Stoic Lessons From The Odyssey w/ Ryan Holiday

27:39Ryan Holiday:And there have been people who have quibbled at sort of like how realistic the armor was like. I care less like whether Agamemnon's helmet was realistic or not and more like why was everything so somber and dark when that's not really what that if that's the apotheosis of the moment, it's not fully representing it. So I did take a slight quibble with that. But I think, like, to me, what's so interesting about the sort of moral, the contradictions of Odysseus is that is the point of the Odyssey. He's both like the best and the worst. He's this trickster character, right? And he's both better than everyone and capable of worse things than everyone.

28:28Ryan Holiday:And that to me is supposed to illustrate that we contain that in ourselves too. And which side of that are we going to let out? Yeah. This is the mindset of every alcoholic and addict. Like, I'm smarter than everyone else, and I'm actually the worst person in the world. And it is a megalomania. Like, that speaks to his hubris. Like, he believes that he's so powerful that he could break the world or make the world. And that's absurd, right? Like, this is, you know, it's death by a thousand cuts or the contributions of millions of people. He's taking the full moral weight of the Trojan War that he was, by the way, as drafted into as everyone else and as at the mercy of Agamemnon as everyone else.

29:20Ryan Holiday:And I think that's a great point. There is a grandiosity about he makes himself the main character. And I mean, he is in a way the main character, but he has this kind of main character syndrome. And you see it in the movie. It's like these other men are raping and pillaging Troy. And yes, it was his idea, but he's not doing it. But he's looking around and going, what have I done? Because I think that's the point. He has the capacity to feel the responsibility and the guilt that if he didn't, if he was more a product of his time, I think he would get away with. We don't get the sense that Agamemnon was carrying the same guilt for sacrificing his daughter as, say, Odysseus was even for just being away for 20 years.

30:14Yeah, it's important to understand that your actions have consequences, but it's also important to have the humility to understand that you're actually not as important as you might believe yourself to be. He's on both extremes of this spectrum. I'm curious also around your thoughts around the ending. We see them sort of sail off into the sunset in a way that is not really authentic to the text. I love this. This is a guy who can't sit still for a minute. As soon as he's, like, they do address this getting back to denial. Like after he hears the song of the sirens, he's disabused of his denial that he actually doesn't want to go home.

31:02Like it's all about like we just want to go home. And actually maybe one of the reasons he doesn't follow Agamemnon is because he doesn't want to go home and he's trying to find the long way so that he can stay away. He can't say that out loud and maybe he can't admit that to himself. But, you know, he is, you know, to kind of quote Arthur Brooks, like he is a striver facing the striver's dilemma. And he just cannot sit still for a moment with himself. And the minute he gets home, he has to leave again and go off on another campaign. And Nolan chooses to end the movie differently. You know, what are your thoughts around that?

31:42Why do you think he made that decision? And what is it that the Odysseus that you know did and why?

31:49Ryan Holiday:So I think there's two reads here that I want to get into. The first is, yes, Odysseus the striver, Odysseus the restless, Odysseus actually the tragic, tortured hero who not only can't go home as he hears from the sirens, I think it's worth pointing out, you know, the sirens don't just sing a beautiful song, the sirens tell you exactly what you want to hear or the deepest, most painful slash beautiful truth you can imagine. So in the movie, they tell him, basically, you don't actually want to go home. And I think on a simple level, the Odyssey is about a guy fighting to get home. But when you look at the full arc of the character, you go, for a guy who claims he wants to go home, he sure makes a lot of choices that prevent him from getting home.

32:39Ryan Holiday:As you said in the movie from not following Agamemnon, but he spends seven years with Cersei. She does drug him a little bit, but he basically has a seven-year affair on his wife and he lives in paradise, right? And he also had a one-year affair with Cersei, didn't he? Yes, yes. He has a lot of affairs. Penelope is supposed to be true and loyal and Odysseus is under no such compunction, right? And so, you know, you imagine it's like that's his son from 13 to 20 or something. Like he misses like a good chunk of his son's life because he's really enjoying himself on an island paradise. and if we can understand Odysseus as not just a character who doesn't want to go home, but as people in the ancient world would have understood Odysseus, putting aside Nolan's ending for a second, he leaves after he gets home in some of the other retellings.

33:37Ryan Holiday:Like he has to go replenish his coffers. Actually, one of the post stories has Odysseus leaving Penelope at the end and marrying somebody else And then like it goes on and on. He is the addict, you know, the typical addict, the striver, the person for whom there's never enough, who, you know, has the midlife crisis and starts a second family and a third family. Like he can't he can't help himself. And so even I think when you read Tennyson's poem, you get the sense, depending on what age you are reading it, that actually it isn't admirable and impressive that this guy, what is the wording? Let me find it here.

