The Stoic Question David Mamet Engraved on His Watch

David Mamet is one of the most influential writers of the last half-century, so when he talks about craft, discipline, and courage, it’s worth listening. In this episode, David joins Ryan to talk about acting, writing, Stoicism, and why most people make things far more complicated than they need to be. David breaks down his blunt philosophy on performance and life, why courage matters more than talent, why “just saying the words” is often the hardest part, and the Stoic question he literally engraved on his watch. David Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross and first broke through in the 1970s with plays like American Buffalo and Sexual Perversity in Chicago. He’s also written and directed films including House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, and Heist, and wrote the screenplays for The Verdict and The Untouchables. Most recently, David released the film Henry Johnson https://henryjohnsonmovie.com/ and published the novel Some Recollections of St. Ives: A Novel. https://www.amazon.com/Some-Recollections-St-Ives-Novel/dp/1648211402 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:06Ryan 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 lives.

• 0:51Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You can tell my voice is mostly back to how it was. We're all recovered over here for the most part, which is good. The famous line from Epictetus, you've heard me talk about it before. He says that we're actors in a play. We don't control the role. We don't control the timing. We don't control what lines we get, but we control how we play the part, right? We control how we say the lines. We control whether we play our role well. I think this is Epictetus looking at a world where he's a slave and Seneca is Seneca, right? And you could argue that sure,

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  society has made some progress since we have more agency. We have more freedom. Individuals are more empowered. And this is all wonderful, but the but the same fundamental reality exists, which is that we're not in charge. Things are happening. We're not the playwright of our reality, right? We are not the director of the universe. And so it comes down to how we respond, how we play the role we've been assigned in life. And this quote is actually what I wanted to open my conversation with today's guest with David Mamet, one of the

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Playwrights and writers of the last half century. Won a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross. Actually, I remember when I started in Hollywood, my boss sent me that famous scene from Glengarry. I don't know what that says about my boss or about where I was working, but it was my first interaction with his work. I've read a bunch of his novels. I've seen a bunch of his movies. Actually, the first movie premiere I ever went to in Hollywood was a David Mamet play. I saw this, this movie he did called Red Belt. Got to walk through red carpet. It was a whole cool other part of my life that I don't talk about too much anymore, but it was fascinating. And as it happens, he is a fan of the Stoics.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  You see little mentions here or there in his writings, including in the new novel that he did. I saw this great interview where he was talking about the Stoics as porch guys, like guys that sit on their porch and shoot the shit, which is an interesting, very Mamet-esque read of the Stoics. And I guess it's literally true. And, you know, again, you always get a different perspective on something you're interested in when you talk to a different person. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to David Mamet today. You have almost certainly seen some of his works over the years. He's written and directed films like House of Games, Spanish Prisoner, Heist, The Verdict, The Untouchables. He did that HBO film about Phil Spector with Al Pacino, created the TV series The Unit.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  And he's published a bunch of nonfiction books on writing, which I've read. And then he has this great novel called Chicago, which I loved. And he has a new novel called Some Recollections of Saint Ives, which is really good, too. In today's episode, we talk about courage and restraint, why just saying the words matters more than overthinking, why he thinks talent is overrated, and what Stoicism looks like when it's actually lived instead of admired from a distance. I don't agree with David Mamet on a lot of political stuff. He's an interesting, somewhat crotchety fellow. Just a couple of days before we filmed this interview, he stormed off the set of one interview. But I like talking with people who are great at what they do, people who see the world

• 4:16Ryan Holiday?

  differently, people who are iconoclastic and uniquely themselves. And he is certainly that. You can follow David on Instagram, @DavidMamet. You can check out his latest film, Henry Johnson, on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube. And you can check out his new novel, Some Recollections of Saint Ives. I hope you enjoy this episode.

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'm excited to talk. In another life, I was an assistant in Hollywood and my boss, on my first day, he made me read What Makes Sammy Run, and then he made me watch the scene from Glengarry Glen Ross. He may have been missing the actual point of both that book and that scene, but it was supposed to be motivational, I guess.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  One of you guys was missing the point of the scene, you say?

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  I think he was missing the point of both the scene and What Makes Sammy Run, which is supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a motivating tale.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, maybe.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  So, across the desk from me was Eddie Bernard, who is the guy who connected us. And I remember the first movie premiere I went to was the premiere of Red Belt at the Egyptian Theater.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Oh, great. Yeah, that's a good movie.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it was a surreal experience for me because I've been a fan for a long time. But anyways, I'm excited to chat. There's a quote from Epictetus, who I know you like, because many years ago, actually, at that job, I read Bambi vs Godzilla, and you have an Epictetus quote in there. But whenever I talk to actors or directors, I give them this quote from Epictetus, and I'm curious to hear what you think. He says, "Keep in mind that you're an actor in a play that is just the way the producer wants it to be. If it's short, if that is his wish, or long, if he wants it long. If he wants you to be the part of a beggar, see that you play it skillfully and similarly. If the part is to be a cripple, or an official, or a private person,

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  your job is to put on a splendid performance of the role you have been given."

