command overlord, something like that. And actually, we're, I'm thinking, I'm talking to some people now about that, but it's, you know, Patton, MacArthur, there've been movies made about both of them. And Marshall hasn't, hasn't, hasn't made it.

• 33:59Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you know, Plutarch, I think maybe the great biographer of all time, sort of makes this distinction. He says, you know, there, there are biographies and there are lives. And, and lives, he says, as a genre is, is how, and this is what I was talking about in my book, Lives of the Stokes, but, you know, he says, lives is, is when you get the essence of a person through an incident, through a quote, through, you know, he says, there may be in a, in an offhanded gesture or remark, you know, far more insight than, than the story of, you know, their grandest battle. And I think what is interesting about Marshall is that he is this riveting, fascinating character, but, but the arc of his life is

• 34:44Ryan Holiday?

  not particularly cinematic. It's, it's really in these little incidents, like we're talking about, which is why I wanted to open it. And I think, you know, it's like, if you were to do something on Marshall, it really, I think, need to be some sort of epic series. Like, you need, you really have to explore character. Like they say, you know, film is about story, television is about character. I think what you see in Marshall is, is character, like good character, but then also just, he was a character. But I think that's, that's a thing that we struggle with as far as learning from and

• 35:19Ryan Holiday?

  Modeling leadership to people is that the people of true sort of character and leadership are often by definition, the least interesting and the harder to write about. You know, like there's no, as you talk about in your book, and I think I noted in He Goes the Enemy, Marshall declines even to write a biography of himself. He refuses to write memoirs.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Right, right, he wouldn't do it. And it is.

• 35:49Ryan Holiday?

  And they probably would have been boring had he done, had he done them because, you know, he, he, he wouldn't, I mean, Marshall, or sorry, MacArthur's memoirs are riveting. Grant's memoirs are riveting. Sherman's memoirs are riveting because they were kind of a different type of leader.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And how to, how to portray character.

• 36:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  In a, in a, in any, any kind of film, TV or movie or whatever, you know, is, you know, another aspect of character that I didn't talk about much in the book, but I, you remember David Brooks's book, he wrote a book about character.

• 36:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, The Road to Character.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  And also, and also featured Marshall in it. And one of the aspects of character that he, that he highlighted, which I think in Marshall's case fits, and it's a capacity to love and be loved. You know, it's hard to imagine a character like MacArthur having that kind of capacity, but it is, that, that was, it was something that, that Marshall clearly had, and I tried to portray that in the book, not, not only with, you know, two wives, but also, you know, the, the grand, the step-grandson who was so close to Marshall and was killed and

• 37:18Speaker 01

  leading a tank platoon on the road to Rome. So, yeah, I mean.

• 37:24Ryan Holiday?

  You do get, you do get in Manchester's epic biography of MacArthur. You do get some glimpses of, of, of MacArthur's relationship with his son, which I found to be incredible and revealing. It was sort of the only place where MacArthur seemed to be human and joyful and connected and empathetic. Although the incredible thing I found, this, that MacArthur's son is still alive.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say that. Arthur, his name is Arthur, I think. Yeah, he was six years old on the baton in Corregidor.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  And took that PT boat trip with MacArthur and his wife to Australia.

• 38:10Ryan Holiday?

  You try to wrap your head around the fact that MacArthur's father, Arthur MacArthur.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Oh, I know.

• 38:17Ryan Holiday?

  Fought at the bloody angle in the Civil War. And MacArthur fought in World War II and, and in World War I. And then his son is just, you know, you could bump into, I think he lives in Greenwich Village. Like, he's like a recluse. Clearly, clearly having MacArthur as a father, you know, had an effect on somebody. But the idea that like you could go for pizza in the West Village and bump into the son, into the grandson of a Civil War veteran, gives you kind of a glimpse of how short history actually is.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the Morgenthau's just, just died. He was in, he died at 100. He lived here in Washington in one of the, in a Presbyterian home for seniors, Morgenthau.

• 39:04Ryan Holiday?