34:19Ryan Holiday:He says, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. You know, he can't stop. He can't slow down. There's never enough. He's not capable of being still. And if we understand Odysseus as this tortured hero in that way, it's like, you know, and a lot of people have made the PTSD comparisons. But if you've seen the Hurt Locker, right, he gets home. Or if you've seen American Sniper, there's similar character arcs. They get home and then they're just like, this is nothing compared to what my life was out there. And in that way, they are tragic, flawed, broken men that we should pity rather than celebrate and want to be like.

35:08Back to the sirens. What's great about that is you can draw this parallel on this notion that they're singing this song of everything you always wanted to hear. And there's a beautiful monologue that is one of my favorite parts in the movie where Odysseus says, I can't recount it exactly, but it's basically like everything you always wanted to hear about everything you always wanted to have and can't have but already had. and some kind of thing like that. And it's just like, it perfectly encapsulates this idea. But there is this parallel with confirmation bias in social media. It's like, it's telling you what you wanna hear.

35:49And that is a hypnotic thing. It's very difficult for us to immunize ourselves from. They have to put wax in their ears to prevent them. We have all these devices that we have to put on our phone to kind of like protect our attention. There is something going on with this. It's like these tech, and you've talked about this, like, you know, the tech barons and all of the, like, they are the sirens on some level.

36:16Ryan Holiday:Well, and the reason we have to be familiar with the Odyssey is just the sheer amount. It's like you have to watch The Godfather or you'll miss like 40 % of pop culture references, right? Or you need to know what, you need to know your sports history or you're going to miss out on a lot of metaphors and references. You have to know the Odyssey because so many of the things that we use to explain the present come from the literature of the past. I mean, Chris Hayes last year wrote a really good book called The Siren Song that's all about comparing social media and the attention economy to the sirens.

36:53Ryan Holiday:And he makes this point about how the sirens aren't just, you know, this beautiful, seductive thing. But there's some element of the confirmation bias at work that you said and how we are complicit in our own manipulation. And he does a good job in the movie of the guy who rips the beeswax out of his ears and throws himself over the boat. It's like the sirens aren't plucking him from the boat the way that the monster is, right? They're saying like, hey, come over here. It's nice. and people are willingly killing themselves to get it, which I think is the sort of ultimate metaphor of the thing.

37:26Ryan Holiday:And then, yeah, the commitment device of Odysseus saying, I want to hear it, but I don't trust myself. So I want you to tie me to the mast. What I thought was interesting is, okay, so Odysseus knowing that if he goes to the sirens, he will surely die. So he doesn't just say, hey guys, don't let me go over there. He says, I need you to tie me to the mast. And under no circumstances can you undo it. And I'm going to block your ears. So flash forward like an hour or so in the movie, they are landing at the island where the sun god keeps his cattle. And because they learned this from the dead in Hades, if they eat the sun god's cattle, they will all die.

38:12Ryan Holiday:Not Odysseus, but everyone else will die. And at first, he doesn't tell them this. And then they ask him and he does. He disclosed, he says, if you eat the sun god's cattle, you will die. And they go, OK, we still want to land in the island. We just won't do it. And he says, no, no, no. The best thing is to not go anywhere near the island, right? The commitment device again, like if you don't want to eat, if you don't want to drink, don't have alcohol in your house, right? And they go, no, no, no, we're fine. We promise we won't eat the sun god's cattle. And then what happens, they get there and their willpower lasts for a while, but it's not invincible.

38:51Ryan Holiday:And eventually they do eat the sun god's cattle and they die. I thought that was an interesting contrast between the two commitment devices. A promise is not enough. A commitment is not enough. You have to be able to prevent yourself from doing the thing that you know you don't want to do. Mm-hmm. And Odysseus is rolling the dice and in defiance of the gods by not putting the wax in his ears and sort of wanting to be the one person who can survive this to distinguish himself and make himself feel special. Okay, so to go back to the ending real fast, because this is something I haven't seen enough people talk about.

39:30Ryan Holiday:So there is a giant plot hole in the Odyssey. There's two, but I'll go back to one. But the big plot hole in the Odyssey is Penelope is weaving the burial shroud, right? So Ithaca is without a king and Telemachus is too young to rule, right? Odysseus is gone. And Penelope is stalling by weaving the burial shroud. But who is she weaving the burial shroud for? Right? Laertes, Odysseus' father. So our modern understanding of kings, it's like, why doesn't he, if he was previously the king of Ithaca, why doesn't Laertes just come back temporarily until Telemachus is old enough? Right? I don't really know.

40:16Ryan Holiday:There's not a great answer to this question. But I think their argument was like, if you're not strong enough, if you're not fit to be the king, you have to voluntarily cede power. And then once you voluntarily cede power, it's not yours anymore, right? So there is something interesting about Laertes waiting on – he's like, my time has passed. I'm no longer fit to be king. Yes, that leaves a power vacuum, which is a bit weird. But Nolan kind of solves for this by when Odysseus comes home, he doesn't rule Ithaca for very long before he leaves and cedes it to his son. So there's an interesting statement here, I think, particularly in this aging democracy of ours, where, what do they call it, a gerontocracy, where old people are not stepping away.