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's great.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  How does that strike you as a writer and a director? Because I think most people are taking that quote from the perspective of an actor, which we all are in the sort of role of life. But how do you think about that as a person who is often giving people the lines and the roles they have to play?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Well, there's some wisdom in what he said. It's insufficient, because actually, what the actor has to do is show up and say the stupid fucking words. So, that which they call talent, and that which the critics call talent, and the award people call talent, is generally embellishment, but which is unneeded, because if the script is good, it doesn't need an embellishment. If the script is bad, embellishment's not going to help it. So what the actor actually needs is courage. And it's actually stoic philosophy this, just say the stupid fucking words. What is the one thing that you can't change? The words, what is the only thing that you need is the words to stand up as

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Cagney said, hit your mark, look the other guy in the eye and tell him the truth will be sufficient. What actors don't realize is that the difference between what's coming out of their mouth and what they feel, which is always no, no, this isn't right, actually is the play. It's been engendered in them by the play. Why they say, I can't play Hamlet because I just, I don't know what I'm doing. I can't play a fellow because I'm just so fucking jealous of this other guy, you know, or whatever. Because the, the words themselves will awaken whatever may be needed in the actor. The actor doesn't have to do anything about it, except say them clearly.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  And that's why a lot of actors won't speak clearly.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  So the courage is in sitting with the discomfort or the courage is in ceding the control to the playwright or the author, so to speak?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  It's both saying, what's your job to stand up there and speak clearly to the other guy? And you don't have to do the play. You don't have to act the play. You don't have to act the character because there's no such thing as the character. He's a guy standing up just saying some words. If you do that, that's going to awaken something in him, which will be a new thing to deal with. So most actors are, are trained by people who know what they're doing. And they say, I have to prepare to say the lines in a certain way, right? But if you ask them that, they would say, no, that's ridiculous. It's not that I have to say the lines in a certain way. It's that I have to realize what the character might be feeling at that moment. So that I can say the lines in a certain way.

• 8:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, then maybe the other virtue here is the restraint to not overthink and to, to simply be in the moment of what you're doing, which is in some ways a harder thing to do than to feel.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Well, of course it is. The perfect proof is the rehearsal process. You don't have to rehearse a play for four months, right? You have to learn the lines and do the blocking and get up on stage and the play will be clear. And we know this because if you see something done in summer stock, which we all used to do summer stock, you got the script on Monday, you put it up on Friday night. Didn't have time to fuck around and say, where do you think this guy went to college? And it was not only, it was not only just fine, it was much better than the people who in effect, prepare the thing in front of a mirror. As you know, they used to, they used to say they did in the old Budville days. But instead of preparing it in front of a mirror, they prepared it in front of the mirror, if I may, of their own fucked up consciousness, right?

• 9:47Ryan Holiday?

  In the ancient plays, you're not even you, right? You're wearing a mask. And so there's probably something simpler there where you are just saying the lines because that's the whole thing. There isn't this sort of disintermediation of inserting this, this person who is pretending to be this person because the, the mask is wearing a lot of that, that weight.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Well, one of the wonderful things about performing in masks is that one understands what's happening in the actor without the face. That there's something ineluctable in the performance that is just, where did that come from? We don't know, but there it is. It's kind of great.

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I, I was just in Greece and, and I saw like an Aeschylus play and a Euripides play and with the, with the traditional masks and it was a very different experience. Even when you're watching a man play a, a female role, for the first few seconds, there's this suspension of disbelief. But you, you turn yourself over to the language almost immediately, almost like watching a movie with subtitles where you're not hearing the dialogue and you're just reading that. The mind can do it pretty quickly to get lost in, in just a different format.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Well, that's so true, what you said. For example, if you go through television and you kind of scroll through what's on the air on television, you can turn off the sound and you can see what's happening between the two people immediately. But what's happening between them generally is narration. They're explaining either what they feel or explaining something that happened off stage. Right? Which was explaining the play to each other because that's what the people who fund and choose the entertainments understand as entertainment. How will they know? I have to make sure they, they, the stupid people, understand.

• 11:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes, that's right. So what I've always taken the Epictetus quote about, you know, sort of, we're all actors in a play. I think it's true in more ways than one, right? So you're the actor in a role. You didn't, you didn't control the dialogue. You don't control how the director's blocking the shots. The director doesn't control the marketing budget and how the studio puts the film out. You don't control what the audience is going to say about it. You don't control what the weather is going to be or world events are going to be when it comes out. That all of our roles are relatively circumscribed, not just in something like the movie business, but all of us in life.

• 12:15Ryan Holiday?

  And when we sort of really winnow down our responsibility to like, what's actually being asked of us here? It creates a different opportunity for, for not just, I think, a kind of contentment, but also a different form of excellence. Cause you're not trying to do everything all at once. You're just trying to do your fucking job.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, yeah. The safe piloting aircraft comes down to what now? What next? What if?

• 12:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And the restraint even probably of modern piloting of where autopilot is doing a good chunk of it. And primarily your job is to not crash the plane by intervening when you shouldn't intervene.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yes, that's always a bad idea.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  So I remember the, the quote, I folded it when I first read it, but the quote you have in, in Bambi versus Godzilla is about, you know, how do we accept the, the response of the audience? Epictetus, you quote him here, he's saying, who are these people by whom you wish to be admired? Are they not the same with whom you are the habit of saying they are mad? What then do you wish to be admired by the mad? It is crazy. I think the Stoics point this out time and time again, how much we seem to want the approval of people whose approval is meaningless to us. Like we want the approval of people we don't respect. It's madness.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, the other thing is that now in this wonderful plague of the computer age, people want to stake their happiness on the display of a little number in the screen. There's nobody there, right? How many people like you? There's nobody there, right? Listen, there's two things in show business. One is the relationship with the audience, right? And the audience is pretty smart. In fact, Billy Wilder said they were genius. The audience is a genius to collectively individually, they're idiots like you and me. There's the connection with the people in the audience. And the way you learn to perform is in front of an audience. Because if you're not in front of an audience, everything is moot, right?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  But if you are in front of an audience, you get corrected right now, just like boxing. You know, you can study forever, but you get into the ring with someone who wants something different. And you're going to learn something, right? It's no longer moot. And the same thing with an audience. You play into an audience, you can say, oh, this worked, oh, that didn't work. And if your paycheck depends on figuring out why it didn't work, you'll figure it out and you'll get out of the business. The other thing is dealing with the audience in a removed situation. For example, right, having a talk back after the play or meeting a fan on the street or etc, etc. It's always heartbreaking because one realizes as the artist that there is no connection,

