The Daily Stoic - Matthew McConaughey, Pete Holmes, Martellus Bennett, and George Raveling on How to Be a Modern Leader

Episode Date: December 26, 2020

Today’s episode features clips from some of the best interviews in 2020. Ryan talks to Matthew McConaughey, Pete Holmes, Martellus Bennett, and George Raveling about focusing on what’s in your control, finding growth in suffering, the Stoic virtue of justice, and why all leaders are readers.This episode is brought to you by GiveWell, the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. GiveWell’s team of researchers works countless hours to determine which charities make the most effective dollar-for-dollar contributions to the causes they support. Since 2010, GiveWell has helped over 50,000 donors donate over 500 million dollars to the most effective charities, leading to over 75,000 lives saved and millions more improved. Visit GiveWell.org/stoic and your first donation will be matched up to 100 dollars.This episode is also brought to you by Trends. Trends is the ultimate online community for entrepreneurs and business aficionados who want to know the latest news about business trends and analysis. It features articles from the most knowledgeable people, interviews with movers and shakers, and a private community of like-minded people with whom you can discuss the latest insights from Trends. Visit trends.co/stoic to start your two-week trial for just one dollar.This episode is also brought to you by HelloFresh, the meal-kit subscription that gets you healthy and delicious home-cooked meals, right to your doorstep. HelloFresh sends you meal kits in a way that fits in with your schedule and dietary preferences. Meals are seasonal and delicious, and save you and your family time and money on grocery shopping. Visit HelloFresh.com/stoic80 and use code STOIC80 to get $80 off, including free shipping.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. When we have the time to sing, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare

for what the future will bring. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page 6 or Du Moir or in court. I'm that Belly-Sai And I'm Sydney Battle and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast Disantel where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build-up why it happened and the repercussions What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama But none is drawn

out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed

to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondery app. Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other

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rise and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode, The Daily Stoke Podcast. We're doing sort of a best of episode today with some of our best clips from our best guests of the year.

We're going to be talking a Matthew McConaughey about how we do that famous thing with the Stokes, say the dichotomy of control, how we accept things that are out of our control, how we fight for the things that are in control. He also told me this fascinating story about decision in his life, similar to one in my life, about the decision to sort of scale things back and focus. As Mark really says on what's essential, talk to my friend Pete Holmes, one of the funniest people alive also has a great podcast called You Made It Weird. We talk about some of our similar struggles with our parents, you know, as he jokes,

nothing will challenge you philosophically from a Zen perspective, from a stoic perspective, quite like family, especially during the middle of the pandemic. Then we talk to Super Bowl winning tight in Martellus Bennett, not just about race, but about the sort of challenges to this stoic idea of justice, which is really important. And then we talk to one of my heroes, one of my mentors, the great George Ravling civil rights activist, reader coach, mentor to some of the best names in college and

professional basketball. And we talk really about what it means to be a reader, George. Probably reads more than anyone I know. I like to joke George is one of my oldest friends. He's well into his 80s. And yet he has this insatiable desire to read. The last time I saw him, he in person, this was in 2019.

He showed up with a huge stack of books that he'd bought for me at book people. He is a supporter of bookstores to say the least, particularly independent retail, just a great man, great human being. You're gonna love that interview. So anyways, here we go. Some best of moments applying stoicism,

applying the philosophy to real life from some real practitioners, whether they know it or not, whether they're explicitly following stoses or not, I think there's a lot you can learn here. So we'll get into it and then we'll be back to new guests here very soon. I've got a whole bunch of great episodes in the can. I've been recording all week and can't wait to show them to you. Here's me talking to author writer and as I said in my blurb about him outlaw philosopher Matthew McConaughey. I've always wanted to ask this question to an actor. There's this great line from Epictetus. He says, you know, life is like being an actor. He says,

you don't get to choose your lines, you just choose how you deliver them. He's basically sending it sort of life is written that there's a higher power who's mostly in control. And then we have this sort of circumscribed role where we do the best we can. It's always struck me as a weird profession your line of work in that you have so little actual control of what you do.

You get to choose your movies at this point in your career, but you don't control what the other actors do. You don't control what the director does. You don't control the marketing budget. No. I mean, it's a select the bar still whiskey version that is how you play the hand your deal. Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, it's part of the reason that I did write a book and I'm going to go back into the acting. So there's four filters from my first rock expression as an actor. There's what I do. And what I'm doing, someone else's script is being directed by someone else, is being lends in the camera by someone else and edited by someone else before it's presented in the final form which you see in the theater on TV. You know, it's a little bit of what I do in my class at UT with the script of screen. The original script is so different from the final product.

Things change, you know, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, sometimes it's just completely different. My job as an actor and I am only learned this in the last 15 years from the great Penny Allen mentor who really taught me what acting was. She's like, you have to own your man, your character. You have to be the sole owner of that. You have to know your man upside down backwards, forwards better than anybody else. It's not the directors anymore. It's not the writers who wrote it anymore. You're the bloodline, you're the expression, the baton has been handled. Now, to do that, that takes a lot of the work of my version is, I want to come in with four versions of the truth in every scene. So, like you said, when every actor goes off script or changes something up,

or the director is completely wants to surprise you, I'm calling audibles, I'm ready, and I'm not having. I'm ready. And I'm not having to think about it. It's instinctually coming out of me. Now if I can do that, like I've always said this, my ideal place when I really get to know my man as an actor is put a blindfold on me. Take me, I don't care if you take me to Mars, wherever. Be rolling camera, be video press record as soon as I walk off and take the take the blindfold

off. camera, press record as soon as I walk off and take the blindfold off, and I should be able to behave as my man would in any situation. I don't always get there, but that's the place. And again, I got to have the dialogue to have the monologue, but every character, every actor should know the monologue of his man or his woman. So was that frustrating early on in your career? Because you seem like a sort of an ambitious guy, a guy who wants to, it has a lot of artistic expression that you wanna get out.

