Steven Pressfield on Battling Resistance and Winning With Love

Ryan speaks to his friend and fellow author Steven Pressfield about battling resistance and becoming who you were meant to be, the triumph of good over evil and ultimately love, his new novel A Man At Arms, and more. Steven Pressfield is the author of several critically acclaimed books including Gates of Fire, an epic novel about the battle of Thermopylae, and The War of Art, a guide to unlocking the creative potential inside yourself. 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. 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. 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 LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. This episode is also brought to you by Ladder, a painless way to get the life insurance coverage you need for those you care about most. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. This episode is also brought to you by Scribd, the e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. We’re offering listeners of The Daily Stoic a free 60 day trial. Go to try.scribd.com/stoic for your free trial. That’s try.scribd.com/stoic to get 60 days of Scribd for 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 Steven Pressfield:Homepage: https://stevenpressfield.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/spressfield Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/steven_pressfield/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StevePressfield YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/StevePressfield See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:44Speaker 00

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've had this person on the show before, and I'm having them again because not only are they one of my favorite people of all time, but I think they are one of the best living writers of our time and certainly have influenced me more than just about any other writer that I've ever read. I'm talking about Steven Pressfield. I have his book, The War of Art, right here. This is my very well-worn, well-thumbed through copy. I don't think any of my books would be possible without this book. I reread Steven's book, Gates of Fire, at the beginning of the pandemic. I loved it as much the second time as I did the first time when I read it almost 15 years ago.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  I remember it being delivered to my college dorm room. I feel so humbled and flattered and inspired by the fact that I get to know Steven, that I get to send him early drafts of my books. He's just been a wonderful mentor and inspiration to me. And so I was very excited to get his new book, A Man at Arms. I think his best book since Gates of Fire. It's just an incredible story about a man, not at arms, although it is a man at arms, but a man who lives by a code. And it's a really inspiring, fascinating historical novel, as all Steven's books are. We have a great conversation today about Stoicism, about battling the resistance, about becoming who you're meant to become.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  And about the triumph of good over evil, which I think is the real core theme of Stephen's books. I would actually say it's not the triumph of good over evil. It's the triumph of love over all things. And that might seem like a strange description of a guy who writes books about Napoleon and Alexander the Great and King Leonidas of the 300 Spartans. But at the core of it, I think Stephen's books are really about love and the power that love has to help us do incredible things. I'm so excited for you to listen to this interview with Steven Pressfield. His new book, A Man at Arms, is out now. Please read it. Read Gates of Fire, read War of Art. And of course, check out his Writing Wednesday pieces. Follow him on social media.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Just a great dude. Here's Steven Pressfield, A Man at Arms, and some stoicism.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  So we'll talk about the book, which I absolutely loved. But I was curious, how many books is this for you now?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  I think it's 20.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  20, wow. So what keeps you going? I mean, obviously, at some point, one could stop or rest, but you seem to be always in the middle of a project. What keeps you going?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  It's probably the same as you. You know, I mean, I feel if I stop, I'm going to be in the grave, you know? Plus, I keep having ideas. You know, I keep having things I want to do. So, I mean, what keeps you going?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Well, that sort of was going to be my next question. Could you stop if you wanted to?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  No, I couldn't. I really couldn't. You know what? You may have heard this before, but a friend of mine has this analogy. Apparently, rats, rats, their teeth like grow back up into their brain. If they don't keep gnawing on something to wear down the teeth, at the front of the teeth grow back in their brain and kill them. So they gotta just keep gnawing. So I'm like a rat that just has to keep gnawing.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Is it because it's funny, you have this concept of the resistance, which goes through your work and is a very real force. And then I think about on a regular basis. But I almost feel like for some writers, for some of us, there's also whatever the opposite of the resistance is, which is some sort of compulsion, almost addiction, that you couldn't stop if you wanted to.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  There's a lot of truth to that. In fact, right now, as you know, I'm really in the throes of promoting a man at arms, right? So I'm doing podcasts, I'm doing all kinds of stuff like that. And I'm dying to get back to writing, you know, it's the opposite of resistance. I just sort of want to get back to my home turf and do something.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  No, I know that feeling very well. I, I'm not talking about it, but you, you were nice enough to read the new manuscript for me. And so I fit, it's done, right? You know, you, you sort of get to that place where, where the book is done, then it's sort of, it goes through the editorial process. So you might see it a few more times, but the vast majority of the creative lifting is done. And I don't want to say it's a grieving, but there's an emptiness that happens. Like I read this book in October, your book in October, and here we are in March, it's coming out. You've been, you've been sort of done with it and then probably thinking about your next thing. But there does see, there's like a hole in you that's not being filled when you're not writing.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm definitely, I know you know this, right? I'm from the school of that there should never be a gap between books, you know, that you should already be eight chapters into your next book when you finish the other one. And that's for that reason, because I think it is a grieving. And it's, it's like not going to the gym, right? If you knock off for, you know, a few days or a month, it's really hard when you go back, you know? So, yeah, every time I've stopped and kind of fallen into that dip, like Seth Godin says, it's not good.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  You know what's weird about that period too? So it's like, when you're writing a book, obviously, it takes so much time and so much energy. And I noticed this because I'm, I'm, I'm sort of in the research, thinking about phase of the next book. So I haven't really started yet, but.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  I noticed that I'm still spending the same amount of time at the office, even though I'm not writing. You know what I mean? So, so it's like, I, there's that idea of Parkinson's law, which is that the task expands to fit however much time you give it.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  But so there's this weird thing where when you're working on a book or a really big project, or maybe you're training for a fight, or, you know, whatever the thing the person is doing is, where it forces you to focus and concentrate in such a way that you get so much more done, then you lift that. You would think that suddenly you have all this free time. And in fact, actually, it's the opposite. You have the exact same amount of time. You're just not, you're just not creatively fulfilled. And you feel like a, suddenly a collapse of meaning. It's this weird experience.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Yes, it's true, which is why I always want to try to have something there that's the equivalent of that, you know? Because it feeds you, you know? And, and to not do it is sort of whatever the opposite of feeding is, it kind of drains you, you know? If you're a creative type of person.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  Is there some, the, the Stokes would say we should always question anything that's sort of not driving us, but anything that, that we're not sort of in charge of. And so sometimes I may be a little suspicious of that. Obviously, look, it's a much more healthy, it's a much healthier of an addiction than heroin or sex or something. But there is a part of me that goes,

• 8:01Speaker 00

  it, it can't be good that I can't stop.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Ah, well, you know, there's sort of, I suppose there's, maybe there's a dark side and a light side of this, you know? There probably is an unhealthy thing when you're addicted to something like that. But the other thing is, like, to me, I just was thinking of this, in these terms, just the other day. As a writer, you feel like you've got, like, an underground river flowing, right? You're on the surface and maybe you can't see it, but you can hear that gurgling underwater. And that's that kind of, or underground. And that's that creative flow. And if you don't somehow tap into that or allow it to come to the surface. Bad things start to happen. So I, I, I think there's probably a dark side and a bright side to this, you know?