• 14:58Speaker 01

  that the great compliment the audience paid you is having a human connection with your performance, right? And so they and I and you feel like we know that person. We'll come up to them at a bar when they're having a screaming fight with their boyfriend and say, you know what? I hate to interrupt the butt, right? But so the people who are fantastically successful in show business, for example, they all want to be liked, just they all want to be liked. And their income is to a large extent based on how many people like them. But they spend so much of that income insulating themselves from regular people, not because they're particularly standoffish or egoistical, but because they can't fucking stand it because there is no connection there.

• 15:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Well, what draws people primarily to the arts is a certain sensitivity, I think, or a certain attunedness to what's happening in the world, what's happening in people around them. And then, so the irony or the curse of that is you're then perpetually looking for a kind of validation. You're going to be sensitive to criticism. You're going to be wondering what other people are thinking. And then there's also kind of an alienation, I think, that comes from making things that people consume. You're making it for yourself, but then at some point, you're kind of flinging it to the public and you've already moved on to the next thing while they're interested in what you've done or who you've been.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, as Shakespeare said, we this way, you that way. That's great risk. That's great wisdom. There's really nothing there, any more than there would be between coming up to a great thoracic surgeon at dinner and saying, you know what, gosh, I'm so thrilled by what you did to my Aunt Agnes over there. Where do you get your ideas? Right?

• 16:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And like you see it with athletes too, you know, after the game, they go, you know, so where does that come from? Or how did you do that? What were you thinking? And the answer is they weren't thinking anything at all. They were doing their job. They were locked in in the moment. So there's also this kind of alienation that I think you experience in any kind of elite performance where there is a kind of an otherworldliness quality to it. Like when you really get it right, obviously it's you that did it, but there's some part of you that you're not regularly accessing that came from it or it wouldn't be so extraordinary. I don't know if you agree with that?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Well, of course I do. But there's something else about being about prominence. And Tolstoy makes this point in the epilogue to War and Peace. Everybody should read War and Peace. Best book ever written. It's a real page turner. He says, what is power? Right? He says, the savage sees the pups of the railroad train. And then here's

• 17:47Speaker 01

  So woo woo woo chug a chug and then sees this big locomotive. So the savage thinks, obviously, since I saw the puffs first, the puffs were causing the the railroad train. And he says, the same is true of Napoleon. He says, why would five million Frenchmen march into Russia? Right? Because this one guy said so? No. On the other hand, there is such a thing as a personal power of the mass. What is it? And I think that's a question that we're all looking at today when we see some people, you know, your viewership is free to determine the side that they loathe, who have nothing other than prominence. I mean, people who you wouldn't hire to to take out your trash,

• 18:31Speaker 01

  who were running for huge public offices because they're prominent. How did they get prominent? Fuck, I don't know. But there they are. And so because they're prominent, those people, and you and I, tend to imbue them with superhuman qualities, whether your side of the aisle, in which case you're superhuman good, or the other side of the aisle, in which case you say they're monsters. Right? When they're just they're just prominent. We just saw them first.

• 18:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and and the the scarcity of it is what creates the value that very few people are that famous or are that powerful or have done that. And then it becomes sort of a it its own motivating force.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yes, also, we tend to believe, all of us, what we heard first. Right? And I was talking to a friend of mine who's a retired career cop. And she was talking about that. She said, if you ever get in the position, God forbid, where the cops have to show up at your house, be very careful what you tell them because they're going to believe what they heard first. And to get that idea out of their mind is is going to be difficult. And it occurred to me the same thing is true in jokes. For example, the old joke about these missionaries are caught by the cannibals. The cannibals say, uh, well, you know, you shouldn't be missionizing here. So we're going to give you two choices, death or kiki. Right. Everybody knows this joke, right? They say to the first guy, what do you want?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Death or kiki? He says, I'll take kiki. So they shave him, they cut off his ears, they paint them blue and they sodomize him. Then they turn to the second missionary and said, okay, I have two choices. What do you want? Death or kiki? He says, I'll take death. They say, well, you shall have the death you desire, but first kiki. So I told a joke to some guy going seven, I said, I said, kik, but first kiki. And I heard him mumbling, yes, but first mungo bongo, but first mungo. Cause that was the way he heard this joke the first time, right?

• 20:30Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  But whether it's mungo, gongo or kiki makes no difference whatever to the joke. Nonetheless, he was inspired to remember that I'd told the joke incorrectly. So that's the primogeniture of the idea. And you put that idea in a kid's head, you know, as a young kid, it's going to be difficult to get that idea out of their head. And what's even more difficult with kids, because they don't realize that they receive an idea.

• 20:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I've, I've been talking about this because I have young kids and I've just been sort of amazed at just how terrible most children's books are. You know, they're funny or they're cute or they're absurd, but there actually is no sort of lesson there, right? And that the, the sort of purpose of stories in the ancient world, up until actually relatively recently, was to sort of tell these stories over and over again, to sort of inculcate the values that society was supposed to be built around. And so, yeah, it's, you hear these ideas over and over and over again as a kid and they sort of become true, the stories that we tell in art and literature and movies and.