Was it hard for you to sort of see your role as like, especially I guess in movies that maybe you didn't like as much? How do you sort of go in and go, I can only focus on what I do here. I think one of the nice parts about being a writer, as I'm sure you found is you do have so much more control over the artistic expression. Yeah. Because it's a solo sport. It's golf versus football. Yeah. Well, even though acting, you know, acting, I've learned to understand that yes, while it's a football,

while it's a team is sport, I get pretty selfish on that. I'm like, I mean, I, I, I'm a team player. I love collaboration. I've learned that there's more than that though I may not be wrong. There's more than one way to be right or a better word for acting is to be true to go out and just tell the truth, not about right or wrong. I mean, sometimes I try to get a measure from a director early on on what is our measure of excellence. All right, I did this with Gary Rawls from Free State of Jones. We're two weeks in a shooting and we're communicating pretty well and he's giving me direction

and I'm feeling pretty good about it and what he's got to say. And I feel like his meter of excellence is similar to mine. I'm enjoying this direction and I'm giving stuff back to him and he seems to be receiving it. But I want to check it. I want to check our relationship. So we do this one, we do the scene one day and I do giving stuff back to him. And he seems to be receiving it. But I want to check it. I want to check our relationship. So we do this one. We do the scene one day and I do 10 takes.

So after the 10 takes, I said, Gary, come here. We go into the 10 and look at the monitor. I said, I'm going to write down what I think is the select best takes. You write down what you think of the best select takes out of the 10, and then we're going to swap papers to see if we're seeing things the same. So I write down first half of take four,

second half of take two. We watch all tin ticks, we swap papers. I open his papers, this first half of take four, second half of take two. Now when that happens, now I'm like, here we go, freedom. You and I are seeing things the same. Doesn't mean we agree on everything, but we have the same measure of excellence.

Like you see that take five, which was really good, but I kind of, I was acting. You see me there, there was a good moment, I anticipated and I tried to put a little cherry on top. It wasn't as true as it was when I did it and take four for the first time. Yes, it's exactly what I saw. You know, so when we meet there on a measure

of what we've deemed excellent or deemed the most true, then the relationship becomes much more collaborative for me, meaning if you're the director and you're telling me to, I don't have any sort of defense up. Now I've had many of films I've done where the director and I are not seeing eye-to-eye on my character or what the truth is for my character. And boy, they open their mouth and I'm going, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, yep, yep, yep, yep. And the other thing is to go out there, I'll, if this has been said long before, I'm saying it now, but in Hollywood, they say if the

director ever says, well, give me one, take my way. Just for me. If you do it, that takes what's going to, they're going to put that taking a movie. No matter how, no matter if you did it that well or not. Most of the time, they're going to put that in the movie. No, and that was one of the things I was really interested in in the book is your sort of deliberate decision to change the trajectory or the arc of your career. So yeah, on the one hand, an actor doesn't have a ton of control over what happens in the movie, but you do have some control over what happens in the movie, but you do have some control over what movies you choose to be in or not.

And so, yeah, your decision to say like, hey, I'm going to be a different kind of actor, then allowed you to say yes and no to certain movies that probably seem totally crazy to other people, to your peers, to your management team, but you knew where you wanted to go. So actually being offered, you know, X amount for this movie, no amount of money made it the right decision. No, because I had hit a red light with my soul and myself. I had hit a red light where it wasn't about how much money that was giving me. It was about, wow, these, I'm going to work, it's easy, it's fun. Nothing wrong with that? Let's not be, okay, I remember telling myself,

hey, nothing wrong with that. Let's not just, again, let's not trip ourself running downhill here. I said, but man, I think there's a way, I wanna find a way where my work is challenging me, where I'm having an experience in the work, where I'm growing in the work, where it's challenging the vitality I have in my life, which was feeling very vital and has been feeling very vital.

So that was a red light for me, is that when I would go to work, I'd feel like, why didn't feel as much in life as I do in real life? And it felt like, okay, I'm going off to work. This is too easy. And it's supposed to be easy, but is that really what I want? So I had a red light in my life. I was not growing through my work at that time. And so that's why I stopped doing what I was doing.

And did turn that. And it wouldn't have mattered. You know, people go like, well, look, you know, that big offer you got for 14, whatever. If that had been 20, would you have done it? I was like, no, I mean, I really wouldn't. I would have probably re-read it again just to say I think I should. That would be the responsible thing just to consider it. But I was never that that my check was, I had already cashed that check with my soul saying, I'm not going back.

It's a champagne problem certainly, but it's not easy to do, right? To say no to, when people, when it's hard to say no to socially acceptable things. Yes. And socially acceptable when they are the best champagne in the world. I mean, as far as the taste, it's a very shiny gold thing's worm in front of me. And they weren't the devil, they weren't evil, they weren't tyrannical, they were, I felt they would be tyrannical to me in doing them and to spend my time there. And so it was difficult and it is difficult to say no sometimes, but you know this, you talk about it all the time, there was, that was the great power in the know. I mean, I had, look, could I have made that decision ten years prior?