41:14Ryan Holiday:There is something about the peaceful transition of power here that's really interesting that Odysseus, in going into voluntary exile, now that his son has proven himself, is demonstrating in a way that I think is interesting. It's not the main point of the Odyssey, but the going into exile to me was less about, in one reading, it's less about Odysseus's restlessness and even the debt he has to pay to his old soldiers and more about solving for the question of who's the next generation. And I think also the less implicated generation, right? If Odysseus' generation has failed and corrupted itself and stained it in blood with the murder of the suitors, for instance, then what Telemachus portends is potentially a fresh start, clean hands.

42:13Ryan Holiday:And this is why Odysseus is so insistent that he not participate in that final massacre. Odysseus is the sea people who's been raiding and murdering and doing all this bad stuff. And Telemachus represents potentially a new and brighter future. That's an interesting perspective. It's a little bit more optimistic than mine in that there is this peaceful transition of power. There is succession. And we're meant to feel like things are stable while at the same time understanding that the Bronze Age is over. And we're going to now be entering into this age of darkness. Clearly, Odysseus does not want Telemachus involved in killing all these suitors.

43:01And Telemachus, we're pretty clear that he's no great warrior. He has his one moment upstairs in the weapons locker where he finally gets the best of that one guy. But that aside, we're in no position to believe that he has matured to the point where he can successfully kind of take charge of Ithaca and kind of acquit leadership responsibly. And it's unclear whether Odysseus has considered this. He's just like, I'm out of here now and we're going to go over here. And I feel good about my son taking over. But we, as the audience, are left to question whether that is actually a good idea. I know in other interpretations of the Odyssey, Odysseus grappling with his striving and his restlessness says at some point, and I think you've talked about this, to Telemachus, like, you're a better man than me.

43:58And you're more fit to rule than I am because I can't just sit here on a chair in this throne in this house. Like, I have to go out and conquer and, you know, like, achieve, to use a, you know, kind of a modern version of that. And he basically conveys to his son, like, you know, this, he's passing the torch in kind of a beautiful way that we don't see in the movie.

44:22Ryan Holiday:Yes. Obviously, in the poem, you know, both Odysseus and Telemachus are blessed by Athena and guided by her, right? Mentor is Athena in the poem. and I think what the sun is setting on one and the sun is rising on the other we could say and so yes a telemachus especially at the beginning of the play and and Emily Wilson has talked about this in her translation just like how modern some of the sort of whiny insolent insecure just like how teenagery uh telemachus comes off in the early pages of the odyssey and then his journey to see Menelaus and then Nestor and then coming back. And then, you know, there's also this coming of age story at the beginning of the Odyssey and throughout it.

45:22Ryan Holiday:And we're supposed to see Telemachus as a kind of a rising hero who, yeah, who's young and inexperienced and desperately needing of help, but comes out of the other side of this, I think, ready and stronger. One of the things my nine-year-old pointed out, or I guess he would have been seven or eight when he pointed this out, but I thought it was interesting because it goes to the polyphemus thing we were talking about. He was like, I don't understand if polyphemus is Poseidon's son, why did Poseidon need Odysseus to take credit for blinding him to know that he did it? Isn't he a god? God. I went to read about it and I asked ChatGBT about it.

46:07Ryan Holiday:I was trying to figure this out because I hadn't thought of that either. And then what I came to understand is that was my son projecting the Christian omniscient God onto Poseidon, that the Greek gods knew everything that was happening everywhere in the world, that they were minutely monitoring human affairs, which is not the Greek understanding. The Greek understanding is the gods are over here on Mount Olympus doing weird stuff, raping people and taking them prisoner and starting storms and feuding and fighting with each other, and then occasionally coming down to earth and interfering and getting involved.

46:47Ryan Holiday:And so it is interesting to think that the Greek understanding of Odysseus is that had Odysseus just kept his mouth shut, he would have gotten away with his crime. But it was the bragging about it and needing attention for it that actually sows his fate. It just shows the different understanding of the gods. There's this famous quote I like from Flaubert. He said, when the gods had ceased to be, but Christ had not yet come. He says, between the time of Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. So now we're going from the Greeks to the Romans here. He says, man stood alone in the universe. That there was this brief moment of philosophy when the old system was falling apart, the Greek understanding of the gods, which the Romans inherited.

47:41Ryan Holiday:And then before the Christian understanding of an all-powerful, all-seeing God who gives us the golden rule that Nolan is sort of projecting back on the Greeks, there was this kind of brief moment where, you know, humans are just doing their own thing. And then this is when we get kind of the, this is where we get Stoic philosophy and Epicurean philosophy and all these other sort of other ways of thinking. I just thought about that quote because, you know, at the beginning of the movie, he says, in a time of apparent magic, he's kind of saying the same thing. Like there are gods, but they're not as involved.