• 21:36Ryan Holiday?

  Plays was supposed to be around repeating the same values and to watch people wrestle with those values, sometimes living up to them, sometimes falling short of them. But that was always the purpose of stories, I felt.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Well, it still is, and that's the purpose of dramatists, right? It's not like, because drama in movies and TV and the stage has really become like the bad children's book. It's a regurgitation of ideas which someone thinks might be acceptable, but it's not entertaining because when we hear the bedtime story, we go to the movies, we want to suspend our disbelief, as you say, and be taken out of ourselves because that's the real benefit. We're taken out of ourselves rather than being forced back upon our prejudices. So you can get people to stand up and scream about anything, right? Because at the end of a play, because we enjoy to stand up and scream, yay, yay, yay.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  But the real task is to take people, they say, a person rises refreshed from prayers, his prayers have been answered, to give them something that took them, just like the kid's bedtime story. Well, you can say you can't tell the kid the bedtime story about, and then everybody is eaten by a big, that scary wolf, but of course you can, right? Because, okay, so, oh, yeah, I get it, I get it. Well, I really paid attention to that, rather than telling the kid. So what education's become in this country is a corrupt and obscene version of the bad bedtime story. I'm going to tell you everything that some educator, whatever they are, figured would make you into a better person, right? But it's not the job of education to make people into better people.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  It's the job of fucking teaching something.

• 23:30Ryan Holiday?

  So do you remember when you were taught the Stoics? How did you come to find Stoicism?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  It's a long time ago, and I don't, I don't remember, but I've always adopted the principles as simple as possible, right? So I used to put on, engrave on my watch, what hinders you? And I I started using those principles very, very early on when I started forming theater companies and acting schools and say, what's actually going on here? What's the scene actually about? And what can the actor actually do in the scene? And Stanislavski would say, you can't tell the actor to remember your childhood. Because when you say some remember your childhood, or what does this make you think of? Their first response is, oh, right, they stop.

• 24:14Ryan Holiday?

  Okay. Yes.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  But so Stanislavski says, you can't ask an actor to do anything more complex than please go over there and open the window. So that was a whole phrase that changed my life. Oh, okay, I cannot ask the da, being a human being, I realize I can't do anything more complex than open the window. The actors are human beings, they can't either. So what are we left with? What's the scene about? What's the one thing that the actor wants in the scene? Ask the actor to do that and then throw the rest of this stuff out the window.

• 24:45Ryan Holiday?

  So so why did you engrave what hinders you on your watch? What did that mean to you?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  It occurred to me, as the Stoics would say, that anything that any sentence that becomes what I wish is a proclamation about something that's never going to happen. Oh, and the other one is, you know, I really should. So this becomes more important to me as I get older. I find myself saying, oh, I really should. And I realize that not as a way to to revel in my oh, weep, weep, weep, how great I am because I'm no fucking good, but rather it's a prompt, right? The and the third, the third thing is, why do I always? Right? And I realized that from trying to apply the stoical principles. But if you say, why do I always? That's another way to reward yourself for not doing anything. If you state it as a question, not why do I always?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Well, there's no there's no answer to that. But you state it as I always, right? Rather, oh, why do I always pick the wrong girl? You state it as I always pick the wrong girl. And then you can ask, why do I do that? Is that what I want to do? What would I rather do? And what are the things that would would change my behavior?

• 25:54Ryan Holiday?

  And and the reminder of that what hinders you to apply the Stoic idea would be that that actually what's getting in your way is the way or is a kind of opportunity. That's that's what the reminder is for you?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  No, it's you have to give it a name, right? What what is actually stopping me? If I can name it, I can address it and I can perhaps defeat it. But if I can't name it, I say I'm gonna go to some fucking therapist an hour or five hours a week for eighty five years, right? Obviously, standpoint of a guy in space, what are you doing? You're enjoying yourself with a therapist, right? What what are you calling it? You're calling it, quote, getting better. What does getting better mean? Well, I can't quite describe it, but.

• 26:37Ryan Holiday?

  I've heard you say that you don't think there is such thing as character, that you sort of believe that in the Aristotelian sense that we just are what we do.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Well, that's true. I wrote that about the theater. There's no such thing as a character. It's just lines on a page.

• 26:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Right? You say, where did the guy go to school or what might the guy? There's nobody there. It's just you. But the same thing as Aristotle says about people, character in general is simply, I saw what the guy did and therefore I'm going to make an assessment of the guy's character, right? I got I got enough information, I can make a pretty good assessment upon which I can base future decisions.

• 27:18Ryan Holiday?

  Someone told me once, like, there's no such thing as love. There is only loving actions.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 27:24Ryan Holiday?

  You don't believe that?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  No, I know there's such a thing as love.

• 27:27Ryan Holiday?

  Then wouldn't there be such a thing as the character? If the idea is it's lines on the page or it is what you do, can't we say the same thing about love? But you can say you love someone, but if your actions run contrary to that, do you really? Does it really matter?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  If your actions are contrary, it's not love. Like somebody that we have this terrible concept that we came up with eighty years ago called hate crimes, right? But what are the love crimes?

• 27:50Ryan Holiday?

  I guess we're getting far afield, but I would agree, there's no such thing as a love crime, but there is a crime motivated by pure financial interest and then a crime rooted by a specific hatred for a specific group, no?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Well, what difference is that to the victim?

• 28:05Ryan Holiday?