No, obviously, and I didn't make that decision ten years prior. Remember, you come into something and this goes along with the line of bring up about being less impressed and more involved. Look, I'm just doing pressed with this industry and impressed that, wow, I get to do this. I would do it for free. There's not one film that I've done that I would not do for free because I love the work.

But you can't roll through, go on. I'm still just so happy to be here. You're offering me that work, of course. You have to be discerning. There's only 24 hours of the day and we've got to schedule through a year. You can't do everything you want to do if you're in a fortune position with James. So I had to make choices. And life is hard. It's so short. You know, even though it does seem to last a while sometimes,

overall, it's very short. So, you know, yeah, to say, no, those things was hard, but I had a hunch that there was a joke in the deck at the end of the line somewhere. I didn't know when the end of the line was. It was going to come, but it did, about two years later. Mark's really says this because you've got to ask yourself every minute, is this essential? Is the thing I'm doing essential? And the upside of that question is a lot of the things you're doing are not essential and

therefore you don't need to do them. Right. And it says the double benefit is that you do the fewer things better. And I think that's that's where you want to get is you say no to most things. And then the things you say yes to you either actually like doing them, or you don't like doing what you do them like they matter. Right. I've had to, you know, I'm a great overleverager.

You know, put me in a, I got a great work ethic. I'm like, I'll, what I have to watch is taken on too much stuff. Yes, because I'm like, I can do it. I can do it. You don't have that. Give it to me. I'll take care of it. Yep. Come on.

I'll line it up. And I'm good at it. I've got resilience. I've gotten endurance. I'll outlast a lot of people and out work them. I did have a time though, probably 15, right around that time where I took off the romcoms inside Tick 2 years off, where my phone rang, I had a production company

at a music label, as an actor, I had a foundation, I was a family man, my phone rang. And as I went to pick it up, I saw it was a number from my office, where I have five, six employees, and I pay the rent in a beautiful office. As I went to pick up the phone, my hand paused mid-reach. I didn't want to pick up the phone. And in one second, I went, what is that?

Why does your hand just, what? And I backed my hand off and I let it ring. And I remember telling myself in my mind, I was like, why was your hand paused to pick up the phone from people that you pay salaries to who you like in an office that you pay it for your production company? I let the phone quit ringing soon as a quit ringing. I picked it up called my lawyer I said shut down the production company shut down the music label. I Make in bees and five things. I want to make a's and three things

I want to be an actor for hire have a foundation be a family member boom and that was a great decision I cleared two things off my desk. It was hard to do. Those people, there were five people that relied who were making a living off the salary. I was paying them. So I gave them fair severance, but it was, I needed to do that for myself. And I did feel like I did start making much better grades, so to speak, in those three things.

Then I was making when I had five. And this is a constant recalibration in calibration because what we value changes over time, you know? I mean, I have a few, you know, it's nice to have a few non-negotiable ones that I put up top that you go, no matter how confused you are, my kind of, this is always at the greatest import. Family, sure, that's up there.

Just put that up there and go, nothing needs to ever take that. If you always go to that, you can't lose. I mean, sometimes you just go, you can't be in the debit if you just invest in that. The other thing is, you know, needs and wants. Geez, man. I mean, what's really necessary? I'm in a position where I don't have to work today to pay my rent tomorrow.

I only have one home. I don't have two, but still it's a big, nice home. There's a couple of rooms that no one sleeps in, right? I don't need that big of a house. I don't have two, but still, it's a big nice home. There's a couple of rooms that no one sleeps in. Right, I don't need that big of a house. I don't need it. I mean, there's questions of like, why don't you really want to break it down, get rid of all of it. And go get a three bedroom house,

the kid sleep will one room, mom actually sleeps another and you can come to sleep in the other one and you pay the rent and they're out of the house and that's it. And I would be just as happy. I know once that decision was made to do that. In the book when you're talking about living in your in your air stream, we bought a we bought an RV in the middle of the pandemic.

We're like, all right, we're not getting on air playing in a while. If we want to go anywhere, you're going to have to do this old school. And we bought like a little RV with the bunks in the back. And what I remember, sitting the first time we took it out, we were in, maybe it was Marfa, maybe it was in Los Cruces, we were on our way to California. And I'm sitting in an RV park, you know, the cost 30 bucks a night, sitting in a camp chair, the cost 20 bucks, you know, cooking hot dogs and the microwave. And it was like, man, this is nice.

This is really nice. And you're like, it's high livens. This is all it. This is when you have that sense of a baseline, it then allows you to turn down a big checker saying no, we're cut stuff down because you know how little is actually needed to for you to be happy. Yes. And you and I've talked about this oblin today now with 5G all over the world.

That's more of a reality now. Should I live where you want? In small place wherever you want. You can be wherever you want in the world. We're seeing that works right now with what we're doing remotely talking. Hey, it's Ryan. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

And here's me talking to one of the funniest people on the planet, Pete Holmes. I actually think one of the things you and I connected over is our somewhat strange parents. It sounds like we had a similar dynamic between the two of them and then between us and them and us and our siblings and so and so forth. I find that place of the like, you know, that I'm special. This is a really hard thing. You don't know what it took to do this. Like you don't understand the economics.

