Troy Baker On How Stoicism Helps Him Be A Better Actor And Father

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1:30Welcome 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.

2:24Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I guess I just have to learn to trust my podcast producer, Rachel. I've been super fried lately. I've just been running around. I did the launch of Daily Dad. I've been editing a bunch of stuff, finishing another project. Just a lot going on. The boys have been sick. Thankfully, I escaped. My wife got sick. There's a bunch of been going on. And so I sort of showed up and she said, I actually, I didn't. And I was in New York and then I flew in the morning because she told me I had an in-person podcast interview and I get there and prepping for the interview.

3:05And I'm like, who am I talking to again? And she goes, Troy Baker, the voice actor, the actor, video game guy. She was like, he's a fan. You're going to love this conversation. And, you know, you never know what to expect. But I did love this conversation. We had an amazing talk. And we really, again, you might not think, this is a guy who's in The Last of Us, both the series and the video game. He's been in Bleach, Full Metal Alchemist, Naruto, Dragon Ball Z. He's been in a ton of stuff. He's voiced the Batman, Joker, Hawkeye, and Loki. I don't know. Like, seriously, he's everywhere. Not necessarily in stuff that I consume a lot of, but he's everywhere.

3:52So if you know who he is, you might not think, oh, this is going to be an in-depth discussion about the ins and outs of stoicism. But that's exactly what this conversation is. And you're going to love it. You can follow him on social media. You can check out his work everywhere. And I think you're really going to like this one. We'll post a million clips of this interview on social because he and I really nailed some topics that I want to share. And the video will be up of this. So this is an in-person interview with me and Troy Baker. Thanks, Troy, for coming all the way out. It was awesome to meet you.

4:23And I'm sorry even that I was surprised because now I am a huge fan. And hopefully we'll do this again sometime.

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5:56I've used 8 Sleep for many years now, and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically, 8 Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately. It can raise and lower each side separately. So it helps you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and then wake up better. Eight Sleep buzzes me to wake gently every morning as opposed to some loud blaring alarm. And then I can check the app and it tells me my sleep score. It even helps me optimize my day based on how I slept. If you want to survive the holidays like a pro and just generally sleep better, head over to eightsleep.com slash daily stoic and use code daily stoic to get$350 off your very own pod five ultra the best part is you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't like it but i know you will trust me your body will thank you for this investment in better sleep shipping to many countries worldwide see details at eightsleep.com slash daily stoic and what's funny i was just i was telling her that uh it's on rachel that the tattoo artist i was like i literally just want this he goes great and i got the tattoo and i was like man that's awesome and i left the coin with the artist i was like you know what man that's yours now i've got this smaller than the coin or bigger same size oh wow yeah it's almost one to one yeah because i i was thinking about doing that at one point and then they're like the i was worried that they couldn't get the detail but that looks pretty good this guy i've never had a tattoo artist take a break and he was about an hour and he was like i need to take a break man because this is just right the detail the attention to detail this is over about a year and a half two years old that's cool so it's hung up man well that's certainly not what i thought would happen when i designed that thing but no there's so many things where i'm like i never thought that people would put the things that people put on their bodies yeah myself included is pretty it's pretty bananas well that's the way you make something and obviously you think it's going to resonate with people, but you're weird if you're like, and then they'll, of course, tattoo this on your body, right?

8:08Like if you like, or you're like, I'm writing this book or I'm acting in this thing. And you're like, and of course it'll change everyone's lives. And it'll be, you know, like you, that would be weird, right? Like, I think as an artist, when you're making the stuff, you have to almost come, it's better if you come at it from a place like, I hope somebody likes it, but they probably won't as opposed to like, this is destined. Nobody, nobody ever set out to write a hit song. They just wrote a song that they had to write and it just so happened to be a hit. When we put out the trailer for The Last of Us Part 2, it had been five years since we'd put it out, the first game.

8:45And we showed the trailer at this event called PSX. And it's like a fully PlayStation branded event. And they were closing the show with this trailer and we knew that they were going to do that. And all we did was, it starts off, if you've ever seen the trailer, It starts off on this kind of like tracking shot pulling away from this, you know, overgrown, beautiful, lush town. And then there's a stop sign where there's a firefly tattoo or a firefly symbol. And people see that and they just lose their minds. And then we show the rest of this beautiful trailer. And in the trailer, the main character, Ellie, has this tattoo on her arm.

9:22People left that event and went to their tattoo artist. and hundreds of people that day got that tattoo. And people still come up to me now years after, you know, it's been two years, three years now that the game has been out. And the amount of people, guys and girls, that have that tattoo on their arm is remarkable. And I think there's something about, I have no idea if we're going or not, but this is okay, cool. Yeah, go ahead. I think that I remember my first tattoo, which is my least aesthetically favorite tattoo, but it's the one that I, it's my first, you know, so there's always something about it.

9:58I was 18 years old. I walked in and I was terrified. And there was a t-shirt that I saw. This was in Dallas, a tattoo place called Tiggers. And there's a tattoo that said, my mom is going to kill me. And I was like, I'm going to leave because that's absolutely going to happen to me. And then right next to it was a shirt that said, your body is a temple. Now decorate. And I went, that's all the justification that I needed. And for me, it has become a thing where I can denote where I was, who I was at a certain point in my life by the tattoo that I got. And I've never regretted a single tattoo that I've got.

10:35There's tattoos that I don't like anymore. Sure. But yeah, who you were when you got it is, is what actually matters. There's going to come a time when this will fade. And so will this, I'm doing everything that I can to prevent those things or prolong that from happening, staving off that fading. But there is something about me turning into, you know, memento where it's like, I want to remember who I was. And it's remember Sammy Jankus. It's, it's, what's funny is this is the one that I wish I got this. This is can't wait, but I wish that I had, um, gotten this, this tattoo after I started reading your books, because I would have gotten a more Fati instead because it's the same intention behind it, which is today's going to be a challenging day.

11:25Can't wait. I've got cancer. Can't wait. It's just understanding that whatever comes my way, okay, let's hit it head on. Let's not shrink away from my future. You know Pete Holmes, right? That's the amazing connection. His thing is yes, please. No, yes, thank you. Yes, thank you. Yes. This is what's happening right now. Yes, thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How did you meet Pete? How did I meet Pete? I listened to his podcast and then, or I listened to a podcast he was on and then I started listening to his podcast and then I got invited to be on his podcast. Yeah. And then, you know, it's like three hours long.

11:59So it's sort of a fast track. And then we became friends after that. But I had a weird one. Speaking of more Fati tattoos, have you seen Zach Brass in a movie? No. A Good Person? No. He's obviously amazing. I went, like Garden State came out when I was in high school. So like he was sort of that I like came of age on his stuff. Yeah, exactly. And then so in A Good Person, Morgan Freeman has a good chunk of the movie pivots around the fact that in the ending, especially pivots around the fact that Morgan Freeman has an Amor Fati tattoo in the movie, which it turns out Zach Braff heard about from my stuff.

12:40And so, I mean, it's obviously not my concept, but that is fucking weird. That was very mind-blowing to be like, okay, a person whose stuff I've grown up watching is asking me to watch this movie, and then I'm watching this movie, and I'm not in the movie, but something from my work is in the... I was like, this is fucking nuts. But it is really cool. Morgan Freeman does have this Amor Fati tattoo in the movie. And then the ending of the movie pivots around why he has it and what it means to him. Is it a real tattoo? I don't think he has it in real life. I don't know if Morgan... He doesn't have tattoos.

13:13Does he? Yeah. I didn't know that. I'm almost positive he does. Either that I'm just creating this false fiction and I'm spreading it out. It would be cool if he did. I think that he does. He's got the earrings, so I'm assuming... That's true. Yeah, you're right. Not that there's necessarily a conflation of those two. No, no, but he's not. He's a cool guy. He's more than just cool because he's old and dignified. He's also got a cool vibe there. Yeah. The movie's great. All right, I got to see it. The movie's great. it's weird because like right now is you have kids you have a five and seven year old is that right i do that's why i was a little bit late i got a kid with a stomach bug upstairs dude is that right yeah he's good he's good uh but yes yes i do have kids i have two it's weird our days we've we've had the same 24 hours our entire life yes but and i don't know how how old are you i am 36 36 okay i got 11 years on you homie yeah so i started way later than you how old are your kids five okay so just turned five he had a revenge of the fifth birthday party and it was epic that's nice our son is spoiled rotten yeah which is a very we should talk about well we'll get into daily dad because i've already started i started on may 6th and um which is talking about punishment i was like well this is a great way i was like damn dude come at me hard but the the notion of okay when i wake up my wife and i have this like sacred time and it's the i used to be the guy that slept until noon now it's like that's the perk of working for yourself doing what you want or it is what i found out for me was i was the kind of guy that like if the sun was going down i was waking up yeah and yeah there's there's kind of an artist mythology of like sleeping in the nocturnal creature yeah there's something like defiant about operating on a different schedule i believed that but what i found out i don't know if you're hit to uh andrew huberman but like understanding how the body desires to function and being able to set that up in a way that my day starts and i go here's how we're going to function and i set that rhythm so i find that i wake up earlier and earlier and enjoy that yeah um and the nighttime it's not like i'm i still love being out in the night i love the night air even last night like being in austin where the air feels different here it's summer it's it's a warm wet here it is the best time of year before it it gets to august and you're like miserable yeah but i i wake up early and i i kind of have this routine where sure i do these five basic movements and um because i want to keep myself mobile and I've got a, I've got a great trainer and I realized that people say I've got a bad back.

