The Daily Stoic - Victor Juhasz on Epictetus and Creating “The Girl Who Would Be Free”
Episode Date: July 16, 2022Ryan talks to illustrator Victor Juhasz about the process of creating his newest book “The Girl Who Would Be Free,” the decision to make Epictetus a girl, how he was impacted by the story... of Epictetus, and more.Victor Juhasz is an artist and illustrator whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Time Magazine, and Esquire Magazine, and more. He has illustrated many books including The Boy Who Would Be King, G is for Gladiator: An Ancient Rome Alphabet and is for Zeus: A Greek Mythology Alphabet.📕 The Girl Who Would Be Free is an all-ages fable written by the bestselling author Ryan Holiday and illustrated by the prolific illustrator Victor Juhasz. The 148-page book, produced entirely by Daily Stoic and printed here in the United States, is OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE online at dailystoic.com/girl or at The Painted Porch Bookshop in Bastrop, Texas.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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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 Stoics,
something to help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice,
temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into
those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how
these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging
issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down,
be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,
and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.
Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars.
And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy
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Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.
Epic Titus is such a fascinating character to me because we know so little about him.
We don't really know what he looks like. We don't even know really where he came from.
I mean, his name just survives to us as a acquired one. That's what epitetus means. So, you know, I heard Val Kilmer
famously say about playing back holiday in Tombstone that making up that character was like
putting clothes on a ghost. And I think, although epitetus gives us these amazing, well,
I'm not even writing, they're just his lectures, the notes that came to us
through his student Aryan. We have a good sense of what Epictetus believed, but we don't know that much
about him. And I've been, as you know, hard at work on writing a fable about Epictetus trying to
put some clothes on that ghost, so to speak. That's what the new book, The Girl Who Would Be Free, is about.
And I didn't do this project alone.
Writers are solitary figures, right?
Or like a comedian.
It's just us and the Mike, us and the Penn.
It's not a team sport, I guess.
So it's been an interesting experience working
on the boy who would be king.
And now, I knew book The Girl Who Would Be Free with Victor Uhas.
And I met Victor through Sean Coine, who's Stephen Pressfield's editor.
I was thinking about doing my first kids book.
And I said, I need an amazing illustrator who don't need to bring these ideas to life.
And he said, you got to talk to the sky, Victor, which I did.
And Victor has been an amazing collaborator and really brought this book to life.
And in today's episode, we have an in-depth discussion about stoicism, what it was like
for him trying to draw and bring epictetus to life, not just as this ghost from the past,
but per my vision of switching epictetus from the male to the female because I wanted the book to be relatable to a broader swathe people it's important to me that stoicism doesn't just seem like a masculine thing and that that was important to epictetus's philosophy teacher mousonius rufus who believed that both men and women should be taught philosophy so
believed that both men and women should be top philosophy. So Victor very matured me. I sent him a bunch of pictures of my wife at EpicTidus's age in the book and he incorporated some of that. And
I let him do his magic and I really do think he did some magic. And I'm excited to bring you
this conversation. I'm in my office here in Bastrop, Texas, Victor at his studio in Upstate, New York.
Master of Texas, Victor at his studio in upstate New York.
Enjoy, I hope you check out the book. It came out yesterday.
I'm very excited to bring that to you.
You can check it out at dailystoke.com slash girl
or get it anywhere you buy your books online,
I believe, or just go to store.dailystoke.com
or swing by the painted porch here in Bastrop, Texas to check it out.
I'm also a big fan of Victor's wife, Terry Cole, who helped negotiate our collaboration
agreement and all these things.
I had her on the podcast a while back, which is to check out that episode.
I've also had Victor on before, but her book, Boundary Boss, The Essential Guide to Talk,
True, Be Scene, and Finally, Live Free was also quite good.
And I thought that was worth a shout out as well.
Enjoy this interview.
And I cannot wait now that the book is out and in everyone's hands to hear what all of
you think.
I hope your kids, it's interesting. Our first collaboration was so fun and so easy
and straightforward. I found this book to be harder in a variety of ways. I want to talk
about all of them. But the fact that it's not out in the world, or it's not out in the world in March when I wanted,
struck me as a sort of stoic reality,
which is you have all your plans,
you have how you want to do things,
and then sort of life gets in the way.
In this case, a global printing shortage,
which is repeatedly delayed the book.
That's fascinating.
Printing in terms of just paper itself or ink or...
All of it. So what happened was that there's been a printer shortage in the U.S. for some time
dating well back before the pandemic. Different plants closed, different printers closed.
Book sales have continued to go up.
I think people were kind of predicting that the,
that that physical book sales would decline steadily
as they were and the opposites happened.
So they sort of, there was too much demand
which is a great problem to have.
But then with the pandemic and then also
the unrest in Europe and Brexit and a bunch of other stuff,
all the big publishers have been ensuring their printing.
So they've moved back to the US and thus overwhelmed the demand and that's delayed thing.
So it's not that the, so basically like the girl who would be free went into the publisher
in February, which is the same time that the boy who would be came went in a year earlier,
and instead of coming out in early March, it came out in June.
It's coming out in July.
So that's how it backed up there.
Wow.
Coming out, do you have any idea when in July?
Yes, when people will be listening to this,
it will be out,
providing some unforeseen further delay,
but July 8th is when we're putting it out.
Okay, super, super, that sounds great.
But I feel like as an artist or a creator,
it must be part of it for you too,
and that you do your part, it must be, this must be part of it for you too, and that like, you
have, you do your part, like you illustrate it, but then you have so little control over
what the other, what the collaborators do with it, you have relatively little control over
what the market does with it.