Like this is a tightrope. To me, part of that logic. If one, I think it's ego, but if I try to place that ego, it's very sort of misunderstood teenager. Like kid who is special, but parents don't think is special or don't fully appreciate how special the kid is. And so it's like, oh, that makes

a complete sense. That was my childhood. And so there's a, I'm curious, one of my favorite things that you've talked about is that Ram Dask, quote, where it's like, you think you're in light and go spend a weekend with your family. How, how, how are you managing that? Because I remember you telling me there was some, some stress, was this like February or something. You were telling me you were going through something. I'm just curious how you are. Yeah, my parents are really, really tricky and difficult for me. My pro, my good boy programming, if you ever hear me talk about my parents on my podcast,

I'm always very careful. I'll be like, I love them. I'll say it a million times. I'll be talking about some traumatic story or some difficult misunderstanding. And I keep, my therapist used to call them pop-ups, like those ads that used to pop up in the early days of the internet, like they do these pop-ups

where I'm getting too close to a true emotion. So I better say like, I love them and they sure did everything they could. They did the best they could. So like, I'm just going to say at once, hopefully I love them. They did the best they could. And honestly, if this is helpful to you, Ryan, whenever I think of them now, because I'm trying to make a new neural pathway, I say I forgive you every time I think of them now, because I'm trying to make a new neural pathway, I say, I forgive you. Every time I think of them and I get a bad, I'm faking it till I make it. I do forgive them, but I'm really trying to get like a deep, like you guys did everything you did and everything you're doing because you want love, because you were afraid, because because you were confused or whatever it was

You don't even like I'm trying to give them the same benefit of the doubt that I give myself when I make a mistake I'm like well, Pete you were scared or you were confused or you were whatever You were doing your best. I'm trying to give that to them So I really am working on that So much so that whenever I think of them I say sometimes out loud like I forgive you I forgive you. And by the way, this sounds, this is a pop-up. It sounds like it's something horrible. This is pretty standard, non-abusive. It wasn't even verbally abusive. This is just like people that,

just like emotional issues, shit. Yeah, that's right. And I say that not as a pop-up. I say that just so people know what we're talking about here. I'm talking about whenever I introduce my parents to people, I say just so you know they're not people. That's like it's the only, it's the, I've known them my whole life. It's the only phrase that I found that is at all helpful in prepping someone to meet them. Because usually people are like,

oh, give them a break, you know, you're probably, you should try and find some common ground or this or that. I'm like, everything you're saying makes sense for people. Like, I know what you're talking about. Like, cookie parents, that's now where we're dealing with. We're dealing with like a species of human that I just haven't seen anywhere else.

So when you, something that you just said, this is where I would tell you that I love them. When we write and when I create, so the forgiveness and my accepting and trying to turn the volume down on my drive, are related. I got in a fight, it was like a was like a weird horrible like a bad play or something We I remember I ordered pizza Val was out of town

So it was me and the baby and I remember being like oh, this is perfect. I can I can sort of Frankly like spare Val like it's not always easy to hang out with my whole family And I was like she'll be with friends. I think she, I don't know if she was in New York or somewhere else, but she was out of town. I was like, that works. Part of me was like, that works. I'll deal with it. You know what I mean?

I got it. Terrible idea. After that visit, I was like, we need to do it together. She said we need to do it together. She said we need to do it together. And my whole life, I've had this, maybe people can relate. It's like, you got to feed my family. Like, we're sort of like reverse Grimmlands. You have to feed us after midnight.

You have to keep feeding us. Like, the best times we've had, and I figured this out, is like, go get ice cream. Like, when they come, go get ice cream. Everyone will be like sugar high, fat, comfortable. We'll have something to do. When we get hungry, we're so bad, and I'm so bad. And I ordered, this is obviously prequarantine.

I ordered from a pizza place. I've ordered from a thousand times. It took three hours. It never came. Like, so we were starving. Blood sugar was so low. It was just me, my mom, my dad, and my baby. And I got real mother bear.

The energy started to feel like it felt when I was growing up. I couldn't even believe what a David Lynchian nightmare it was that like voices were starting to get raised and like the frequency that only they can create. And frankly, only the three of us can create. Like, I'm participating in this. I'm something to them. They are something to me. And it's just creating this thick, horrible, shadowy nightmare of tension. And we're so hungry. And I had, I have on my mantle piece, there's a little statue I have of Christ meditating, which I just thought was fun. So I got a little Jesus who's meditating.

And then next to him is Hanuman. Hanuman is sort of the Jesus of Hinduism, meaning he's not the son of God, but he's similar. He's sort of like God's faithful servant. I just like both of those stories, and they're in similar positions. So I put them back to back. Almost just like action figures.

It's not like super thoughtful. I mean, I like both of them, but I'm not like, isn't this perfect? I mean, do you get it? You know, it's not like fan fiction. It's just like, I like the way these look. And I like what they make me think of. And frankly, they are, you know,

seen from the rational mind. These are opposing religions. Seen from the heart, you go, these are exactly the same thing. How beautiful to put them together. It's literally what the mystics would call third-way thinking. It's not exclusionary. It's inclusive. It doesn't make literal sense.

It's mythical. It's something special. Does that make sense? It's like, it's putting two things that don that make sense? It's it's like it's putting two things that don't make sense together together and somehow they make sense and you can't quite you couldn't even articulate it. So my mom who raised me evangelical and we really bonded over that was like and I'm so hungry and I'm holding the baby and it's now at 7.30 which is the baby's bedtime and they're still there. You know what I'm saying? Like they should have that. One of the things, and I would say this,

if they were in the room, not that they'll ever hear this, but it's just like, they don't have that like, oh, okay, well the pizza's not here. Here's my fantasy. Peter, we're so happy to see you. Thank you for having us over. Obviously it's the baby's bedtime. It stinks at the pizza didn't come. We're gonna go. We love you. This is clearly stressful. I'm sorry it didn't work out,

but we got three hours together. We're gonna go. Good night to the baby. I hope you do okay with the baby good night. But instead they're just sort. Good night to the baby. I hope you do okay with the baby, good night. But instead, they're just sort of like waiting to be fed. I made a joke on, I forget if it was Colbert or a cordon or one of them, whereas like they said, are your parents helpful with the baby?

