Steven Pressfield On Work Without Attachments (Part 2)

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2:26Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:16hey it's ryan holiday here is part two of my interview with the one and only steven pressfield i promised you i would tell you the story of his new book the daily pressfield which as you found out in last week's episode is actually dedicated to me this would have been 2018 2019 steven and i were talking and he said hey let me know when you're going to be in la and i said hey actually i'm going to be in la like next week or something and while I'm there I'm also going to this event was like a town hall for people who were alarmed at the direction that the country was going sort of fascistic authoritarian and just all the other awful anti-stoic stuff that we've been talking about here for many years don't do so and the idea was like let's get a bunch of writers in the room to talk about how to tell a better story how to beat these movements and anyways I invited Steve and he came and as we're sitting there it was some theater on Wilshire and we're sitting there.

4:12Diana, his girlfriend, also the unsung hero of all Steven Pressfield's published work these days. Anyways, we're sitting there and I said, Steven, have you ever thought about doing a daily book? Like, I love your stuff. I would love to read one piece of advice from you every single day in book form. And he said, I haven't thought about it, but I'll think about it. And then I saw him maybe a year later or something. And he said, I'm doing the book and it's going to happen and I'm going to dedicate it to you. I said, oh, okay, sure. Well, flash forward quite some time later, it exists. I have it on my desk.

4:48It's awesome. I read The War of Art or Turning Pro, one of the Pressfield books, usually before I start any creative project. Steven's someone I've consulted for advice on all my books, Blurb to Obstacle and Ego is the Enemy, if I'm remembering correctly. It gave me a ton of advice over the years. Plus his writing is just absolutely fantastic. And so the idea that I wouldn't have to reread one of the old books, I could just read a page a day. I could sort of get that kick off that jolt of motivation every single day as part of one cohesive book. I just thought it was an awesome idea. I didn't participate in any way.

5:25It was just, I thought it would be awesome and it exists. And it's so crazy full circle for me that this guy whose work I read in 2007 or 8, I would be mentioned in one of his books, let alone like the first page you see has my name in it. It's just absolutely incredible. You got to read the Daily Pressfield and grab it at stephenpressfield.com. I'll be carrying them in the painted porch as soon as I'm able. Stephen signed a bunch of copies of his books when he was there at the Painted Porch. So you can grab those. I'll link to those in today's show notes. Check out the Daily Pressfield. And here is hour two of my conversation with our most popular, most repeat guests.

6:08Enjoy.

6:14But I mean, you watch a young quarterback versus a veteran quarterback, right? A young quarterback scrambles, maybe throws long passes, can take hits. An older quarterback gets rid of the ball quickly, throws a lot of slant routes. You never saw Tom Brady run with the ball ever, but definitely not in his last season. He adjusted, right? How is the difference between a 50-year-old writer and a writer today, How is that different for you? You know, it isn't very different. Really? You know, because I always start something with tremendous self-doubt, you know? I always think, first of all, I think I'm not good enough to do this, or I'm the wrong person to do this.

7:05Or then I think this is an idea that's never going to fly. It's like the 48 laws of power, you know, who's going to be interested in this? So I'm sort of always dealing with that. but it's always, I feel more confident. Like I can do four hours of work now in two hours. You know, I definitely feel that. You're more efficient. I'm more efficient. I think that I can handle the self-doubt more than I used to. It wouldn't drive me completely crazy. And, but I'm still just a believer in sort of being led by something, you know? and trying to be a servant of that, whatever it is, and keep the faith, you know.

7:53It gets more mystical over time, I think, you know. Yeah. But I don't feel like I'm any better. I don't feel like I'm any better as a writer. I mean, when I finish, when I go over a page that I've written on third draft or something, I look at it, I go, what the fuck is, you know, I still realize, I still feel like I'm a guy with a very minimal amount of talent that's making it work like Steve Kerr calls himself an overachiever in basketball. He didn't have the ability, but he just worked so hard. So that's still the way I feel. And as long as I have the energy to keep doing that, then I'm okay.

8:32And I do think it energizes you. That thing I said about rest before, it does. I've been just here in Austin now for two days away from work, and it's already I'm getting a little drained by it. You know, I want to get back and get into it again. Can you work on the road or no? I can't, you know, I just can't, you know, it's like I lose fitness on the road too, you know? Yeah. Maybe it's my own resistance, I don't know, but I can't on the road. I think like the last page in the Daily Press field is about that Spartan king who was still fighting. Yeah, I guess. In the Spartan ranks at 82. Which is hard to believe, but true, yeah.

9:05Yes. Yeah. Yeah, some people have a remarkable staying power, but maybe that's the idea. It keeps them young. like the Rolling Stones are still doing it because they're still doing it and if they stopped is that where I wonder how much it'd be I'd really be curious to know how much are they still doing it do they still I know they have a new album yeah but do they still get together in the studio do they still are they still producing new material or do they live their separate lives and but even just playing I mean music the the cool thing about music unlike what we do is music is something you can make new music of but also performing the old music that's still the art which we can't do yeah yeah and and so the the ability to they have been playing music in front of people for yeah 60 years how long i don't know a long long time yeah and they're still started when they were like 16 or something yeah and they're still doing i mean paul mccartney is still performing yeah and and so is is perhaps the idea that because they're still doing it it keeps them young in some way um i mean i i feel that way you know my own work you know yes and uh if i were to stop i i think i would go off a cliff you know psychologically or emotionally spiritually you know yeah you don't see you're 80 right yeah i just turned 80 you don't seem 80 well as i started so late you know maybe i don't know what it is but i'm i'm hoping this is this is this is this is sort of my challenge at the moment.