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like the Langston Hughes thing. What happens to a raisin in the sun? What, what happens if you don't, if you don't let it out? It goes somewhere bad.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it does, you know? I, I, well, I don't know. I know I've told you this thing about, you know, right up the hill from me, right above me, Tom Loughlin used to live there. Did I tell you this story about him?

• 9:10Speaker 00

  No.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Tom Loughlin and Billy Jack. Do you remember him? Oh, you don't? Oh, there was a movie called Billy Jack, like probably before you were born, but it was a huge hit. It was one of those Kung Fu, fully early. Anyway, Tom Loughlin became a kind of a Jungian therapist. And what he used to do was if people had cancer or some kind of, you know, tumor or something like that, he would, he would sit with them and he would say, is there something, some creative thing that you had that you stopped doing? And a lot of times people would say, well, when I was young, I wanted to be a concert pianist. And I, you know, and, and his therapy was, okay, go back to the piano.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  And, and sure enough, people's cancers went into remission. So it's, his theory obviously was that that energy's got to go somewhere. And if it's not going into a positive way, it's going into something negative in your own body. So there may be something to that.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  That's a very LA story.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  That you can cure a cancer by following your dreams. But I, I do love the, the general concept of, you know, Robert Greene talks about, you know, what's your life's task? And usually we sort of hit upon that when we're young, we have some sense of it. But then we deny it or we come up for, with reasons why we can't pursue it, what you call the resistance. And there's undoubtedly going to be consequences for that in all sorts of ways in your life.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think. To get, I didn't want to get political, but I'm gonna get political. I think a lot of the stuff that you have with the Proud Boys and these other guys that are acting out with guns, if we could speak to them individually and get to know them individually, I would bet a million bucks that each one of them is frustrated in some way by that underground river not being tapped. And so that energy flows out into hating other people and acting out in some kind of negative way.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  I think that's absolutely right. I've got to imagine, you know, if, although some of them certainly do, so it's not a complete solution. But, you know, if you have a wife or a husband and you have kids and you've got a job at the local power plant, you know, you don't have time for any of this nonsense. You don't have time to go play act revolutionary at the Capitol. You've got stuff going on. And so I do think there's, right, there's an element where they call it cognitive surplus. What do you do with the cognitive resources that you're not spending?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  I've never heard that before.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  I read a great book a few years ago where, I think it was by Clay Shirkey, and Clay Shirkey was saying that, you know, Wikipedia is a positive use of the cognitive surplus. We all have a little bit of extra time and we collectively come together and we make Wikipedia, which, as you know, as a researcher, solves so many writing problems for you. You're like, you're like, what was that? And you can figure it out. But, but yeah, QAnon would be the example of the negative results of a cognitive surplus. People have created a preposterous fantasy world based on, you know, lies and hatred and delusion. Where do you spend that energy? And yeah, I got to imagine a good chunk of the population

• 12:36Speaker 00

  is, because of the resistance, you know, abandoned some purposeful or meaningful thing they could be dedicating their life to. And it feels, feels good to be politically active. They're just being politically active in a destructive way.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I hadn't even thought about that before, but I think that like, QAnon and that, all of the, the theory that created these conspiracy theories and all that stuff, that's really a shadow creative expression, you know, that's like a novel. It's as, it's as involved as a novel and it's as creative as a novel. It's wildly creative. It's just going into, you know, a darker channel.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I read an interview with a guy who was like, uh, uh, one of those massive, uh, role playing game creators, like he creates those like Warcraft games. And he was like, that's what this is. This is a endless, cause you know what I mean? That there's always an answer, there's always an explanation, there's always the next thing and just keeps you going. And yeah, these people have been sort of trapped in a shadow world. And, uh, and, and I think a lot of their anger and despair is being weaponized against them by people who are, you know, trying to.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's the real dark side of it, you know, that this, in a way, this sort of fantasy and dark side thing is harmless and it's, if it's just allowed to be just that something exists in your mind, but when it becomes weaponized and turned into some kind of political, then it gets really dangerous.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  And I don't think you wanna, you, you, you don't wanna overstate it, but in a sense, this is what Hitler does as well.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. I was gonna say exact same thing, you know, the protocols of the elders of Zion, all this stuff was the exact same thing.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that in the despair and the brokenness of post-war Germany, he creates a completely preposterous storyline and myth, uh, with no basis in reality, uh, that, that everyone, you know, sort of play acts their way through.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  And then you could argue, and he's a character in my next book, you could argue this is also what great leaders do, right? So de Gaulle does, de Gaulle does the same thing.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, true.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  The, the fantasy world that de Gaulle creates about sort of, uh, France as a world power.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  France as an idea and as a, as a, you know, symbol of resistance is, you know, not as no basis whatsoever in the facts at the time, but he wills it into existence. There's that expression, a, a leader is a dealer in hope. And I think, uh, that's, that's what de Gaulle does.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And he did it so well, you know, and it really worked.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  I mean, Pericles in Ancient Athens was the same thing where, you know, where he, his whole thing was you must fall in love with Athens, you know, and he made the city this some kind of ideal that this engine that could create anything and that could bring people's aspirations to reality. And he sold it and people bought it and it worked.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Well, that's what's so tricky about patriotism or nationalism. You know, these actually aren't necessarily evil things. I mean, no, few people think patriotism is inherently evil. But if you say nationalism, people, especially today, you have an immediate negative reaction. But nationalism could, of course, be a positive thing. You know, there's a lot of nationalism that motivates, you know, the US engagement in the Second World War. And there certainly can be positive nationalism. Yeah, you could argue the nationalism of Athens and the, in the Peloponnesian War. It can be positive. It's just you're playing with fire.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I mean, think about even like sports teams, like the Oakland Raiders, let's say, or I guess they're now the Las Vegas Raiders, the black hole, right?

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And how people dress up into, I mean, it's true for all sports team, right? And their whole identity becomes, you know, consumed. But that's at least a positive harmless thing that's contained within the world of sports where the game's over, you shake hands with the other team and you go on, you know?