  There's no difference to the victim, but there's a difference to society and how we might treat this person, whether they they could be potentially rehabilitated or whether they need to be locked up and kept from other people like that.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Well, no, because that's why we have laws, right? Because the the the idea of the law is what is prohibited? Did the person do it? What is the penalty for having done it? Because you can explain away their motives forever, right? There never was a young kid brought into court whose mother didn't show up and say Johnny's a good kid, right? That's what they do. So instead of the mother, you've got a lawyer, as used to say, a liar, whose job is to come in and explain why what you saw actually didn't happen or what they did actually wasn't the they didn't do it on purpose or it was some other guy, right? So the problem is, everything becomes, as my father would say, purely suppository.

• 29:01Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting. Yeah, you seem to have a very kind of black and white worldview. I've always seen this in your interviews and in your plays. I mean, even your point about just say the fucking line or, you know, there's no such thing as a hate crime. Do you find that that people make reality too complex and you're you sort of go towards simplicity or how do you think about that?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Well, you know, somebody said, what choice did I have? Nobody ever says, what choice did I have, other than in a situation? But they did have a choice, but they don't want to face it, right? So I'm interested in the theater and in drama and how people act. So that being the case, I'm interested in how I act, right? Am I am I a good person? I don't think particularly so. Am I better than anyone else? I don't know. In some places, yes, and in some places, no. But I would like to, if I were a better man, apply the same strictures to myself that I'd like to apply to others. Well, why did XYZ do that? Okay, Dave, don't you do it?

• 30:02Ryan Holiday?

  Have you always just found yourself fascinated by what makes people do what they do? Or are you fascinated more in the rhythms of how they communicate and present themselves to the world? Or is it some combination of the two?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. There are two things. I've always been fascinated by what people do because I didn't understand what they did. And I grew up, I guess, with a sense of wonder because people were doing some crazy fucking things around me. And it was called human beings. And the other thing was that they kept telling me I didn't understand because I didn't, right? But so I was given over to one of the great joys of life, one of the great joys of childhood, which is daydreaming. So we've taken that away because of these devices. And there's a great piece in Anna Karenina where Karenin is trying to correct his son's step on.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  And he's trying to teach him about a verb and an adverb, right? And the kid is looking out the window, he's daydreaming. And Karenin's getting very mad at his son. We have to learn the difference between a verb and an adverb. And the kid is looking out the window and he's looking at a bird. And he's thinking, wow, look at that bird on a tree. The shape of the sitting bird absolutely mimics the shape of a leaf. What kind of a world is it? The creator of this world has adapted. How did that work? And the kid is thinking these incredibly deep things, which is what daydreaming is, right? And Karenin comes over and he whacks the kid. So I was that kid. I don't know if you got a chance to read that book, St. Ives, did you?

• 31:43Ryan Holiday?

  I haven't read St. Ives yet, but I loved Chicago. That's one of my favorite novels.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. I'm very proud of that. I think you're gonna like St. Ives because it's a book about Stoicism. It's an imagined memoir of a prep school. And it's my imagined vision of a perfect school. Of, you know, there's a teacher and a student and a board for them to sit on. I'm very, I'm proud of it, but I don't think I've ever said that about anything before, but I'm really proud of that book.

• 32:11Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you have, you have a, a line in there about the stoic, and I think you've said this before, that not everyone knows that stoic just means porch. And you say the stoics are porch guys.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:21Ryan Holiday?

  That they're sort of vision, Zeno's this guy, and I was just there at the Stoic Pocule. That they're just sort of sitting on this porch, this long marble hallway, supported by columns, you know, under some paintings, and they're just kind of shooting the shit about life. You know, we tend to think of philosophy as something, I don't know, much more abstract and theoretical and highfalutin than that, but it's really just people talking about why we do what we do and does it need to be that way? Is there a better way to be a person in the world that's slightly less frustrating and aggravating and miserable?

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, because dealing with actors and dealing with, producing with the audience, it's all, does it work? Does it not work? What are you trying to do? What's the scene about? Am I getting to it? Do I need this line? Is the audience beating me to the punch? Do I need another line? Does the scene work? What's wrong with the fucking play? And it always comes down to what is the objective of the, of the protagonist? Everything which is not the objective of the protagonist, you gotta throw it out.

• 33:29Ryan Holiday?

  Have you read any of Seneca's plays?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  No, I don't think I've read the plays, no.

• 33:34Ryan Holiday?

  It's fascinating that, you know, one of the great stoic philosophers who's also, you know, sort of trapped in this dysfunctional relationship with Nero, who's losing his mind, is also like a famous playwright. And I sometimes think about what Seneca must have thought about releasing things to an audience, you know, and he, he says that like, because he, he sort of does go sideways, you know, he gets caught up in Nero and he gets corrupted and, you know, is, is complicit. And, and then he writes this in one of his things, he says, but the, one of the things that I learned, being a playwright, is that the audience will forgive a bad play if you give it a good ending. And Seneca has this sort of magnificent ending where Nero demands his suicide and he sort

• 34:19Ryan Holiday?

  of goes out bravely. And, and so Seneca, for thousands of years, has been admired as this philosopher, but also proves this point that, you know, you can get them, you can fuck up the middle, but if the beginning and the end are pretty good, the audience will stay with you.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Maybe. I mean, here's the thing. When the lights go down, you have their attention. Right? It's yours. If you can keep it for that first moment, the question is, can you keep it for the second moment? And the thing about the second act is an old joke. Guys are sitting around in New York off Broadway at a theater. And one says, how's your play? And he says, I'm having second act problems. Everyone starts to laugh because everybody has second act problems. Because the whole, the whole point of the second act is the problem which the protagonist cannot figure out. He spends the first act trying to figure out the problem as he understands it. And at the end of the first act, he turns away and says, I was completely wrong. I don't understand the problem at all.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  So the second act is in the belly of the beast, as Joseph Campbell said. What in the world is going on here? So it's very hard to figure your way out of that as a writer. Because what you're going to figure out, if you can stick with it, is your position is the same thing as the protagonist. You have misunderstood the play.