10:36I'll put this out to you for whatever this is worth. You know, the floating in the air is a concept of what you should be at 70, 60, 80, whatever it is, right? And it ain't a good concept as you get up higher and higher, right? It's like now - The expectations get lower. You know? So I'm having to sort of every day reprogram or counter-program that, you know, and say, that's not me. I'm not going to, I refuse to do that, you know? And, uh, you know, so far I'm knocking on Joan Didion's desk, uh, so far so good. But I certainly believe that, uh, work for me is the answer, you know, that's what keeps me energized, what keeps me sort of connected to the source of power.

11:29And so I'm going to keep doing that as long as I can. Well, what's remarkable about Joan Didion, right, is she's this great, young, successful writer. She's like the hottest new journalist on the planet. And she is for many, many decades. And then in the early 2000s, you know, she's could have deservedly retired, you know, is, you know, people think that best work is behind her. And then she gets knocked by two horrendous tragedies. Her husband may have even been sitting at this table, you know, and drops dead. And then within 18 months, her adopted daughter also dies. And it's not like a good thing that it happened.

12:17But perhaps her two greatest, certainly her most moving books, come out of that terrible tragedy. She writes A Year of Magical Thinking, and then she writes Blue Knights, which are Joan Didion marshalling all of her talents and experience to explain and communicate the worst and hardest thing that she's ever gone through. And these are the books that people now give to people when they lose someone, when they're struggling, when they're facing their own mortality. And she took this experience and turned it into something. It's not an experience. I think as I've come to understand, the idea of the obstacle is the way, you know, 10 years post writing that book.

13:07It's great that this happened because it's that this happened. And from that, what I was able to do is this, right? You didn't choose the obstacle and the obstacle was terrible and painful and awful, but you made something come out. You were the best version of you inside that. And because of that, you did something good largely for other people. And that's what those two works are. But I think there's kind of this, like the historian's argument would be that everything she went through and did up until that point was leading her to be able to respond to that moment with the height of her artistic powers.

13:55I mean, that would be true to some extent. To me, what I would just say about that is that that's art. Yes. That's what art is, I think. Meaning from pain. Taking pain and producing and like, you know, a lion can't do that. AI can't do that. Yes. And producing this gift. I mean, that's, talk about the soul level. Yes. this gift that, like you say, you could hand that book to somebody in pain and this is going to actually mean something and help them somehow. So God bless her for being able to do that at that, you know, under those circumstances. But that was what everything in her life led to up to that point.

14:37Well, one of the things Robert Greene told me, it's one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from him. He said, it's all material. The best thing - That's what Nora Ephron said too, yeah. The best thing about this job is that you take all the shit that life throws at you, all the heartbreak and the pain and the problems and the mistakes, and you find a way to get something out of it, to turn it into something. You have this superpower in that you can take the worst moment of your life and make something of it, whereas as an ordinary civilian, you might be somewhat at a loss. you're not because actually everyone can learn and grow and change by what happens but as an artist your path is so much clearer how do you how do you speak about this how do you make something from this this is also true as a parent as a leader as a sister or brother like it's also true for regular it's just less clear as an artist it's so obvious go make art from this and yet Yeah, the interesting thing, at least for me, in my experience, is it's not like you take it directly.

15:46It's not like X thing. I mean, Joan Didion did this. Yeah. But X thing happened to you, and then you write about that. For me, it's like X things happened, and then you write something over here that seemingly has nothing to do with that whatsoever, but in some crazy way is informed by that. And I don't know how. It's a mysterious thing. I'm reading about Hemingway right now. And I guess early in his career, he was in one country, his wife was coming from, his wife is traveling to meet him and she has all of his manuscripts in a satchel and she leaves it in a train station where it's stolen. He loses everything.

16:23And there's this letter, he's talking to one of his editors and he says, like, don't tell me this is good. I'm not there yet. But with time, he does come to understand that it was good in the sense that he had to start fresh he had to it was it's yeah cortez burning the boats yeah you know it's it's it's wiping the slate clean what book are you reading uh everyone behaves badly ah yeah i just read that a little while ago yeah it's a great book really by a young gal that you know pulled it out of nowhere yeah have you read um that summer in paris i think it's called by uh i'll send you the thing it's uh what was it about well who did i I forgot the guy was kind of a minor writer who happened to know Hemingway.

17:07And he and his wife went to Paris and sort of hung out with all of those people. And this is his version of what it was really like. And he's boxing with Hemingway and that kind of thing. I'll send it to you because I can't remember the guy's name now. I blanked it out. That's Summer in Paris, it's called. But I really like that idea of I'm not there yet. Because eventually you do get there, right? Enough time passes and you see how that thing shapes you or informed you or forced you to go in a different direction. In retrospect, we look at most of the things that have happened to us and we go, that was making me who I am.

17:49In that moment, though, we wanted nothing more than for the opposite. So the moral is shave everything to the cloud. Yes. I try to do that, actually. I try to have multiple places that I see. Me too. But, you know, I have lost stuff. And what does it do? It forces you to go back and redo it. And in some ways, it's like a, you know, a forest fire. It clears it all out and only the essence remains. I find I can never get to the level that I was the first time. Do you think so? Or is it actually better? It's never the same. I don't know. It's never been better for me. It's like always a disaster.