• 16:47Speaker 00

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

• 16:54Speaker 00

  I remember a few years ago, I was with my wife and we were in London and we were, we had just walked up from the Tower of London. We were near the London Bridge and I could just hear this, like I could hear this stomping, you know, this loud noise. I couldn't figure out what it was. I mean, it's getting louder and I'm hearing yelling and very confused. And I look up and one of those, you know, those red double decker buses goes by and it's filled with Raider fans.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Really?

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Who are doing the Raiders chant because the Raiders were playing and, you know, they had a London.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  And you're just like, man, you just can't get away from these people.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  That's a scene out of a novel, man. So good. That's great.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  But you do. You're right. Those, those things are, those are, that's a real powerful force. I, I told this story one time. There's a, the, the general Belisarius, you know, in sort of Byzantine Rome, there's a chariot match that, that ends in a sort of a bad outcome that leads to the overthrow of the Roman government. Like,

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Really?

• 17:57Speaker 00

  If the, if the, the, the Bucks win the Super Bowl this year and people are angry about it, and it somehow leads to the Biden administration abdicating, like that's how, that's how integral.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, really.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  You know, politics and sports are, because I do think they play on the same sort of tribal.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. And we're like Rome, America's like Rome, and that we're crazed sports fans. I mean, gladiatorial games, it's not that far away from what, what we're doing now, you know?

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Blood and circuses.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  All right. So, so how do you think about the resistance in your career today? Like what, what? Obviously you've done 20 books now, so, and you have the compulsion, you can't not do it. But where do you get hung up on a, on a project?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Well, I can tell you one I'm getting hung up on right now.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  It's, I have this idea for, for a book that I've started to work on and the voice in my head is saying, this is the dumbest idea you've ever had. You've worked all these years to create a certain reputation. When this book comes out, it's, you're going to trash your reputation forever. Everybody's going to see through you. You're an imposter. You're a loser. You know, nobody's going to care about these stories that you want to tell. So I'm, I'm really fighting that. And the what, what I sort of tell myself, reading my own book, The War of Art, is that. When you feel massive resistance, it's a good sign because it shows that the

• 19:32Speaker 01

  dream that you have, the work, the book is meaningful to you. If you had very small resistance, it would show that the dream was not meaningful to you. So in other words, I'm still fighting it exactly like I always did.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Well, because I remember reading in The War of Art, you say something like, you originally thought you weren't qualified to write that book. You were going to do it as historical fiction.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  And so is there a confidence that you develop, you know, that goes like, I thought it was crazy when I did this one and it turned out not to be crazy. And so now I don't have to be that afraid of that feeling now?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  That's a great question, but it does somehow, it doesn't work that way. Even if I tell myself that, I'm still so overwhelmed with doubt that I think, oh, this is not resistance. This is real doubt. This is me really telling the truth. But to go beyond that, what has sort of helped me in this particular case that I'm dealing with right now is my dreams. I've had like two big dreams that sort of, you know, that woke me up and I had to write them down and the whole thing. That the sort of the bottom line of the dreams was my unconscious telling me, keep going, have faith, this is okay. You're doing the right thing.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Right. I've talked about this a bunch of times, but I just finished the Taylor Branch series on Martin Luther King. And there was this moment in the third book where King is deciding whether he's going to speak out about Vietnam or not, which ostensibly has very little to do with civil rights. And he's just made all this progress. You know, he's just got white people and a political establishment on his side. And now he's going to do what was much more controversial then, which was to question, you know, the United States at wartime. And what ultimately sort of pushes him over the edge is he remembers he's like, when we were going to march on Selma, they said, it's a bad idea. Don't do it.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 21:29Speaker 00

  He noticed that at every critical juncture in his life, the reasonable influences told him, just wait, don't do it.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  You know, and but it's tricky because sometimes, maybe it's one out of 10 times or it's nine out of 10 times, it really is a bad idea.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Your friends are trying to say they're like, Steve, don't do an interpretive dance version, you know, please don't write poetry. That's not what we want from you. So how do you know how to filter through what's the resistance and what is actually something you shouldn't do?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  I have my little rule of thumb here that is, I say, when in doubt, it's resistance.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  In other words, nine times out of 10, you know, it is. And I find even sometimes when I do take on projects that are losers, and I look back and I say, gee, I really shouldn't have wasted those two years. If you look back on it, and I'm sure you've had the same experience, right? Like, you say, it was all to the good. You know, I learned something. It helped me move along the road a little bit, even if I didn't make any money.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  Well, I'm just finishing this, this other project that I haven't told you about, which I'll show you soon. And actually, by the time people listen to this, it will be out. So I, I, I just did this sort of children's, or I guess, I just did this fable about Marcus Aurelius as a young boy.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Wow.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  That, that Sean Coyne was, was hugely helpful on. He

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Great.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got this offer from my publisher about it, and I was thinking about doing it. And then, but I was thinking, I wanted to do it my way. And he told me I should just do it myself, not think about money, just do it right. And it was great advice. He even, he even connected me to, to my illustrator, who you're also working with, Vic.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Oh, right. Yeah, Vic Chulas. Yes.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  So, so it was this, it was this great project. But anyways, as I was sort of kicking it around, I called Neil Strauss and I said, Neil, like, here's, here's my dilemma. I want to do it this way. My publisher wants to do it this way. I don't know if I'm being egotistical and wanting to insist on it doing my way, or if, you know, or, or they really are, or, I'm really right, and I should listen to that voice. And he said, that you're even asking the question means you're probably not doing it out of ego. Right? And so I, I think what I've noticed to go to your point is that, like, What you're saying, when it's, when you're in doubt, it's resistance, that you're having

• 24:04Speaker 00

  the doubt is a good sign. Usually I find when I'm doing something out of ego and I'm not listening, I'm so certain, I'm not even questioning whether it's not, you know, like that's the problem with ego is that it doesn't even entertain the doubt, it just knows.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Well, I'm very, I'm gonna, I'll send you the kid's book. It's called The Boy Who Would Be King. And I'm very, I'm very happy.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  I think it's a great idea. It's a crazy idea. I give him credit for coming up with it, you know, and I can see how you would think, wow, am I doing the right thing with this? But yeah, it sounds like a great idea. I bet it would, I bet it'll go great.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  I think, I think so. But you're right. Anytime you do something outside your comfort zone, there's this sense of, am I about to commit career suicide?

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Well, okay. So I want to talk about the new book, which I loved. It's filled with notes. I think what struck me most about this book, and I guess a lot of your, the characters in your books are like it. It just, maybe it strikes me because it's something we're so missing today. But A Man at Arms is really a book about a guy who lives by a code, right? Is a guy who lives by a code. It's somewhat of a, of a incomprehensible code and an ancient code. And, and yet, it's very clear that it's guiding him through

• 25:30Speaker 00

  the darkness of the experience that he goes through. I'm just curious what you, what is, what does it mean to live by a code? And why is that so important to you?