  I think one of John Tyler's grandsons just died.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's right. They're trying to get him something. I forgot what it is, but it is. And, you know, just, just writing about these characters.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Has been really interesting because like Harry Hopkins daughter who lived in the White House Eleanor was her Hopkins was widowed. So he had this daughter who was seven or eight or six or seven years old and lived in the White House for a couple of years and Eleanor was her sort of her mother figure. She's still alive. She lives out in Vienna, Virginia. The son of Marshall's beloved stepson, the son of the stepson, which would be Marshall's step grandson, you know, lives up in Northwest Massachusetts and I've interviewed him several times. He actually, he actually had a box of documents, you know, underneath the bench

• 40:05Speaker 01

  and he's in a farmhouse up there. And one, you know, one day Nancy and I drove up there. I went to Amherst College and it's not far from where this guy lives. And so we went up and spent a day with him and he pulled out these box of documents. I couldn't believe it. And on top was this crumpled map. It was a battle map that was in Marshall's stepson's hand when he was shot by the Germans on, you know, commanding that tank platoon. It's the actual battle map. I've never seen anything like that before.

• 40:49Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  The topographical, you know, the kind of map that they handed out to these tank commanders. So anyways, it is.

• 40:58Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, it's, it is. I think this is, to me, the importance of studying history and the importance of biography is it connects you to the past in a way like I've, my, my son is four and we try to read him these sort of poems before bed. He likes, you know, You know, he likes Kipling's "If" and, you know, Longfellow's Psalm of Life. And there's a line in that poem where he says, you know, "The lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and leave behind as footprints in the sands of time." I think there is something in the, you know, the tradition of MacArthur's ancestors or

• 41:39Ryan Holiday?

  knowing that, you know, people who maybe met George Marshall are still alive. I had George Ravling on the podcast, who I know I also connected your son Rich with. It's like when I had Rich on, or sorry, when I had George on the podcast, I was talking, not only did he meet Martin Luther King, but he met Harry Truman. I mean, he stopped by Truman's Presidential Library. They'd won some basketball tournament. And, you know, Harry Truman gave him a signed copy of his memoirs. And that's actually what he put the "I have a dream" speech in when Martin Luther King had given it to him. But we just have this idea that these figures, the Marshalls of the world are relics of

• 42:23Ryan Holiday?

  the past. The Churchills of the world are relics of the past. They're really not that distant past. And they were just human beings while they were alive, who, I think it was Marshall's second wife, said something like, you know, "My husband had an ego and he had a temper. He was a totally normal person. He just managed to, in the pivotal moments, sort of rise above those things."

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Where was Ravling when he met Truman? Where was he coaching?

• 42:55Ryan Holiday?

  No, he was like a college basketball student and they, a college basketball athlete, and they did some tournament in Missouri, sort of before, you know, March Madness or something. And they swung by and, you know, and it sounded like at that time, Harry Truman was sort of in a bit of a kind of a political exile as a figure from the past. And he sounds, it sounds like he was very excited for anyone to come see his library. And so that's where George Ravling met him. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  So right to my right in my library here, I've got a boxed, two-volume set of Truman's memoirs, the one that he always sent out to the important people. And it's signed by Truman.

• 43:44Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  I borrowed it from my law firm, Steptoe & Johnson. I mean, I don't know whether I'm ever gonna give it back. But that's my first book. He wrote, Truman wrote in his inscription on the memoirs to Louis Johnson. I've never heard of, hardly anybody's ever heard of Louis Johnson. But Louis Johnson was Truman's Secretary of Defense after Forrest Al committed suicide. And Louis Johnson's-

• 44:14Ryan Holiday?

  Not a good one, if I remember correctly.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  No. Well, he had a lot of problems. But that was when I, that's how I started writing nonfiction, after getting, you know, tired of doing the legal stuff at that firm, my firm, Steptoe & Johnson. So I, but I found those, the memoirs in the library there. And, and then I went to West Virginia, where the firm was founded. And said, I'm gonna write something about Johnson and the firm and all that stuff. And I ran into a real historian who had already done some interviewing. And as a result, I ended up, for lots of different

• 44:55Speaker 01

  reasons, writing the book, the first and only biography of Louis Johnson. But still, you know, Truman was a big part of our law firm, because the beginnings of our law firm, we ended up representing a lot of the defense contractors. It's just so, you know, it's, Washington's full of stuff like this.