48:19Ryan Holiday:They're not everywhere. They could, You know, the concept in the movie is that, like, you have to treat the stranger well, not because God wants you to, but because that stranger might be a god. They're probably not, but they might be. And so it is interesting, this kind of, like, maybe, maybe not-ness of the magic in the movie is interesting. This episode is brought to you by Element, a company I have been working with for years. And what I respect about Element is that they've always stayed focused on the fundamentals. They started with simple electrolyte drink mixes, then came the sparkling cans, and now they've introduced lemonade iced tea, which I've had my fair share of caffeine over the years.

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50:04The first time I saw an R2 in person, I got it immediately. This is the Rivian that a lot of people are going to be able to enjoy. Driving it with RJ only confirmed that. All right, so first impressions in my first experience in the R2.

50:24Nice. All right, now I'm getting the feel. Yeah. It feels really tight. It feels nice, right? Yeah. Interestingly, like from a first impression point of view, when you see it from a distance, proportionally it looks very similar to the R1. You know, like the way that it is designed, it looks kind of integral with the original.

50:46Ryan Holiday:It's quite a bit smaller, and so when you look at them separately, sometimes people will be like, is that an R1 or an R2? And they have a lot of similarities. But I actually think R2 ended up with a better set of proportions. And it's that kind of thinking that just exists across everything to try to deliver an experience that still feels really Rivian-like, but at a fraction of the cost of R1. First impressions aside, there's a lot more to the R2 than what you see at first glance. To learn all about the R2, watch the rest of our conversation and book a demo drive at stories.rivian.com. slash ritual.

51:25I thought that Nolan was implying, indirectly and overtly at times, a degree of omniscience with the gods because unlike other versions that have rendered on screen and in the text, like the gods are not around all the time. We see Athena pop in and out, but the gods aren't like coming down and interacting with humans in the way that other versions of this describe. And Odysseus doesn't have to say, I'm Odysseus to the Cyclops. It's just understood that this communication is gonna get conveyed to Poseidon or he's overlooking this and then hell is gonna break loose on the open seas. Similarly with the sun gods and the cattle.

52:10He even says, Odysseus overtly at one point, did you think the sun gods weren't gonna notice?

52:16Ryan Holiday:This is the best part of the movie. Nolan is saying like, there is an omniscience here. And he's sort of layering over a more Judeo-Christian notion of God is all seeing. Yeah, you're right. He says, did you think if you ate very quietly, the gods wouldn't know you ate their god? Kind of in this hole, you know, like they dig this hole. So like as if that is going to protect them, you know, in some way. But then they say, we didn't think we would fool the gods. We were just trying to fool you. Hmm. Yeah. And what does that get them? Yeah, it doesn't change the prophecy, you know? I wanna turn to some of the lessons for life that we can extract from this story.

53:03In your video, maybe we can start with this. You talk about the difference between perseverance and persistence, and I'd never really heard those parsed in that way, and I thought that was super interesting.

53:17Ryan Holiday:And look, I might be making a semantic difference, but I do think there is something about, hey, I'm going to do this hard thing for a while. And then I got to do this the rest of my life, right? Like the day-to-dayness of endurance is to me the more impressive thing. Like how do you deal with this forever? And you could say like, you know, the 10 years of war in Troy, the 10 years on the journey home, in one aspect, that's the odyssey for Odysseus. But the deeper one might actually be once he gets home, the guilt and the pain and the re-entry is actually the harder and longer battle. In The Obstacle is the way I used Odysseus to make that distinction between perseverance and persistence, that perseverance is just persistence on steroids.

54:23Ryan Holiday:And that wanting something really bad and being willing to sacrifice for it is one thing. But life asks so much more of that than you. And I do, I mean, look, when you do endurance sports, it's like you think you've hit your limit and then there's this whole other reservoir that you have. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think what's interesting in this context is we see Odysseus. He is this avatar of perseverance, of persistence, of being unrelenting in this quest to win the war and get home and all these sorts of things. And it speaks to like the human will and our capacity to weather obstacles and overcome them, et cetera, if we just stay in it and remain focused and just never give up and all of that.

55:18But ultimately, the only way that he gets home when he departs Calypso is through surrender. Yes.

55:57want to achieve things and accomplish your goals, et cetera. And yet, ultimately, you will be capped in your potential to the extent that you are refusing to relinquish your grip. At some point, you have to recognize that your self-will is the obstacle in your way and that the kind of next level, whether it's climbing Maslow's hierarchy of needs or just growing and evolving as a human being demands surrender, like this recognition that there are higher forces at play and that you are not the center of the universe, that you're not the puppeteer pulling the strings.

56:38Ryan Holiday:And ultimately, that requires more willpower and discipline, that surrender, that submission. It seems like weakness, but it's not. It's much harder for him to lay down on that raft and let the waves take him where they will than to stay on that beach for 10 years and figure out how he's finally going to breach the walls of Troy. Sure. Yeah. And look, the great American named after Odysseus is Ulysses S. Grant, right? That's how the name is rendered, Ulysses. You know, one of the great military victories in American history is Grant's victory at Vicksburg, right, where, you know, he basically lays siege to this citadel, not unlike Troy for months and months and months.

