The Daily Stoic - Victor Juhasz on Epictetus and Creating “The Girl Who Would Be Free”

Episode Date: July 16, 2022

Ryan 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.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 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,
Starting point is 00:00:55 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 and fashion forward. 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.
Starting point is 00:01:44 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.
Starting point is 00:02:30 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.
Starting point is 00:02:52 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
Starting point is 00:03:51 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
Starting point is 00:04:22 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.
Starting point is 00:04:51 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,
Starting point is 00:05:35 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.
Starting point is 00:06:06 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.
Starting point is 00:06:34 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?
Starting point is 00:07:05 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
Starting point is 00:07:25 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.
Starting point is 00:07:57 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.
Starting point is 00:08:28 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,
Starting point is 00:08:49 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.
Starting point is 00:09:06 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
Starting point is 00:09:30 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.
Starting point is 00:10:08 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
Starting point is 00:10:51 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
Starting point is 00:11:52 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.
Starting point is 00:12:19 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.
Starting point is 00:12:48 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.
Starting point is 00:13:12 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.
Starting point is 00:13:34 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,
Starting point is 00:14:10 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.
Starting point is 00:14:35 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.
Starting point is 00:15:17 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,
Starting point is 00:15:49 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
Starting point is 00:16:25 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.
Starting point is 00:17:08 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
Starting point is 00:17:35 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.
Starting point is 00:18:02 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,
Starting point is 00:18:40 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.
Starting point is 00:19:09 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,
Starting point is 00:19:59 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.
Starting point is 00:20:40 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,
Starting point is 00:21:32 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
Starting point is 00:22:02 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...
Starting point is 00:22:47 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
Starting point is 00:23:23 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
Starting point is 00:23:55 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.
Starting point is 00:24:16 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
Starting point is 00:24:54 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.
Starting point is 00:25:21 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?
Starting point is 00:25:56 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?
Starting point is 00:26:20 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.
Starting point is 00:26:51 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...
Starting point is 00:27:25 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. While we take a little break here, I want to talk about the story. I'm going to talk about the story. I'm going to talk about the story. I'm going to talk about the story. I'm going to talk about the story. Hey there listeners!
Starting point is 00:27:48 While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Mandukayoga mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time,
Starting point is 00:28:15 like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discussed their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondering. How do you think about that? Because I imagine like I think every creative person struggles
Starting point is 00:29:00 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,
Starting point is 00:29:35 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
Starting point is 00:30:00 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
Starting point is 00:30:41 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
Starting point is 00:31:21 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,
Starting point is 00:31:53 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
Starting point is 00:32:20 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.
Starting point is 00:33:07 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.
Starting point is 00:33:31 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
Starting point is 00:34:00 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
Starting point is 00:34:20 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,
Starting point is 00:34:53 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.
Starting point is 00:35:55 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.
Starting point is 00:36:30 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
Starting point is 00:37:10 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.
Starting point is 00:37:30 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.
Starting point is 00:38:06 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%,
Starting point is 00:38:41 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
Starting point is 00:39:15 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,
Starting point is 00:39:49 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,
Starting point is 00:40:14 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.
Starting point is 00:40:43 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,
Starting point is 00:41:03 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,
Starting point is 00:42:05 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
Starting point is 00:42:47 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.
Starting point is 00:43:08 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.
Starting point is 00:43:49 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
Starting point is 00:44:14 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.
Starting point is 00:44:49 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,
Starting point is 00:45:26 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.
Starting point is 00:45:51 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
Starting point is 00:46:32 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,
Starting point is 00:46:57 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
Starting point is 00:47:59 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.
Starting point is 00:48:40 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
Starting point is 00:49:01 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.
Starting point is 00:49:33 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.
Starting point is 00:49:58 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.
Starting point is 00:50:33 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
Starting point is 00:51:48 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.
Starting point is 00:52:32 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
Starting point is 00:53:22 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.
Starting point is 00:53:49 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.
Starting point is 00:54:24 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,
Starting point is 00:54:46 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
Starting point is 00:55:06 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,
Starting point is 00:55:49 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
Starting point is 00:56:10 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
Starting point is 00:56:42 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
Starting point is 00:57:07 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.
Starting point is 00:57:52 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.
Starting point is 00:58:28 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,
Starting point is 00:59:00 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.
Starting point is 00:59:21 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
Starting point is 00:59:43 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,
Starting point is 01:00:18 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?
Starting point is 01:00:58 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.
Starting point is 01:01:27 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.
Starting point is 01:01:48 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
Starting point is 01:02:15 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
Starting point is 01:02:49 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
Starting point is 01:03:31 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,
Starting point is 01:04:05 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.
Starting point is 01:04:34 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,
Starting point is 01:05:00 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.
Starting point is 01:05:33 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.
Starting point is 01:06:24 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,
Starting point is 01:06:53 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,
Starting point is 01:07:23 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.
Starting point is 01:07:49 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.
Starting point is 01:08:28 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.
Starting point is 01:08:50 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. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to
Starting point is 01:09:08 us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music App today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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