15:56And it's like, you don't have a bad back. You, I, um, there's some things that I need to do to make sure that I'm staying mobile and that I, that I have the mobility that I need to as I get older. And so I was kind of, uh, not bedridden, but I was, I was definitely injured for about three weeks i found you can sprain your ass okay that is the glute medial and the pitiformis and i strained that and i had a sprained ass for about six weeks okay so never wanting to feel that again and it's just a weird thing like i i had pain is a great source of empathy and once i realized that there were people that woke up every morning and that was a chronic situation like that was their life was that they have no hope of getting better no hope of getting better um it made me be more grateful for my body maybe of course be more grateful for the ability to help it get better so these five basic movements i do every morning and then i um i read marcus um right now i'm also reading um seneca and i'm reading daily dad oh amazing um and i kind of bounce between those three and then in covid my weird habit that i picked up was um i started learning french so i'm now a thousand fifty days or whatever like of a streak that i've been doing it i'm doing go yeah and it's awesome um it's it finally figured out how to gamify learning a language um i've got a friend of mine that lives here in austin and she's doing japanese but we like we're like in a league together so it's like it's the nerdiest way to learn language but it's awesome um and then i get my first cup of coffee um and then my wife kind of finishes what she's doing and then we come down and we just kind of get our day together and then how early are we talking this is all happening typically six to six thirty okay are kids awake yet or no no typically traveler wakes up around seven thirty okay if he has to go to school he may sleep until eight if he doesn't but he's at the point now where it's come down the stairs by himself oh that's nice it is also still terrifying for me um but it's it's really funny when all of a sudden we just kind of get this glimpse.

18:00He's got long Mowgli blonde hair down to his butt. And so we just got this like naked dude standing on the staircase, holding a random stuffed animal and just looking at us going, it was like, dude, get down in here. But this like sacred time that we have to just check in with each other and, um, figure out what we have to practically do for that day. And then the rest of the day belongs to everybody else. And then we get a little sliver of time at night yeah um so it's those like sacred times um that we covet but it's yeah it's so all of this to say like i want to watch the zach brath movie it's really good but it's like it's the finding of those times i watched it on the airplane that was like the only planes are going to catch up on shows the problem is it's terribly terribly sad so i was like weeping on this flight by myself which was you know weird but uh it's it's a beautiful movie a couple things come to mind from this.

18:53So one, Mark Sturilius, they think has some sort of like stomach ailment. Like he has this like, something's wrong. We don't know exactly what it is, but we can imagine him being sort of a chronic pain dude. And there's some argument or some belief that he's like hooked on opium. Cool. That is not knowing what it was. They're like, here, this will make it better. Sure. And there's some speculation even that that's where some of the weird kind of beautiful mystic passages of meditations come from is he's like on opium um so i think that's interesting uh but um what i what i think about with that morning time is like if i carve it out if i start things off on the right foot if we have a little time together i get my shit stray i'm sort of intentional about the day then like i've more or less already succeeded and everything else is extra.

19:51You know, like if I have a great writing day, that's extra on top. If I work out, that's extra. If it's fun, you know what I mean? Like it's all good from there. And I think that sort of time, it's like to leave all that stuff till later, a lot of stuff has to go right. You know what I'm saying? You know, like to have reading time, to have, you know, exercise time, to have family time, to have spouse time. Like a lot of things have to go right for you to get that at 4 PM, 5 PM, 6 PM. Yeah. It never happens. And then you're also tired, annoyed, frustrated, like you're not your best self for that.

20:34Right. Well, there's two things that I, I picked up from you. Um, I remember you, I think you did a specific podcast or maybe there was just like a one little video. I was like, here's my day. Yes. Here's what I do. And one of the things you talked about, you're like you don't the relationship that you had with your phone felt very healthy we're like i don't even i don't check my email and look at my phone um i can't remember the distance you said it was to your mailbox but it's like a half a mile or something like that yeah a quarter mile to mine so it's a little bit a little bit similar to where i wanted to intentionally make sure that i wasn't waking up grabbing it and just looking you get sucked in well not only do i get sucked in but then i realize i'm i'm already it's reinforcing this notion that i'm already behind Yes.

21:14And I'm not, and I'm on top of my day. There is something incredibly powerful. I will say about because you know, I travel a lot and I was traveling a lot internationally. I spent last year was a rough year, man. Uh, it was a great year professionally. Like there was, we had some incredible things happen. Um, but at the same time, those things required me to invest my time and my energy and my focus into planting in those fields and not being back at the farmhouse. harvesting. And so I spent about four months out of the year gone. I was in, um, or I was in Europe or I was in London or I was traveling other different places, but I was coming back.

21:55So I was gone for like two, three weeks and then back. And so my body was like, the fuck are you doing, dude? We're all over the place. And I found out that one of the best things to do, it's not taking melatonin. It's not taking anything that your body is depleted of. It's, it's retraining, was retraining my body, how to produce those things naturally. And one of the things that I did, is I would wake up in the morning before the sun got up and then wait for that sun to rise. And dude, it's the stupidest thing. If you really want to be nerdy about it, play that first cue from 1979 or 1977 Superman.

22:30There's 79 Superman. And that John Williams cue where you're first going to Krypton and it's just like that cresting of the sun over it. It's like this beautiful emotional thing you can do for yourself. but if you get low level sunlight directly into there's the i'm going to say this wrong and this is you can quote huberman on this but um there's cells in the bottom of your eyes that are designed to capture that low angled sunlight yeah and then that is something that triggers your body to start producing uh it tells your body to wake up your body temperature goes up um and so once i do that that sets my circadian rhythm so that the rest of the day i'm functioning better and i go to asleep when I'm supposed to.

23:11I'm not like lying in bed, trying to go to sleep or crashing in the middle of the day. So like doing stuff like that helped. But the thing that I didn't have a protocol in place for was how do I reconnect back to my life? How to reconnect back to my son? How to reconnect back to my wife? How do I not feel like I've turned my house into a hotel that has this ephemeral quality to it? Yeah. I mean, I woke up at the Marriott at Newark airport this morning and flew in for... Are you serious? Yeah. Yeah. Because I had a talk in New York last night. I flew in today. And so like my whole thing, like I didn't get a workout.

23:43I didn't go on a walk. I woke up, you know, having to get on an airport shuttle. Like it was not my, so it'll take me a couple of days to get back into the thing. The problem is I'm leaving again on Monday. Right. And so like you're, I think one of the things I found, you mentioned sort of things you picked up on COVID. One of the things I really found out during COVID was like, oh, if I didn't like travel just like I wasn't, we went places, we took road trips and stuff. But like I didn't like I didn't go like on a business trip for almost 18 months. Yeah, same. And I was like, oh, this is my natural state.

24:19Not like a couple weeks of not traveling, but like the vast majority of time you're not going anywhere and you really get into a rhythm. and I've been thinking about that recently. I just wrote about this, I think for Daily Stoic. I don't know if it's come out yet, but I was thinking about how like one of the things that I felt during the early days of COVID was like that I had so much time. You know what I mean? The day suddenly felt so long, right? Because there was fewer things you were doing. You were obviously felt like no one was doing anything. And so suddenly, you know, there was, your work was getting done faster.

24:56you had time to FaceTime people, you went to high school with, you know, like you just had time. Everybody started a podcast. Yeah. You just had time. And then what's been weird, you know, three years from that strange period is that it feels like all that, a lot of that time has gone away, even though fundamentally there's the same amount of time in the day, right? But the world felt like it was operating a little bit more slowly, but it's sort of realizing that that's, something you control the dial on if you want. But most of the time we're just like, oh, everyone's operating on this pace. That's my pace.

25:30And the ability to sort of turn it down or slow it down actually requires like a lot of discipline. But if you can get there, things are wonderful. For me, my wife is the one who reminded me of this. And maybe you can tell the etymology of the quote, but comparison is the thief of joy. Yes. That's Theodore Roosevelt, I think most people think it is. I don't know if you made it up, but. It's a, that to me is one of the most. If no one's doing anything, it's easier to not do stuff. Sure. For sure. But like what you're talking about is like the whole pace of the world slowed down. Everybody was in it together.

26:05There was the most communal. There's a few communal moments I can think of that I've had in my lifetime. Where 9-11 was a communal moment. We all felt that as a country and almost globally. Sure. COVID was a communal moment. It's, we're all in hardship often becomes the best component for bringing people together. It's nothing helps, you know, create more community than tragedy. We've seen that here in Texas as well. The problem becomes when I start feeling like either I am underperforming or outperforming based upon the status quo, based upon the norm of what everybody else is doing. And that's something that I still struggle with, which is the, again, I'm behind.

26:55Yeah. Because I picked up my phone and my phone told me so. Yeah, if you wake up in the morning and you're like, here's what other people are thinking, here's what other people are doing, here's what happened while I was sleeping, then you're like, shit, I got to catch up. But if you wake up and you're like, this is my life, this is my day, what do I want to do? What am I put here to do? you have a little you have a version of that kind of bubble and the longer you can stay in it the better i find you like if we i wake up i don't touch my phone take the kids for a walk we get outside um or like say i'm traveling i get up i go for a run i work out and i'm you know you're 7 a.m and you're like i already like did some stuff yeah yeah yeah and and and And it wasn't out of, there was no urgency to it.