I think an underrated skill for a creator is the ability to just sort of go, it'll come
out when it comes out, it'll
be what it, what it'll be. And I just have to kind of, you almost have to get to a zen
like place with it, because if you, if you hold on to it to tight, the thing, it'll, it'll
just break your heart over and over again.
Well, it will, but the nice thing about what I do is that that after I'm done my work, I notice this is essentially
your baby.
You have your money behind this.
So I'm out of it.
I was finished with everything I had to do.
I could step back.
And what happened, however unfold would unfold in its own way.
So I just wait for the end results.
But I imagine you've had to get that way over
your career.
If rolling stone commissions are drawing from you,
you do that drawing.
But when the story runs, whether the story is good or not,
so many of those other factors are out of your control,
I imagine you've had to get a little self-contained
with the parts of the process that you care about,
namely, the parts of it you control,
which is the work that you do.
Right, and do it to the best of my ability.
It would be very professional,
and actually be more than professional,
really put your heart and soul into it.
Yeah, Epictetus actually talks about this
in his discourses.
He talks about how we're sort of all actors in a play
and we're not the director.
He doesn't exactly say who the director is,
but accepting that you're not the director
is, I think, a critical part.
He's like, you still have to act the hell out of your role,
but you have to understand that you didn't,
you're not the playwright, right? And once you accept that, you can, it's weirdly freeing because
now you can just focus on doing a really good job on your part.
Exactly. I would never make a good general or a kernel or anything like that. At maximum, that maximum might probably be a very competent sergeant,
just manning my outpost and doing the best I could out there.
I mean, I have found that, right?
So these two books, the boy who became in the girl
who'd be free, I self-published,
which meant I had all the control
that I sometimes frustrated that I don't have on my bigger books.
And you know, you sort of be careful what you wish for because you get the control, but
now you also have all the responsibility and the frustration and the obligation.
It's, you realize, it has given me some empathy for my publisher because suddenly I'm like, oh yeah,
a lot of this isn't in their control either.
And I'm taking personally or holding them responsible for things that we're out of their
hands too.
Right.
But also being that you've self-published both of these books, did you find that this dec... I mean, I don't see any name publications reviewing
who have reviewed the boy, you know. We got great comments on the Amazon website and
I mean, wonderful comments, but no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Another way to have success on my previous books, because I realized that that matters so
much less than you think it does.
What actually matters is do human beings like the book, and have you gotten it into as
many of their hands as possible.
So I could have gone the traditional route with both of these books.
It would have meant worse economics, but I was less concerned with that.
It would have meant less control over the timeline, and it would have meant less control over
the content.
So, when I went to my publisher with the boy who would be king, they were like, we love
the idea, we see how it fits with all your other books, but they're like, we would like
it to be about 10,000 words.
They wanted it to be more of a novella or a longer story,
and they were like, that's what we're interested in buying.
And I was like, I understand what you're interested in buying,
but here's what I'm interested in making.
And I was interested in writing a fable
that was illustrated in the way that you illustrated it.
I feel very lucky that you and I got connected by Sean Coimbe because our visions of it were
remarkably aligned.
But my vision and the publisher's vision were very much not aligned.
So I had to decide what's more important to me having access to say being on the New
York Times list, being reviewed, getting some critical feedback,
or publishing the book that I want to publish.
You've got to decide what race you're trying to win, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you made the right choice, obviously,
and the fact that we got so many,
that the book got so many great comments,
and all these, what I especially love is when people talk about
how their kids continually come back to the book.
Yes.
In those comments.
And that was probably the most consistent comment I got
from the boy, from friends who I gave the book to.
And they even Matt Taibi was telling me like his son
read it all the way on a long drive.
I mean, I over and over again,
he just was hooked by the story.
That's what I love to hear too.
And I think the hard part is,
how do you measure the success of what you're doing?
And in a lot of ways, sales or revenue
or did important people like critics accept
it or awarded something, those are the easiest ways to measure success. The didn't accomplish
what you wanted to accomplish as an artist, is it true to the vision, did it make somebody's
life better. Those metrics are much harder to measure by,
but I do feel like as I've gone on in my career,
I have gotten better at prioritizing those things
and sitting with the ambiguity of it.
Like I know it's a success
because it did what I wanted to do,
whether that's a shared assumption with other people, I have to sit with the divergence
there.
Right.
Well, Stephen Pressfield writes about that.
One of his copies is, what happens if your book doesn't sell?
Yeah.
Well, does that negate the creative process, does that create all your effort? No, it doesn't.
But this that is the fundamental tentative stoicism also, right?
What what part of the process is in your control? The effort the work the intention the vision, you know
all of that is in your control the external
reception All of that is in your control. The external reception, the world events in which your book is really, all of that stuff is outside of your control.
And so you have to decide what you measure.
And I think ideally as an artist or an entrepreneur, whatever it is, you've got to get to a place
where you are the one who decides whether you succeeded
or not.
Right, right.
Let's get into the nuts and bolts here because this was definitely a different experience
for me than the boy would be Kate.
Yeah, I heard you say a bunch of times it was much harder for you.
I'm curious why that was. Well, first of all,
once I got the manuscript and I read it,
I said, okay, great, this will be terrific.
And then when I reread it,
and then I kind of like compared it to the boy,
I said, this is way heavier already already the the theme behind this book is much more nuanced much more layered
Then the boy would be king the boy would be king is essentially your classic
Heroes journey. Yes, you know, he doesn't you know, he runs away from his challenge
Finally accepts the challenge overcomescomes it, brings back something
to his community.
This one starts off right away, heavy.
She's a slave.
She's a slave.