57:29Ryan Holiday:He has to try to reroute the Mississippi River at one point. He ends up having to cross the river, you know, miles, miles south. He has to run these gun batteries. It's one of the great military campaigns in human history with actually an equal amount of cleverness to Odysseus. He basically goes around Vicksburg and then he attacks it from the other side. And then they're suddenly trapped in this fortress as opposed to being safely ensconced inside it. So Grant's sort of success in the Civil War is your sort of standard persistence, right? Like he's like, look, I don't go backwards. I don't quit.

58:08Ryan Holiday:They said he's like a bulldog. He grabs on and he doesn't let go. That's Grant's sort of military strategy. And he ends up succeeding. And he probably thinks that's the most difficult thing I'm going to have to do in my life. That's his sort of persistence. Well, after Grant is president, all of his money is stolen from him. He gets swindled by this sort of Bernie Madoff figure. He loses all his money. He has to hawk his Civil War mementos and uniform to J.P. Morgan just to pay off his debts. And so he's basically looking at, you know, complete poverty, humiliation, and then he finds out he's dying of throat cancer.

58:53Ryan Holiday:He's smoked like 20 cigars a day. And so Grant is now facing what they call his final battle. Under debilitating pain, he writes and dictates his memoirs over the next several months. Mark Twain agrees to publish them. He ends up publishing them. He dies like three days after he finishes his memoirs, becomes the bestselling book in American history. It's his final battle, but I think at some level, it's a different kind of persistence, right? It's perseverance because it's operating here now at like this kind of soul level. It's one thing to like fight really hard for what you want. And I think it's another thing to sort of stare down death or to conquer your own body.

59:41Ryan Holiday:And so when we're talking about the distinction between persistence and perseverance, I think, yeah, fighting at Troy is persistence. But the Odyssey home and the ultimate surrender, as you said, and then as he says in the movie, just like taking your punishment, basically, that is a perseverance at a different level. And then the making of amends and having to face the people that he's wrong. That's just a whole other kind of journey that's different than being cold and tired and wet and lonely. And I think ultimately that's the message of the Odyssey, that sort of perseverance, not persistence.

1:00:22Mm-hmm. The acceptance of certain things that are unmutable. Like there's the idea of we're going to breach the walls of Troy. It's unacceptable that we can't and we're not leaving until we do. a refusal to accept a certain reality because on some level there is a sense of mutability to that. But cancer, having your money swindled or whatever, to persevere, you have to first accept this as reality and then figure out how to survive and navigate your way through it.

1:00:55Ryan Holiday:Yeah, to accept your humiliation and your failure and your mortality. These are all, I think, you know, much more soul level battles as opposed to, you know, most of the Odyssey is Odysseus fighting with his cunning. We're told over and over again in the poem that he's the craftiest, most cunning, you know, smartest man in the world. And that only gets him so far. And ultimately it gets him into trouble, right? Right. He's a galaxy brain. Yes. And it's that sort of having to conquer the other things at the deeper level, which I think the movie does a much better job. There's less catharsis in the poem.

1:01:42There's less resolution because the Greeks didn't have the same struggle with guilt and responsibility.

1:01:51Ryan Holiday:and Odysseus is not as tortured of a figure in the poem. He's like, yeah, I'm gonna murder all these people and I'm also gonna murder all the female slaves for cavorting with them, even though I think we would say now that they were not consenting participants in these exchanges. But yeah, at the end, he just murders all these. The catharsis is the murder. The catharsis in the movie is dealing is dealing with his own culpability and his own responsibility and then ultimately trying to make amends by heading west and honoring the dead. Yeah. If you were going to, like what stood out for you as intolerable in the movie that you would change?

1:02:39Like if you were doing your version, like what was missing or what do you think is relevant for us to know that was lacking in the film?

1:02:47Ryan Holiday:So I don't think Christopher Nolan does a good job showing how crafty and clever Odysseus was, which is his predominant character trait in the poem. And so I think skipping the opportunity to trick Polyphemus, the no man joke, which is just amazing that like, you know, watching my kids just like fall over in laughter at a 3000 year old joke from an ancient epic. It just does show you how powerful. It's who's on third, basically. Totally. Totally. It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. And so he misses a handful of opportunities to show Odysseus as being clever and how that cleverness is both his secret strength and the source of his undoing.

1:03:34Ryan Holiday:I thought that was a flaw of the movie. The only casting choice that I think people are allowed to be upset about is the casting choice of Agamemnon. I think Black Helen, totally fine with. Elliot Page, totally fine with. Fine with everything. I just don't understand how the Bane character could be one of the Safdie brothers. Like, how he's supposed to be the more intimidating brother of Menelaus, who John, what, Bernenthal plays incredibly. And you can get both the pain and the kind of menace. Like, I think he captures, like, I mean, that's why he's a special forces operator in like every movie.