27:47There was no insecurity to it. There was no distraction to it. There was just presence and experience and fun and gratitude. That's wonderful. That's what you want to do. Gratitude to me is the key because what I can have the tendency to do is start feeling obligation. Yes. And I think that there, someone pointed this out to me where every new protocol, every new behavior feels false because it is. it's not, there is some feeling of, I'm not dancing is I don't know how to dance and I've taken dance classes before and it always feels weird. I picked up drums again because Traveler's showing some interest in drums.

28:26And so purely for him, I got a drum kit. I've played on it every day. He's looked at it. He thinks it's awesome, but there's, this is an instrument that I've been playing since I was, you know, 12 years old, but of course I've not devoted my life to it. have devoted to other things so it now feels false it feels weird feels uncomfortable but the more that i do it the more oh that's right i remember this and this is my there is a physical sense memory but it's somebody pointed out to me this way where it's choice leads to pattern pattern leads to behavior behavior leads to character and over time there's things like getting up early in the morning man that was not my gig at all right now it's who i am no matter where i what no matter where i am i do this weird thing where if even i'm in a hotel room i don't use the blackout curtains it feels weird i will keep them just slightly open so that when sun shines in then i'm awake and i'm allowing that to kind of trigger me it's really weird if like you're in vegas because there's just always lights yeah yeah um but i just don't like to feel like i'm isolated and cut off even in a, it's like my own little nightlight, I guess.

29:36Well, it's funny when you have kids, right? You take them to the doctor and the first thing they're doing is like giving you these statistics about where your kid compares to other kids, right? They're like, they're in the 90 % height profile and the 30 % weight profile. And you think about, obviously there's some medical reason for this information, but it is inherently playing into this thing. We go like, wow, I gotta have a taller kid. Like, you know, like their arms aren't long enough. Like they're giving you information about where your kid stacks up against other kids in a thing that is largely out of either of your controls.

30:13Right. Completely. And that is, I think, sort of my metaphor for parenting as a whole, right? Like if you just had a kid and nobody else had kids, you wouldn't be like six is when they better be reading at a certain level, right? You would just be like, obviously at some point they'll get it. Did you ever get hit to Bluey? Yeah. Okay. If you're a parent and you're not watching Bluey. Bluey's great. It's pretty incredible. it's very poignant in the same way that like Bugs Bunny cartoons were for kids but they're also for the adults this is completely different humor and style but the notion of there's the walking one where it's like when are they supposed to walk how quickly are they supposed to walk it's all just made up shit it's all made up a lot over time I had a what would be classified as a panic attack we were literally sitting down for dinner and I think Pam was pregnant at this point maybe but I was we're sitting having dinner and all of a sudden it's kind of felt like man heart was starting to race a little bit had an apple watch so I looked and I was sitting down and I watched my heart rate go from 84 to 98 101 110 and I got out the door was at 120 and I thought I'm having a heart attack I drove myself to the hospital and I learned that if you go to the hospital and you say I think I'm having a heart attack you don't get to just go home yeah never mind I'm fine they're like we're immediately hooking you up to ekg come in and the doctor there is they're always like the most you could be walking and holding your own head they're like well it seems to be the problem here super calm he's like hey he goes troy baker like yeah he goes you a video game guy i'm like i am he goes man i'm just playing last plus part two right now i was like this is not the time to have that moment we'll get there and he goes um because i see you're wearing an apple watch i was like yeah he goes um you told me what your heart rate was when you when you came in is that how you knew because yeah he goes did you watch it go up he goes yeah he goes let me walk you through the timeline so the second that you become aware of your own heart rate yeah it jumps up at least 10 to 15 bpm yeah sure because now you're heightened by that so it's increasing give me more now you said you ran out the door you got into the car so now you're in a panic state which is increasing because just the mention of going to the hospital is going to increase it he goes so what happened is when's the last time you had a cup of coffee i was like um and i traced it back i was like oh i did i had i had this literally as it was happening well it was it was several hours before he's like give your body time to process this but it's it's going again to that notion of the comparison thing where just by the sheer notion of something telling me this is where i'm at and me thinking that's bad yeah literally had a physical yeah effect on me so what do i do with my son if i have this notion where i think that he should be doing X better.

33:03Yeah. It's really hard because my son is incredibly, remarkably, um, astute and intelligent. I think that's, we've got a great kid, but it is, I see myself, man, we could jump into so many different spider web tangents of this conversation, but bottom line, it took me, I'd love to talk about how I got into stoicism, but apropos to this specific thread of the conversation. It took me a long time to come to, to be able to say this statement with honesty. My parents were doing the best they could. There was nothing that needs apologies for nor forgiveness. They were doing the best they could. They were given a system and those systems, some served them, some didn't.

33:51They tried all of them, probably tried to come up with some new ones. those worked those didn't work but they were doing the best that they could it is now incumbent upon me as a parent to not only do the best that i can but make sure that the best that i am giving traveler is the best for him not the best for me and what systems that i was given will work and what systems i have the ability to i was telling a friend last night if i look back six generations into my family and saw that every male in my family line had cancer, but I had the ability, it would stop with me. I would get cancer, but it would stop with me and Traveler wouldn't get cancer.

34:32I would do anything in the world to do that. That is anger. And that has been the through line for my family, his anger. And I think it's remarkable that Marcus continually talked about more than anything, getting control of his anger.

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36:55And you know he had a problem with it because of how much he talked about it, right? Yeah. Like he's not talking about like you got to remember, Marcus, jokes are funny. Right. Come on, man. Lighten up a little bit. Right. Anger. Yeah. He's clearly had a huge problem with it. I think it's probably the thing that he talks, one of the things he returns to most. And you got to imagine, first off, he's looking, so Hadrian, the emperor who sets in motion Marcus eventually becoming emperor. there's a story where uh hadrian gets mad at a secretary messes something up and he picks up a pen and he stabs it in the guy's eye just like that's the level of power and indulgence that the roman emperor could get away with the the story is that the he obviously feels bad about it after and he goes like um i'll give you anything like i'm so sorry i'll give you anything to make it better and the guy just can i have my eye back and uh which is i think a poignant reminder that like the things that we do out of anger cannot be undone.

37:57But you think about what Marcus could get away with and what would be tolerated. The fact that he's like sort of considerate of this at all, you know, I think deserves some credit. But then maybe you think about if it's getting back to him that he has an anger problem, how bad is his anger problem, right so um yeah i think it's sort of it's it it's important that we don't see the stoics he's not writing in meditations from this sort of sage like zen perspective of having triumphed over his emotions it's the opposite he's saying that because he got pissed at people today i literally picture him you know when he's like you know from the river you know he's like sitting they're going you gotta get your shit together man um when there's a passage towards the end he's like you're an old fucking man and you're still doing this you know and you realize this is not this is not teenage marcus putting down rules for how he wants to be this is 30 40 50 years of philosophy marcus who's still having trouble with this shit with great teachers along in the way.

39:08It's not like he didn't have a model for it. Like he had literally the best education and he's still struggling. So there, there is sometimes where I think that the employing of comparison can be helpful. Right. To look at stories like, all right, here's literally the king of the world, the most powerful person in the world, the most wealthiest person in the world. And he's still going, I got to get my shit together. That brings me some comfort. Yeah. It also inspires me. I think it's Ralph Walters that said, all of history exists for the sake of a single man and we look at that and go oh humans build pyramids no matter what you see on tiktok humans build the pyramids therefore i'm a human i'm capable of great things yeah um and so to me that there is this inspirational thing i so i have two one here um and my watch roman numerals yeah okay which is i know odd because people are like well he'd be greek it's like yeah but whatever um i can't cover it with my watch it is always in sight i was um in the middle of a project and i've never had a fight with a co-star and i found myself on the streets of this city in the middle of a fight with this co-star like a literal fight not like a fist fight but but yelling yeah and i the the here's the problem i was right yeah sure i was right i could i could walk you through chapter and verse how I was justified in my anger, justified in my argument.

40:37I could point out chapter and verse, the fallacy of their argument. And we ended up walking in separate directions, uh, back towards the same hotel. So you can take a cab, I'm walking just the most adolescent moment, one of the most adolescent moments of my life. And that was on a Friday. And I spent the entire weekend just going, man, how did this fail me? Years of doing this, this study, this practice, waking up every morning and reading Marcus and meditating on this, reading your books, listening to the podcast, this whole thing. And again, what I, comparison, all of a sudden I found this parallel between, okay, so I was raised in the church and there was a system that was given to me where here are the tenements that you live by.

41:22Here's the belief system. Here are the 10 commandments. And at one point, those I said failed me. So I played 52 card pickup with my entire religious and philosophical beliefs and says, what else is out there? And that's led me to this journey. But what I realized is that those systems didn't fail me, nor did I really even fail them. It is, that's the gig. Great. Start all over. So what I did was I brought out and I went all the way back to the very beginning of meditations. So is that 2-1 in meditations? Yeah, man. I wake up every day and I read it. The people today you will meet are jealous and surly and stupid and annoying and blah, blah, blah.