18:31Yeah. um yeah i'm i'm enjoying the book hemingway has always come off as a complete dick to me though i'm not and i i like hemingway's writing and i like hemingway as a person less yeah i i sort of feel the same way you know yeah uh but his writing is so great when it's great it's so great so much better than anybody else was doing at the time you know or even now yes you know well she's talking about in the book speaking of like the obstacles away he discovers his writing style almost accidentally in that he would have to send these international cables like he would go they'd send him to cover a war in greece and hemingway would go and he'd obviously consume all this information and he'd have to cable back you know like troops routed thousands dead or whatever right and then they would translate that into several paragraphs of right he would have to figure out how to in as few words as possible because they're charging him a fortune a word express the the essence of the event and um he's talking to another writer he's showing him the cables and the guy's like yeah yeah isn't that cool how like they go from the cable to uh all this paragraph and he goes no read the cables aren't the cables great and so it's the constraint of having to wire information across the atlantic and and not being able to say everything that he wants that makes hemingway a great writer and so you know the obstacle is the way isn't just you you lost everything and now you have to start over it's just the guardrails that you resent at first ah yeah you know the publisher tells you you got to cut 10 000 words out of the book or it's going to be too expensive yeah and you think how dare you but it actually forces you to go back and solve all these problems that were caused by the fact that you had unlimited space yeah although and joan didion used to copy hemingway word for word right to learn her stuff too yeah i do that probably at this table maybe yeah uh i do that myself uh i do too like like i was reading that passage that i said that's because when i finish a book i go through and i type up all the stuff that i like out of it either by hand or i type it up and i get this experience like obviously that's that's also to gather material which i use in my books but the real benefit is that i have typed multiple books worth yeah of other people's writing yeah over the last 15 years yeah And I feel that going through my fingers.

21:12Yeah, yeah. I do that too. Or I did that too. I don't do it anymore, but I used to, yeah. It gave me a, I'm still thinking about it, but it gave me a weird take on AI, actually. You wouldn't think it would. But so oftentimes I'm, if I'm, if it's a long paragraph and I'm going to print it out, I'm going to put it on the wall or I'm going to, I'll type it up in Gmail. Like I'll open up my Gmail and I'll write it there, right? And Gmail has a predictive AI layer on top of it. So if you go, if you send me an email and you say like, you're like, hey, do you want to meet here at 11? And I'd be like, yes.

21:48And then it would show in light gray, like, see you there. And I can hit a button and it'll just type see you there for me. really it guesses based on millions of other things that other people have written um what it thinks i'm gonna say or what the right thing to say is right so let's say i'm sitting down and i'm writing a passage from hemingway because i want to get that the juices going you'd think it would be able to know how to finish this sentence right the first draft of anything is it should say shit right because it's actually you know but it's not it never knows it never actually knows that's interesting what we all kind of agree is perfect writing yeah excellent so there is i think something fundamentally irreplaceable about great writing yeah maybe bad writing is replaceable or mediocre writing is replaceable but something unique and new and different is at least up till this point technologically it is irreplaceable when they figure out how to do that that's when we can throw in the towel you know i don't think hemingway gets enough credit for how how great it isn't just that it's short words or it's simple things you know like i guess it's the opening to um a farewell to arms we talked about the dust on the trees that summer and the troops walking along the road bumping bumping and it comes back to the dust and the trees at the end no ai can't do that you know yeah i mean it's it's it's poetry it's i don't know what it is but it's it's not just simple stuff you know it's genius to get to where he where he got that so i have to forgive a lot of his other bullshit you know yes anti-semitism anti-blackism anti-gay anti also he's just fundamentally a bully like was just like they talk about in the the everybody behaves badly thing he liked to just oh we should box and then oh i'm gonna just punch you in the face when you're not listening yeah yeah you know like he was an asshole yeah like that i think if you met him if if you were one of hemingway's peers you'd probably be like fuck that guy you know um there's that term art monster he was an art monster yeah he was he was yeah but the art was great yes yeah yeah he's like an inverse of uh fitzgerald who was like fitzgerald turned it the energy inward unfairly on himself and hemingway turned it outwards on other people but they were both fundamentally abusers one just chose himself this book that summer in paris also talks about fitzgerald they're all there together it's really interesting yeah yeah the first the guy's first name is morley i'm trying to bring it back i can't remember what his last name is you know what is the the names back then were just incredible like john dos passos what a sick name uh what ford maddox ford yeah you know which i don't think was his real name anyway yeah ernest hemingway f scott just the names are so great they seem great yeah no gertrude stein is a good name they're just so good the names are so good um you know you mentioned anti-semitism i was i was thinking about how i was going to write about this too i have a daily stoke email where i'm messing around with it but i i was going to make this argument that anti-semitism is the oldest virus and that you know it infects the romans at different times and like that it's this virus that you kind of watch consume societies cultures and then every once in a while like a historical figure like a brilliant mind you know henry ford where does he pick it up and it warps and it breaks his brain elon musk you know like it's this it's a it's you might be on to something it is like a virus yeah in meditations margis realist talks about, he says, there's two types of plagues.

25:47There's one that destroys your life. And he's talking about the Antonine plague. And then he says, there's this other one that destroys your character. You know, it makes you hate other people or it makes you commit injustices or inhumanity. And yeah, antisemitism strikes me as this kind of perpetual, sometimes it's dormant, sometimes it's not, but it kind of worms its way in. And once it's there, it's hard to cure. Look, if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably heard of HelloFresh, right? They're the number one meal kit in America. They make home cooking easier with chef crafted recipes and fresh ingredients delivered straight to your door.

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27:41You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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28:55To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under Podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic, and you'll get your donation matched. That's givewell.org. Code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. It's true. There's no other people on the planet that somehow, you know, are the target of that same thing. For back to Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, you know? Yeah. yeah that's why uh that's why israelis act the way israelis act and why jews act the way they act me included yeah you can't uh it's uh it's an indelible thing you know you and and it's so easy to pick up right and like i saw this meme and it actually changed how i think about things but it was something like um uh all my life we never had cats because my dad was allergic to cats so i didn't like cats this is what this this thing is saying so i didn't like cats i always had this aversion to cats i was suspicious of cats um and then and then uh then he's like then i got a cat and i love it and then i realized that's what racism is like you just pick up this thing yeah you you caught it in transmission from a family member from an environment from an area you're in and it gets in there and obviously there's more severe cases than others but it's this thing that kind of it's a mind virus you know it gets in there and it messes with how you see the world and how you see people who if you could zoom out just enough or you could look at it for just a you would realize are utterly indistinguishable from you in every every way mm-hmm yeah it's uh yeah it's a it's a strange it's it it's a it's strange how that's the one that doesn't go away yeah and it definitely does not go away you know yeah and it finds ways to reconstitute itself and mask itself or the symptoms look different in different times Yeah, yeah.