And I'm like, no, it's like three babies. I just have three, three things I have to feed. So my mom, at the worst moment, the baby is starting to like, need to go to bed. I'm feeling very protective of the baby, and we're all starving. And I'm basically a baby holding a baby at this point because they've made me revert to my child self,

which is a very erred, small version of myself. It doesn't even make sense that I'm holding this baby. Like if we shot this as a movie, it should be a 12-year-old holding a baby. Like that's what it should be. And without getting more into it, I could talk about this night for a million years. My mom starts grilling me about the Jesus and the Hanuman. Yikes. And I'm just like, it's, I know, isn't this the worst story? This is like one of the worst nights of my life for sure. And that, and what a great thing that it's just psychological

trauma, but it, my shit is my shit. And this is my shit. So she just goes, I just don't understand like how do these make sense? And I thought I was being loving. I really tried my best. I said, it's okay to me that it doesn't make sense to you. That's what I said. I was like, it's not important to me that you get that and that you like it.

And I really meant it. I thought I was really being very zan about it. I was like, she's like, like it. And I really meant it. I thought I was really being very zan about it. I was like, she's like, but it doesn't make sense to me. I was like, that's OK with me. That's all right. Like, I'm kind of walking you through the seven hour lecture of why I can appreciate the two faiths at the same time.

I'm just going to say, I was trying to be loving. I was like, that's okay. Like, I don't need you to be me, basically. It's what I was trying to say. I don't need you to believe what I believe. I don't need you to think how I think. If that's confusing to you, that's okay. But the real rub of this, by the way, Ryan,

is that I've explained and talked about those things to my mom a million times. The thing that's so frustrating about my mom is that we've had these moments of two-person enlightenment. I'll send her a Richard Roer city, and we talk, and there she is. I mean, like the real her, like not, not neuroses, not fear, but like we meet as souls and we're there together and it's like the clouds part and we're both free together. We've dropped the role of son and mother.

We're just two pieces of the mystery and we can breathe fresh air together. And it's been so wonderful. It happened when I sent her Rob Bell's book Love Winds. The punchline of that is that I took her to meet Rob and the first thing she said to Rob was, I loved your book, but it's not biblical. I mean, like she just went away. Like the mom that maybe you've had experiences like that, the converted mom, the free mom always kind of gets sucked back in by her, I don't know what it is, by her fear, by her church friends, by her community. What I happen to think it might be her fear, but she goes away. So the next time I talk to her, there's no continuation. It's not like, well, we made it to that

wrong of the latter last time. So next time we talk, even if it's two, three days later, we should still be on that wrong, right? Yeah, you wanna build and you're sort of craving a connection and you're having expectations and it's like Groundhog Day. It's beyond Groundhog Day, because not only, let's say when we talked, she was on Run 3, and then we got to run 6.

Oh my God, how did we get to run 6? We're having like a real conversation about a loving presence and grace and mercy and everything being okay. That's what, like a lot of enlightenment, you can say, you feel one with everything, right? An easier way to say that is, everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, which I believe is a vanagette, or just everything is okay. I'm okay. You're okay. The world is okay. Everything is forgiven, including reality itself, is forgiven for being as horrible as it can be, we are forgiven, everything,

and we're just in the moment, and everything's in sunlight, and it's great. But then the next time you talk, you go from six, now you're on the ground, you're not even on the ladder. Like you go lower than you were, the last time you talked in, got to six, now you're on run zero. And so there's that pain.

And as I'm talking about that, you're helping me get in touch with how much that hurts me. If it's not that I don't like explaining to my mom how I've grown. But you have to keep in mind, this is the mom that comes over and I have a Buddha in my garden. She knocked it over. She went over and toppled it.

The first time she came over, she toppled it. And she was kind of half-kitting, but she said, I cast you out in the name of Jesus and she pushed Buddha onto his face. And I'm just like, no, why do you like this? What is it about Buddhism that you like? It was just, so like I've tried, and in my mind, there have been moments where,

I'm not even gonna say I did the impossible. It really did feel like a moment of grace, like something happened where we both opened. Just like, you know, a flower doesn't open itself. The sunlight opens the flower, gives the prompt to open the flower. So the sunlight opened us both. But then, like I said, it always reverts.

So she's asking me about Hanuman and Christ. And buddy, this goes back to exactly what we were talking about. And forgive me, I've been talking so much. But in that moment, I felt so hurt. I remembered that I wrote a book about it. Yeah. And Ryan, I hope this is of some use to you, because this was a breakthrough for me, just like all the great moments of suffering afterwards are these great moments. I realized how much me writing books, writing TV shows, I just have the episodes at the Simpsons' air that I wrote,

so much of what I'm doing is trying to get my parents to understand who I really am. So it's not even just religion, that happens to be this area that we disagree on. But like, that's when I kind of snapped. And when I say snapped, I mean that in a very wasp way. We're not meaning we're not like a we're not colorful. We're not having like a screaming match. Maybe it would be healthier if we did. But my heart just

broke when I thought I wrote a book about it. And read it and I realized in that moment it doesn't work. So we're back. Never gonna happen. We're back to surrender. We're only saying just 10 minutes ago I was like surrender is a huge part of it. So is suffering is a huge part of it. And in that moment I really had my nose rubbed in it just how badly I need both of those like fucking Stop it. Don't write a book so your parents will read it and go There you are Peter like fucking hook. There you are. I see you now there It's sad, but like whether or not they ever update the file on 15 year old me, 14 year old me,