• 35:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and the wrestling with what the motivations are and how they're going to get through it, that's, that's the whole thing. You can, you can set up an interesting premise and you can come to a satisfying conclusion. But the why is really what haunts us. And I do think that's the interesting thing about Seneca. There's a fascinating book by James Rahm, who's a professor at Bard, about Seneca in his time with Nero. And I find it endlessly fascinating that this, this guy who writes this, you know, beautiful philosophical writing, you know, believes in these principles, would spend so many years, you know, working with this deranged brute who's trying to murder his family and, you know, whatever.

• 36:16Ryan Holiday?

  But that, that is, I guess, ultimately what makes drama interesting, the, the infinite complexities of people and why they, why they do what they do.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. So that's the, the task of a director. Nobody knows how to direct a play anymore. I mean, there may be some, but I haven't met them. Because it all comes down to throwing away everything. Which is not the task of the protagonist to obtain a specific goal. Because the audience might go along with it as they do in movies because they got pretend two people pretending to have intercourse or two guys shooting each other with guns. Right. Try to keep people's in effect, reducing all film to pornography because you got to give them a treat once in a while to keep their attention. If somebody said to Betty Davis, you have to sleep with guys in order to get ahead in show business. And she said,

• 37:08Speaker 01

  yeah, you don't have any any talent. Right?

• 37:11Ryan Holiday?

  This story you told about, uh, you know, the student who's being lectured on on words when they're looking at it nature. I have a story in the, in the book that I'm just finishing about Monet, where he, you know, he falls in love with painting. He's has this talent. He wants to be a painter. And so his parents try to send him to this fancy painting school. And instead he gets drafted into the French army. And they, they try to use this as leverage. They go, you know, look, we can buy your way out of the army if you agree to go to school. And he's like, no, no, the army is exactly where I want to be. Wants to be sent into an African regiment because he thinks the light in Africa is going to be incredible. And he'd been particularly influenced by Delacroix's paintings, which

• 37:52Ryan Holiday?

  a lot of which he'd done in Africa. And so this is, this is where he gets his real education as a painter is, is in the army, you know, sort of marching under the, the beating sun and in North Africa. It's this weird impulse we have with education that we try to sort of sit at your desk, shut up, do the stuff, when maybe that's not actually where we're going to learn the things we need to learn. And that's what I like about the idea of the, the Stoics just sort of sitting on the porch, shooting the shit.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I met a couple of great teachers and very fortunate to meet a couple of magnificent teachers in, in my life that changed my life and, uh, changed the way that I, because to a certain extent, my life, it's from 50, 60 years as a teacher. The question is, Dave, you and every other motherfucker in the West has been abused by the education system to some extent. Yes. Whether that was physically abused, sexually abused, mentally abused, or just bored to fucking flinders. Why is everybody sitting on their ass listening to some fool read from an electric plan? And so I thought a lot about, you know, as we see to California over here, the taxes

• 39:06Speaker 01

  are obscene and what are they being used for? God knows, but we got the worst schools in the country. So I thought a lot about teachers lately. In fact, they wrote a play about this called Oleanna. And so this professor was trying to do good and this young woman was trying to understand what's required of her and they end up killing each other. It's a classical tragedy, right? They're both trying to do good and they both end up destroying each other. So the question is, what are we doing for children? Did you feel like you had a good education? Well, I had a terrible education. I went to the Chicago Public Schools and the teachers had been born in the 19th century and it was all line up and sit down and shut up and blah, blah, blah.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  And I failed every, every course because I just couldn't, wouldn't study, wouldn't do it. Just bored the fuck out of me. Then by accident, when I was 13, 14, I went to this great school in Chicago, a private school called the Francis Parker School, which at that time spectacular because several of the teachers had been Holocaust survivors, I'm talking about in the 60s, who got out under Hitler. And these were people who had multiple doctorates from the universities of Europe. And they came to Chicago and they couldn't get work because they didn't have a teaching certificate. So the Francis Parker School hired them and I worked with some of those, some of those

• 40:34Speaker 01

  teachers and they, they changed my life. One of the ways they changed my life is they said, you know, you're actually really smart. They didn't say you're really smart, but although I was failing the courses, right? Sure. And one of them said, a hole in Latin grammar is like a hole in your shoe. Fix it.

• 41:04Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the question that kids ask is like, why am I learning this? What's the point of this? And the impulse that we have to dismiss that question because we don't have a good answer is probably in and of itself, the indictment of most of the educational system in this country.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Well, the good answer is somebody who's interested in transmitting. What Milton Friedman said, it's a heritage. He said, the way that we do things here is actually a communal heritage. Right? We do this, we don't do that. It's a communal heritage. So that's what schools should be doing rather than, quote, good works. Right? Because the question is, how can you take a kid and have him take French for four years? And he can't order a cup of coffee. Right? So that some people like the Waldorf schools or maybe like the Montessori schools. So you don't have to teach them to read, you know? Let them come in when they're eight and they can learn everything that they need to know in three months, which of course they can.