The first couple of pages were talking about how you're talking about, and I'm drawing
the lives of slaves in Rome. And so we have that.
And then we have just the philosophy itself. As opposed to the boy who would be king, yes, Marcus
are really as was a stoic, and we're getting snippets of what Rousticus is telling him. And we're getting snippets of, you know, what Rousticus is telling him. And we're getting that in a subtle way what's going on.
But here, the girl would be free.
You're getting stoicism.
And you're getting stoicism on not on how to be a king, but how to manage, how to navigate
a life of incredible suffering.
Yeah.
You know, that's heavy.
And I remember, I remember so many times,
as I was working on the illustrations
and rereading your copy and just seeing
how do we manage these images.
I said, what's the, this is different from how to explain
the boy to a child.
This is gonna be like, why are they suffering so much?
Why is Epic Titus on Crutches?
Why are the slaves like this?
Sure.
And then what's the parent gonna do do in terms of it's a great
opportunity for a parent to get hopefully into a little bit of history and explain that for much
of human history, slavery was the norm. Yeah. I'm a big believer in not babying your kids when it
comes to books and pretending the world is something different
than it is.
But I also dislike, there's a number of kids books that are just dealing with themes
that sort of kids have no business dealing with.
You know, like I don't think you, I'm making a kids book about a school shooting seems,
you know, to me to be reversed, right?
I don't think there's a positive lesson in there,
but I did want to deal,
I guess I liked the challenge of like,
Epictetus has this horrendous life in real life.
And somehow it never breaks him, it never changes him
and somehow he goes on to do all this amazing stuff and is seen as a beacon
of inspiration and hope.
So like, how do you get from A to Z there?
That to me is the fascinating challenge of that story because by any measure, Epic Titus'
story should be a depressing example of the worst of what human beings are capable of, and instead
somehow is an example of the best of what human beings are capable of in real life, not even
in this story. Exactly. And the emotional maturity, the philosophical maturity, that I have to admit, I don't even know if I would be able
to manage that kind of level of peace with my situation.
Yes, I don't think so either.
I guess I imagine one of the challenges of the book,
and I think you mentioned this to me,
is that because the book is more philosophical, I imagine
the challenge, that philosophical or action based as a writer, it's not that difficult.
I mean, obviously, you always like a story more than an idea, but this one I really tried
to address the ideas of stoicism more, although obviously Epic teedus lives them, but I was
thinking of the example where I was talking about how the words we use for things is almost
a form of magic.
It changes what, how we see them, the words we use for things changes, what they mean.
As a writer, that's a pretty straightforward sentence to write in a kid's book.
But I remember you came to, you were like, how the hell am I supposed to illustrate this?
How do you make a picture of that idea that's not a, I don't know, a symbol or so, you
know, and you ended up coming up with something cool about it with like hands and a bird appearing
from Epictetus's father's hands. But I imagine illustrating abstract ideas is much harder than the narration of actual events.
Yes, because you're reading it, you can sort of, you can, in a weird way, you visualize
what the author is writing.
But to take that and actually make a visual that maybe not everybody will even jump on as being a correct visual,
that's always a challenge for any illustrator.
There are many times I see an illustration in a magazine or a newspaper illustrating a topic or a story and I'm going, I don't know, I definitely don't think I do it that way.
You know, I don't know how I would do it,
but I don't think this is not reading to me.
It's nice to look at, but I'm not sure
if it's addressing the topic.
So how do you think about that?
Like let's say there was a passage in the book
where a magazine comes to you with an opinion piece
that needs a graphic or an illustration, and it's not immediately obvious what it is.
So the first page of this book, it's talking about life as a slave, you're like, okay,
I just have to figure out what the life of the slave look like and document that.
When it's a more abstract idea and it's not immediately and tutly obvious what it is,
what's your process of figuring it out? Do you just start sketching? Do you go for a walk and
think? How do you crack those non-obvious puzzles? Well, in editorial illustration, especially if you're
doing political type of editorial illustration. There are certain...
cliches, not the right word, but there are certain formats that you can revert to.
That's right. Yeah, you go back to Thomas Nass, go all the way back to Granville or Gilray
and stuff like that, or people like that. And there's a whole history of how to portray things.
So if something doesn't strike you right away
to create a concrete visual,
there's always this history that's right behind you.
Right.
I can always go to all the books
and start fishing through.
Or if I'm feeling frisky, I'll just go to Bugs Bunny.
I'll just go to Warner Brothers, Mooney Toads.
I mean, a slapstick idea, especially in terms of political illustration, for me has always worked.
Interesting.
So you sort of go back to sources of inspiration,
in the way that if you're trying to write a song,
you might go, you might go play similar songs to the one
that you want to write, where the mood you're trying to evoke,
and in the process of kind of riffing and messing around,
it just appears what you want to go,
the inspiration appears.
Right.
That's a pretty good analogy there.
I was just actually reading Steven Pressfield's new book.
He has called Put Your Ask Where Your Heart Wants To Be.
How much of it for you is like walking around
and getting inspiration, or it's like,
no, I got to put my butt in the chair and do the work,
and eventually the muses will visit me. Depends on a time can I be honest? Yeah a lot of time it's
spent over there but a lot of time it's spent outdoors in the garden. You could spend if I have
enough time and that's not always the case on on on editorial jobs because now the goddamn news cycle is so fast
you have to get things produced very quickly.
But if there's that time and ideas are not coming
and you're just out of loss,
then you go outside, now, more,
and I'll work in the garden
or cleaning out the chicken coops or whatever the hell.
And I've got that time to think.
And I think the best thing in the world, a lot of times,
is to get away from the drawing table for me.