42:06All of these things happen to them because they're ignorance of what is good and evil. But you or I who have seen that the nature of good is beautiful and that the bad is ugly. Yeah. And that my kinsmen, the same nature exists in all of us. And to me, it's not just, this is what I learned from that passage, entry, whatever, is he woke up that morning and that was a real thing for him. Again, it wasn't the sage-like, zen-like pontificating. It was like, yo, man, you need to begin every day by telling yourself you're going to meet the person that's going to piss you off, frustrate you. And I understood then that anger comes in many different flavors.

42:43And there's the anger that was demonstrated to me by my dad, which was yelling, and that's how you asserted power, was by whoever was loud is one. Or throwing things, or there's a physical demonstration of anger. or there's the very passive what i did which was i grew up and i was this gangly awkward teenager i was never gonna win a fist fight but i will eviscerate you with my words i will cut you down so there's the verbal anger there's frustration where i've seen it in my son where if i get frustrating i see i see myself in him i see this mirror of myself he goes oh come on i'm like you got that from me 100 it's like a christmas story where'd you learn to curse like that yeah i I couldn't tell him it was from them.

43:25Fudge, but only I didn't say fudge. I just said the real thing. All of those systems, I realized, I'm like, oh, this is how I'm now imparting them unto him. And there's some things where you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I can't put the genie. You'll hear me do this a lot. In therapy, my therapist, I said, you know, like when you find yourself, they're like, who, me? I went, what? She goes, you said you. Are you talking about me or are you talking about yourself? I was like, no, I'm just talking about people in general. She goes, why are we bringing people in general? I mean, they're not in this room.

43:56It's just you. What do you do? Right. And you know how everyone's exactly like me. And we can just all kind of bring everybody down to my level real quick for a minute. It makes me feel way better about myself. Again, the comparison thing. I, with all the conversation, circling pronouns right now, which I believe that we should be having those conversations, a very easy conversation doesn't matter. Yeah. There's nothing needs to be debated. whatever somebody needs to be called feels they want to be called chooses to call themselves that's what they if you said hey my name is Gates McFadden on Star Trek love the show that's not her name she walked onto set one day and said call me Gates Sting one day said don't call me Gordon call me Sting that's balls man yeah who gives a shit who gives a shit doesn't matter the only reason why people fight that is because they're afraid but that's a whole other conversation the pronoun war that I fight every day is not saying you when I mean to say I or me.

44:49And so I've been changing my pronouns to, I feel this way. I do this. The problem with me is, and that's a daily battle that I have to, that I get to wage with myself is don't let myself become susceptible to the thief that compares, but that I choose to go, oh no, this is no, I have no idea if anybody else is dealing with this, but today I am. I was joking with someone the other day that my wife and I fight about pronouns all the time because I never know who the fuck she's talking about. She's always like he or she or they. And I'm like, you didn't introduce a name of a person first. You have to say Steve was doing X and then you can pick up he from the team.

45:33Who are we talking about? But my favorite part of that Marcus quote is towards the end, right? because it begins, actually, when I was on The Daily Show, he asked me if I had like an inspirational quote that I would replace live, laugh, love with. And I said that quote. I said 2-1 for meditation. Did you really? Yeah, because I think it's funny, right? Because it ends or it begins so darkly, right? The world sucks. People suck. Your day is going to suck, right? It lists all the shitty attributes of the people. And the worst people you're going to see. That you will meet today. And then it kind of about midway through, it takes this surprising turn, which is he goes, but you can't hate them.

46:17And he says, you can't. You can't be angry with them. Yeah, you can't even be angry with them. And he says, and you can't let them implicate you in ugliness. And he says, we're made to work together like two hands or two rows of teeth. The upper and lower rows of the teeth. We are made for cooperation. And so I think that it's like what that quote gets at is I think actually is itself kind of a microcosm of Marcus Realist and meditations, which is at first glance, it's dark and depressing and resigned. And if you only skim the first part and you don't let the second half sink in, you get the wrong impression.

46:56But if you read it all the way through and you sit with it and most importantly you try to apply it, it's actually beautiful. It's actually inspiring. And it's actually profoundly hopeful, right? Like a depressed, resigned, positive person doesn't go, look at how shitty people are. But I'm here for them. And we're going to do good stuff together. And I don't control the things they may or may not do. but I do control whether I let the bad stuff in this world drag me down. I control whether I am jealous and surly and anxious and awful and all of these things. And to me, that is, the whole of meditations could just be that passage.

47:42That to me is almost the perfect definition of stoicism as a whole. There's also this notion of, you chose this. I chose this. If these people are in front of me, because at any moment I can abdicate. I can abdicate my throne if I want to. But if I showed up, this is the gig. So I have forfeited the right to complain. I knew going in, these are the people that I'm going to meet. So remember. Or just stay in bed today. Just stay in bed. Yeah, exactly. Just don't do anything. Yeah. So that is why. I mean, I love that. That's the reason that literally the second I got back, I was like, I got to get this because I need to look down and go.

48:18And it's on my right-handed dominant traveler's left-handed. We think. Who knows? um all the time to decide um but this is on my weekend and to me that is reminding myself that's why can't wait is on my hand that i greet you with it's like i can't wait so these two things go hand in hand uh or wrist and wrist rather well there's something where marcus talks about that in meditations maybe you missed it but he talks about how he's practicing using the reins holding the reins to his horse in his non-dominant hand so he can get better with practice and so the idea of like you put on the the face you try the thing that's outside your comfort zone you strain to do the thing that you're not naturally suited to do that you know you do it the the way that's not easiest and that's how you get better this is interesting i'm looking at you you have paper on the right hand, which tells me that you're right-handed, but you're holding the pencil.

49:20No, no, I'm left-handed. I'm very left-handed. Interesting. I just put this here because I'm not really writing on it, but also I, uh. Do you ever try to write with your right hand? I am very, very, very left-handed. Like as far as any, any, any kind of writing thing. I do, I think I bat, I, I, my, my dad was left-handed, but he was also cheap. And so he didn't want to have to buy more expensive sport equipment so like so many people so like i think i like i think i bat whatever the normal way people is i golf the way normal people like uh i remember i if you were to play guitar you play right well i so like i got a guitar and i got a left-handed guitar this is very left-handed and then i wanted to get a new guitar and he's like can't you just switch i remember him like i was like no i can't switch i remember your brain real quick he went to my guitar teacher.

50:11He's like, are you sure? Like he didn't, he was like, this would save me like $200. This will save me like$200. We can't just have him rewire his entire brain and relearn the entire instrument. But yeah, no, I'm, I'm very left-handed. Interesting. Yeah. But that is it. I, like, I remember early on there was some, like my son was using his right hand and it looked maybe like he was left-handed at first. And I remember going like, are you sure? And then my wife was like, why do you have an opinion about this? And I was like, you're right. Why do I have an opinion about this. It is what it is. And are there some benefits they think creatively to being left-handed?

50:47Maybe. But pretending to be left-handed doesn't give you the benefits. It's literally... It's like you're either wired to be... Geniuses choose green, but you didn't choose them. It's like in Fight Club, sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. Pretending to be left-handed doesn't give you the benefits of being left-handed. And also when I think about it, being left-handed is also sucked. Like scissors suck and getting the ink smeared on the side of my hand. Why am I forcing it one way or other? Like this is another thing to not have an opinion about. And when I think about this as a parenting thing, I think it's in the Daily Dad a little bit.

51:22But like the source of conflict between parents and children so much of the time is about parents having opinions about things that they don't have to have opinions about. And if they didn't have an opinion about it, things would just be. And how much of the conflict I had even with my own parents that in retrospect seems silly because like I don't care about it anymore. But why did they care about it at all? And it's – which is a very stoic idea. In meditations, Marcus Trudeau says something like, remember things are not asking to be judged by you. Or he says you always have the power to have no opinion.

51:57And I think parenting is done wrong. The opinions about a bunch of shit that it's not your call, like what their sexuality is, what sports they like, who they like. You know, like why do you care? Like why do you care? Why do you actually have a strong opinion about whether your kid can dye their hair or not? Is it because there's some legitimate health reason not to do it? it's certainly not going to affect their employment. They're seven, you know what I mean? Or whatever, uh, or 10, like you don't want your kid to dye their hair green because you think other parents will think you're a bad parent for that.

52:40I think there's, there's that in my experience, what I've learned through this so far, I'll never forget when Traveler was born, um, I counted his fingers and toes and I'd get it almost involuntarily. Yeah. Yeah. I think they tell you to do that. We had a weird birth, man. They tell you to do that. And then that's even like, like people like our son was born today. He had 10 fingers and 10, it's like, it's like what you're supposed to report. He's normal. She's normal. Everything's intact. Yes. And we didn't, we didn't mess up. But for me, at least what was revealed to me in that is that the desire and the fear was that again going back to the cancer it's please let everything that's bad within me stop with me and let him be perfect and pure yeah and for some reason to me the 10 fingers and 10 toes was a a totem of that was somehow a demonstration of everything that's bad within me he was starting over from scratch and it wasn't just passed on but i think the reason why i get afraid of what, will he be left-handed, right-handed?