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Well, I think that actually, the key thing about the character Telamon, who's the lead character, he's kind of a one man killing machine, like a Clint Eastwood type of gunslinger.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Of the ancient world, is that he changes his code. That the whole book is about him evolving beyond this code. That he starts with this code, that's like a Samurai code, you know, if you think about any of those Samurai movies that are, the, it's usually an isolated warrior that's had some terrible experience. And that becomes kind of a law unto himself, right? And he's always ready to move, to go to violence as the first, you know.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  He's the lone wolf.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  A lone wolf, right? And. So Telamon's code, I really sort of patterned this, I don't want to ramble on too much. I really sort of patterned this after Westerns, after American Westerns. And his code is, um, he's sort of come to the end of it. It's a totally self-protective man, a law unto himself type of code. And what breaks him out of it, as you know from the book, I won't give away too much, is a form of love. You know, of reaching out towards another character that kind of pulls him out of that code and makes him say, well, what's beyond this?

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  And so, but I do think, characters that have codes are always great characters. You know, a detective, you know, the man who walks down these mean streets, but he is not, you know, not mean. You know, those are always great characters.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, because that gives you so much room creatively because do they uphold the code? Do they violate the code? Are they tempted away from the code? There's a logic to the character.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Right. Plus you also, at least I, when I watch those, I say to myself, should I adopt that code myself?

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Is that a cool code? You know, the way Clint Eastwood said, that kind of thing.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it strikes me that, because I think this is, this is my second favorite book from you. This is my second favorite fiction book from you. I think this is right up next to Gates of Fire and how riveting it is. Um, it's funny though, to me, that both books, which are ostensibly about warriors, are really books at the level underneath, they're books about love.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Not a love story, but about the power of love.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  They definitely are. I mean, I mean, to link them with Stoicism, and of course, everything I know about Stoicism, I've learned from you, from The Daily Stoic and Lives of the Stoics, but. They are, these characters, and I would say this of any Western character, death is a huge, is sort of the unspoken presence constantly through their, you know, they're threatened by it or whatever, and they have to come to terms with it in their code somehow, you know, like for the Spartans at Thermopylae, Gates of Fire, you know, they were willing to give their lives for a cause greater than themselves, right? And that was, that was part of the whole Spartan ethic.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  And in my character of Telemann in A Man at Arms, he is like, sort of like a stoic in the sense that he's always at the brink of death in his mind. He's always ready to face that, and he's not really afraid of it. In a way, he's almost, you know, seeing it as a mystical experience of some kind. So that, when you have death, you're gonna have love somehow. There's gotta, that's gonna be an answer to it.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Well, you think that the Stoics, and this is the stereotype of them, is sort of unfeeling, disconnected, detached, but there's this line from Marcus Aurelius that I've thought quite a bit about over the last year. I think it's been the thing I've been sort of meditating on most as far as Stoicism goes. He says that he learns from Sextus the philosopher, who, as a history nerd you will love, Sextus the philosopher is Plutarch's grandson. And he is Marcus Aurelius's philosophy teacher. Yes. Isn't it weird how small the

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  But, but he says he learns from Sextus to be free of passion, but full of love. And that's

• 29:55Speaker 01

  What did he mean by that? Tell me, I know you're thinking about this. What does he mean by that?

• 29:59Speaker 00

  To me, that's, that's actually kind of the end state of Telemann in the book, which is that he's, the anger has gone away, the, the lust for power or control or violence has gone away, and what's left is The, the, the love for another person in, in, in, in, in Gates of Fire. It's the anger, the ambition, the drive, the jockeying for power amongst all the different sparks. By the end, all that's left is the love, the camaraderie, the connection. So the Stoics have this, and I'm sure I'm pronouncing it wrong, but the Stoics have this

• 30:39Speaker 00

  concept of megalos, let's see, megalopscolcia or megaloscopia. And it basically, it's like a greatness of soul. So it's sort of like beyond courage, beyond ambition, beyond power and skill and mastery is this sort of selflessness, this transcendence of one's kind of earthly constraints into that higher plane. And, and that's where your character gets at the end of the book.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly right. And we were just talking about the word agape, right? This actually, you know, Sean Coyne, who we were talking about is, is my editor. And he really edited this book and that was the word that he used. And it's really sort of, not to get too mystical here, but you know, that's what we're talking about, right?

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  It's really the, the, um, the, the limited element you were talking about is really an ego centered thing. The gunslinger, the, the god, the man of violence, the ambition or whatever, even nationalism, even patriotism is really an ego thing where you identify with whatever side it is. And, and there's an enemy that you're going to kill that enemy, right? But beyond that, and this gets into, you know, into Christianity, into Hinduism and that sort of thing. Beyond that is the idea that we are all one, you know, the idea of karma and the idea that, and that becomes that sort of all embracing love. Or it isn't even just love for one specific person, your wife, your kids, whatever it is.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  It's a love that goes beyond that to embrace, you know, everything in the universe, you know, um, the environment, the future generations, whatever.

• 32:24Speaker 00

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

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a quote from Seneca. He says, "We should cherish the body with the greatest care. We should also be prepared," he says, "when reason, self-respect, and duty demand the sacrifice to deliver it even to the flames." And to me, that's, that's obviously sort of heroism in the highest form when one lays down oneself for someone or something else. And, and obviously, that's extraordinarily rare because it violates every evolutionary impulse that we have. But I think it can almost be a little intimidating for people because they go, "Well, nobody's throwing any grenades near me, so there's not a grenade for me to throw myself on top

• 33:16Speaker 00

  of to save other people." And so I think we, we also need to kind of, like, I was thinking about that even in the pandemic. It's just like, like, I've had this business I've been trying to open, which you know about and not quite talking yet about, but, you know, every day that I don't open, it hurts me financially. But it's also not the right thing to do. And you know what I mean? And so there's this, can you, to me, can you just put something or someone above yourself at a cost to yourself? That's, that's, that's what love is, even if you, it's not acknowledged, even if it's not understood, even if you're not appreciated.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  I mean, if you think about what a story is, you know, and what sort of principles guide a story, there's always a hero in a story, and there's always a villain in a story. And if you, what's the difference between a hero and a villain? The difference usually is that the hero is capable of sacrificing himself or herself, or their happiness or whatever, for something else or another character, whereas the villain is not. The villain is hanging on to his thing. So... The fact that we need stories and we're hunger for stories tells me that that must be a quality of our soul, of all of us, the universal quality of soul, of wanting to sort of prepare ourselves

• 34:39Speaker 01

  for that moment when we may be called upon to do that. But even just evolving in our lives to get out of the ego, which is natural enough in the younger part of your years, you want to start a family, you want to have a business, you want to establish your identity, you know, I'm this and I'm not that. But at some point, it does need to kind of evolve beyond that into something that is for something greater.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's almost a bafflement of the authorities and the, the, almost every person that Telamon meets in the book is baffled that he is protecting these people that he's doing like, it's like, what is in this for you? We don't understand. Why are you doing this? You know?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't think he even knows, you know?