1:04:24Ryan Holiday:Like, and he's the Punisher. He is perfectly cast and captures it perfectly. Peeking behind the mask on Menelaus, I'm like, I don't buy it. I don't like it at all. I would have loved to see - Agamemnon, you mean? Yes, Agamemnon. Agamemnon. Sorry, sorry. I would have, I think Killian Murphy could have done it. I think Christian Bale could have done it. I think so many other people could have done it. I just did not buy him. I'm violating my own rule by questioning about this, but that's my piddly concern with the movie and I hated it. But he's frame-mogging everybody in every scene that he is. I mean, when the gates of Troy open, he's 10 feet tall and he's just dominating and you don't see his face.

1:05:07Someone like Cillian Murphy or Bale, they're not going to say yes to a small part like that. That's why I think it would have been so good. But to me, it doesn't really matter because you never really see his face. He doesn't take his mask off until the end. And when he does, it's this moment of vulnerability and realizing that he has made this grave mistake that ends up with him being killed. And again, it goes to the unreliable narrator aspect of it in that we're seeing Agamemnon through the eyes of Odysseus telling the story to Calypso. And so whether or not Agamemnon was as tall and as imposing in real life doesn't matter.

1:05:54It's Odysseus's interpretation of Agamemnon through his memory of Agamemnon being this imposing figure dressed in all black. It's so interesting that we have Agamemnon in black and we have the black helmets of the Ithaca army, the warriors, and everybody in Troy is dressed in white. You know, this is like, it's, you know, it's pretty binary in that regard. Interpret from that as you will. But he's inverting, you know, these expectations slowly.

1:06:25Ryan Holiday:If I could give another recommendation to people, Aeschylus's trilogy, Orestia, is a side plot of the Iliad and the Odyssey that you briefly see in the Odyssey because they do focus on Agamemnon a little more than people would think. So for people who don't know, the brief story is to get favorable wins to Troy, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, which obviously his wife is not happy with. So what, Clemenestra? Again, I'm bad with the pronunciations. But his wife takes a lover while he's gone. And then when Agamemnon comes home, he and she kill Agamemnon. And then they don't bury him. And then the rest of the trilogy is, and this is also where we get the story of Cassandra because Agamemnon brings Cassandra home from Troy.

1:07:23Ryan Holiday:And she is gifted with the power of prophecy, but cursed that no one will listen to her. And so she predicts all this is going to happen and nobody listens. He ends up dying. But then his son avenges his death, kills his mother and her lover. That's the second one. And then the third play is really interesting because you get where all these myths come to explain to us where our modern system, where our civilization comes from. So anyways, after he kills his mother, he brings on the Furies, right? The gods are angry at him for killing his own mother. And so they're chasing him and torturing him.

1:08:12Ryan Holiday:And he flees to the temple of Apollo. And what is proposed as a way of solving this conflict is that he plead his case to a jury of 12 peers and explain why he did it and what happened. and then they'll render a verdict and he will abide by that verdict. And so from this play, this fictional event, we have the Greeks explaining and trying to deal with the cycle of vengeance, right? Like somebody does a crime, someone avenges that crime, and then someone has to avenge that crime. So the Greeks were wrestling with this question of how do we stop the cycle of violence? How does the state step in and resolve the cycle of violence?

1:09:07Ryan Holiday:And they settle on the legal system, right? The impartial legal system and the jury of our peers. And so it's just incredible. You're just reading this play that's basically 2 ,500 years old. And then you're like, you're recognizing, you're like, oh, wait, this is where that comes from. And so, again, these stories are not just weird stories with names that are difficult to pronounce from a time long ago. They are the origin stories for the institutions that we take for granted today. And they are also wrestling with the same fundamental problems that groups of humans, which we call society, have wrestled with for all time.

1:09:52Everyone can kind of quibble around the margins. Oh, it should have been like this. Why didn't they do that? I don't understand this. It doesn't make sense. If I was doing it, I would do this. Everybody's free to go off and make their version of the Odyssey and render it to film. My thing is we should just be celebrating what is just an absolutely fantastic achievement on behalf of Nolan and everybody who contributed to this extraordinary work of art. Like the attention to detail, the scale. Like I've watched all these documentaries on how they, you know, how they did what they did, the behind the scenes stuff, the sets that they constructed, the far corners of the earth.

1:10:37I mean, they go to Iceland for one sequence to shoot the Hades thing, you know, and they're schlepping just an unbelievable amount of gear and this 70 millimeter camera that they had to construct a housing for so that it wasn't so loud that they couldn't record dialogue between two characters standing in front of it. the house of Ithaca, like, you know, everyone had to get into costume and hike up there. Like the commitment to render this story on film in the most visceral and authentic way possible is something to really appreciate in Marvel. And I think the fact that leading into it, there's sort of this culture war going on, at least on X, which side sidebar, like everyone on X is arguing about casting.