I know I've learned enough about how Steven works.
I don't know if I have that discipline to just sit down there
against a bare wall with the desk facing the wall and just do something. I kind of am a procrastinator
and a tangential goofer. So there's a lot of stuff that goes on. There's a way that you can create
all sorts of distractions, which is what we call the resistance.
The resistance, the resistance, yes.
Do you believe in the magic of it, though?
Are you ever just amazed that you're just sitting there and you're like, where did that
come from?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And you know what's even better is, but if you're in a conference with an art director,
either in person or on a Zoom or just going back and forth, but usually it's gotta be,
there's gotta be some sort of visceral activity,
a Zoom or actually dealing with the art director in person.
But when you're bouncing back and forth and suddenly,
you got it. There it is.
And you're like, ah, where did that come from?
But it's a great quantum jump.
I call them quantum jumps. Something triggers something that it's not A to B.
It's actually going to A to W. Yeah, and W takes you to Z, but
you it's a large jump. It suddenly gives you enough of
The bulk of it that you now can you know like that thing about like feeling an elephant, you know, you're feeling it. Yes, yes.
Oh, no, no, no.
I have enough sense of this now
that I understand what I'm dealing with.
Yes.
Which is one of the reasons that was always good
to go back to you and just throw something out.
There's something about a collab,
part of what I do too, and one of the reasons
I think that I've lasted this long in a business is that I'm not an ego driven, necessarily
an ego driven illustrator. I'm very much into the collaborative thing because I'm illustrating
your story or I'm illustrating somebody else's article. I'm not really illustrating my own story. If I do, then it goes on its...
It's a sketch or a drawing or it's an idea
and I'll put it on Instagram or Facebook.
But generally speaking, I'm doing somebody else's work.
Hey there, listeners.
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How do you think about that? Because I imagine like I think every creative person struggles
with notes, right? Like I don't know if you said the last season of curburentusiasum,
Larry David sitting down at this meeting and he's like, I think we're going to work great together,
everyone's excited. And he's like, all right, number, he's like one last thing. Don't give me any
fucking notes. And they all go, ha, ha, ha, ha, you know, he laughs and he's laughing with him. And
then he's like, I'm not joking. And then he walks out of the room. Which is, I think, kind of the artist's fantasy,
and you think about getting to a point
where it's just you and no one can tell you what to do,
and notes are often quite terrible,
but also collaboration is key,
and ego is the enemy, I would say.
How do you think about the art of notes,
especially when I got to imagine a good chunk
of your notes are coming from people
who have no idea how to do what you do
or how what you do works.
So I imagine a lot of the notes are like impossible
on top of it.
I'm lucky.
I work, I've generally worked with really great art directors, especially the last 10 years.
Much of my early career was just doing, grinding out a lot of work that paid to bills, but I'm
at a point in my life now, at least since the mid-2000s, where the people I'm working
with almost to a person are just a pleasure to work with.
So that, going back to what we were talking about before, you have an conversation and
a word pops up and that's the word that I was missing all the time while I was sitting
at the drawing table.
And that word triggers an idea.
Okay. Or mixed or actually fills in a space where the idea works. Because there's a lot of times you're kicking around. We were doing this with both books, but I think even more with the girl,
where there was always this sketch that I'd send, oftentimes
it was a sketch that I'd send.
But in back of my head I'm going, yeah, but this is not resolving a certain part of the
visual narrative.
It's not solving what's happening later on or it's not reflecting what's what happened
earlier. And I'd have to keep on going back and forth with you
or Niels and see where's that missing piece in the puzzle?
Yeah, no, Niels for people who don't know
is my editor and sometimes writing partner
on a lot of prejudices.
I've worked with on all of my books
and has, he and I have a unique
collaborative relationship and that he is really good at helping me finish thoughts or,
there's that Mark Twain line about how the right word and the wrong word is the difference between
lightning and lightning bug, right? And you know what I mean? Just the right, like the concept,
just one degree different can be the difference
between it working and not working.
And I think that's the problem.
If you're the kind of person that's like, no notes,
I'm the expert, I know what I'm doing.
In a lot of cases that protects your work
because you don't have incompetent people
bossing me around messing with your vision,
but it also prevents you from that thing that doesn't quite work working perfectly.
And I think the difference between Seinfeld and Kirby enthusiasm, although they're both
fantastic shows and obviously Kirby went a lot longer, is I'm often watching curbing enthusiasm and I go,
this is just not, it's not that it's lazy, it's just not quite as polished and tightened
as it would be if there was a sign filled in there who was obsessed about details and was so meticulous.
I'll go with you on that. That's a writer.
That's somebody who's writing assessing something.
It's like when I'm lucky enough to be with the musician and we go to a concert and they're
breaking it down for me.
I go, I've never even thought about that.
But they're hearing something that a pro hears, you know?
Yeah.
Or even when I go with a friend who's a really great painter
and we go to a museum, I'm okay.
I paint all the right, but I'm not a technical.
And then suddenly they're breaking it down.
And you're gone.
So obvious.
How can I, how can I miss that?
So yeah, I know what you're talking about and and that's fine and actually a little raggedness never hurts which is one of the reasons I
I try not to make a
a polished finish
Like not touched by human hands kind of image
So you'll see some ghost lines.
You'll see that you might see the history
of the drawing happening.
You know, I like that.
I think it creates kind of a sense of movement
and authenticity and realness to the illustrations.
And so when I saw your first drawings of Marcus
for the boy who would be king, I was just like,
yes, this is exactly because I didn't want it to feel like a polished children's book.