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, but it's shocking how rare it is. I mean, to go back to what we were talking about with, with, you know, the events of January 6th, you had some police officers guarding the Capitol who said, I'm not going to stop this. I'm going to open the gates. I don't want to put myself in danger. And then you have, you know, the day we're recording this, you have, you know, Brian Sicknick, who, who gave his life to, to preserve not just the Capitol in the strictest sense, but, but, but gave the ultimate sacrifice to protect, you know, the, the very idea that this thing was worth protecting.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  In, it's not, it's not quite, you know, the Spartans at Thermopylae, but here was a person who his individual sacrifice, in one sense, made no difference. It happened, it stopped nothing in no way.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  And yet he said, I'm not going, there's this famous Solzhenitsyn line where he says, "Let evil come into the world, but not through me." And I think the Spartans, the Spartans who died at Thermopylae had no idea that, that the fleet would be victorious in, at Salamis, right? They had no idea that a week shouldn't have been enough time. Like frankly, they, they may have gone, they may have gone down well aware, or, or, or under the impression that they had failed.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yes, they probably did, yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  They were supposed to hold out for much, much longer. And, and they're obviously betrayed. And so, you know, what, they probably could have held out for a week or, or, you know, several weeks. Instead, they only managed to hold out for a week. They didn't know it was enough, but they said, "Even if this is futile and hopeless, we're not going to be a party to it happening."

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And do you, do you, for me, do you feel in your life, because I know reading your blog posts and reading all this stuff, that you in some, on some level are training yourself and preparing yourself mentally and emotionally for a moment that may come when the shit really hits the fan? And, and you, you may be called upon like Seneca or like any of the, of the, of the Stoics that you admire.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  That's a good question. I mean, it, it's a little bit, it's almost sort of delusion, like delusions of grandeur to say that you are, you know?

• 38:01Speaker 01

  But it could be a very small moment. It could be a moment where you're driving your pickup into town and something happens, you know?

• 38:06Speaker 00

  I, I think that's right. I think if one goes through their life thinking, "I am training myself for a moment." I don't know if it'll be a big moment or a small moment, but how, how could I possibly expect to do the right difficult or, you know, selfless thing if I've not trained for it? So yeah, I do think that.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that's a natural, normal thing. And I think in a lot of families, particularly families where, military families where like the father and the grandfather, and it's a whole tradition have all served. The son, as he's growing up. Kind of imbibes that, that there's gonna be a moment, probably you're gonna join the military, you're gonna be, you know, and, and they're sort of rehearsing, well, my dad did it. He flew B-17s, you know, my grandfather was in the Spanish America, whatever. I think there's a lot, like you're saying, like the, the Capitol Police, think about what it must've been like. First of all, overwhelming force of people here, one guy, and there's like 500 people out there.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  You're not really trained for this. It's not like a scenario that you've run in your mind. All of a sudden, holy shit, there it is, you know? Sorry if I'm using profanity here. And so God bless anybody that stood their ground, or, or even those that yielded a little, trying to sort of hold people back, you know, and slow it down a little bit, you know? Cause it was something I'm sure they had not prepared for mentally at all.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  No, I'm, I'm thinking of the video and I'm forgetting his name, but, but you also saw him at the inauguration. He was the honorary sergeant of arms. He was the one who led them up the stairs.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Right, right. God bless him. Yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  That was, that's one of the moment, that's a moment we're talking about.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Yeah, really. The guy should get the Medal of Honor for that, you know? Just turning one way instead of the other.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, it's funny, you bring up this point about, about tradition, and I wrote this down because it's something I wanted to talk to you about. It's a moment I underlined in the book. I'll, I'll read it in a second. But, uh, but you know, I don't really come from that tradition. My, my grandfather landed at Normandy, I think D-Day plus three or four, uh, which, which was, uh, you know, that's, that's sort of part of my experience, but I don't come from sort of a, a strong military background. So it's not something I think about. Um, but there is, I'm trying to find this, let me find this quote, because it's so good. And it seemed like a very, uh, very stoic idea, something I wanted to kick around.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  In a way, I very much appreciate you reading the book so, so thoughtfully, you know?

• 40:44Speaker 00

  There, there, there it is. I found it. I folded the page and I marked the line. It, it says, "If the child indeed can identify no father of blood, it seems to me that heaven will take scant offense if she chooses now one of her own." And there's a line from Seneca I love, that Seneca says, you know, "We can't choose, uh, who our parents are, but we can choose whose children we would like to be." And you know, your book is about this man at arms, but it's also about the two young characters who choose to follow in his tradition.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You know, when I was writing that scene, I was thinking about the scene in Lawrence of Arabia. If you remember, I think it's after they come out of the Neflu Desert or something like that. And Lawrence gets to choose a new name and they're telling him El Orans is much better than Lawrence, you know, and he says, and somebody says to him something like, you're free to choose your own name now. You've earned the right. And he says, okay, El Orans, I'm El Orans. And I thought, that's great. We all are looking for that name, you know?

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're, you know, we don't, most of us were not born to some great, you know, aristocratic family or some long tradition of warriors or public servants or something. You know, we're not the Kennedys and

• 42:06Speaker 01

  In a way, Ryan, you have chosen the Stoics as your, you know, fathers and grandfathers. You picked them. That's your family.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Well, that's what I was gonna say. We have the ability to choose whose footsteps we want to follow in. And I think your books are a great example. Your books are almost like a fictional, like you could pick Alcibiades or this, you know, Leonidas, or you can pick Alexander the Great, or you can pick Telamon. You're sort of putting meat around the bones of one of these traditions. So we can really understand who these people are.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  You know, I've never even thought about that until you just said it, but I think it's probably true. I have probably, like you've chosen the Stoics, I've chosen these certain characters, book by book, not even knowing it, not even consciously doing it. But I sort of, I wanted to get to know them. So that was why I wanted to write about them. But I think that's true. They are kind of my family.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Seneca says, you have to choose yourself a Cato. And you have to choose a hero because without, he says, without a ruler, you can't make crooked straight. And so I like this idea of sort of who are your heroes? And then how are you measuring yourself against those heroes? How are you either upholding the tradition or admonishing yourself for falling short of the tradition?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's absolutely true. I mean, you and I have a kind of a person in in common. General Jim Mattis, we admire, you know?