• 42:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, when they have a motivating reason for wanting to learn things, that's always going to be a more powerful force than discipline, structure, consequences, et cetera. It's always been interesting to me because I hear from lots of parents would be like, what's a, what's a good, you know, introduction to the Stoics for my 13 year old or for my 15 year old or my 17 year old? How do I introduce my kids to these stuff? I'm fascinated by our impulse to find intermediary works and not to give them or encourage them or make them feel that they are capable of reading and understanding the classics. Right? Like 16 year olds in ancient Greece and Rome were, were, were reading the Odyssey and

• 42:52Ryan Holiday?

  memorizing it. And we sort of baby our kids when it comes to ideas and books. We, we, we need people to explain the things to them as opposed to giving them these difficult, imperfect, complicated, even violent.

• 43:08Ryan Holiday?

  And, uh, you know, um, inappropriate texts and having them really wrestle with with those ideas. And that you understand that this is not a text you're supposed to read one time, but something that you're supposed to read and reread and evolve with as you as you evolve and grow yourself.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, see, the great upheaval which we're experiencing in the West now, as it's basically the second or the third industrial revolution, where everything changed when the industrial revolution, steam came in and and mass production came in, the people left the farms. So all of a sudden, everything changed. So then we have the the second part of the industrial revolution, the end of the 19th century. People have left the farms and they came to the cities for industrialization. And so now we see that that industrialization of this and the cities has died because of the internet. So the people are out of their fucking minds. The question is to what can they recur? And the answer to to most of them is fear and hatred.

• 44:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the these sort of ancient timeless sort of primal forces of of humanity. That the the energy that's always there sort of right beneath the surface.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure, because the people in Salem Village, right, 1641, it was, were under constant threat of Indian attack. They were being savaged constantly. They just couldn't stand it, right? Drove them crazy.

• 44:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  So they they decided to start burning old women at the stake, right? That went along for a couple of few, a couple of years. And then they kind of forgot about it and said, okay.

• 44:49Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the energy burns itself out a little bit or things stabilize and then you don't need the catharsis the way that you did before.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  That's right. So the same thing is happening now, except instead of old women, it's the Jews. But that's that's been happening for a while. So we're we're kind of used to it.

• 45:05Ryan Holiday?

  Anti-Semitism being sort of the oldest virus that there is.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, been around a while.

• 45:11Ryan Holiday?

  And you see demagogues, whether you're talking about those in Greece or Rome or in the Middle Ages or or in the, you know, the Great Depression. They sort of tend to tap into the same forces and have the the same kind of energy. It might change a little bit regarding what medium it's happening in or, you know, the the person's individual style. But demagogues basically do what demagogues do.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the uh, somebody says Dennis Prager, he said, uh, is the Torah about what's happening? He said, no, the Torah is about what's always happening. So the Torah, the Old Testament is about human nature. New Testament is about aspiration, but the Old Testament is about human, human nature. And that's where the Declaration and the Constitution come from, is people got together and it wasn't an aspirational document. It was a how to guide to keep human nature in check.

• 46:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, it was, it was looking at the sort of classical lessons of history and saying, hey, how do we encourage the positive forces in humanity? And put up guardrails against the negative forces in humanity? And set up a, an imperfect system in an imperfect world. It's a little bit better than how we've done it before.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you see today, but demagoguery is I know what to do, I'm better than everybody, you can be better than everybody. If you vote for me, and we're going to have some golden age. If you just hate the people I tell you to hate and give me your fucking money. But if you look at the Constitution, it was obviously written by guys who'd been around the block. Who'd been involved in business and got cheated or cheated each other, or guys who got into X, Y, and Z. It's like hiring a safecracker, right, to design your, your security system.

• 47:05Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I've always been struck by how young the founders were, right? And so, you know, I think the average age is like thirty five. It's not so much that they were incredibly personally experienced, although many of them were. But it's also that they, they had borrowed from, you know, two thousand years of, of experience. From the ancients and from the greats. I mean, I joke about this all the time, but the, the most famous play in eighteenth century America that the founders had seen over and over and over again. In addition to Shakespeare and all the others that they'd watched, was Joseph Addison's Cato, right? They watched this play about the Stoics so many times that most of the great lines in the revolution are them just cribbing from Addison.

• 47:48Ryan Holiday?

  And the way that somebody might say, you know, coffee is for closers or something today. And if you don't have a familiarity with the canon, you're not going to recognize that that's a riff.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:59Ryan Holiday?

  But if you do, then you know what to recognize.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, indeed. So I mean, the more I look at the Constitution, the cooler it is. Cause somebody say, oh, well, this is going to be finally going to say, wait a second. The other guy say, no, no, no. If this was the law, here's what I'd do to circumvent it. Oh dude, they say, okay, well, we got to take care of that. So I said that the Constitution comes down to this. One child cuts the cake. The other child gets the first piece.

• 48:28Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and, and I do think, and we probably disagree politically. I, I do think the problem with where we are now is not any one person, but that the whole system was about a set of interlocking or interconnecting offices that were supposed to be dependent. The fundamental assumption of the founders was that each individual office or branch or representative would zealously assert their prerogative. Right? And that this would, these would check each other. So look, again, you could think whatever you want about Trump, but we'd be in a very different situation if we had Trump and a strong Senate and a strong Congress.

• 49:11Ryan Holiday?

  Like if we had a working legislative branch, it would relieve a lot of the pressure on the judicial branch. And it would also reduce the incentives for the president to be such a, you know, unitary executive. I think one of the weird parts about the moment we're in today to me is the willingness with which a lot of people who supposedly strived very hard to get the power they have, seem to be willing to hand that power over to a charismatic, demagogic figure.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not going to ask you who you're talking about, but the question to me is looking at the, the current mess, which is called human nature, right?