53:49I'm not. I think it's actually kind of cool. Who will he like? Who will he not? It's memento mori. At the end of the day, it comes down to I don't have control over it. And that makes me feel uncomfortable. If I'm not in control of that, ultimately it all points to I'm afraid of dying. And that's why to me the memento mori of all the aphorisms is the one that means the most to me because if I can get cool with death, yeah in Don Robertson's book he talks about this where I'm going to butcher this quote but in speaking to death he says I've imagined you I've imagined you many times now pass through the gates of my imagination let us visit his friends that to me that quote and also there was a soul you may know this story a soldier approaches his general and says sir your son is dead and the general responds I knew he was mortal yeah it's in Epictetus I think or somebody or maybe 10 because it says, yeah, I knew he was mortal when I had him.

54:44That to me is everything because if I can bring myself to that, and that sounds cold and callous on the surface, but it is also to me the most loving thing is like, I knew that my son wanted to be in the army. I knew that he was going to take a risk. And if I had been a weaker father, I would have prevented him from doing the thing that he wanted to do more than anything. I would have prevented him from being the person because he could have potentially gotten hurt. but I allowed myself to assuage my fear enough to not stand in the way of him becoming the person that he wanted to be. And I knew that.

55:17And I accept that even if it means it is the most crushing, horrific reality that can possibly imagine for myself. I knew he was mortal. Do you do the stoic thing that Marcus talks about in meditations where he says, like, as you tuck your child in at night, you say to yourself, like, they may not make it to the morning like that this is a mortal being that you are tucking in and you don't control what happens can you do that because it's the hardest it is so i have i have this i have this thing that i say to traveler every night i've done it since he was a baby and he's at the point craig mazen has this thing where kids will hit this different point in their life where um they reach the age where it's fuck you don't tuck me in and it's this i don't want to be around you i don't want the hugs because I don't want anything, but still tuck me in.

56:03It's, it's, I still need you to be daddy. I still need you to be mom, but I'm still my own person. And there's elements of, of fuck you, tuck me in that traveler already has. And it's whenever I say these words to him. And that to me is I have this like weird superstition, like I'm going to knock on the door three times. So make sure, because if I don't do that, he's going to stop breathing. And so there is a version of that, that I do where it's like, I understand that today was a gift and I'm not promised the same gift tomorrow. But if I get it again, I will ravish and ravenously enjoy it. And I think about it's like, so why am I trying to wrap this up?

56:39You know what I mean? Like to me, the idea of meditating on this thing, which I think you do privately. I don't think you need to let your kid know. But you know you might die. We used to say that to each other. I don't think that's the right way to do it. But I do think there is something in, okay, if I know that there is some night that you're going to do that and it's going to be the last time, either for - You or for him. For you or for that. So why is it that you're saying you won't read one more book? Like why is it that you're saying stop fucking squirming around? Like why are you saying you got to call – like why are you not just letting this unfold as it unfolds?

57:20like if you truly understood that you only get to do this a certain amount of times, why would you try to rush through it? Because what are you rushing towards? You're rushing towards the last time you get to do it. It's because I'm afraid I'm going to be a bad dad. I'm afraid I don't, I need to exercise and learn new systems that allows me to be a better parent than, and I don't, I don't mean this as a disparagement against my dad, but the system that was given to him was because i'm your father because i said so i have this assumed inherent authority over you yeah and that bedtime is this time and if you are not in bed by this time then you're doing something wrong and i'm allowing you to do like there's just a soul arbitrary bad kid yeah and the thing that pam and i were very quick to dispel from our vocabulary is you're not a bad kid.

58:15You're not a good kid. Yeah, you're just a kid. You're just a kid, man. And he has zero responsibilities right now. Our pediatrician is amazing. And he said, I'm going to give you one piece of unsolicited advice. He goes, you have one rule, not many, one rule. You tell your kids, you can do whatever you want. But the second you hear me say your name, you stop doing that thing and you come to me. Instituting rules for a two-year-old is just the most... sisyphean task ever everything's incumbent upon me it's my job to provide for him it's my job to to and we tell him it's like what's our number one job he goes to keep me safe it's like that's all i gotta do so if i tell you to stop doing something why am i telling you to do it yeah because i'm not keeping you safe so his job is to be five yeah and that's it yeah it's not to learn all these tenements and responsibilities be five go i the fact when he falls we we every bruise that he gets were like, dude, way to go, man.

59:13Way to go. You did good today. It's like, oh man, just so gnarly. I don't look my knee. So how did you come to stoicism? Oh man. Have you ever broken up with a friend? I suppose, yeah. I have broken up. I've had relationships go south and I was a serial monogamist as a friend of mine told me. So I would jump from one relationship to another. With friends or? No, like romantic relationships. But I'd never broken up with a friend. and this is 2016 you don't just ghost you actually have a breakup there was a breakup and which i'm weird man i i went into this is a separate thing but like i i was the guy who called my agent i was like hey can we have a meeting they're like yeah so i went to the new office and then i was like hey so i'm out and we need to find an exit strategy that is to change and they're like wait a minute nobody you email us i'm like you hired me to do it for you i'm to do it to your face.

1:00:07But this was a relationship that there was so much anger there. And I realized it was like, oh, here's what's happening. I am preventing you from being the person that you are trying to be. And you are preventing, I'm allowing you to prevent me from being the person that I want to be. So instead of us getting frustrated at each other, this relationship is no longer, it's run its course and I'm out. When I did that, I didn't realize that I had made this person the linchpin in my entire social network so once i removed that linchpin i'm now untethered to that social network right they got all the friends and the friend divorce yes and so all of a sudden i find myself lost and i had rock bottom man it was it was the darkest that i've ever been in my life and there are pools of thought that one that i began swimming in that i was like I might need to reach out for some help.

1:01:08So I found myself in Glasgow, Scotland. I do a lot of Comic-Con conventions and it's really cool. It's a great interaction. I get to hear things that I've been a part of, what it means to people. I get to share in that community. But then also you get the hotel bar conversations to where it's like people that you never would have thought you would have been across or just kind of random people come into your life, come into my life. and I get to commune with them for a little bit, and then we're on to our own thing. And I ended up opening up to this guy named Igor. In the hotel bar? Yeah, he's with a friend of mine, but he's like the plus one.

1:01:47He's just the guy that tags along. And I hope he listens to this. We're talking about different stuff, and he goes, have you ever read Meditations? I was like, yeah, I've meditated before. He goes, no, no, no. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. And I shit you not, I was like, are you talking about the guy from gladiator yeah he's like you know that was a real emperor i'm like i'm i'm gonna allow myself to be the stupidest person in this conversation openly so please teach me he's like here's a book he showed it to me on amazon and he goes it's 4.99 it's the blue dover thrift edition he was like this is the george s long translation it's the one that'll retain kind of the king james-ness of it which you will vibe with but you need to get this it's like 99 pages i'm like okay i get this by get home the book's waiting for me because we live in a magical world where things can get to us in 24 hours see when i bought meditations i had to buy two other books okay to get free shipping cool sweet amazon prime did not exist yet otherwise you had to pay an arm and a leg to get it yes so i get this book and i made this i don't know why but i always had struggled with telling people they said have you ever read this yeah absolutely yeah have you ever seen this absolutely and a few years before then i had been we're in my apartment and some friends of ours we had just all auditioned for this aliens game and it was three of my closest friends and we're like man i really feel like i want to re-watch aliens like yeah let's re-watch that classic movie and so we walked and from my apartment you could walk outside go across the street on the other side of the street was a Blockbuster.

1:03:25And so we get aliens, we come back home and we sit down and we pop it in and title screen comes up and I press pause like... I just want you guys to know I've never seen this movie before. And it came out like I blurted it out. And what I realized in that moment was that the joy that people get to be there for the first time is one of the greatest. It's like, oh, I can't, I don't want to watch this. I want to watch you watch this. And so I found this new joy in humbling myself. instead of pretending and saying, I want to watch this. So I decided to make this commitment that I wasn't going to just burn through this book.

1:04:07And I was like, I'm going to take time. And there's this old far side cartoon where Gary Larson drew this kid with this really, really small head. And he has his hand up. He goes, teacher, can I be excused? My brain is full. And I said, I will either stop when this book stops me, or I will only read an entry a day. Yeah. And so it took me 18 months to get through meditations. And there's only two books that I've read. Sorry, three, including a graphic novel. Why the Last Man, believe it or not, didn't cry in the road. The book or the movie? We don't talk about the movie. we'll talk about the book um one of the best opening lines in a book um if the if the child was not the word of god then god never spoke it's one of the best lines that corman kathy's ever written um city of thieves city if you've never read city of thieves david benioff it's a wonderful story about his grandfather um half fiction half not you don't know which is which um but i got to the end of that and i cried and i got to the end of meditations and i cried um partially because the asper you talk about the beauty of it he dies he dies um he talks about that though yeah and talk about departing this life satisfied and i was like that's the goal depart this life satisfied and to not and he talks about being an actor which i thought was pretty cool too where he says don't react yeah curtain and don't get upset because your time is done you did your thing get off stage, it's done.

1:05:45It's okay.

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1:08:16I was just talking to someone about this the other day. Like the more you read meditations and the more experiences you have, the different, you pick up different things. So like what I took me till the pandemic to pick up on this fact that as he's wrapping up meditations, he is he gets probably the plague like he knows that he's dying and he has to send his son away because they can't be near each other because he can't let his son get the plague and so you just think about like the the period on the sentence of all the things that marcus goes through however flawed commodus is and commodus seems to be about as bad as joaquin phoenix's character presents him as.