and see me as 41 year old this that and the other, that is so out of my control. And brain science is not in my favor when it comes to the neuroplasticity of minds as we age. Like there comes a time to go like, you know what? I have a posted on my desk here that says because joy matters. You're a big, why guy? Like why do we do things? I'm trying to do things now for a more pure reason. What would happen if we didn't do it for money, if we didn't do it for power, if we didn't do it to get our parents to understand us,

what if we did it because joy matters? Like your joy and me sharing truth and joy and light and what's helped me with you. And if that lights your candle, that's a beautiful thing. We can get some real shit going instead of playing this. There's, I'm sorry, I'm really ranting here, but Eckhart Toley has this great thing. Eckhart Toley is one of my great teachers.

Obviously, the power of now is one of the greatest books ever written. If the people listening read one book, don't read mine, read the power of now, absolutely hands down, that's not false humility. He says in it something like, people say, I need my parents to understand me to be happy. And he goes, really?

Like, he says really? Almost like sign fell or something. He's like, you need your parents to understand you to be happy? Like, what are we doing? Like wake up from the dream. You do not need that. That is something that you've come to believe that you need. When really the surrender and the suffering can take you in and drop your anchor

into the perfect present where that story is irrelevant to your general contentment. that story is irrelevant to your general contentment. And here's me talking to Super Bowl Champion, but in his eyes, much more importantly, artist and author, Martellis Bennett. I know you wrote like a really beautiful, although it's also tragic. When your brother got arrested, and there was that thing in Vegas in, was that 2017,

I remember your Instagram post. It like, it really hit me. So I grew up, my father was a police officer. So I'd always sort of had, you know, like, you hear things and you go, oh, okay, I assume this is what's happening, I assume this is what's happening. But I remember when I read that, it was eye opening, you were basically saying like, look, this could happen to anyone,

and it could happen to you. I'm just curious, like, what do you feel on about everything that's happening in the world right now? Well, I just think that people always be like, they're so straight, black, or they're so straight, we're so straight, the struggle associate the struggle with blackness. Right. So like if you have money,

it's almost like they don't see you as black as someone that's poor and black. Right? Because they think, when they think of black, they think of poor. But if you have money, like, well, you're not black and poor, you're like a whole different type of black, right? It's like, you know, right? You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm just, I'm just as black because everybody else, I had, like, one person told me, like, why do you care about this thing? I have friends who are blacker than you.

I was just sparing, but I was like, I do it. I was like, real like,, how could you have some light that's blacker than me? What does that even fucking mean? Like, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Because he, because he's so shabby with it because they didn't have the things that I have in my life. My thing is that like, when you're black, okay, how much money you have or, how much money you don't have, your blackness is the same in the world, right? Like when the police see my black he doesn't see my black as any different That anyone else is black until he reads the ID, right until he reads the driver license or something Then they'll treat you differently in that situation

But if there's a chance opportunity where they don't have your license if something is going down Right, they treat you as they would treat you if they thought you were Go other black to them, right? Sure And so I just feel like everybody is a suspect no matter how much money you have as black you are the suspect I mean you have you nowhere. You have the Milwaukee Bucks player and Milwaukee getting, you know, tased from parking in a handicapped spot.

Every time I talk to you, you manage to say something that, and I think this is what's special about you, is you have such a unique perspective. And you manage to always, and this is the artist in you, you manage to always pick a really vivid either analogy or metaphor or way of expressing it and always hits me in a weird way,

which I wrote down I wanted to talk to you about. We were texting and we were talking about, I forget what it was, but your point was, you were talking about your goals with what it was, but your point was, you were talking about your goals with your animation studio and your art, and you were just like, look, Disney is the most successful animation, sort of movie studio of all time.

You were like, look, that was founded in 1923, and then you said something to me like, think about what it was like to be a black person in America in 1923. And that's why Walt Disney is owned by a white person and not owned by a black person. Yeah, because if the competition at the Panfield was even, who knows if Walt Disney would be as popular as he could have beat out a some black media company could have been the biggest media company in the world,

or just as equal, there could be two, South by South, like serving two groups of people. In a way, I think about that about most media, I'll watch, we just have the opportunity to start businesses, and then you start businesses a hundred years ago, they burnt them down. I was reading a lot about reconstruction and about the Jim Crow years. And I think it's just hard for people to wrap their head around. Like it wasn't that people were racist back then.

It was as if society was ruled, but not in all of America, but definitely in the South. It was as if America was ruled by a series of gangsters who would murder you if you stepped out of line in some way. Like Jim Crow wasn't just like, hey, you got a drink at this water fountain and then we'll give you a nice water fountain. Jim Crow was like, we will literally murder you and your family

if you try to approach this ballot box. You know, like it was viciously and ferociously aggressive. And I don't, I think that's hard for people to wrap their heads around. I mean, I tell people like that, like it's crazy because it wasn't that long ago either. Like I think my dad was born a year after the Jim Coles ended. Like, you know, it's just crazy. Like that's my father. Like, and it's not that many generations removed. But then here's like some households

want to talk about their family's experience during that generation, right? Because they may be embarrassed about it or they may not be embarrassed about it. They may feel like that's the way they should be, right? So there's like this whole space of word these conversations aren't happening with children way things should be, right? So there's like this whole space of word, these conversations aren't happening with children and these households, right?