31:11But there is this underlying condition. Yeah. You can see that it's sort of stopping me, you know? Yeah. I'm, yeah, I don't know. Why is that? Maybe it's emotional for me, you know? Yeah. Maybe I don't want to go there, you know? Huh. Yeah, okay. I guess, I mean, there are other forms of it, right? Obviously, racism is another form of it. And you could see how the founding, the original sin of, of America is the way that this idea has permeated, you know, into the institution. Why is it so ineradicable, you know? Yeah. Nothing, nothing seems to change it. You know, you can have Michael Jordan be, you know, the idol of X, Y, Z, a million people across the American South or wherever it is.

32:04but yet nothing changes in terms of, you know, I remember when I was in college, which was a long time ago, I went to a Klan rally just like to laugh at it, you know? Hey, let's go out there having one, you know? And I thought, this is gone. This is, you know? And now it's back with a vengeance. It actually, it was kind of funny in a way. They actually had the grand wizard, whoever it was at the time, was there. And he was, believe it or not, he was kind of funny. I mean, there was like the Klan was out in this field. Yeah. And there were various Duke students and UNC students hanging around. And he said, I remember he said, you know, the Republicans have their conventions and the Democrats have their conventions at the Cal Palace.

32:57We have ours in the Cal Pasteur. She says, but at least we know what we're stepping in and how high to roll our pant legs. And everybody thought, that's pretty funny, you know? Yeah, that's pretty good. And actually, it was not a hate-filled event like you would have thought. It was sort of embarrassing more than anything else. Yeah. But that was why I thought, this is over. This is like something from 100 years ago. Yeah. And I never thought it would, you know, be back with a vengeance. but that is the thing about the clan has it's it's it's like it's this insidious virus or thing that it was like it was semi-comical when it was started and it became serious and then it was they thought they eradicated it but there was a little and then it goes through these yeah these it's like herpes you know it just never goes away yeah i remember my my father was a police detective so he would get assigned to these different divisions and he worked in the hate crimes division when i was a kid and i remember he took me to this sort of community meeting once uh where they had asked him to speak about maybe there'd been a hate crime in the neighborhood or something i forget what it was but he was saying that one of the ways that these groups recruit is like they would go into a high school or a you know a public park or something and they would graffiti on the walls like kill whitey fuck white people they would write racial slurs against white people and that's how they would seed um like sort of people go what is this and and so they would create a kind of a defensiveness that's almost like uh what is it a false false flag is that what they call it yeah hitler does this right like you you i mean you write about it and trust me i'm lying right creating a sort of a sensational thing to get people to react to it yeah and so they that's how they would drive recruitment in the areas is that they would make white people feel persecuted and i so i i'd always remember that and then i just saw like in south africa at some university someone had written all these things on and it's i saw it first as a news story that someone had written all this stuff and then a few weeks later they catch the culprit and it turns out it's this racist apartheid group that's doing it and you realize also just like how timeless in a sense the ways in which i don't want to say good but ordinary people are caught up in these movements or they're exploited by these movements by the same kind of fundamental triggers or human weaknesses do you know what i mean yeah yeah which are also indelible they never go away the trick always works yes yes how do we make it actually Activates the virus again.

35:45Yeah, somehow. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. It's like, you know, shingles. Like you have it, you have it in your body and then you get exposed to something and it re-triggers it. Yeah. Right. And. I know what I wanted to ask you about, your opinion about something. One of the things they talk about in Vedanta that we were talking about before is like that what they call, what I would call resistance, what somebody would call the monkey mind, you know, the crazy stuff. they just call the mind that's the source of all sort of negative stuff and what they would call then there's a level in their thing above the mind called what they call the intellect and this is sort of like marcus aurelius in a way where the whole goal of vedanta is to get is to live in the intellect and not you know and rise above this do you is there in stoicism a parallel to that?

36:42Yeah. Your ruling reason or your rational center, Mark Cerelius calls it in one of the translations, it's rendered as the command center. All right. In fact, you were talking about the gladiator in the arena today. Yes. And so, yeah, you have this sort of the, oh, this happened, so I think this, right? But then wise people or smart people have cultivated the ability to sort of check that against this thing is is that really true which is really what robert green's philosophy is about too right sure getting to that level zoom back to the 30 000 yeah yeah like a therapist you'll tell something to a therapist that you think and then the therapist will go is that true you know or why do you think that what makes you think that um so the skill is to do that for yourself.

37:36Do you think everyone thinks that? You know, like these kind of questions that get you to realize, oh, this is just a thing that I made up. You know, this is, this is just my unconscious, you know, sort of system operating under a stimuli or a trigger or whatever. And sometimes that's the right one. You know, sometimes your mind is, as we said, you have this, this idea, this calling to do something and your mind is saying, well, that won't work or what about this what about and actually you should kind of follow that sort of deeper you know instinct uh but i think more often than not it's about sort of i don't know someone wronged me i must seek my vengeance you know is that actually the right way to do it and that where we get ourselves in trouble it's where we get ourselves in trouble is not just where we as individuals respond that way.