1:08:59It was his only son that was still alive, right? Yeah. So he buries all these children. And then in his last moments, because of the job, and then because of, as it was in COVID, it was during the Antonine Plague. You die alone. Yeah, you die alone. And still, he manages to pull out this kind of beautiful, hopeful passage that's full of gratitude and appreciation and almost like a fearlessness for whatever's happening. That's practicing what you preach, I guess. Are you familiar with what's attributed to be his last words? Yeah, go to the rising sun for I am setting. What I've heard was, and now if you will grant me, I will take my leave and pass on ahead of you.

1:09:53Which is, the other one was, don't weep for me. Or why, he almost got angry. He says this to his friends, yeah. Why are you weeping for me? He's like, this is not my first death, this is my last. As I understand it, he said something like, why are you crying for me? think of your own death and think of the death of all of the people that have what I have. But yeah. And you know what Antoninus's last words were? So Marcus's stepfather. So basically they think that you have these last words and then there's sort of this last word, either it's made up or it's some sort of part of the transition from power.

1:10:30The emperor kind of says some word. This is what you say when you die. Yeah. Yeah. They think Marcus's was go to the rising sun for I am setting, meaning like I'm not the emperor anymore. To the rising sun. Yes. But Antoninus' last words was equanimitas. Which means what? Equanimity or stillness or poise or peace. And so, yeah, there's some kind of like with your last breath kind of a how do you sum it all up-ness to it. There is that notion with me that I hope, by the way, I have to say it's incredibly intimidating. and the conversation about comparison, it is incredibly intimidating to try to quote or even remember in front of you.

1:11:13So I'm acknowledging that. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll play video games after this. I'll school you. Yeah. There is that romantic notion within me, and maybe that's something that I need to surrender, where it's when I come to that point. By the way, the first copy that I have of Meditations is - The silver one? yeah it's in my safe um i love first editions yeah i'm a book collector it's my it's been my souvenir wherever i go in the world i go and buy a book and i've got some really cool ones that i'm proud of um one is um a first edition of f scott fitgerald's um play the vegetable and in the card it says that it was received so poorly by not only the audience and the critics but including the director himself who left before the end of the first production and i'm like i have to buy that because to know that you can go write the great american novel and then write a piece of shit there's both of those the capacity isn't within both of us for goodness and and just utter shit but that first copy is the cover is worn the pages are it's it's it's been used and it's all marked up and there's something that i hope that when traveler whenever whether he's 40 or 14 or whatever decides that's not his copy and it sits on our safe and i've done the dedication to him um which is a message just between he and i but it's also like i want you to know just like i have these tattoos this was my first underlying yeah sure so if i were to go back through and read it now there's all sorts of stuff that would stand out to me but this is the thing that hit you and I did it in one color.

1:12:58I want yours to be a different color. That's beautiful. What's going to hit you when you read this? Well, I have a leather edition that I'll give you that might stand up a little bit better. Yeah, I do. Because, yeah, I have the paperback of the Gregory Hayes translation, which is the one that I love. That's the more modern translation. Is that right? Yeah, it's for the modern library. But I think it's not King's James-y. It's very sort of poetic. And there's some people, they dispute certain things. They don't like it. But I think it's whatever. It's like you got into whatever music you got into, right?

1:13:33So I love that one. But mine was really starting to be worse for the wear. And so I decided I would start fresh. And so this leather one is great. I'll give you that. But you can think about this like where's Marcus's copy of Epictetus, right? Does he have the exact same discussion with Commodus? And then Commodus probably doesn't listen at all. but maybe he gets it to one of the other sons that don't make it. But yeah, the idea of like this thing changed me. And every time I come back to it, I'm different because I was changed by reading it the first time. And then I'm also different because of the things I went through.

1:14:13And you kind of never come back to the same. You never come back to the same book. You know what I mean? I agree. Because you're not the same. The book is not the same. The world is not the same. And there's this kind of really cool process of returning to the same ideas over and over and over again, because they're not really the same. I think there's this misnomer. I've had this conversation with my brother-in-law. He's a blue-collar scholar. He's an incredibly intelligent person. And where he's decided to devote his study, practice, whatever, is within more of the fundamental beliefs of the Bible.

1:14:49Yeah. and i'm ravitously uh devouring content from all sides of different things because i do love discourse i love debate um but i think there's this misnomer that anything that ends in an ism is somehow a religion and the thing that i found for me that was revealed to me through this is that this is as much of a religion as a diet it is a practice it's a protocol yes it's a way of thinking it's a way of operating but it is not a religion that is venerating we i have a tendency to venerate these people like epitetus and seneca and and like my rock stars would like yeah be going all the way back to xeno and it's like how cool is that and there's these stories that i've i've helped propagate and learn and and have i've loved discovering about and maybe i do fall into the same pattern I did when I was reading about the disciples and everybody else who was in the Bible.

1:15:47The difference though, is that this doesn't replace anything of that. It builds upon or it goes alongside. Um, I was going, my first reading as I started reading meditations and then I would go over to Alan Watts. And so I was like doing this East and West thing and seeing the crossover between there. It was a similar vibe. There is, it's a completely different approach to the same thing. Um, and I can see how the thing that I love that Alan Watts did was that he would talk about, he's like, first thing to understand the history of this. And so the very first part of the way of Zen is just kind of in the same way of like the book one of meditations is like, I'm going to go through and acknowledge all these people.

1:16:25But if you want to understand why the importance of this is critical to the, and foundational to understanding the rest of these chapters, know who these people were in my life, why he thinks his stepfather, why he thinks all of the people, some of the people that even tried to hurt him, what he learned from that. Sure. That's an incredible forward. I have a tendency to want to skip past that, but I - But sometimes I wonder, because we don't actually know that he wrote it that way. So it was compiled that way. Interesting. Well, I mean, maybe he wrote it that way, maybe, or maybe that one was the way it was, and then everything else is compiled differently.

1:16:57But it's also, it's interesting, like, what if that was just, he just woke up one day and he's like, oh, what did I learn from Sextus? Or what did I learn from Antoninus? You know what I mean? Or maybe it was, I don't know. It's, it's also, it's, it's fascinating to think we don't really know when he wrote it, how he wrote it, why he wrote it, how he ordered it, what it looked like. You know, we don't. That wasn't done until like the 19th century or something like that. Yeah. I mean, we, we, we have copies that go way back, but it was like, we don't have the copy. Right. And he certainly didn't publish it.

1:17:32He'd probably be mortified. wasn't it it's to himself right it was supposed to be it was never supposed to be this is where it gets there's something that i've been um i don't want to say dreading because that sounds way too dramatic even for an actor but i i have been avoiding journaling oh interesting um and the reason why is because i understand the power of journaling now even writing down my thoughts there is ownership in them and so there is this incontrovertible reflection of my thoughts that if i keep them just up in my head not even myself has to recognize them and there is this again this weird comparison with marcus never wanted people to read this well what if you wrote what if you wrote 500 more entries and we only saw the ones that we saw yeah yeah maybe they got rid of all the bad but even even still that's not the point yeah um and it's something that obviously you talk about exhaustively about the practice of doing this and i was like yeah i should do that journaling and there's a lot of people that's like i'm gonna do my daily devotional yeah um and even even daily data is very much of like here's a bite-sized thing.

1:18:54Read this, take it in. But the, I love vinyl because there's a relationship that the listener has with the material that it's finite. You know, after 22 minutes, you're going to have to get up. And if you want to continue the experience, you have to flip that record over, put the needle down and begin side B. There was a whole, I never listened to side B of Joshua Tree for like years because I just loved where the streets have no name with or without you, all of that. That's all that I wanted to listen to. So before it would flip over, I would rewind or I would just, you know, drop, drag the needle over to the very outside edge.

1:19:36And then I was driving and I had a tape and like an old tape players for you young kids who don't know it would, you didn't have to tape, turn the tape over into this auto flip thing. And so all of a sudden I didn't press stop rewind or whatever fast enough. And I started hearing, Oh wait, there's other good songs. Red Hill Mining Town. And that became one of my favorite U2 songs. And when they came back through LA, uh, they did this world tour where I'd seen them on every tour, but Joshua tree. And so they did this 40th anniversary of Joshua tree. And they, I came back and they played this one song.

1:20:12All of a sudden I start hearing the, those guitar tones of those delay tones of the edge playing red hill mining town. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I can't believe I get to hear this song. They get done. And I shit you not. Bono goes, he looks at the edge and he's kind of nods. He goes, we've never played that song live before. That was the first time. And a buddy of mine was at the show the night before. And I was like, did they play red hill mining town? I was like, no, they played this song. I was like, they just played red hill mining town and they never did that. So I got that moment. And so I think about all the other things where, because I won't allow myself to have a relationship with that.

1:20:47What am I missing out on? What's the Red Hill Mining Town moment with journaling that I have that maybe I do want to preserve that to be able to look at my tattoos and go, man, I don't like necessarily this, but now I can appreciate it because that has grown into this. I don't like the colors of this. I would never do that again. But how grateful I am that I have that written down as a marker to remind myself of the person that I was, if for no other reason than to measure the growth of where I'm currently at. I have a funny Bono stoicism story. You want to hear it? Go. So there was this guy who's like a studio head and he writes in the books and he wanted some like marketing advice or media advice or something.