1:11:24these are the sirens what's that? yeah these are the sirens the influencers are the sirens they're having this ridiculous debate that makes it seem like there's a controversy when I actually don't really think that there was and Nolan recognizes this like he's not paying any attention to this but all of that quickly gets replaced as soon as Emily Wilson writes a somewhat negative review of the film and then all of the discourse on X becomes like kind of piling on her. Like suddenly they're on Nolan's side. Like, anyway, that's all weird and very funny actually. But we're all talking about this story.

1:12:02Yes. And we're all wrestling with the themes and what it means and how it applies to our lives. And I think that that is just, you know, just an incredible thing. Like the conversation that I had with my 19-year-old daughter on the way home from seeing the movie last night was just, you know, precious and I'll never forget it. And I think that that is super cool. And I think that Nolan is his own superhero for figuring out a way to make us interested in this thing. And we should be doing nothing but celebrating this achievement.

1:12:35Ryan Holiday:It's really powerful to think that that conversation you had on the way home is the conversation that parents have been having with children for almost 3 ,000 years. Right. Like like people coming home from from hearing a bard sing it to them. People coming home from from seeing it performed. People seeing art talking about seeing it in museums and in statues and in private homes. Like they just found a mummy that was wrapped in papyrus because that's what they would use to wrap the mummies. They found a mummy in Egypt that was like 1900 years old. And one of the pieces of papyrus has lines from the Odyssey.

1:13:19Ryan Holiday:Like somebody had a copy of the Odyssey, threw it away, and they used the scraps to wrap a body that's almost 2000 years old. I was just in Italy and on this island of Ithaca, they discovered a cup that is, they call it Nestor's cup. And it's just like a cup with a line from the Odyssey that's like, again, 2000 years old. And so just people have been quoting lines, talking about these ideas, debating them, wrestling with the moral questions of them, saying things like, you know, I'm between Scylla and Charybdis here, or you're distracting me like the sirens on the rocks, you know, I'm on an odyssey here.

1:14:02Ryan Holiday:Like they've been making these references and illusions for, for basically as long as there has been such a thing as Western civilization. And like, we're a part of that tradition. So Nolan should be celebrated, not just for, for bringing it back, but I think also for managing impressively to like, add a new take on it. Like I think his take is fresh and new and different. And there's parts that I would disagree with. There's parts of it that I think I prefer the older part, but I think he has presented an interesting take on Odysseus that lands especially hard now. And as you said, it's hard not to see the suitors overrunning the house and just sort of looting it and destroying the institutions and then go, yeah, we have a similar hostile takeover of our political system here in the United States.

1:14:57Ryan Holiday:This is the subtext through which we are interpreting this art. And hopefully a thousand years from now, if we haven't destroyed ourselves, we'll be looking at different takes of different kinds of odysseys because we'll have a thousand years of history repeating the fundamentally human themes from the art. Yeah, beautifully put. I mean, there's no reason in spending years trying to render a version of this story to the screen unless you have an interpretation, you know? And it's about like, we're kind of like coming full circle to end this with the point that we raised at the beginning, which is the point is interpreting it and sharing that interpretation and the discourse around that interpretation and other people's versions of that story and their interpretations.

1:15:53In that synthesis, we find some indelible truths about what it means to be human, what it means to live a meaningful, good life, and what's important. And I think that the conversations that are happening all over the world right now around this, we're getting like a B12 shot right now. And I think it's really fucking cool. Yeah.

1:16:15Ryan Holiday:And I'd much prefer we're debating this about Homer and the Odyssey and Odysseus than, you know, like superheroes, no offense to the Batman movies, which I also thought were good. And he imbued with sort of real substance and symbolism. But like, these are the myths that people used to understand. They used to understand. We would teach kids at a young age about hubris, about loyalty, about angering the gods, about moral injury. And by sort of going like, oh, that's a bunch of old dead white guys, you know, or, oh, those are old stories, or those are racist or violent, or all the different, you know, both the right and the left have undermined our collective stories.

1:17:01Ryan Holiday:And then our education system has underplayed them. They're like, oh, let's read the Hunger Games. I think anything that brings these ancient stories to a modern audience is doing something really important because all those norms that Odysseus is lamenting are being violated are being violated today, but we just don't have the shared language and story and myth that helps people appreciate where those norms came from and what they mean and what the costs of violating them are. That to me is one of the root causes of the political and cultural nightmare we're in. Agreed, my friend. Well, this was super fun.

1:17:50I could talk to you about this for a million hours. I appreciate your perspective on this. Hopefully more conversations like this to come. And I loved it, man. Thanks. Was there anything unsaid that any point that you wanted to make before we ended here?