38:31But when something happens at such a profoundly shocking way that everyone is in lockstep. Which is really where a guy like Trump is sort of a master instigator, at creating that sort of virus thing you were talking about, that people are all gonna sort of react out of the amygdala, whatever it is. And I suppose journaling, I'm not a journaler, but is a way of getting to that level of intellect where you do it for yourself. What do I really think? What happened today? What journaling is fundamentally is putting your thoughts up for review. It's interrogating. Am I full of shit to think this type of thing?

39:16Meditation is a form of that. I think going for walks is a way to do where, where you're, you're, you're having to sit with those thoughts a little bit. And, um, the Socratic method is this, right? Like, yeah, what about this? Oh, so you mean this. And, and, and as you play that out, you know, you realize it's not as on, it's not on as sound of footing as your emotional or your, you know, your, your emotional sense would have you believe yeah um so i think that's what you think about how important it would be for someone like marx to realize to be doing that in meditations he whatever he wants he can do yeah like there's a a moment where hadrian his predecessor gets angry and he just grabs a pen and just stabs it in the eye of a secretary like he's so just what the fuck is wrong with you right and nobody like no consequences you can't get impeached you know there you can do whatever you want yeah and so mark is trying to not be like that but knowing that he could be tiberius or nero yeah he could do whatever he wants i think the journaling practice of meditations the notes to himself is the process by which he filters out the intrusive thoughts or the destructive urges yeah and we all need that yeah and you society needs some mechanism by which it doesn't yeah this is what leadership is but this is also what elders are for and literature is for i mean i think again you go back to the greeks like this is what the the tragedy is there to yeah to make you go oh yeah or the the oracle you go to the oracle the oracle gives you this riddle and it forces you to actually think about what you're doing and why you're doing it.

41:05You know what we need here, this is one of my pet feeds, we need in America is the practice of ostracism like they used to have in ancient Athens. You know, for our audience, let me spell this out here. They used to do once a year in ancient Athens, they would have an ostracism. And what it meant was everybody would vote and there would be one person in the society that they would then exile for 10 years because they thought it was for the good of the, if somebody got too much power, somebody was too much of a pain in the ass, whatever it was. And it was interesting in that not only was it, there was not so much opprobrium attached to this, like they didn't confiscate the guy's property.

41:44In a way, it was sort of an honor in a kind of a sense. And a lot of times some of these guys that would take the 10 years, they would travel around the world and go to various, you know, go to the pharaohs in Egypt and gain knowledge and do all that sort of stuff. But what they would, but it got somebody out of the city for 10 years. And I can certainly think of at least one person that we would love to ostracize right now. Well, yeah, I mean, you think the American system is predicated on the idea that if you lose multiple elections, if you are criminally investigated for dozens of felonies, if you have been impeached twice, you know, if you have been revealed in the court proceedings to have been an inveterate liar and fraud and philanderer and and sexual abuser, you know, all things that are now factual statements about Trump, who I viscerally disliked from the beginning.

42:50But like the idea is you would leave in shame. Aaron Burr is probably the only similar American, Aaron Burr and maybe Jefferson Davis are the only two people that kind of reached that level. You know, Jefferson Davis tries to flee and actually Lincoln's plan before he's assassinated, he goes, if he were to accidentally make it to Cuba, that'd be all right with me. You know, he realizes that He needs to go away. Aaron Burr heads south and, you know, goes to explore and sort of wraps up his days that way. But we don't have a strong discharge method. It's supposed to be the founders wrongly assumed that character and a sort of a social cohesion, a shared sense of values would make it impossible for someone so humiliated and so repudiated to continue to show their face.

44:00but i would argue we were up against an existential threat the second that he managed to walk on that second debate stage after the uh the access hollywood yeah yeah um i know billy bush actually he read the daily stoic in his own exile and he was he didn't he wasn't the one doing it but he was humiliated it sent him into a whole spiral of self you know examination and and questioning and it collapsed his marriage and you know he had to do a bunch of stuff right but for trump his superpower is that he could get up in front of 70 million people and go yeah yeah and you can't it's the whole mega superpower of shamelessness that's what it is the founding fathers thought that there would be shame yeah people would feel shame but if you don't feel shame you just stay there and you say hey three strikes i'm not out yes throw it again i'm not leaving you know yes And then it calls the bluff of the system.

45:00Yeah, it does. And the system - It's terrorism, you know? The system really doesn't have a way to enforce the bluff. You know, like - Yeah. Jackson tells the Supreme Court, you enforce it. And they go, shit, we don't really have a way to do that. The whole system relies on voluntary cooperation. And so in that way, he's Shakespearean or belongs maybe even in the Greek or the Roman plays where you have, you know, he's - he's so bigger than all the human vices in every way that the rule is designed to contain ordinary humans, even what they would call men of ambition. It can't. No longer apply. There's nothing.

45:44Yeah. There's no. Yeah. So we need ostracism. I got to tell you one story. I'm sure you know this story, but I'll tell you. Yeah. There was one character, a personage back in ancient Athens named Aristides. Do you know about this one? And he was called Aristides the Just. It was a very super honorable guy. So the way ostracism worked came from the word ostracon, which was a pot shard. They would break a pot shard apart and you would write the name of whoever you wanted to ostracize and they would throw it into a big jar. So supposedly an Athenian guy from the country, a farmer who didn't know how to write, you know, it was that day when they were – and he came up to Aristides on the street.

46:26And he said, I got to write. Would you help me write the name? You know, he said, sure. So he said, Aristides. So the guy, so he writes his own name and the guy says, thanks a lot. And Aristides says to him, just for curiosity, why do you, why do you want to exercise this guy? And he says, they always call him Aristides the just and I'm just tired of hearing that shit.