I wanted it to feel, I don't know,
I imagine part of what's exciting,
but also frustrating about what you do is like,
I had a vague sense of what I wanted,
but it was also ineffable and impossible to express. And your job was to go
bring that into existence, even though I'm not actually able to tell you what I want,
but I'm going to immediately and vehemently know if it's not what I want, which is kind of a
philosophical thing. Like, I don't know what I want, but I can tell you I hate all these things that you just did, right? And that must be so strange.
Yeah, but you never really shot, you never, in the time that we've worked together, you've
never really shot anything down. I think we've gone through various stages of ideas, let's say per page.
I don't think there was one page that we created that was really spot on right from the beginning.
Maybe a few, but everything needed to be tweaked because everything needed to correlate before and what's coming.
Especially, these are books that have an illustration on almost every page, if not every
page.
And therefore, all the more onus is on me to make sure I got the images right.
Your copy is already down for the most part.
You did a little bit of readjusting in the more.
More on this one than the last one for sure.
I was editing up towards the end on this one.
I don't know why that was, but there were things that I thought were almost there,
but every read, every review of the drawings would create a slightly
clearer sense of what it should be.
And I feel like that final 10% was actually really important.
Yeah, I agree.
Because I remember when we were going through the final draft, a look through the book with
the images. And I remember looking at the page,
I said, no, he didn't write that the last time. Yeah. And but it's making more sense now with
the image that's on the page. Yes. What's the most current iteration of the copy? So that's good.
So yes. And even going back to comparing the two books,
we know pretty well based on sculpting
of what Marcus Aurelius looked like.
Yes.
All right.
I don't think we really know what rusticus looked like.
We can assess, we can kind of guess.
But Marcus Aurelius, we do know what he looks like.
Even we have even a teenage image of him.
And I think even a young boy, there's nothing on a pectetus.
There's probably tells us something about how slaves were seen, right?
Like Marcus really is his famous from a young age.
So there's descriptions of him, there's statues of him, as you said, even as a boy.
I mean, a pectetus's name literally means acquired one.
And he was a slave for the first 30 years of his life.
So we can't even, even if he was, even if he went on to be famous,
and well known, and would teach the emperors,
and become Marxer Realist's favorite philosopher.
It doesn't erase the fact that for 30 years of his life, at least he was considered less than human.
And if not worthy of a name, certainly wasn't worthy of being carved into marble or described.
Right, right. Mary Beard talks about that when she talks about those her lectures on Roman histories.
And she's like, you go down the Apping Way
or wherever they had all the families had all the statues
of family members who died.
She goes, it's not a story of slaves.
It's essentially a story of the 1%,
that people could afford to put up a monument
to a family member.
Sometimes you get a slave, but that would be a slave that was really integrated into
the family and maybe became a wife, you know?
Interesting.
Yeah, and it's, well, so I wanted to talk about this because I just got this email today.
The customer service people at the beginning, they always told me, I'm going to read this to you.
It says, I'm a very big fan of Ryan Holiday, but I am very disappointed upon hearing about
the girl who would be free.
In today's political climate, it is bad enough with all the white male bashing, and it is
nice to have a bastion to get away from it all.
Mainly stoicism. And now you take an epic tale of bravery and temperance, and epic teedis,
and this is spelled wrong, epic teedis was definitely a white male. I see no need to feminize him
to pretend he was female. Females have their own stories to tell in history. This was quite a
disservice to epic teictetus and shameful,
and I can only regard this as playing off the political climate to make a profit,
and it makes me see through a different set of lenses. This will never reach Ryan, of course it did,
but maybe someone else will read it and shake their head in unison, like I am now picturing someone
writing about epictetus as a female. This makes absolutely no sense and can only be,
on writing about epictetus as a female. This makes absolutely no sense.
It can only be a play on feminizing men,
telling little boys that not only do they not have to be men,
they can be girls also.
I'm not against anyone and don't have any phobias,
but you could have written a story for females,
for the females without trying to turn epictetus,
one of the greatest philosophers ever into a female.
I quit, I'm flabbergasted shaking my head.
I'll let you go first on the comments because she is essentially addressing your philosophical
decision to switch to the sexes.
Well, I'd be curious to hear what you think.
To me, it was a pretty straightforward decision.
I had written the boy who would be king,
and I have two boys, so naturally,
there wasn't any part of me that was like,
Marcus Rios is a boy.
Of course, I'm gonna write a story to my boy
about the story of Marcus Rios,
but I heard a lot of notes from people
who really liked the book,
and they just said, I also have a little girl is there any version of the book you're planning on doing that would make them feel included and I I did actually try to address this in the boy who would be king the last page or the last page is something like now many boys and girls have ruled since Marcus really is right I was trying to say this was a specific story about a boy, not this is a story about
how boys should become kings.
But as I was thinking about doing a book, a second book, I was like, I wanted to write
about a female stoic because I thought it would be interesting, I thought it would be different,
I thought it's important that it reach all
genders. And so I was originally going to do a story about Porsche Cato. This would be
Cato's daughter. But even from what we know of her historically, she is although really
interesting and really inspiring. And I write about her in lives of the Stoics,
there's, it's just the arc of her story is not that great.
She's like a wife, a widow, and then she'll commit suicide.
She's a very strong and brave woman, but there's not that much of an arc there.
And so I was like, you know what?
I just want to tell a great story. And what do I care?
What does it matter? The least important thing about epictetus in real life is that she happened
to be a man. Do you know what I mean? So to me, it was an easy decision artistically, creatively,
but also ethically. And I'd be curious what your reaction was
to that when I first told you about him
and then how you came to think about it
as you were doing the book.