• 45:19Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so one, one last, sort of revealing incident about Marshall, and then I want to get to something else with you, which is, there's a story that Dean, is it Acheson? I'd never heard of-

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Acheson. I want to say something, I want to say something about that too, but go ahead.

• 45:36Ryan Holiday?

  Okay. So Dean Acheson, who worked under both Marshall and Truman, and sort of was, you know, found them both to be heroic figures, a sort of cut from the same kind of American mold in a way. I'm writing about this a little bit in my next book. He tells this story of, he tells a sort of the lesson of watching Marshall sort of preside over these meetings and all the bickering and the complaining and the what about this and what about that? Or, you know, should we ask this? And, and he finally sort of cuts through the noise and he says, gentlemen, let's not, let's not fight the problem. Let's aside the problem. And I thought that was the essence of Marshall in a way as well.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  But An Asherson, that's the president of the creation is, Asherson was a really good writer.

• 46:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  And, you know, in a law firm that was kind of the same kind of law firm I grew up, he was at Arnold, at Covington and Burley. He, and we're talking about how to portray character. He, he had this phrase about something like the moment General Marshall entered a room, everyone in the room sensed his presence, aura of controlled power. You know, it went on with several sentences like that. And how do you ever portray that, you know, without

• 47:10Speaker 01

  the man himself? It is a wonderful word description. But, and that's what it was. There was this sense of controlled power. You know, he would be reserved, would, would let everybody talk. And then he would guide, guide them to.

• 47:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think it's difficult to portray and really capture the brilliance of the absence of something. So like when I, when I was writing my book, He Goes the Enemy, I wanted to, originally it was going to be a book about humility. And what I realized is that humility is very hard to portray because often it is nothing. It is that you are not doing something, you know, and so Marshall's restraint, the feeling that you feel him come into the room and not be what he could get away with being is very difficult to portray that, you know, he could be a tyrant, he could be a megalomaniac, he could be delusional, he could be too big and too important for everyone. He could be

• 48:18Ryan Holiday?

  all those things, but that he wasn't was the greatness. And that's, it's very difficult to capture that. Whereas Marshall or MacArthur's excess and brilliance is quite easy to portray.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Sure. Or Patton in front of the American flag in that film, you know, when he's standing up there telling everybody that, you know, that they're gonna have to kill those sons of bitches.

• 48:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  That thing was, you know, before you go, you know, I opened up your book, Ego is the Enemy, because I knew that there was a, you know, section on Marshall in there before this, before I

• 48:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  I talked to you. And so I'd forgotten this. In fact, I couldn't find the book for a while. I finally found it in my wife's office room. I wrote down, it must have been, when did that, was that published?

• 49:13Ryan Holiday?

  2016. And I think that's when we met at Politics and Prose.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Four years ago, yeah. In the last part of a chapter, what's important to you, you said, find out what, you know, what you're after, ignore these, ignore those who mess around with your pace, let them

• 49:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  covet what you have. I wrote in my hand, I said, I was thinking about, what do I want to do with the rest of my life? You know, I'm not, I'm at the other end. So.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  I want to write a good slice of history. This is my own hand.

• 49:49Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  I want to take care of Nancy and my kids. Kids, rich or old, you know.

• 49:57Ryan Holiday?

  He's doing all right.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  I want to die with dignity and peace. I've forgotten that I've written that.

• 50:04Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  So it's on page 119 of your book.

• 50:10Ryan Holiday?

  I'm very honored to hear that. I mean, I think you know, you sit down and you write something and you kind of, it has an impact on you because the source material has impacted you, but you really have no idea whether it's going to land on someone. That's, that's kind of, I sort of have, I have some sort of broad bullet points like that myself from my own life. And it's very easy, and I'm sure you saw it in your career. It's very easy to measure success based on your salary, based on cases you argue, based on how many copies your book sells.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Recognition.