46:47So MAGA existed even then. And as the just, he is obligated to participate. in his own removal, but he respects this, maybe the subtext of the story is he respects the system enough, even though it calls for his head. Yeah, yeah. There's a Stoic named Agrippinus, who is sort of a foil of Nero.

47:19And he's asked if he wants to attend Nero's party by this other philosopher who's sort of like should i go should i not go they all hate nero and he goes yeah you should go and he goes why should i go and he's like because you thought about going he's like for me it's not even a question so it's inevitable he would find himself you know in nero's crosshair uh what happened he's brought he's brought up on these trump trump charges you know he he's i knew something like that he's working he he knows they're deciding his fate you know they're they're casting the votes or whatever the senate rubber stamps whatever Nero wants.

47:53So he's working out, you know, as he's waiting for the, the, the info to come in and it comes in and they say, um, you've been exiled. And he goes, and my property. And they say, you know, you get to keep your property. And he says, very well, we shall have our lunch on the road. And then he goes, he just accepts, he accepts the fate. And then there's another stoic named, um, Rutilius Rufus, who's sort of the only honest official in sort of pre Caesar's Rome. And, you know, the idea in Rome was that you would get a political job, not because you wanted to be of service at that time, but because it was the way to get rich.

48:31And you wanted to get sent to one of the provinces, which you would proceed to loot. You would come back to Rome, a rich man. Just like today. Yeah. You wonder, so-and-so enters Congress with a net worth of $200 ,000 and 12 years later, they have$32 million and you're, how does this work? So the idea was you would go and loot and come back and then you would throw the games. You would start to throw this money around and then you would run for higher office. So, um, Rutilius Rufus is sent somewhere at Smyrna or Asia, somewhere like this. And, um, he's not interested in corruption. He wants to do a good job put aside the ethics of colonialism he does a good job and he's a good governor um which immediately runs him afoul of all the lower level officials who also got this posting for their their their uh looting he's like serpico yeah exactly exactly he's he's getting in the way of the not honest his honesty is troublesome for other people so um they bring him up on charges of corruption, right?

49:40They frame him for the one thing he would not do. And, you know, he's sent to trial and he refuses to utter a word in his defense. Cicero begs him. He says, you got to fight. And he says, you know, Socrates didn't fight. I'll take, I'll take, he wants it to be an indictment of the system. And so it's the, you know, it's the big trial. everyone's watching the full uh farcical nature of all of it is is uh you know unavoidable it's it's a show trial everyone knows it and the the sentence comes down he's he's to be exiled but there's one mercy they know that what they're doing is wrong so they they offer him one mercy which is it won't kill him it's exile and he gets to choose where he's going to be exiled so you know where he chooses no the province he was brought up on trump where the people accept him with open arms because he was the only honest official of that what a great story and uh it's it's this sort of it's the idea that the the stoic is supposed to be the last honest man uh that you do the right thing whether they love you for it or hate you for it and and you should probably steal yourself in advance for the fact that they will hate you for it yeah i was thinking when you were starting to tell a story how does he get executed yes i know he's gonna get executed one way or another yeah wasn't he somebody's mentor or tutor rutilius rufus uh rusticus was marcus i knew it had an r u at the start of the name yes um but the the argument like this is happening uh the generation or so before julius caesar and cato in the class so there's this great book by um mike duncan called the storm before the storm and he says it's wrong to think of the the republic simply collapsing because caesar made it so it's a steady decline of a collapse like us today yeah people who could have stood up and did something but didn't it's the the widespread acceptance of political violence.

51:51You know, it's the rule of the mob. This is what is setting in motion, you know, the inevitability of a Caesar, not Caesar. You know, Caesar obviously has choices along the way, but if Caesar had not been Caesar, somebody else would have been Caesar. And there were people who tried before Caesar. There's the Catalan conspiracy and all this, but it's a very haunting book that I both recommend reading and tell people don't read. If you want to continue in your feel-good naivete. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week.

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53:05Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns.

53:41There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour.

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54:48Should we talk about this book a little bit? Yeah. What did you, I mean, I have come to love the daily format. And so I'm excited to have this on my desk because I like to sort of alternate between different ones. But how is writing for it? for you? Did you write them one a day or did you write a bunch in a row? I wrote it just almost like a, like a work of fiction, you know, where I definitely thought that I wanted to start, I wanted the book to be since it is a one day, you know, in a row thing that somebody that was going to start a project, like write a novel or write some kind of long form thing that they could start And we're going to have to deal with all forms of resistance along the way, all forms of self-sabotage.

55:38To start like a day one and kind of address the first, like the first chapter in here, the first day is called Resistance Wakes Up With Me. And it's like when people ask me, when do you first experience that sort of thing? And I say, as soon as I open my eyes. So it was something that on your first day, you could start there. and then it's sort of the middle of this book is all about you said you were just saying you don't have act two horrors but everybody else does you know and all of the panic that you have in the middle of work and then it takes it through to the end where the sort of the big question at the end is what if you never succeed at all what if you're doing all you know and then it sort of right and it doesn't work addresses that kind of issue of like writing or any form of art any form of creativity as a practice, as a noble practice.

56:29And so I just thought that everything I've written in my various, you know, turning pro, do the work, all those things, I want to try to bring it all together in one book that you could start at day one and go all the way to day 365. And it would guide you through and would make sense in uh as a cohesive piece of thing also i wanted to cite you know my stuff is in two silos the stuff i write there's the war of art stuff about creative process and then there's my kind of ancient history fiction and the two really are the same because there are ones about the external war ones about an internal war so in here i take a bunch of passages from gates of fire and from the lion's gate about Israel, you know, and, uh, all sort of war themed stuff and bring that into this internal battle situation.