Ironically, the one thing that I objected to
with regard to making Epic Titus of Girl
was Epic Titus is such an ugly name.
Such an ugly word. It doesn't roll off the tongue.
It's not, it's not Daphne.
It's not Diana.
It's, it's epic teedus.
And every time we say, we know, every time it came epic teedus,
and I'm going, I'm trying to visualize an epic teedus as a girl.
Which, by the way, became the real challenge.
So once you explained, you basically said the same thing when you first proposed this idea to me and other than in fact that in my mind I'm thinking as an illustrator.
Okay, so how do we make him a girl, a young girl.
We were starting off around 11 years older.
What do we have in terms of reference?
I mean, the deep dives into research where, once again, just really fascinating to just
go into it.
I would hope that the person who wrote that
was it a woman, did you say?
No, it was a man, of course.
It was a man.
Obviously, it's obviously a very angry white man
who wrote that, you know.
Yeah, but I would hope that that individual
would look at the book, would read the book,
and also identify as opposed to a democracy
of Julius book. Part of that, part of the research and the development of epictetus, her
character, we went through a long time where I was just feeding you ideas how I was visualizing
her, you know? And she was tough because we know she was Greek
by origin.
So we're not drawing a Scandinavian.
We're not drawing a blonde hair blue eyed Jesus.
We are drawing somebody from that part of the world.
First. That's a really important point, too, because this idea that the Stoics were white men
is a lie.
We have told ourselves not just historically, but in the history of art, right?
Epictetus comes from what is modern day Turkey, right?
Zeno, the founder of St of stoicism comes from Cyprus,
but he's described repeatedly as swarthy.
The idea that these were blonde-haired blue-eyed Aryans
is just a convenient fiction that we want to believe.
When, in fact, the ancient world,
was more diverse than we'd like to think it was.
Then we allow it to be, which is a shame,
because it doesn't matter what someone looks like
or where they're from.
What matters is that you can adopt anyone
as one of your kind.
Yeah, it became irrelevant to me
whether Epic Titus was a girl or a boy, for me, the challenge
was, how do I create her?
Then how do I infuse her because she is in so much of the book.
And so much of the book, as opposed to the boy, so much of this book is going to rely on the viewer,
connecting with the various expressions
that Epictetus is making.
She is much less, she's actually reacting a lot
to a lot of things in the story that's happening to her.
And as opposed to being a mover, she's kind of like reacting.
She's observing.
She's responding.
And if you really want to make her delimits
with the philosophy, make sense,
you've really got to hope to, you successfully engage the viewer,
the reader, with the character, with the expressions
that I'm putting in there.
So we went through an awful long time before we even started rolling
with the book, what does she look like? Who is she? What's interesting, too, because we tend to bring our prejudices are so innate and natural that we tend to assume that everyone is similarly prejudiced.
And I don't mean that just in the racist sense,
although I remember when I moved to the South,
it would be amazing how often other people
who are white would feel like in private,
they could be more openly prejudice because they would assume
obviously your like them and not would not be offended by that. Do you know what I mean?
It's a tribal thing. It's like when Trent Lott was doing some sort of, when strong When strong Thurman was leading this headed, and Trentonod broke out of the Southern gentility
and actually said what was really on his mind was that if we have followed strong
philosophy or a way of doing things, it would have been a lot better.
Well, and so it's funny, right?
We assume, oh, I like epictetus.
So obviously, epictetus is white like me.
The obviously stoicism is for men.
But what I find so fascinating about
Epic Titus' real story is his teacher,
Musoneus Rufus, who I also write about in his lives,
lives of the Stokes.
What's fascinating about Musoneus Rufus is, first off,
he's a remarkably progressive guy
in that he's teaching slaves philosophy, right?
Like that, that he would even take
Epictetus on as a student
This this guy who had this horrible life and would teach him and make him what he was is I think already a testament to something but
Musoni's Rufus was controversial in his own time
In that he advocated for the teaching of men and women in his classes.
He thought that women should be taught philosophy because it's basically his point is
there's nothing gendered about virtue.
Courage is genderless.
It might take different forms, especially in the ancient world.
It might take different forms, but courage is courage.
Temperance is temperance.
Justice is justice and wisdom is wisdom.
And, you know, so it's actually quite possible that there was a female epic teedis in those
classes, right?
And it's only that we were so, you know, a fish doesn't know it's wet.
We're so used to thinking of philosophers as men, as white men, because that's what artistically we've represented them to us,
that anyone who's surprised by Epictetus being a girl
in this book, I think you're actually revealing something
that should give you a moment of pause.
Yeah, yeah.
But again, it's not unusual.
I'm not shocked.
I won't be shocked if you do get some pushback about the fact that Epic Titus is a girl.
But I would like to think that pushback modifies is ameliorated by what they read the content of the story and what they see.
Yes. Well, and look, I would, for every person who's slightly offended or turned off by the
decision to make Epictetus a girl, I am heartened or more excited about the potential young girl or mother or father who might have thought
that stoicism might not be appealing to their kid and the book actually makes the ideas accessible
and relatable. Representation is so important. Obviously, as just a white dude, I've grown up my whole
life seeing people like me on television, right? Although I was reading interesting, I read
Judd Apatow's new book and he was talking about how one of the things that motivated him
as a creator was like, there were never any regular dudes in movies. They were always like chiseled
you know, supermodels, right? And he tried, you know, if you think about
Judd Apatow's movies, they're all about regular people, right? And so part of what he was trying to do was
Represent people like him on the screen. So we know from all different minorities and we mean that in the most general sense anyone anyone who is not like everyone else, that representation is such a huge part of your experience in culture.
And so it was really important to me for something that is fictional, right?