1:21:26And so I flew out to LA and I was meeting with him and he was like, I want you to meet my wife. So he took me to dinner. What's the hotel everyone has dinner at? One of the fancy hotels, like Beverly Hills something or other. The Beverly Hilton? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Some fancy hotel. or whatever yeah yeah and so we're sitting there and um like bono is sitting at a table like down down the row or something he said do you want to meet bono and i was like uh sure and so he's like okay and they're they're apparently friends and so he like walks me over and he's like ryan this is bono bono this is ryan he's like ryan wrote this book the daily stoic he writes about stoicism have you heard of him he was like no and i was like why did you do me like that like you don't So my Bono story is him being, him not acknowledging my existence in any way, as of course he should not.

1:22:16But the Schrodinger moment that you lived in for that moment, you were like, this could be the time when Bono goes, I love your book. No, I knew it wasn't going to happen. It should have just been, this is a regular person off of the street meeting you, Bono, not a presumed mutual appreciation. You heard of him? No, you didn't think so either. Go back to the table. I'll be back in a minute, kid. It's like, you know, people go like, what do you do? And you say like, I'm an author. And they go like, what books have you written? And then you know you're just having to tell them in this moment something they've never heard of.

1:22:46But it's way worse because no one ever does it that way. They ask you in the strangest ways like, anything of yours that I would have read? I have no idea. What's your taste? What do you like? You're an actor. What do I know you from? I have no idea. I've never lived your experience. You tell me. A lot of times. So it was that, but with Bono. But with Bono, that would make me shrink away so bad. There was this moment where there was a person who came out and was like, hey, can I tell you about something? And I don't remember what it was, but it's something I didn't want to hear about. And they were like, we really had to share this with you.

1:23:18I swear it was like Moonies or something. It was really weird and anachronistic. And I was like, oh, no, thank you. It was like, okay, well, hey, you're famous. I'm like, to some people. And he was like, what have you been? It was like a lot of things. It's like, okay, well, can I take a picture with you? who I am. But now you have somebody. I was like, yeah. And so he puts his arm around me and it was some religious group. I don't remember what it was, but his friends framing up the perfect picture and everything. And he was like, I don't know what it's from, but I'm going to figure it out. I've seen you in something.

1:23:51And right as that person every once in a while, the universe gives you these moments. Right as they're taking the picture, it's like, I do a lot of hardcore gay porn. And the person just looks at me and you just get this picture of the fan. I was like, just have Have fun explaining that moment to all of your friends. I had a, I had a humbling version of this at the, actually the airport yesterday. I'm like sitting there waiting for my flight. I'm like leaning against the counter. This guy walks by and sort of makes eye contact with me. Then like three minutes later, he walks and now he's like walking directly towards me.

1:24:22Sure. And, uh, and he's like looking at me in the face. So I'm like, okay, like I've been recognized and this person's gonna like say something to me or whatever, but you like, you know, it's like a part of what you do and it's always weird and uncomfortable. comfortable but um so i kind of go to like start shaking his hand and then can you tell me where the restroom yeah yeah he was like are he's like are you in line like i was like leaning against the counter for the game uh no you know it was like it was totally just like i was in this person's way it's the worst version of when you think someone's waving at you and you're like yes i'm just gonna do the hand behind my back thing and i was i'd like was listening to music so i was kind of zoned out and like because you know you get you just get used to people like in regular life, people don't pierce your bubble.

1:25:06And that, except usually if either you actually know them or they think they know you from this thing. And so the ego goes, of course, like your ego, it was just this sort of subconscious moment. What I took from it besides just the awkwardness and funny, it was like, there's some part of the ego there that's existing in the world going, people know who I am, right? Except for Bono. Yes, well, no, no, no, but I'm saying it was like my, that was an assumption I wanna make sure isn't part of the operating system on a passive, just regular basis because that's not a good way to live, right? And it's not a humble way to live.

1:25:46And so, but it was just like that some part unconsciously reflexively, the bubble gets pierced. And I don't, I'm not thinking I'm in this person's way. I'm thinking this person knows who I am. And I would much rather be the person that is thinking, oh, I'm in this person's way. And then be pleasantly surprised if, oh, no, no, actually they wanted a picture or something. Absolutely. And so. It's one of the reasons why I do conventions is because you put me in front of 5 ,000 people. I'm great. The one-on-one is a real struggle for me. And especially when people are saying, and typically no one's going to wait in line to say something.

1:26:26It's comfortable. The terms are agreed upon. Yes. Who is who? What is what? Why are we all here? But there's still an awkward commerce because it's like, I have a finite amount of time to tell you as much about myself and for me to tell them as much about myself. So it's just this weird commerce because there's a lot of people that are trying to do the same thing. But also no one, for the most part, stands in line to not say something kind. Sure. I fucking hate your work. Yeah. People have done that before. It's like, I didn't like this. I'm like, thank you for taking time to do that. appreciate you sharing your opinion but i got really uncomfortable and when i was in a band people would come up and go hey great show tonight and i would feel like the need to be humble and go oh no no the sound was off my voice was a little weak or whatever didn't play that song right and a friend of mine pointed out to me he said modesty is the epitome of arrogance you got to take the compliment just say thank you disagreeing with someone's opinion and they're not wrong So doing their opinion and presuming my opinion is more important than theirs.

1:27:27I know better than you. So one of the reasons why I do the conventions is when someone goes, hey, thank you so much. This has been incredible. I think it's just to go, thank you. It's to develop that practice of just going, thank you. That really means a lot. And also realizing that I didn't make The Last of Us. I was in it. But there were 300, 500, 600 people that made that game that all worked really, really hard. I, at that moment in time, I'm just the recipient of all of that appreciation. Yeah, sure. So that's all that I have to be. I don't have to stand it up on its own. I don't have to, I can just be, hey, thank you so much.

1:28:04I'm going to pass that along to everyone on the team. I'll make sure that Neil hears that. Ashley would love to know that. That's what I do. I had an exchange on the like, hey, great show where I was, I was doing a talk. There's a bunch of speakers. And like, before I talk, I'm like a wreck. I have to like pace nervously and sort of get in a zone. And so not like paying attention to anything. And so the person, one of the people before me goes, you know, the audience claps, they walk off stage and go, you were great. Like, great job. That was awesome. Which of course I did not watch one second of their thing.

1:28:33I was just being nice, you know, just whatever. I know it's uncomfortable. So I was just being nice. And then like later I went and did my talk and someone was like, Hey, that was great. You did awesome. Like another speaker. And I was like, Oh, like I was like that. I'm not that person. No, no. No, my first take was like, yes, this must be true. They just said this to me. I was feeling sort of filled up. And then I was like, they probably did not watch one second of what happened. And that person was boner. No, what matters is what do I think of it, right? Like, did I do what I set out to do?

1:29:07Do I feel filled up by it? Did I leave anything on the table? You know, what did I learn from it? You have a different gig because like there are people that pay you a lot of money to go around the world. And you talk to football teams. you talk to the military, you do all this. How, when I say prepared, there's, there's a difference between, um, your, the years that you've put into this have prepared you, but do you walk out knowing what you're going to say? Do you make sure that you stick within, um, like you have like your PowerPoint, your keynotes, or do you go, I have no idea what I'm about to say until you walk out there and you do it.

1:29:44No, I, I, I almost always know what I'm going to say. I have a talk that I'm doing that I'm moving pieces around depending on the audience that I'm in. Like a couple of days ago, I talked to all the coaches in the athletic department at the University of Tennessee. And last night it was like these Wall Street CEOs. One was a talk. The other was like a fireside chat. So the fireside chat was more like I wasn't in control. So I have a less good sense of how it went because like there wasn't something I was intending to do. so I like I was asking I was actually just asking my agent for for feedback the weird the weird part of what I do is that um like basically you know like most people know the difference between like corporate gigs and all other kinds of gigs like all my gigs are corporate gigs basically right like very rarely am I speaking in front of an audience where each one of those people made the individual choice to attend so it's a weird vibe right like like when it's cool to talk to an nfl team but i remember a speaker who's done this many times was he's like this is actually one of the worst audiences none of them want to be there they're all fucking tired uh they're all really good at what they do and they're all grown-ass men or whatever for the most part like whatever there are obviously there's women's sports but they're all grown-ass adults in what they do and their boss is making them sit there and listen to this person.

1:31:12And so it's a rough crowd. You have to think about why is the crowd there, what do they want, what's going through, and then you have to adjust accordingly. But most of the time, like even when I'm speaking at a conference, right, like the conference put together the bill and people are attending the conference for work or for whatever. They're not like there to see me necessarily. So it's an unusual audience or style of doing stuff because you're not performing for your people. You're usually performing for like total strangers and it's 7.30 a.m. in Las Vegas or whatever. You know, it's like in a windowless ballroom.