• 50:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  That's one of my, you know, okay, yeah. So, and go on to your next thing.

• 50:51Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I was going to say, what is, I think, why Marshall's such a great example and why your book is so important, why I'm so glad it was published, why you got over the hump of the fact that, you know, he is not the most hotly anticipated person to be, to have their biography written, is that he's a great example of what you can accomplish. Like, you know, as, as, as Brooke says in The Road to Character, if you focus on the eulogy values rather than the resume virtues, you really can have an incredible life, a meaningful life, and do incredible things.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 51:32Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so the last thing I wanted to talk to you about, and this, it actually dovetails nicely with where we were talking about, you know, sort of how short history is. You said you got to meet some of these sort of, let's call them old timers. Here in Austin, I got to meet a guy named Richard Overton, who died almost two years ago now at age 112.

• 51:54Ryan Holiday?

  He was the oldest veteran in the United States when he died, but it was incredible for me to meet someone who was born, for instance, when Theodore Roosevelt was president and to be able to wrap my head around that. And where that really gave me some insight is something I know I've talked probably too much on the podcast about, but is important to me and I know it connects with a piece you sent me that you'd wrote. What really made it clear for me, Richard, who was African American, lived in a segregated part of Austin when it was segregated, who would have been in a segregated regiment of the, when he fought in World War II. Richard was born in 1906 and in 1910 that they put a Confederate monument, you know,

• 52:38Ryan Holiday?

  two and a half blocks away from my office in this town that I live in. And it was like, oh, you know, you think history was so long ago and you go, oh, the Civil War is a long time ago, you know, let bygones be bygones. And you go, no, they put up this, they put up this monument partly as a giant middle finger to this four-year-old boy who had no idea that, you know, he was different because he was black. Like, you know what I mean? I got to imagine that your experience of studying history has colored your view of, you know, this debate about Confederate monuments. And I know you came and you protest, not protested, but advocated for the removal of

• 53:21Ryan Holiday?

  a, was it Stonewall Jackson statue?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  No, no, no. So what, I'm actually now advocating that Stonewall's been removed from VMI.

• 53:32Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  So that leaves only Marshall in front of VMI right now. But no, what's happening in Virginia is they've decided to remove the statue of General Lee from the US Capitol, statue, Hall of Collection. And so I've been involved in advocating. So each state in the country gets two statues. So now we own, for Virginia, they only have Washington and there's going to be an empty place. And so I've been advocating that Marshall, as a Virginian, who lived there for 27 years

• 54:09Speaker 01

  or more, is the one who deserves to have his statue at the elbow of George Washington. That's not going to happen because the governor of Virginia really wants to have something that represents Virginia's break from its racist slaveholding past. And I knew getting into that argument that would probably happen, but I wanted to at least gather some support for putting George Marshall in there. Because, you know, in 1947, when Marshall gave his Marshall Plan speech at Harvard,

• 54:51Speaker 01

  the president of Harvard said, you know, there's only, in the honorary degree of Marshall, the president of Harvard said, "To a soldier and statesman who brooks only one comparison in the history of our republic." Those were his words. And, you know, meaning Marshall's the only guy that, you know, can be compared favorably to George Washington. So, you know, I know you were successful in removing the Confederate statue from your town near Austin, and Rich told me about that. And so I'm advocating Marshall.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Now, that's what I'm trying to do is get a conversation going beyond this Virginia thing. Sure. To persuade the senators in Virginia, Tim Kaine and Warner, and also the senators in Pennsylvania where Marshall was born, to sponsor a bill, to, you know, introduce a bill into Congress, because there's another way that you can get your statue into the US Capitol, and that is through congressional acts. They just did that with Rosa Parks. And I think they're gonna do it with Frederick Douglass. So.

• 56:11Ryan Holiday?