Ultimately, everything in the book is made up.
There are quotes in epictetus's mouth that are loosely tied to epictetus's thinking,
but I also bring in the serenity prayer and I bring in, I get, I assign quotes from, for
instance, agrippinus to Musoneus Rufus.
Like, I'm messing, I'm playing with the boundaries of reality, because that's what you get to do
in a work of fiction.
But all the choices I was making were around the idea at an early age of introducing the ideas
of stoicism to people when it can make the biggest difference.
Right. Right. Going back to that letter, I'm assuming the person, how did the person read the book?
They haven't, that's the funny thing. This is purely a reaction to the title of the book.
Okay, so if you read the book, you're not advocating one thing or the other.
You're not saying that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. You're telling the story of a character
who has the name of a real person.
Who has the name of a real person who's in this story is a girl.
Yes.
You know, this reminds me back in the, back when black actors were starting to make the
stage, the Broadway stage, and there were critics, there was one in a particular who thought
it was absolutely horrible to cast black actors
in Shakespeare.
Yes.
You know, other than Othello, maybe, but other, it was ridiculous.
It's out of control.
I'm not naming it critic.
I know who it is.
And well, no, famously, Orson Wells did a version of Macbeth in the 30s of entirely black actors, and it was immensely
controversial, but also very much ahead of its time.
Yeah.
Welles was this brilliant individual, regardless of his craziness, his own personal craziness.
We're all crazy. We're craziness. We're all crazy.
We're all crazy.
We're all crazy.
No, I think about this too.
It's like I can't think of something less stoic
than being very offended about a book you haven't read
because it features a girl instead of a boy.
One of my favorite lines is actually in the back of the book,
Epic Titus in real life said,
look, when you find yourself offended
or upset about things,
reminds yourself that you are complicit
in having taken offense.
Essentially that it takes two to tango,
that we control our reactions.
And so, let's say it was an immense
perversion of what the philosophy was. And in this book, I've committed a sacrilege, right?
Don't care. Like, someone always has the ability, as Mark's really says, to have no opinion,
to not care, to not read it, to tune it out. And so it's interesting how the even the historical understanding and discussion of
Stoicism challenges us as Stoics to practice what we preach, right?
Like, what do we control?
We control not what happens.
We control our reaction to what happens.
And so I, of course, of course, I knew when I was doing it,
that there was a chance that some people would be frustrated.
So, I'm trying to, as I'm hearing some of the people
who are offended, I'm having to remind myself,
well, why did I make the choice that I made?
What are the values from which I made that decision?
What was I made that decision?
What was I trying to accomplish?
I knew it was inevitable that some people
would not agree with that.
So if I allow myself to be hurt or distracted
or pissed off by that,
I myself am being challenged as a stoic.
So I have to just think about it intellectually and
you know, ponder it without letting it pierce the bubble so to speak.
Yeah, yeah, I agree, I agree. I think there are so many things that I've taken from
your that book, even if it's a children's book, right? But it may, it may be reread a bunch of
even if the children's book, right? But it made me reread a bunch of stoic matters,
stoic writings, and re-examine.
I mean, for all practical purposes,
I knew about stoicism since high school,
really did not get into it until you called me
on to the boy who would be king.
And then that became a deep dive.
And I gotta say, in many
ways, especially psychologically and just looking at life as it's getting crazier and crazier
by the day around what's happening around us, it's been invaluable. It's been a lifesaver. And I know it's been in many ways to people
I've given the daily story to as a gift, it's been a lifesaver to them too.
What strikes you about EpicTitus' story as you got to spend time with her and probably
I know the time I've spent with Marcus and Epic Titus for this project and other projects,
that there's, I always feel like I get something out of it
or every time I come back to them,
I get something different.
But what do you think her or him,
what do you think strikes you most about Epic Titus?
Well, the way you've structured the book,
her epiphanies don't happen until later on.
She's still pushing back at her dad, you know.
She's absorbing.
She's absorbing subliminally.
She hasn't really grasped it in a visceral, obvious sense until later on in the book.
Until after she basically recovers and comes to terms with her injury and stuff like that,
which by the way, a wank nerd would say, oh, that's not the way Epictetus broke his leg, you know?
Well, thank God you didn't tell the real story.
Yeah, should we say that real fast?
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, yeah, so Epictetus breaks her leg in the book.
In real life, Epictetus breaks his leg,
or rather has his leg broken,
sadistically, by his slave master.
There's a story that we don't know why, but the
master is bending Epic teed.
This is leg maybe as a punishment, maybe as some cruel bit of torture.
And Epic teed says, if you keep doing that, my leg is going to break.
And if you keep doing that, my leg is going to break.
And it does break.
And Epic teed doesn't cry.
It doesn't whimper.
Just says, I told you that was going to happen.
And Epic teed walks with a limp for the rest of his life.
I found that, obviously, as a human being, as an adult,
I find that the stoses and the strength of that to be amazing.
Amazing to the point of being almost unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
And God, I don't think I would wait for the opportunity
to kill the son of a bitch who did this.
Yes. I found that to be maybe not the right theme And God, I don't think I would wait for the opportunity to kill the son of a bitch who did this.
I mean, I found that to be maybe not the right theme for a book that I do hope people read to children.
Right. No, that's true. That's true.
But sorry, you were saying about about...
Well, there are so many things that Epic Titus eventually comes to these epiphanies, comes to these realizations that she's learned from her dad,
that she's learning from Rufus,
and that she's absorbed and made part of herself,
as well as whatever she's bringing,
whatever observations and conclusions she's bringing on her own. And for me, again,
I'm just in awe of that kind of, I don't like to use the term, I wouldn't want to want
to use the term, at peace with, you're not necessarily at peace with, you're just dealing with a hard life.