• 43:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  That's a living person that you actually can know and talk to. And, you know, he's a hero for me and I kind of, I sort of, you know, using him as a ruler, not falling way short of it, but I do think of him as somebody that I'm trying to, you know, do like what he does.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  What's so inspiring and I think humanizing about that, though, is so you have this living person who's inspiring living people today, but then if you asked him who inspired him, he would have a list of names.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  And in fact, Marcus Aurelius is one of his, you know, number one goods.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Right. Or famously, you know, as Secretary of Defense, he had in his office Sherman's desk and Grant's desk.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 44:21Speaker 00

  One was the desk that he sat at and the other was this like sort of conference table desk. And you could imagine sitting at that table and feeling that energy come. Like I have a little statue of Marcus Aurelius on my desk. You can make little sort of totems that kind of emanate the energy and the reminder that you want to have.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. If you look at, speaking of Marcus Aurelius, if you look at the movie Gladiator, and when Russell Crowe or in his tent or wherever it was, he had numerous busts of, I'm sure, you know, various seizures or, you know, maybe senic or who knows what it was. But that was, you know, something that you can draw on.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Well, what's funny is Marcus Aurelius, I would say, almost certainly doesn't have Seneca in his, as his bust, because he, of all the Stoics, Seneca is the only one he doesn't talk about. And we think that the interpretation is that this is a, this is a deliberate choice, that Seneca is more of his anti-hero, the Seneca who doesn't deliver. And so there's another part of it, too, where I think you want to have your heroes, but also your, your anti-heroes. So like, I loved your book, Tides of War, but like, Alcibiades is, to me, a little bit of an anti-hero. He's the, he's brilliant and wise and ambitious, but it always seems to be in service of, of himself and never anything really of any greater significance.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that there's a lot of truth to that. It's, it's a tough call, whether he was really about himself. I like, I like the guy. So I think that maybe it was in the service of Athens, at least partly. But you're right. He was kind of an anti-hero.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  But, but I just think it's, it's, it's you have your heroes, and then you also want to have your anti-heroes, you know, who are, and you talk about sort of heroes and villains. And I think you had this great piece a while ago where you're saying sort of, the here, the, the villain is zero sum, and the hero is non-zero sum. And I think, you know, even, so, so like, who, who is making the selfish choice, who is not making the selfish choice? What would so-and-so do in this situation is, I think, a really helpful guide as you're, as you're struggling with things, or you find yourself in the moment that we were talking about.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  And even to bring it back a little bit to love, to the topic we were talking about a little before, if you think about a, when I say a villain is, is a zero-sum, sees the world in zero-sum terms, he sees it that if he's going to gain three pounds, he's got to take the three pounds away from you, right? He sees that it's a world of, of limited resources, a pie. If I'm going to take the pie, I'm taking it from you.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Whereas, love is limitless. And when we're in that dimension of, of love, the more love there is, or the more love we give, the more love there is. So that's why I think of somebody like a FDR, is a, is a non-zero-sum leader, you know? That felt that the more that he could help people, the more those people could help other people, and the more the snowball would roll in a good direction.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could kind of, I was thinking about this recently, I'll probably write about it somewhere. It's like,

• 47:26Speaker 00

  At the core of Hitler is the Hitler is the apotheosis of zero sum to for Germany to rise again, it must come at the expense of the rest of Europe, right? He has to take from all of these places. And, and, and so obviously that's a bad strategy. The famous joke of like, maybe we're the bad guys, which I love, you know, eventually that's a narrative that doesn't work and Germany unites the world against it basically and falls. But then you have this moment where the United States is now in unparalleled in the history of the world, the United States, for this brief moment, has not only defeated

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Germany and Japan, but is the sole possessor of nuclear weapons. So we're indisputably the most powerful empire that the world has ever or will ever known, will ever know. In that moment, the United States could have destroyed every single other enemy that ever existed and made itself uniformly the dominant nation for all time. Right? And yet it doesn't. In this moment of supreme triumph, you know, you have, you have Rome in your book as sort of Rome is really the main villain. You know, the merciless hegemon

• 48:45Speaker 00

  that is crushing everything that gets in its way, even a small girl. But Churchill famously says of the Marshall Plan, that it's the most unsordid act in, in the history of the world. So, so not only does the United States not dominate the way that it could at this moment of triumph, but it uses its might out of love to rescue all these impoverished nations and war torn allies from, from the abyss, essentially. To me, that's not just the opposite of zero sum. That is what, what a story or a, a, something driven by love is fundamentally capable of doing.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's an amazing moment. I hadn't even thought about that, you know, but the Marshall Plan really was a high water mark, probably of, of American civilization, really. I'm sure that there were self interested motives. I'm sure that people go, well, if we rebuild Germany and Japan, da, da, da, da, da, da. But nonetheless, it was an amazing thing that, that gesture, and it certainly worked. And I but of course, there were voices, I'm sure, within the American government that said, let's drop the big one and see what happens, you know.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. No, I think in a thousand years, some of these moments will be on par with Leonidas, or, you know, the idea of this federation of countries coming up and deciding to stand against a million invading troops is an incredible moment. And as you said, a lot of moment, a lot of the other Greek nations sided with the with the Persians. I mean, the number one advisor to Xerxes is a is a Spartan defector. So so for every hero, there's also a coward or a traitor who's willing to go the other way.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm tempted to laugh, but to get into politics, but I'm not going to do it. Let's not let's not do it.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Well, let's keep going about this moment, because I do think it's also it is a little incredible. There, there's a few moments like that and I for Eisenhower and with Marshall. But I it's there's also when when Eisenhower is thinking of running for president, the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, you know, is is attempting to sort of undermine all these institutions that have come out of the war. And I this is another great moment. Eisenhower goes, was it Senator Taft? And he says, if you agree to preserve NATO and these institutions, I'll let you be president. Eisenhower offers to not run if this guy just concedes to these things.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Wow, a very Washingtonian move there. Yeah.

• 51:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he can't do it. And that's why Eisenhower ends up running for president.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Wow, I didn't know that. Huh. See, this is what you're such a great reader. You've read all these things.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  But I, but I think, you know, you asked me, what am I doing? I think part of what I'm doing is I read, when I read, I don't really take up the dates or the names or, you know, the specifics. I'm, I'm just fascinated in moments like that and I, I squirrel them away in my mind, hopefully to do something like that in my own life.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Can I tell you an Eisenhower moment here that has nothing to do with anything we're talking about?