  I think that goes to something that I think is important, and I don't actually think should be that controversial, which is, we really should be actively deciding and talking about who our heroes are and who we admire, and we should be celebrating that. I mean, obviously, statue is the most ancient way to do it, and there's a certain sort of history and prestige in that. But I do think generally, the idea of, you know, how are you honoring the people that you want more people to be like, is a sort of an element of culture that's been forgotten. It's almost as if, even in the case of biographers, you read some of these

• 56:54Ryan Holiday?

  biographies, and you get the sense that the main objective of the biographer was to puncture the myths of the person, you know, not to, or almost, you know, and that's why I love Plutarch, and why I think he's endured as long as he has, is, you know, the purpose of biography, I think, is ultimately to learn something about history, and about yourself, and how to apply those lessons. And it almost seems like biographers and artists today almost deliberately reject the obligation to teach anyone through their work.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  So you know a lot about statues in, you know, in ancient times, and that's, they were like, what were they, like a substitute for photographs today?

• 57:38Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  You know, but they were, you know, they were, they were intended to, to celebrate the quality of the leadership, or whoever they happened to be, and to last for centuries. So I like that. I like that today, too. You know, I think I posed to you a question. Why do we have statues? Why do we do that?

• 58:04Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  You know.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  And so what's your answer to that? It's, it's.

• 58:10Ryan Holiday?

  I think it's, it's about, you know, there's a quote from Demosthenes where he's talking about, he's giving some speech at a, you know, at a, at a front of a celebration of an Athenian victory or something. And he says, you know, let me remind you that your ancestors put up this statue not to recognize, not, not solely to recognize what had happened in the past, but to call you and spur us to similar heights of greatness.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  I want that quote. I want that quote.

• 58:42Ryan Holiday?

  All right, I'll, I'll send it to you.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Where did that come from?

• 58:46Ryan Holiday?

  I'll give it to you. I'm writing it down. But, but you know what I mean? That, that the purpose of, of, of putting these people up, and, and to me, this is what the indictment of the Confederate statues is. You know, what, what is the primary accomplishment of Stonewall Jackson's life? What did, you know, Nathan Bedford Forrest stand for? So, so when you put up those statues, you are calling people in effect, you know, and I actually think there's, there's some gray area about Robert E. Lee, but, but not, not a ton, but I'm just saying, I could, I could see him embodying some virtues that you want people to have. For the most part, I think he was actually mediocre and, and is, you know, is, is traitorous

• 59:31Ryan Holiday?

  and all these things. But I could at least, I could at least see a, a non-disingenuous argument for Robert, a Robert E. Lee statue. Nathan Bedford Forrest, as I had another writer on talking about, is, is basically a murderous psychopath. And so to put up that statue, you are calling people to follow in those footsteps. And so I think we, that, that's why Rosa Parks should be in the Capitol, and that's why Frederick Douglass should be recognized as an American founder. I mean, what, what's so great about Frederick Douglass is he said, you know, he looked at the astounding hypocrisy of, you know, the founding fathers and said, I'm going to look past that and I'm going to help us get closer to realizing it. And to me, that's, that's what we want people to do.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, you know, and the Confederate statues were there to basically, you know, elevate the lost cause and

• 1:00:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  All of that. Blight's, Blight's books on, on that are just fabulous.

• 1:00:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was reading, just as a history nerd, I'm sure you'll appreciate this. I was reading this biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes recently and, and you know, late Liz, you know, he basically is another one of those figures that sort of, he, he meets Emerson and, you know, lives all the way into the, you know, the, the 30s, you know, he meets Emerson in FDR, like, that's an incredible life. But, but he has this, he's talking about some, he's telling some dinner anecdote about his wife, you know, being rude to Stonewall Jackson's wife at a dinner party in Washington. And, and, and I was just, I was like, why was she invited? You know, I was like, like, first off,

• 1:01:16Ryan Holiday?

  her husband's dead. He was a traitor and, and, you know, what, but, but it is amazing, the, the sort of collective amnesia we had where, where Stonewall Jackson's widow is still considered, you know, was, was, was getting invites to prestigious events, you know, through the, the late 1800s. You're just like, oh, this was, it was a weird time.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  You won't believe that. So I tried to track down, there is a story that Marshall led, led Stonewall's widow at a graduation ceremony at VMI.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  And I couldn't, I couldn't, I could not document it, but, but it's possible that that also happened.