• 49:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  What the framers did is they said, here's how we're going to run our country. The question of government is not what's right. The question of government, the way you keep it limited is you say, what's the law? Because our ability to determine what's right. Changes from person to person and changes over time. What you think is right now, you didn't think it was 12 and it's not when you're gonna think it was 80.

• 50:16Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  And so this is really the difference between a Christian and a Jewish understanding. Because the Christians say, yes, it's a great idea. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Right? In the Torah, it's written very, very, very differently. It says, what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. Because I, I might wanna do unto others what I wanna do unto me, they might not like it. Right?

• 50:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  It's not that I think I'm right all day long, I know I'm right, just like you do. Right? But I can restrain myself from doing what I know hurts me. And so that's what the, the Constitution is a much more Old Testament than a New Testament document.

• 51:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a set of duties and obligations that you're supposed to, you're supposed to uphold. Even when you don't like it, even when it runs counter to your party interests, even when it's short-term. So I think, yeah, we're in a moment where it's like, hey, Congress apportioned this money. It has to be faithfully executed by the executive branch, even if they don't like it. If they don't like it, then they have to go through Congress to fix it, right? That's how that's supposed to work. And, and I do think the founders perhaps overestimated, or perhaps it says something about the modern world, that this idea of duty and responsibility, you know, that the idea, hey, I swore an oath, or hey, this is, this is the job of a lawyer. I'm supposed to protect my client, even if I think they're guilty.

• 51:47Ryan Holiday?

  That there's this kind of, yeah, as you said, Old Testament, but also sort of classical sense of duty and obligation that I, I do feel is missing in the modern world.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Well, it's missing in every world, right? Human nature doesn't change. Tolstoy, my guy again, says, it's a mistake to say in these times as if human nature ever changed. Everybody's all, everybody's always looking for an out. And any law is going to have to be executed, if not with precision, perhaps with some restraint of conscience. And if you don't have that, doesn't matter, doesn't matter with the lawyers.

• 52:21Ryan Holiday?

  Right. One of the knocks on the Stoics is like, oh, it's a little, they're a little depressing, you know, and it's like, the life is fucking depressing. What are you talking about? These were people who were exiled and had their families executed and lived through plagues and wars and disasters. There is something, I think, too, about the modern world where we expect everything to be awesome and wonderful, and that's just not what history is.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Well, the problem with that, of course, is that, as they say, what the eye does not see, the heart will not lust after. So we're constantly seeing these images and these stupid fucking machines, which one didn't see in the, in the, uh, in the olden days, and they get us all ginned up. Who's, who's strong enough to resist it? Nobody. Nobody is. So the only way to resist is to do it, is to do without it. And, uh, because it's, uh, it's an addiction to say, because what's, what is news? News doesn't say, stand by, news flash, everything's great.

• 53:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Like, news is always inciting us to want more news because it gets us mad and it gets us frightened. And in that, it's no different than a cigarette. Right? I want a cigarette because I'm bored. I want a cigarette because I'm happy. I want a cigarette. Something triggers in me a desire for the cigarette. Something triggers in me a desire to turn this stupid fucking machine. And people will always say, why are you on that machine? And what does the other person always say? You know, oh, Ryan, we're out to dinner. Why are you on that machine? What do you say?

• 53:56Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, I'm getting an email. I, you know, there's always something.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's usually prefaced by, the explanation is, I just have to do this.

• 54:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. Of course. Just this one little thing.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. But so if you break it down, well, no, you don't, you're telling me, you're explaining to me that you're an addict. I have to do this.

• 54:16Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Right?

• 54:17Ryan Holiday?

  Because the, the purpose of the cigarette is to smoke the next cigarette. That, that, that's what it's, it's about. And, and then each news story, if the news story was conclusive, then you would not have to watch any more news.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:30Ryan Holiday?

  The whole point of the news is to leave it just unresolved enough, you will remain tuned in, or you will check in tomorrow. Otherwise, you just read a book and be done.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was having a bad night, a night hanging out with my wife, a Sunday night, and it was very, very Sunday nighty, right? And I was going, oh, weep, weep, weep the world, oh, weep, weep, weep my children, oh, weep, weep, weep. And she said, you know, this is the grandmother of all Sunday nights tonight. I said, yeah, you're right. It's, it's terrifying, terrible. What should we do? She said, oh, I know, let's read the Torah. So we did, we read the Torah, read the Torah portion. So it was, it was great because we made that choice rather than saying, oh, what can I do? I'd give up drinking, but I'm, I'm an alcoholic, right?

• 55:19Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  We made, made a physical choice to get ourselves out of our own mind by doing something that interested us. And at the end of an hour, we were refreshed, right? Because we'd heard the word of God, maybe, but certainly because we'd spent the hour doing something which was more interesting than our own sick self-examination.

• 55:43Ryan Holiday?

  Whenever I pick up my phone, whenever I go on social media, I never put it down and think, I'm so glad I did that.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:50Ryan Holiday?

  But almost every time I turn to some old, you know, beautiful work of art or literature, I'm proud of myself. I feel better. I put some distance between me and the moment or distance between me and, uh, and my own thoughts, and I learned something. And we'd all be better off if we did more of that, I think. Well, that's a lovely place to wrap up. I'm a, I'm a big fan and I'm, I'm so, I'm honored we got to chat.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Me too. Please do read that book, Say Dives. I think you're really gonna appreciate it.

• 56:16Ryan Holiday?

  It got sent a little late. It's on my list now.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Excellent. What's dripping talking to you?

• 56:21Ryan Holiday?

  Likewise.

• 56:24Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. 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.