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  When in 1967, Israel, when Israel was on the brink of war, Egypt and Syria and all the Arab nations, Jordan were lining up against them, ready to wipe them out. And they appealed to America to help, you know? They also appealed to England and France and they turned them down immediately.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  Is this the Six Day War?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  This is the Six Day War, 1967. So they're, because the United States had guaranteed the sovereignty of Israel, et cetera, right? And the United States told them, this is true, Secretary of State, we lost the letter. We don't have the letter where we promised you to do this. So, this is true. A Jewish businessman, I forgot his name, in Amer- in, in New York, he drove to Gettysburg, to Eisenhower's farm. Eisenhower was a former president at that time. And they literally went through the drawers in Eisenhower's desk with Mamie there, you know?

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  And he found the letter and, you know, brought it back. But the bottom line was it didn't do any good because the US still didn't help. But that's my Eisenhower story.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Well, to nerd out, there's another moment I'm thinking about using in, not the next book, but the book after that. At the pivotal moment where it comes for the United States to recognize Israel as a country, the, almost uniformly, including Marshall, the political foreign policy establishment in the United States is like, this is a horrible idea. Because it, you know, it would upset the Middle East. It might, you know, they, they thought it was not a good idea. And I'm, I'm forgetting his name, but it's, uh, it's Harry Truman's Jewish army buddy who drives to the White House and basically says, you gotta do this.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  You gotta do this for your old friend, you know, and basically the, the country of Israel in some part owes its relationship to this mind opening friendship that Harry Truman gets as a, as a young boy from Missouri in the First World War. He's never met a Jewish person before. And this connection leads to, you know, decades later, the personal appeal.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a great, I didn't know that.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  Of political courage.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a great, that's a great story. I did know that Truman was like, he made that decision very fast, like before just about anybody else recognized Israel. He did. And I always sort of wondered why, why did he do that? Ah, that's great.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  It was his Jewish friend.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Ah, wow.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  And, and so I, I was going to take that to me. There's a great LBJ quote where he goes, "The way to have power is to be close to the people who make decisions." And so we think justice is about being right, being correct, you know, having the moral, the most moral of the, of the arguments or whatever. But really it was a friend, uh, you know, uh, convincing another friend and access to power.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wow.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Um, what else should we talk about? Uh, I do think the cruelty of Rome is an interesting, uh, very well captured part of your book, you know, that you can, you can watch, you know, you, you, sorry, you can read about Rome, you can feel a kinship with a Marcus Aurelius or, or, or what have you. And it can obscure from you just how violent and depraved, the opposite of love. So in some ways this, this world was.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, you know, I sort of created my own Rome in this story. You know, you have to kind of bend reality, but certainly Rome's whole reason for being was kind of conquest, was an ever-expanding conquest. And within that, what made Rome great, among other things, was that they was order. They were, you know, like I say in the book, there's a, there was a moment where a Roman detachment was surrounded in a waterless place and the enemy, which were Jewish zealots, were bombarding them with, and the commander sent a detachment out to get water and bring it back. And they did.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  And the guy who's telling the story says, you know, nobody, in our world, nobody would have done that. If you were in the detachment, you would have run as fast as you could have. So that, so Rome's sort of the idea of, of discipline, which is absolutely what the legions were built upon and all that sort of stuff was that, it makes a great villain, Ryan, you know, because it's like a machine. It's like the, the alien or the shark in Jaws that's just not going to stop, you know? So I don't think it was, in my mind, it wasn't so much evil as it was just self-perpetuation. You know, any rival, any threat, we're just going to steamroll over these sons of bitches.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  Well, I tell the story in Lives of the Stoics of this sort of terrible, unfortunate clash between the Stoics and the early Christians with Junius Rusticus, who's Marcus Aurelius' philosophy advisor and sort of the mayor of Rome, and Justin Martyr, who is the, the early Christian, but, you know, sort of thinker, but had actually trained in Stoicism as well. You know, Justin Martyr is accused of worshiping Christ and, and, and the, the Christian God. And he's drawn before this tribunal and on the one hand, he's totally powerless. Who cares what somebody else worships?

• 57:48Speaker 00

  And the Roman state just could not, like, the idea of religious liberty or the idea of mercy and compassion was so in opposition to the idea of Roman order and efficiency and... Unity.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  It sets on this, this, this heinous collision where Justin Martyr is martyred. That, you know, the Stoics have to rightly be criticized for, but to me, it's also sort of an allegory, a metaphor for why order is good, but if taken too far, becomes a vice and a, and almost a self-imposed prison that, that blinds you to the reality of what's in front of you.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's all about threats and how you respond to threats.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  And there's another, I mean, I, I probably stole this mentally from Ben Hur or something, but there's another moment in the book where somebody, where this Tribune says, "The emperor doesn't fear armies. He doesn't fear hosts from anywhere all over the world, but a new faith, a new, a new belief in what's, what's heaven and what's hell, that can overthrow." And that's what needs to be crushed. And I think that that's the way they thought about it.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  And, and, and so when it, it feels so in, inhuman and cruel, the, the injustices that, that the, the Roman state inflicts upon the Christians and the Jews.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  But there was something about it where the Romans, I, I think, thought they were doing the right thing. Their logic had become so twisted, their sense of, of, of insistence on order was so ingrained in them that they couldn't see what they were doing. And I think, again, this is a cautionary tale that we have to see as a society. You know, Marcus Aurelius says, "And remember, you can commit injustice in doing nothing as well." The idea of even questioning the impulse or the law, you know, there, how many Americans, you know, in the, in the, the civil rights movement said, "Sure, we don't think black

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  people should be discriminated against, but law and order is important."

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  I think, and, and we're seeing that today, too. You know, why are they so angry? Why are they upset? Can't we all get along? You know, there, there is this sort of desire for keeping things the same, keeping that, you know, clamping down disruption that, that you're telling yourself is coming from a good place, but it's actually enabling a grave injustice.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, the other thing I think about Rome at that time, that's sort of a parallel for us today, was I think that even though people in Rome might not have articulated this or admitted it to themselves, they knew that on a spiritual level, their own gods were dead.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Right? That was over Jupiter, Minerva, whatever it was, nobody took them seriously anymore. So that the idea of a kind of a new god, quote unquote, that was going to come along, that did have energy and that people did believe in, that was absolutely terrifying to them.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm gonna read something to you. There's a great, uh, there's a great novel by Naomi Murchison. Let me get this. Um, by Naomi Murchison, and she says, "The Christians were being persecuted because they were against the Roman state. No Roman ever really bothered about a difference of the gods. In religious matters, they were profoundly tolerant because their own gods were not of the individual heart, but only social inventions, or had become so. Yet politically, they did and must persecute and equally must be attacked by equally all who had the courage." I think she was just saying like, they knew that their gods were just part of the civic

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  structure of Roman life.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  There was no potency in them because no one sincerely believed that any of these things were real. And I think when you see a new movement, whether it's Christianity or again, nonviolence as Gandhi originates, or as Martin Luther King pioneers in the United States, was seen as so threatening because it was sincere and real and earnest, and thus had the power to potentially turn everything upside down.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Right, and even more so, it was just like with Rome and with Christianity. Christianity became adopted by Rome, by the people of Rome, right? I mean, the Pope, the papal thing, the Vatican is in Rome, right?