A hard life that so many in the Roman Empire,
it would have been a horrendous.
Yes, I mean, the average life span was 30 years old.
Why?
Because you were a book to death, essentially, you know?
And you weren't a 32 year old slave
wasn't worth anything to anyone because they could be freed, right?
So if you died at the ideal thing from the sadistic Roman perspective was, where out your slave
at 30 by 30 years old, they dropped dead at 29 years and 364 days.
You got every penny out of them.
You got your money's worth.
Yeah, exactly.
Good investment, good returns.
Yeah.
Well, and I agree, and I think,
if epictetus comes out of the womb, stoic, right?
If epictetus comes out of the womb,
I only care about what I control.
I don't think about externals.
I'm immune to suffering.
In some sense, that takes the heroicness out of the equation.
I heard someone say this about Mr. Rogers.
If you thought he was naturally that way, then you ignore how hard he worked.
When you make him into a saint, you're actually doing him a disservice.
Exactly.
And I think if we think about Epic Titus as a superhero,
it's not the same story.
If you think about James Stockdale as a regular person
who gets dropped into this prison camp
and he's tortured and he has all the temptations
and weaknesses and doubts as a normal person,
it makes the sheer
incomprehensibility and superhumanness of what he accomplished.
It allows you to fully appreciate it. And so I think you have to see
epictetus as going on a journey from a person who would have woken up every day
for most of their life, convinced that what had happened to them was profoundly unfair and unjust and awful
because it was, but strove to find something deeper inside that
an empire of his or her own. That's what makes Epic to this great.
I mean, how many times do we get up in a morning?
And I'm like, oh, you know,
especially if it's, you know, when it's 530 and I'm getting up to get let their hands in the
geese out, you know, back in the yard here. And after that initial agitation, it feels great out
there. And it becomes, it becomes my morning daily meditation,
almost more of a meditation than sitting down
with repeating something to myself.
It becomes peace.
And I'd like to get, I mean, when you hear about stories
of war heroes and people who are human, you know, human
trafficked or people who go through the worst things that human beings go through, there
is damage there, right?
There is scar tissue and PTSD and issues.
And I would like to think that epictetus had all those things,
but worked hard and found some kind of peace and happiness.
Like, we don't know what his life was.
We know he adopted a young child and sort of raised this.
I think it was a boy.
I like the idea, you know, that there was not redemption
because epictetus didn't do anything wrong. But the idea that there was not redemption, because epictetus didn't do anything wrong,
but the idea that there was a happy ending
to the epictetus story is probably too simplistic.
But I'd like to think there was something good
at the end of it, if that makes sense.
Well, there's a sense of,
the life came to a certain level of fulfillment.
EpicTitas winds up doing what industry she wants to do.
Is that can you get any better than that?
Well, and does it get any better than despite
all the horrible things that happen to you,
despite having every reason to give up on life,
to give up on humanity, to throw
yourself and to drink or pleasure or anything to make up for what's happened to you.
Epic Titus instead focuses on teaching and finds a way to have a positive impact on
to leave a cruel world that mistreated him or her to leave it better
than he or she found it.
To me is, that's what the meaning of life is all about.
And that's what I wanted to capture in the story.
Yeah, and I think we have done that.
I think those last few pages kind of tell you what's going to go on in your life, how she will handle herself.
Well, and we could only allude to it, and they don't perfectly overlap, but I do love
the idea that in some ways, Epictetus's life and this story is a prequel to Marcus Aurelius'
story, because Marcus Aurelius' life is changed by Rousticus, who in real life gives him a copy of the lecture
notes of Epictetus.
And so the idea that the speeches of a freed slave, hundreds of miles from Rome, could influence
and change the life of the most powerful man in the world.
I just love that so much. To me,
that's the real meaning and beauty of Epictetus's life that the least powerful person in Rome
goes on to influence and change the life of the most powerful person in Rome.
of the most powerful person in Rome.
Yep.
I can't wait to see the book. I can't either.
I hope it exists very soon.
When I saw that final rough,
everything looked really good.
It looked really good.
I think we also, in a way that we didn't
in the Marcus Amelius book,
we got a lot more into detail about settings.
Marcus's story kind of like he's in the pictures and there's hints of what's going on around
you.
Here, in order to make this story work, you really have to get a feel of the Roman Empire,
of what life was going on around her.
Yes, I feel like your capturing of Roman life
is exponentially more detailed and vivid in this book,
than in the other one, not that the other one is insufficient.
It was just a different vibe.
There was a minimalist vibe to the boy who would be king.
And in this
one, I feel like it's much more immersive and I feel like you did an incredible job.
I think the kids are the kids, any adults, we'll have a fun time just looking at what's
going on in each one of those pictures. And I think there are certain points where we
do have the repose or elect. we have this circumstances where we are almost repeating
epictetus's face and are dead through several pages in a conversation, but there's subtle
changes in the expressions, but it's much different than a lot of the Roman settings that
we have in the rest of the book.
I think that's right, and I'm so excited for you to see it
and for everyone else to see it.
And I loved working with you, Vic.
And I hope the muses visit us again
and maybe there's another book at some point.
I have no ideas right now.
This one was a surprise idea that visited me
in the summer of 2021.
So who knows what could happen, but in the meantime, I really appreciate all the work
and what you helped me realize.
Well, my pleasure, and I'm looking forward
to coming out there.
Yeah, I can wait to see you.
We'll do a little panel thing.
Let's do it.
The bookstore.
Thanks so much for listening.
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