Like the parents, the grandparents are racist and then the kids are racist, then racism is taught, right? And people don't think that they're teaching it, but the number one thing that we learn is by seeing, seeing the behavior, right? We see racism, like there I used to hand people, it used to be like a family gathering. I put them down football game.

Everyone is going to go around and like, let's go see what racism is. Like, it's the craziest thing ever. Like, everyone stands around like, kids are there, right? Parents are there. They eat sandwiches, they're picnic, picnic, and religion. No, and if you missed it,

you could buy a postcard of it later. And there's postcards that you can fucking buy with charred bodies on them, or a dangling cadaver. I mean, even you go to college football, like those gator bait chance. That is not just you know a funny thing that that has roots in racist art that that you know comes from

you know who knows if it was true or not but comes from a very very vicious place culturally like we'll feed your babies to an alligator? That wasn't white babies. And you know what I know, really fucked up. I never thought about just going back in history. Like, I never realized that a master bedroom was called a master bedroom because that's what a master lived in.

And it was like, you're like, bro, like that's so fucked up. Like, that's just crazy. The biggest number of the house. And everyone's just like, you're like, bro, like, that's so fucked up. Like, that's just crazy. The biggest number of the house. And everyone wants to mess with everyone when you get to the house. Right? Everyone talks about this. This room was made for the person who ran the plantation. No, that's that's that's that's that's because racism and these tropes are these ideas are still entrenched in our society. And my problem with everything that everyone is trying to do, right?

This is my issue with everything that's happening right now. Well, it's not my issue. Like, this is a big part of my thoughts on what's going on right now. I know you actually hear. What the problem I see is that everyone is looking for new ways to work within a system that we already live in.

When what really should be happening is a new way for people should be designed a new way to live. The old system, no matter how you rework a room, the room is still the same size. You can move the furniture, you can move things around and around, left and right, all that shit. You can do all that shit, it's cool. But their room is still the same, just because I decorated different,

doesn't mean that the room is a different room. They may have a little different feeling to it, you change the color of the paint, you can get a new piece of art, yes, and we carpet. Now, it may feel different, but at the end of the day, it's still the same room, right? And we're saying what we, the problem with ours is that the way the system is set up is root is right at the foundation.

Because the foundation was built racism, hate, crime, dovery, stolen, like sometimes like like like if you're if you're white and this makes out radical as hell, I'm just trying to say something. There might be a time when your ancestors have stolen something that made your family prosperous, prosperous down the line from people that they shouldn't have been still at home and they got it away with it because they were white. The joke family prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-prouc-pr Well, no, and look, that's what I think people miss too, right? So they'll go like, okay, you know, whether it's the Michael Brown case or whether it's the George Floyd case or whether it's the, was it Jacob Blake case in Kenosha right now? People are like, well, why are they, you know, why are they resisting arrest? Why aren't they going peaceful? It's like, first off, you know, they're resisting arrest because they still get killed even when they are not resisting

arrest, which anyone who watches the George Floyd video will see. But if you have a relationship with law enforcement where law enforcement is essentially an arm of the sharecropping store come to collect absurd unpayable debts from you in the form of, you know, parking tickets and court fees and bail amounts, etc. You're going to have a much more hostile relate, like, when I get pulled over, I'm like, okay, the worst thing that happens, I have to pay this ticket. I'm not spiraling through in my head if I, you know, I'm already on probation for this charge. And so I could go back to jail for that. If I get this fine and I can't pay the fine or if I can't miss work to do my quarter appearance, you know, like the red of using my freedom is never there. Bro, and why do people, this two things, Look all that, I don't have any arrests. And somebody get pulled up, I hear a silent and a rap song.

I get mad at you. Very, very much like that, damn it. I have to be nervous. Why am I driving? Like sometimes, I have to all the driving the more safe bins. I went to the windows. Right? Because I was just a little, they got to see me.

My wife, I was jogging, I lived in Hollywood. I was jogging through Hollywood and I stopped because I felt like I look suspicious running past the sidewalk every damn day and my neighborhood my wife who let me walk at night because you know I have to wake up at 6 a.m. to walk and sometimes I got a gauge with time if the sun goes down I can't go for the day about missments so I can't walk in the evening unless I bring my poodle with me. You know what I'm saying? Or my dog with me or whatever, right?

Because then it's like, you know, he's a big black man with a poodle. He can't be suspicious, right? Like, you know, so like in my own neighborhood, I hate that, man, that sucks. I hate that. And another thing that you touched on too, why do people say that not communicating with

the police is resisting arrest? If I'm not under arrest, I don't have to talk to you. Hey, it's Ryan. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. And here's me talking to the absolutely wonderful, pureless Godfather of basketball, George Ravling. The value of quotient of reading for me was probably different, obviously, than Truman's

but I think when I, in the moments that quiet during the day, when I think back about my life and reading and so forth, I find the early origin of about reading came from my grandma. When I was a little boy, my grandma used to make me sit and watch her cook in the kitchen. And my grandma never got past eighth grade, but she had common sense and so she would make me sit there and watch her cook and so it turned out as I realized in my adult life it was a classroom she was teaching me how to cook by observation and then she would

have conversations with me why I was sitting there and so one time she said to me She said no back in the days of of slavery The plantation owners used to hide their money in books and I said Grandma why did do that? She said because they knew the slaves couldn't read, so they would never take the books down. And so to me, the moral of that story was, as long as someone can control your mind,

they can control your body. And so I think that was the early revelation to me of why books had to be more relevant in my life. And then I started to realize, you know, George, you've got a moral obligation to read that people died, literally died, to get you the right to read. If you remember your history, George, there was a time in America when it was illegal for a person to teach a black person how to read. There was a time in America when a black person could not get a library card. The libraries were segregated. And so people get me the right to read. So am I going to dishonor their deaths by not reading? I see it in a broader context than just reading to learn or reading for entertainment.