1:31:57It's like you got to get used to it. How's everybody doing? Yeah, you got to be like, here's what I'm trying to do. You can't be like, was the crowd, you know, like, you just got to like, what are you setting out to do? And then most of the time you realize like, it's actually the boss who you're performing for. And then he's like, he or she is like, you guys getting this? Are you guys getting this? This is what I've been talking about for the last six weeks. Exactly. So like, you have different audience. Greg, you especially listen. Listen to him. you have different audiences that you're performing for at simultaneously and then but it's weird it's it's a weird thing and it's also so different i mean like what i do is write books and then people are like is that what you say like would you consider yourself first and foremost an author would you consider yourself well i would say a writer but um but yes i i that's the medium that i am most comfortable in but you do podcasts so well do you feel like you do well i mean it doesn't um i'm i've been doing it less long so i have you know i i would measure them differently do you know what i mean like i mean different artistic journeys on each one but it feels like you produce more content for you produce more content as a speaker podcaster whatever than you do writing is that maybe i mean a book is like you know the the a book is the culmination of years of work in one thing that gets consumed by lots of people over a long period of time.

1:33:32And then the reason I would say a writer is that I also do like the Daily Stoic and the Daily Dad. That's basically a book a year that I publish for free in the form of the daily email. So I'm seeing it writing first and then the other stuff, then doing a podcast episode of that email like that's that's from the that's descendant from or derivative of the writing and interviews i mean i feel like i definitely feel like i've gotten better at it and i've definitely gotten better at speaking you just do it a lot of times and you get better at it but um then video straight to camera stuff that's obviously been its own journey but like um that's more like I identify as a writer and I identify as a reader, but I understand and am interested in reaching people who have different identities, if that makes sense.

1:34:31Makes perfect sense. At this point, this is a luxury of the books having done well, but at this point, I don't really care how the idea is consumed. it is interesting because you do you're such a strong advocate for reading yes um and i think you even talked about this and um because the first one that i read obstacle was the way it was the first one that i read but i i say read it was it was done as a uh as an audiobook yeah yeah um but i remember i was on the 405 and it hit me we're like you should be reading i'm like dude you're doing an audiobook right i was like am i am i cheating i think that there there's different ways like i've read um but i ended up listening to um how to think like a roman emperor because it's a great book and don's such a great dude he's a very sweet dude um delightful voice i know this the best part about him listening to this scottish brogue yeah yeah um i love the way that that what's funny is so i started reading um uh meditations and then a buddy of mine who's a big youtuber named jacksepticeye turned me on to how to think like a roman emperor and then that led me into uh the obstacle is the way and so it's like there's been this weird concentric circles of and then that led me into reading seneca and then that so it's like there's been this constant pinging off of different things to, because when you start talking about someone's like, I don't know, who's Zeno?

1:36:08I have no idea who you're talking about. Um, did you read Lies of the Stoics? Not yet. Uh, that's, that was just referenced it the other day. I think in the, in the podcast, I was like, okay, I got to get in that. Um, but this is something that for me, there's a private practice that, that somebody can have. And there's, there's something I can do in my private life like if i go to the gym that's going to impact i can't impact my work doing performance capture uh in video games the luxury of it is you don't necessarily have to be camera ready you don't have to look great because they're going to make you look awesome yeah they're going to put that character model on whatever body you have that's why you wear the stupid suit i'm just bones literally just a skeleton yeah but i treat it the same way that anybody else would with the film because there was this one role that I did, this game that's coming out this summer called Fort Solace, where I play this character who's a medical officer, but there's a big confrontation with the other lead played by Roger Clark.

1:37:09And we have a couple of fight scenes. And I was like, the thing that I want to be about this guy is he looks docile and very passive. But if that dude were to take his shirt off, you're like, I had no idea that was underneath thinner and so i started training that way and again i've got a great trainer that that walked me through and i was like i told dan my my trainer was like this is what i want to do and so we developed a program that would allow me to have that but the reason why i bring this up is whatever i do if i get in the gym or if i have a diet that's really kind of for my own personal edification for my own thing but the thing that's inherent to all actors is how do you submit yourself to a as an actor, how do I submit myself to a process where the gig is to take criticism?

1:37:52The gig is to be told what you're doing is wrong. And I'm going to tell you how to do it better, even though a majority of the time I'm wrong. And what you did so many times there is a take or a line or something where we go back to the first one was like, that's what it is. We did 50 other versions of this. why don't you just listen to my taste or there's also a lot of times where i think my way is the only way and i don't listen to the writer the director or whoever else is involved in the process to be able to go there's a different way of looking at this and i'm robbing myself neil druckman who's the director of the last of us um i would come in and go i think this line needs to change yeah and he goes he tolerated that for a while and then finally goes why don't instead you let your first reaction to be come to me and go what about this scene this character or this story do i not understand oh sure and then if we go okay i understand all those things but i don't understand how this line speaks to that goes then we can change the line i've said that to my editor before i was like you how could you possibly be giving me these notes if you i haven't explain to you what I want the book to be.

1:39:09Like I was like, your job, your job is not to make my book what you want it to be. Your job is to make my book what I want it to be and to tell me when I'm not doing that. Um, now sometimes maybe I don't know, we can have a discussion about what that is, but ultimately we had some disagreements about what the role of an editor is and we made some switches. But, uh, with one of my editors, that was the issue is like that the, uh, there's ego in that. There's the assumption that you know, and you get to tell people how it should be. I think that's a really good note from the director. That's like, just assume you don't have enough information.

1:39:42And then let me give you the information and then we can talk about whether, once we're on the same page, then we can decide whether this works or not. Or, oh shit, you know what? You're absolutely right. It doesn't speak to that. We need to change that. Yeah. There's plenty of room for improvement, but you got to know what the thing is. There's this one job that we just wrapped up on and there was a specific line of dialogue that I really, really pushed back on because when they first pitched the whole story to me, to me, there's always a line either in the character description, in the story or something that I go, that's everything hinges on that.

1:40:16And I pushed back on this line. I was like, it doesn't belong here. It belongs at this one place. And there's times where I think as an actor, there is a humbling of myself that I have to do to go, maybe I don't have all the information. and there's other times where I'm like they can be wrong they can be wrong and I need you to understand but whereas before I think I would have thrown a fit or I would have let my anger be the way that I communicate that um these precepts and waking up in the morning and holding that time sacred yeah has really been able to help me um I mean as a dad and also as an actor as a director be able to go what's the best way the other um one of the tattoos that I have there is the Hegelian dialectic, which is not actually attributed to, it's attributed to Hegel, but it's not actually him, where it's, this circle represents the thesis, my point of view.

1:41:12This one is the antithesis, your point of view. And somewhere in the middle is the synthesis, the better perspective of it. And I drew two points in a straight line to represent, get to the solution as quickly as possible, get to that as quickly as possible. So my whole goal, I'm not an actor. I'm not a director. I'm not anything other than I'm a storyteller. Yeah. That's my whole thing is I'm here to not only tell my story, but I'm here to help you tell your story. So my focus is how can I help you tell your story? So what is the story? Let's just figure that out. And then we can move on. Yeah.

1:41:45I was just reading like they were going to have Jim's character in the office cheat on Pam. And he was like, no. It's a betrayal of my character. Exactly. And so you have to, obviously, though, the actor that thinks they know more than the writers is going to not last long on a show, but also, like, fuck up the greatness of the show. But then there are moments where the actor who lives inside this person knows more than the rotating cast of, you know, people in the writer's room that are just like, well, what's interesting? This will be the interesting episode. Yeah. There's a great story, Stanley Tobiaski, who's an amazing actor.

1:42:24If you've ever seen him, he played Sammy Jenkins in Memento. He also played Needlenose Ned Ryerson on Groundhog Day. I was having a conversation with him one time. We were on the same gig, and I said, it had to be so much fun working on Groundhog Day. He goes, it was miserable. I'm like, why? He goes, oh, this is a movie where famously Bill Murray and Harold Ramis fell out. And he goes, there was this moment where they're shooting the last scene of the movie, and PA comes to Harold Ramis, and he goes, Bill won't come out of his trailer. And he goes, why? He goes, he says he won't come out of his trailer until he finds out what Andy is wearing.

1:42:58Andy McDowell played the female lead in that movie. And Bill Murray felt that he needed to know what Andy McDowell was wearing before he would come out of the trailer. And Harold Ramis just lost it on him. He was like, he doesn't need to know that. He goes, bangs on his trailer. Bill Murray opens the door and he goes, get out of your trailer now. We've got to shoot this scene. He's like, what is Andy wearing? He goes, you don't need to know what Andy is wearing. You need to get on your mark and do the scene. And he goes, is she wearing my clothes, her clothes, no clothes? What is she wearing? And if you're familiar with the movie, it's the morning after when the whole day actually resets.

1:43:29And he's saying, I need to know what happened that night. Yeah, right. Did we have sex? Did we not have sex? What is she wearing? And Harold Ramis was like, fuck, he's right. Yeah. He's like, he didn't, he knew that I didn't have the end of my movie. I was trying to shoot a scene. He was trying to tell a story. Right. And so Harold Ramis gathered all the cast and crew together and said, okay, everybody, we're going to vote. Yeah. What is Andy wearing? And it came down to she's wearing her clothes. So there are times when the actor is right. But what I've had to learn is how am I, I can introduce a problem so far downstream that it becomes destructive.

1:44:08Yeah. So just because I may be right, how am I implementing that information? Am I being a team player? Am I helping other people tell their story? or am I just going in and shitting in the pool and now everybody has to get out because nobody can swim. It's the weirdest thing you'll ever see in this movie. If you've had diarrhea in the last 24 hours, don't swim in this pool. Dude, this is awesome. Man, I agree. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. It's my pleasure.

1:44:38Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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