1:18:10Ryan Holiday:You know, I actually, I was curious for you, how did the Calypso scene resonate with you as a person in recovery? Because in the poem, he's a much more active participant and conscious participant in his sort of indolence and escapism. She presents him more as a person who is injured physically and spiritually and is just in a kind of a self-induced stupor because he can't handle the pain. And it takes him time to sort of claw his way out of the bottle, so to speak. I was curious how that scene landed with you. Yeah, I thought it was fascinating. Here you have this guy who's, you know, in a modern day context, he's a workaholic.

1:18:56He's a striver. He can't sit still. It's always about the next conquest. What's he going to achieve? And the thing that he's trying to achieve in the moment is to get home, whether he's in denial or not, he's on this quest. But he doesn't really want to go home. And he can't tolerate the internal dissonance that he's experiencing. On the one On one hand, he's being celebrated as this great leader and he has this egoic attachment to his identity as this great leader. And yet he also knows that he is a complete piece of shit who has just broken the world. And how do you reconcile that internally?

1:19:36And that dissonance is eating away at him. He's already established himself as an addict, addicted to striving and work, et cetera. and that blinds him from being able to be the better leader that he could be. And so when he lands on this island and Calypso gives him the lotus flower and he takes a taste of it and suddenly he can't remember and he doesn't feel so bad, he's all in. This is the person who's tried heroin for the first time and they're like, oh my God, finally I can breathe and all I want to do is do this. And even Calypso says to him at one point, like, wow, you really like that.

1:20:17Like even she, you know, I know she's a manipulative figure and she's got her own agenda and all of that. But she's the codependent in this relationship. And she's more than happy to hold him captive and feed him the lotus flower because her emotional needs are being met on some level by him remaining there. So she's participating in this and contributing to it. And the only thing that brings him out of it, the only way that he's able to emerge out of it is because deep down he has this knowing that he could be better. Like he – in order to save himself, he's going to have to get off of this island.

1:20:59Ryan Holiday:And drugs. Yeah, like he doesn't have – there isn't like a well-defined like rock bottom for him. But he recognizes that if he doesn't get off this island and stop eating these lotus leaves that he's never going to leave and he's going to perish on this island. And that is more painful than the pain of him having to reckon and reconcile his guilt and his guilt over what happened in the Trojan War and his guilt for having left his son and his wife for so long. And that's ultimately what wakes him up. But in this very kind of like 12-step way, the only solution, the only way he's going to solve this problem isn't through like white knuckling it or like trying to just will his way out of it.

1:21:51He has to surrender. and this is beautifully illustrated on screen. Like he has to let go and like I can't, like the alcoholic is like, I can't control my drinking. My life is unmanageable. I have to turn it over to a higher power and Odysseus has to turn it over to the gods when he lays flat on that raft and says just, you know, you take me. Like it's your problem now whether I get home or whether I end up drowning in the sea. And I think that there is this really poetic and beautiful parallel with the addiction recovery story in that.

1:22:31Ryan Holiday:I thought the same thing. It's like there's surrender. There's accepting a higher power. There's the fearless moral inventory. There's the making amends. He basically goes through most of the 12 steps. He has to remember he's doing this inventory. Yeah. And he's doing a fifth step with her. Like she's on the receiving end of him, like explaining like all of his moral failures and character defense. And she takes that and says, okay, now you have to go. Now you have to really surrender and like take these contrary actions. Well, and his speech to Penelope is a similar one. You know, he's making amends to the men when he goes and leaves.

1:23:13Ryan Holiday:But when he sort of, when he lays out everything and she sees it, she goes, oh, you were the sea people. This is her wrestling for the first time with who her husband was and what he did. And she accepts him anyway, which is a beautiful sort of gesture. And the screen between them eventually comes down. But yeah, if you told me Christopher Nolan was in recovery and that was the subtext for the whole movie, I would buy it. It seems like it's there. Yeah, it's pretty well illustrated. Yeah, and the final amends is him going to the West to pay tribute to the dead. It's a living, they call it a living amends because he can't actually make amends to these people.

1:23:58They're already dead. Yeah. I'll probably see it a couple more times in the theater. The first time I saw it in Washington, D.C. in a Dolby with Dolby Sound, but not in IMAX. I saw it last night in the Chinese theater in IMAX 70 millimeter, which was its own insane experience. if you have made it all the way through to the end of this podcast and have not seen the movie i don't know why you would still be watching or listening but please make a point of of going to see it preferably in imax you know i just nine years old is too young right i can't take my nine-year-old to see i think i think it's i think it's too young yeah i think it's too young for that but there is this thing like i'm sitting in the chinese theater it's being projected in there's a difference between IMAX and 70 millimeter IMAX.

1:24:47Like there aren't very many theaters that can do this. And I just thought like, this is, you know, I'm so glad I'm doing this because soon this will not be in the theaters and maybe five years from now they'll screen it again. But there was this specialness to the idea that we have this opportunity to have this story be told to us in this way. Hopefully more stories like this will be rendered to the screen in the wake of this massive success. All right, dude, I'll let you go. Thank you so much. Super fun.