I feel personally I have an obligation to honor those people's death. They die so that I could have the opportunity to read. And people asked me, when you were growing up, did you read a lot? Well, no. The only books I saw in my young life were school books. That were the only books I knew. Black books I couldn't afford a book, even they, five dollars, when I was a little kid, was a lot of money. And so I can tell you that when I grew up, there were books in my home because if they were, there were school books.

I were the only books that I knew. When I was growing up as a young kid and washed the DC 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, every day was about survival. When you got up in the morning, you were happy that you survived for another day. And so you get up in the morning and you look out the window and a tip to stand and you say, I made it another day, but it's all about survival. And so along the way, I continued to progress to where I finally get a basketball scholarship to go and over. It really wasn't until I got to go and over that I started

to realize the wonder of reading it and how it could separate you from other people. And you and I had the buddies, I don't think I've ever told you this, but when I was in class in my freshman year, there would be people in the class that someone would say, that guy's really smart. And so as time went on in the class, I would listen to the person or persons, and then I would think to myself,

well, I know that, and so then I would say to myself, well, if that guy's smart, maybe I'm smart. And so, a lot of this was just about self-discumbery, trying to, I had no idea at the time, but I was in search of myself and who I was. And I'm trying to find an identity for myself as a student at Wilnover. So over the time, once I got out, I really started to get into to to reading like a between that I used to keep a collage of four people in a frame in my office and particularly when I was working at Nike and it was Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali.

So people would come in the office and they would see this collage and they would say to me, why do you have that up there? And I said, they're my mentors. Well, most people could only readily identify King. And then they had no idea who balled with us and then some people might figure out Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. So they said, well, you know all those guys, I said no, I only knew one, Martin Luther King. And one of the guys said to me, but you said they're your mentors.

I said to him, a person doesn't have to be alive to be your mentor or you don't have to know the person to be your mentor. You just have to know about them. And they're both. Yes, well, yes, that's a great way to study from someone because it's a doorway into their mind and their soul. Yeah, so I progressed from having no books as a youngster to a library in my home right now that we have over 3,000 books. That's the evolution of it. And so now, I've had to develop my own reading style. I really believe more people would aggressively read

if they could create their own style of reading. We're talking, you read from front to back, all the things, but what I've done is I decided, I'm gonna make my own rules for reading. And so I've developed them over the years. And as a result, it's helped inflame a passion in me about reading. And it's not just, God knows you, you know this,

and I learned it from you. It's not enough to read. That's the first step. You've got to learn, and then you've got to read. That's the first step. You've got to learn and then you've got to understand. So when I pick up a book, I realize I've got three quests. One, to read the book, to learn from the book, and to understand what I've learned. And then can I make it applicable in my everyday life? And one of the things that I'm grappling with now, as I guess is about my fifth week of house arrest, I haven't been to a bookstore. And I go to bookstore on a normal day, five times a week.

I go in the bookstore and search for good things. I mean, one of my real worries is when we get on the other side of this, that will bars and nobles still exist. Will bookstores still be present? And a lot of people when I express this, they say, oh, you don't have to word because Amazon, it's not the same, it's not the same. If someone's not a reader and they're list right now, you're

to the great example of, it's never too late. Obviously, it would be better to have a reading that early in life, but it doesn't matter when you start, it matters that you get started. And so I love that your story, you know, you didn't come to reading really until you were in college. But the other part is the idea that reading was something that slaves were forbidden from doing. I mean, there's this cliche, we go on knowledge's power. But to me, there's not greater proof of the idea that knowledge is power,

then the fact that in the vicious power struggle between master and slave for hundreds of years in this country, books were considered an important battleground. There's a reason that slaves owners didn't want their slaves to read it, that it would make them harder to control. It would make the moral catastrophe that was slavery more obvious to the slaves and the injustice of it more undeniable. And so, yeah, reading is a powerful thing, and we can't just voluntarily relinquish that power, which, unfortunately, is what a lot of people do by deciding not to read. And, right, one of the things that I've come to realize in the last two or three years is in some ways

we still have a sophisticated form of someone controlling what we can read. And almost all states in the United States, there's a board that has to approve what books are used for curriculums in the schools. And I'm not going to be able to say that all the books right now, but I just read an article in the last 48 hours where in the Alaska, the great gaps we was wanting to books. But this panel that approves the books for the state of the Alaska had five books on

there that they would not approve books for use in the school system. So I'm trying to, I think to myself, is that they don't trust us? To read these books, I'm trying to figure out why we even have someone who decides what we can read and what we cannot read as we're learning and growing as adults should not some of that choice be ours. And at some point you're not going to be able to hide the truth for us forever. No, I think that's right. And another example of that is just what books are allowed

and not allowed in the prison system or in certain government buildings. That was one of the things that Joseph McCarthy focused on, which was what books did government officials have that US embassies around the world. And yeah, when people are trying to control people, one of the first things that they go to are the books that are allowed to read.

Hey everyone, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It's incredible to think that these episodes have been listened to more than three million times. If you could do this a huge favor and just leave a quick review of the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or whatever you're listening to this on, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews help with visibility and help bring stosism to even more people. Thanks again. Talk soon. Wondering Plus in Apple podcasts.