57:29So that I wanted to do too, to get sort of a whole thing across everything that I've done. Is that why you did it as like day two 60, you did it on days. Like the daily stoic is April 8th, April. I did it. I rooted it in dates and months. Yeah. But yours, you were thinking about it more as a year journey. Like if somebody picks up the book on April 4th, I don't want to think, oh, shit, I can't start this until January 1st. So day one is whenever you start. That was my theory. The number of emails I have gotten in the last seven years, when people go, I just got the Daily Stoke, what day should I start?

58:11Almost makes me wish that I did it that way just so I wouldn't get that email anymore. Um, but it's like, it says in the intro, literally three paragraphs in, the idea is you start on the date that you're on and you go around because the idea is you're supposed to keep doing like the, the goal, uh, like the, the, the first thing you're supposed to do when you, you actually have some more days, but when you get to day 365, you have a bonus week. Uh, or when you get to 366, if it happens to be a leap year, the idea should be, uh, and And then the next day, you start the next one. Because it's supposed to be, like, I've now had people who have gone through the Daily Stoic for seven consecutive years.

58:53They should. And I had to do a leather version because, like, they don't hold up that well. Like, you can't carry a book with you every day for seven years. One thing I did want to say before I forget this is the illustrations in here are also by Victor Juhas, who you worked with. He did. My kids' books. I give my partner, Sean Coyne, great credit for turning me on to Vic. Vic is a great illustrator. Yeah. So you did it, The Boy Who Would Be King, and then the Repetitus book, right? Yeah. Yeah, Vic is great. But there is something about doing loops. Like I've read Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom four or five times gone through.

59:33And every time I go, how did I miss this book? Yeah, right. How did I miss this the last time? Yeah. It's because that day, that wasn't what I needed to hear. And maybe that day for three consecutive years, it wasn't. And then, you know, as they say, when the student is ready, the teacher appears, that same thing, now it resonates. Because I brought an experience or I have an openness or it somehow, even though it wasn't intentional for that moment, it's perfect for that moment. Yeah. And the other thing I've tried to do in here is like make it work in a sequence. So it isn't like just a, you know, that day seven, day eight, day nine, day 10 are all actually about the same thing.

1:00:11It's all carrying the same process forward. Yeah. So that it isn't just a random, you know, like your horoscope in the newspaper. Yes. Yeah, exactly. They're building. Although the chances of someone reading it every day, you know, no one's going to be perfect. so that's also part of the process of coming back is you're probably not going to miss the same days right so you come back and you realize you you're on vacation you left it at home so you missed these eight days but now it's exactly what you needed yeah and then there's the other crazy serendipity thing yes that a lot of times like you were just saying that day somehow your horoscope pops up and it's exactly what you need to hear i hope that's the case well that happens with the daily stoic email so every day so i finished the daily stoic and then every day for the subsequent seven years i've done this email and uh which i subscribe to i read every day that means a lot it's only like three things that i subscribe to that's one of them well it's my it's my favorite thing to do i do a parenting version of parenting i'm amazing i'm amazed that you do it every single day well i don't do it every day like today i wrote four i wrote two daily dads and two daily Stoics.

1:01:21And those, I write them in the doc and then the editor, Kristen, for Daily Stoic and Daily Dad grabs them, edits them, sets them, adds links to them, and then sets them for me to record them for the podcast version. And then she decides the schedule. Hey, you've been talking about this theme too much, so we're going to space them out. Or in October, we're doing a lot about Memento Mori because it's Halloween. She kind of picks the rhythm of how she wants it to go. but but i'll get emails from friends usually because i i i try not to get emails from the lots of people who get them it would drive me i couldn't i couldn't handle the daily yeah yeah i can't have a conversation with everyone who likes it but anyways i'll get an email from a friend this is absolutely perfect for what i'm how did you know and it's like i wrote that 76 days ago that has been sitting there i didn't know that three days before you know this event would happen or i certainly didn't know what you were going through yeah but that that is what is so cool about literature but also our art is you're making something that means something to you in this moment and then it's like this uh time release capsule you know and it's kind of this And then it's exactly perfect for some person at a moment down the road.

1:02:44Yeah, yeah. Do you have entries that you think are your favorites or that mean the most to you? Well, there's one in there called Prostitution. Okay. And I don't know where it is. It's halfway through. But, yeah, I do have a bunch of things like that. The one about prostitution is I just say that what I sort of – you gave me this thought, you know, What I do is I, or in each daily entry, at the top of the chapter is a thing from a particular work of mine, from The War of Art, from Gates of Fire, and then the bottom half is my sort of commentary on it. And so in this one, I think the top part is something like, to work in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.

1:03:31And then I say underneath that something to the effect of that I've sold out a million times. I've worked for Mr. Charlie. You know, I've done things I wouldn't tell my mother about, but I was a whore to do it and I can't excuse myself in any way. And that's one of my favorite ones of that. But I hope that something like that, you know, hits somebody and encourages them in the moment, you know. But there are some things you wouldn't do for money, I imagine, creatively, right? There are, but certainly, yeah, there are. There are a lot for me. But certainly, I used to work in advertising. realizing you know you used to work for dove charney or whatever his name was we've all we've all worked for the man you know yes and uh we have to forgive ourselves i suppose as long as you're robbing peter to pay paul i think it works you know what i mean like as long as you got to keep body and soul together one way or another yes yes you know you need the money or whatever to then be creatively free the problem is you actually get it and then you don't want to give it up do you know what i mean like yeah do it do i never had that nobody wants to take this step some people step down right like you think i guess what i'm saying is you think being financially successful would make a person would raise your risk tolerance because you can afford to but you actually tend to be more risk averse that's true you get spoiled by it although i never made enough money that i had to worry about that kind of stuff but actually i think about it this way it's not just money though it's like um you'd think having a hit right you have it you've and you've had many hits um that it would allow you to then then comfortably do whatever you want creatively but actually no now you have this thing that you measure yourself against right you go maybe so this sold this many copies um are you at like i i love this book i've been raving about it um deliver me from nowhere about bruce brunson making nebraska yeah yeah in fact i got it because of you i haven't read it yet just to think about what a a punk courageous move it was to come off born to run his first sort of hit album his first charting album his first world tour and then to go for my next act yeah i want to release these acoustic songs i recorded in my bathroom uh that are dark and disturbing and weird and utterly unviable commercially that's my next project good for him what guts that takes yeah yeah um and it's you know that wasn't maybe he couldn't have done it after born in the usa but he could do it he was just successful enough that he felt comfortable going in that direction but maybe not so successful that he had to look over the edge that he was jumping on Hmm.