• 1:02:00Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I, I loved in your book, doesn't like McKinley appoint

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Ryan Holiday?

  To WMI or

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  No, Marshall, Marshall was a senior at VMI and, you know, on his own, he traveled to Washington in this, because he wanted a commission. It was hard to get a commission then. And, and because that right after the Spanish-American War.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  So he goes to Washington. He has a couple of letters that his father set up to meet with the Secretary of War or whatever. But he stands in line and goes into the White House, you know, and they eventually gets upstairs and, and McKinley gives him an audience. He said, I want to commission the United States Army. And I, I don't know whether McKinley actually got it for him, but he got one. He got a commission. And think of, think of that. Think of that, you know, the guts, for, for example, of just trying to, you know, go to the top back when he was, and he was only 20 years old at that time. So.

• 1:03:04Ryan Holiday?

  But also just how small the world was that, that some kid could just show up at the White House and get in line and see, see the president. What, what a horribly inefficient system that was for a very, very long time.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  I'm on a job at the Department of Justice, right?

• 1:03:20Ryan Holiday?

  Right. No, that way, I mean, even, you know, a couple of decades before that, like the bane of Lincoln's existence was just all these people that wanted to come complain to him about crap. And he had like, the job of the president was to hold office hours. And he had to, you know, I, I actually though, you got to wonder, would the president be better if they had to meet average Americans on a somewhat regular basis? And that average Americans could call on the president at the, at the White House?

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  It would be great. It's, you know, it's better than reading their letters, you know?

• 1:03:55Ryan Holiday?

  Or their tweets, you know, Obama would read letters, Trump, Trump reads tweets. I'm not sure either is a particularly good insight into the, the lives of average people.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  You know, Roosevelt told Eisenhower that he really wanted, wished he could have given the command of overlord to Marshall because he said, no, no one's going to remember him. No one remembers who was the chief of staff of the army during the Civil War.

• 1:04:23Ryan Holiday?

  Henry Hallic.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  It was Henry Hallic. And every day, not every day, every other day, I walked by his house on our street in Georgetown.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Lived in, because it was on a hill. And, and I once, I, I walked in there one day because it's, you know, got guards all around it and no one lives in it. And there's a retired DC cop. I said, what, you know, this is Henry Hellick's house. What, you know, who owns it? He said, oh, it's one of the Bass brothers down in Texas. An oil guy. And he never, and he just owns the house and it just sits there. But again, nobody's ever heard of Harry Hell, Henry Hell.

• 1:05:09Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's a, that's sort of a great stoic note to end out on, which is that, you know, at one point, Marshall was arguably the most powerful military commander in the world. He, he commanded not just, not just his, his soul, but, but in his spirit, but, but literally millions of men and the greatest military, you know, accomplishment in human history. And if it were not for the Marshall Plan, uh, which, which, you know, he didn't want to be named after him and is only sort of named after him as a quirk colloquially. No, no one, you know, he would be, you know, ashes and dust like, uh, like everyone else. And that, that's my favorite line from Marcus Aurelius, who goes at the end, Alexander the

• 1:05:51Ryan Holiday?

  Great and his mule driver are buried in the same earth and the same thing happened to both. There is this sort of an ultimate equalizer that, uh, that happens that we, we can, we can forget and ignore to our own peril.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  We're all specks, we're all dust.

• 1:06:10Ryan Holiday?

  Exactly. David, thank you so much. This was an honor. I love the book. People should absolutely read it. I've raved about it a bunch of times, uh, but it is.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  I have, I have fun talking to you. So call me when you're in Washington.

• 1:06:23Ryan Holiday?

  I, I will, if that ever is able to happen again, I, I can't wait to get back out there.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:06:29Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The, 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 it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.