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  And likewise with Martin Luther King, I think what people really was afraid of, what, I mean, let's say the white people that were opposed to him was our own daughters are going to be seduced by this non-

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  -by this thing. And that's the absolute terrifying moment.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Well, or that it's communist influence, or, you know, we came up with all these ways to not have to wrestle with what it really was.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Which is challenging our most deeply held assumptions and forcing us to look at our own morals and our own selves. And I think, you know, in a way, that's a, not to trivialize it, but that's a form of resistance as well. We would rather go, we would, and this is what's so fascinating about that period to me of United States history, we would rather send an army to Vietnam, 500,000 men, we dropped more bombs than we did in all of World War II, to fight the communist menace, right? To fight for the self-determination of some other people, thousands of miles away, in a former colony from the 19th century,

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  than we would ask ourselves, hey, why do we have an apartheid system in our own country? Why are we not living up to our own creed in our own country? Why are we, why are we blocking the self-determination of millions of Americans? So there's this, the resistance says, I will focus on anything and any problem, no matter how far distant, provided it does not require me to make any personal changes or look at it.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  That's it. Let's bottle what you just said. That's exactly, exactly true. And of course, we're living through that same thing today, right? Better to burn the capital to the ground than to change, you know, anything that we were clinging to, and have to actually change.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  And so it's strange how timeless it is, right?

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  That people don't, people- The resistance is real and it's always been with us.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  And the other thing sort of interesting is like you were talking about Martin Luther King trying to make a decision whether he should speak out against Vietnam. And then you think about Muhammad Ali.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  That there was the exact moment, right, when he refused to be drafted, you know, because, you know, no Vietcong, you know, ever called me the N word.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  Right. And, and, and so there's this great expression I love where it's not a principle unless it costs you money, right? And so, so I think one of the big questions, when it, it's great to have an ideology, it's great to have a belief, but what are you willing to pay for it? And, you know, on the other side of that, John McCain, he can leave the Hanoi Hilton at any moment. He just has to betray his own internal code. He just has to accept special treatment. And instead, even though he doesn't really support the war, even though, of course, he doesn't enjoy being tortured, he chooses that the code says you stay.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. God bless him. What a guy, huh?

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So last thing I wanted to ask you about, and I don't want to give too many spoilers away on the book, but you have at the end of your book, one of my favorite Bible verses, the idea, you know, we all, we all stare through the looking glass darkly and then face to face. I just love that. It's such a, whoever wrote that is such a good writer. It's such a beautiful expression. I just, I don't know. I just wanted to, I just, I love that expression so much.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of that, you know, I don't want to give away too many spoilers either, but what happened, where that sort of came from was a couple of years ago, my niece got married and she asked me to be the perform the ceremony. Actually, her own dad had performed it sort of a secret ceremony and I was going to do the, the public ceremony. And so I thought, well, what am I going to, what am I going to say? What am I going to do? So I went to the Book of Common Prayer and I just went and looked through those various things that, that people say, and so much of it came. From Paul's letter to the Corinthians, first Corinthians, that where that quote comes from that you just cited. And so I just, I just felt like that stuff is so powerful and it's about love.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  It's about the primacy of love. It's not, it goes beyond the cross or the resurrection or any of that stuff. To the idea that we are all one and it's all about love in the end, if we can ever get there in our minds. The Marshall Plan, you know?

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  Well, there's a moment I, I, I tell the story in, in my next book where and, and Theodore Roosevelt talks about it in a letter afterwards, where Theodore Roosevelt is considering whether to invite Booker T. Washington to have dinner at the White House. And he quotes that letter to a friend as he explains his thing. He says, "We all look through the looking glass darkly and then face to face," meaning that, that you don't know until you get up close with it, you know? And then you have clarity and, and I just, it's just such a beautiful expression. And I think is that timeless thing, you know, the Stoics talk about wisdom and wisdom is the hardest thing to see what's before you clearly.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  I love that movie, um, Lincoln, where he has that speech, where he pounds on the table and he says that to see what is before you, that's the only thing that counts. And, you know, Lincoln has the ability to see through all the political considerations of the time and get to the, to the truth, what the right thing is. That's what we're all doing and resistance gets in the way.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you think of what's going on in this country today, there is stuff sitting right before us.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  And we can't see it, you know?

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  We refuse to see it.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  We refuse to see it. You know, we'll come up with anything else, any other, it's like the thing of who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes, right? And that's why everything is about lies and conspiracy theories these days, unfortunately.

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  Well, and, and at the root of that, at the root of that hate is an absence of love.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  And a refusal to change or to even entertain changing at all.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  That's right. Stephen, thank you so much. I love the book. I will tell everyone about it. Here it is. You should absolutely read it. It's one of my all time favorites from you. I read it in like a day. And I read it in October and it's been hard for me to sit here and not talk about it for five months, but I'm very glad I am.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much for having me on and for asking such great questions and taking us in such interesting directions.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Can I say one thing to plug the book a little bit? Just that if anybody wants to know any more about it, just go to www.amanatarms.com. And as I learned from you, there's all kinds of pre-order bonuses and all kinds of good stuff there that you can find out about.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  Killer.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  That's it. That's my plug.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks, Ryan.

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  My new book, The Boy Who Would Be King, it's an illustrated fable about the early years of Marcus Aurelius. How this little boy was selected from obscurity and ruled the world and did so without being corrupted by it. He really did become the man that philosophy wanted him to be. And that book is now out. It's available everywhere. I've been working on this book for the last year. It came out of the pandemic for me, something I've wanted to do for a really long time. You can check it out. Go to dailystoic.com/king, where you can pick up The Boy Who Would Be King anywhere books are sold, including on Amazon. But if you buy it from us at dailystoic.com/king, you get the audiobook for free, which has me reading it and a bunch of other cool people. So check it out, The Boy Who Would Be King. And we should learn to lead like Marcus Aurelius.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  And we should try to not just make Stoicism proud, but we should try to make the example of Marcus Aurelius proud.