1:06:36I'm going to, I just want to say one thing for whatever this is worth that, uh, since I actually started writing novels that were coming from my heart, I've never done that. Really? I, yeah, I've never written one for money or any, you know, cause it never worked that way for me. You know, when something was a success, it was a complete surprise to me, but I, I, I've, you know before that i did what i had to do but uh but since then i haven't i've never done that so you you didn't have any sophomore jitters after the legend of bagger vance like your first novel comes out it sells it gets turned into a movie there was no i gotta top that it was totally artistically you hadn't i'm not saying you made the wrong choice you had nothing you know no wrestling about what to do not not whatsoever because if you think about like the second book was gates of fire for me and as i was writing it i thought who's going to possibly be interested in this this is as as uncommercial and you know a place that nobody can pronounce spell americans hate stories about anybody but americans so it's a whole nobody's going to like this book so i just thought, you know, I was just seized by the story.

1:07:54I just had to tell it. So no, because I've, no, I've never have really said, oh, I'm going to sell out this time. You know, by that time I was so old, you know, that I felt like, what's the point, you know, to do anything other than what I want to do. It is with, with the obstacle is the way in retrospect, people think things that are different. Right. So like with the obstacle is the way it ended up being a much it ended up dwarfing the success of my previous two books oh really did so and then obviously i've written other ones and it's become sort of a niche that i'm now identified with so it people think oh he must have done that for money like that that was you were doing that because i was seeking a bigger market right but in reality it's actually a much scarier thing like okay taylor swift is now the biggest musician in the world so you might someone who's into country music might go oh she was into country and she sold out by becoming a pop star but in fact to leave the niche in which you are comfortably ensconced and which people want you and are willing to pay for you to do more of it's actually the scary thing only if it works out and it dwarfs what you did in the past and it seems like you sold out or jump ship when i went to my publisher and said i want to write a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy they were not like thankfully you've decided to get commercially ambitious and they were at least willing to back me you know adrian did buy that book yeah but you can imagine the market was not like yeah yeah we are eagerly anticipating this work of philosophy from an uncredentialed college dropout in his early 20s, you know, it was an uphill battle every step of the way.

1:09:41So you, you really do have to have the interior motivation that says, I want to do this because it's important to me. I always say the only reason to write a book or to do something is because you can't not do it. I agree completely. In fact, I think if you don't have that thing, you're, you're, you're in the realm of prostitution, you know, doesn't mean it's going to work, but you know, probably won't work. But that's the only motivation that I think that's pure, that's valid, and that is coming from a soul level. Well, and that goes to what we started with, so it's a good place to wrap up. But that is work with attachment.

1:10:17You are doing it not because you want to, not because you are indifferent to how it does, but you think it'll mean something to you. It'll fulfill you in some way. You think it's important. You think it'll help people. you're doing it because you think it's justified by an outcome which is as you said not only not guaranteed most things don't work like most 90 of things fail so you might as well do it because you want to do it and because you are motivated to do it and you enjoy doing it yeah to do it only for the promise of the potential upside which is almost certainly not coming yeah is a bad bet Yeah.

1:10:59I mean, I don't know about you, but I've hardly ever done a book that I had a contract for. You know, it's almost always been a spec thing for me. So I have to sort of ask myself, if I don't make any money at all on this, am I still okay with myself doing it? And, you know, I have to look at the bank account and say, can I afford it? You know, but that's, you know, I think, I don't know, that's the way I work. it's funny when i had uh i wrote the obstacles away i'd sold ego as the enemy which was in the middle of writing and my agent steve hanselman came to me and said you should do this a book of uh a daily devotional of stoicism and uh he's like i'll do the translations i was like what you'll do the translations i didn't even know that he spoke greek or latin um and and he goes uh it'll be your best-selling book.

1:11:47And I said, sure, Steve, that sounds like something an agent would say. So that, that I, when he said that, it seemed so preposterously untrue that it did not, it was not part of my calculus in any way because I could not conceive of how that could be true. And certainly the publisher didn't buy it either because the advance was like not very much, certainly not very much compared to what it ultimately ended up selling like it uh you know and and so i wrote it because i was captivated by the idea by the challenge like it seemed like an interesting puzzle like how do you break a philosophy down into 365 pieces and i was also interested in solving this problem which happened to me a lot which is people go where should i start with the stoics and it wasn't like oh you should start with my book the idea was it was problematic to say marcus really is or epictetus or seneca because um maybe that wasn't the right like i wanted a sample a survey sample of it so um i was motivated by that equation and i really got into it and i got so into it that i'm still doing it to this day like i'm still doing it um and then the irony is that steve ended up being right like like two million copies later he was right uh but again i don't know how there was any evidence that that would have been true i have no idea you didn't believe it and that's the important thing yeah yeah i ironically i didn't believe it and that's why i did it i don't know if that i would have done it i don't i don't if that's why I was doing it, I don't think, I think a different book would have emerged.

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