← The Rich Roll Podcast
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- [00:00]
Rich Roll
This episode is brought to you by Whoop, the wearable health and fitness coach that for five and a half uninterrupted years has delivered me tremendously valuable, highly personalized insights into how my habits impact my sleep, impact my recovery and stress levels, so I can up level those habits and make more informed decisions about the strain I impose upon myself. It keeps me on an optimal growth trajectory and sets me up to show up as my best self more consistently, which is even more urgent for me these days as I rebuild my body in the aftermath of spinal fusion surgery. And one of the key lessons Whoop has helped me learn is that pushing harder isn't the answer. It's knowing when not to and humbling myself to hold back when my instinct is to hit it like I always used to when I was 23 or even 43. All of which is a long way of saying that Whoop saves me from myself by decoding my body's reactions to my decisions. Now I adjust my training and my work output to ensure I don't exceed what my body can absorb by knowing when a hard day is the right call and when the right call is rest. By doing that, I've actually accelerated my recovery because I'm not breaking down. And that's really priceless. So try it for yourself. Go to join.whoop.com roll or for one month free of Whoop. Ryan, you are an expert on stoicism and Greek philosophy. This is your moment.
- [01:34]
Ryan Holiday
Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey the Odyssey the Odyssey. Possibly the most anticipated movie of the year, already breaking ticket sales records.
- [01:43]
Rich Roll
The story's endured for 3,000 years. It's resonated with every generation.
- [01:47]
Ryan Holiday
Each generation reads the Odyssey differently than the generation before. The more you know about it, the more it operates on all these other levels. The whole point is that the Odyssey is complicated and it's hard to know who the good guy is. Odysseus, in his Odyssey, is a reflection of the human undergoing any kind of ordeal. He's both like, the best and the worst. We contain that in ourselves too. That is the point of the Odyssey. Are we cool with spoilers in this thing?
- [02:20]
Rich Roll
I think so. Yeah.
- [02:22]
Ryan Holiday
Okay. The cat should be out of the bag by now. 3,000 years later.
- [02:28]
Rich Roll
I'm super excited to talk to you, Ryan. You are well known worldwide for being an expert on stoicism and Greek philosophy. Generally. We're having a monoculture moment that you must be relishing, where everybody is celebrating this old poem by dint of Christopher Nolan's I'll say it right now. Masterpiece. I love the movie. Saw it a second time last night. And you have been posting lots of videos and this YouTube video with your thoughts on what we should understand from the Odyssey. What's important to understand. And so I thought it was an opportune moment to just get you on here and have you share your reflections on Homer's Odyssey, Nolan's Odyssey, and how you're kind of synthesizing this and interpreting it for us. So first of all, I guess how did you like the movie?
- [03:25]
Ryan Holiday
Well, I should stipulate here that I know it not as a classicist. I don't speak Greek or Latin. I know it as a regular person who has been fascinated with it, who studied it with its connection to Stoic and other sort of forms of philosophy. And then my 9 year old son got very excited about it. And so I've sort of hit it from a bunch of different angles, but all of these angles much closer to a layperson than say like a translators. Right. So I do feel like I was able to enjoy the movie on a couple of different levels. And I really did enjoy the movie. I thought it was spectacular. I have some quibbles here or there, but I think what we have to understand is the Odyssey, like all of the other Greek myths, was both a form of art. It's beautiful language, it's evocative, it's entertaining, it's all this. But then it was there in a way that we don't always understand art and entertainment to be today, which was a means of communicating ancient wisdom and timeless moral truths. So, you know, like if you watch a Greek play, you know, like Shakespeare, all the actors are men, but they're not really like they wear these masks. The acting is not the key in a Greek play or in a Greek tragedy. It's the language, it's the, it's the lessons, it's the lines. And so I think the problem is we don't always understand art as being that like, you know, most fiction today is almost like, I want to say it's almost amoral in that it's like designed not to teach moral truths, but to question moral truths. And so if we understand the Odyssey as being this sort of story that was told and retold and retold for thousands of years, each generation sort of thinking about the same truths, but bringing their own interpretation and understanding of them, their understanding of Odysseus, for instance, the understanding of Odysseus dilemmas throughout the play, then you should actually appreciate both what Nolan did in telling it his own way. And you should appreciate the arguments over it. Right. Like that is. The point is that each generation reads the Odyssey differently than the generation before. And then each new medium that we're able to tell it in, including going from an oral tradition to a written tradition, is going to fundamentally change. The medium is the message. So each generation, in telling and retelling it and how it captures it, whether it's with film or radio or a television miniseries versus a blockbuster, all of this is changing the story and allowing us to see it in a different way. Which is the whole point.
- [06:14]
Rich Roll
Yeah. The assignment is the interpretation. There is no one singular Odyssey. There is this, you know, original text, I suppose we're not even sure that Homer was one person. Every interpretation or translation is different. And it. It kind of evokes the lens of the translator. And right now we have Emily Wilson. Her translation is apparently a primary influence on Nolan's version, his interpretation in this movie. It's been interesting to see the discourse around her kind of, like, review of the movie. Like her celebrating the fact that this is a monoculture moment. And it's kind of exciting in that regard, while also her taking issue with how he has interpreted it. But I think that is part of what is exciting about this. It is the clashing of these interpretations and how different people see it differently. Like, who is this character Odysseus, and what is it about him and this story that is so indulgent, that has made it the architecture for all stories and a tale that has withstood eons of time and is still relevant today?
- [07:29]
Ryan Holiday
That's the debate that we should celebrate. And that's what the conversation is about. And I think that's very different than, hey, should Helen be black or not? Is it okay to have a trans person in or not? Which is one of the points that I want to make. And I think Emily Wilson would appreciate, given that she wrote. She wrote a famous biography of Seneca earlier in her academic career. But Seneca 2000 years ago, in one of his letters, is lamenting. Just people totally missing the point of the Odyssey. And I think it's fascinating to think that 2,000 years ago, people were having these debates about where was Troy and where were the different islands, and did it actually happen or not? Just like today, we're like, is Homer really one person? Was he blind or not? And he was saying that this is not what it's about. We're not supposed to be debating the trivia of the art, but we should be going to the essential questions of the art, and that ultimately we should understand that Odysseus in his Odyssey is a reflection of the human undergoing any kind of ordeal, battling their sort of higher self and lower self, you know, the perils of hubris, the impossibility of ever returning home, you know, that, that he's saying, like, if you don't see the. Philip, if. If what you're debating about the Odyssey is not the philosophical questions, then you're just, you know, you're. You're just engaging in culture war nonsense. Obviously, he wouldn't have used that term, and I think it's sad that it's devolved into sort of culture war nonsense. But if. If that's what you're fighting about, then you're part of the problem. Right? I think there's a lot of things to argue about in the Odyssey, and there's a bunch of issues I take with. I would argue over interpretations and arguments that Nolan's Odysseus and Odyssey are making and how they not, like, because, oh, you have to be true to the text. But this choice versus that choice, you know, fundamentally changes the arc of the story. I'll give you a really good example. So, like, the whole. The whole. And are we cool with spoilers in this thing?
- [09:46]
Rich Roll
I think so, yeah.
- [09:47]
Ryan Holiday
Okay. The cat should be out of the bag by now, 3,000 years later. But I think the premise in Nolan's Odyssey is that this sort of law of hospitality, how we treat strangers, how we treat others, and we violate this at our peril. And so the tale of Polyphemus, the interaction with the cyclops, is so fascinating because, again, my children love this story. Odysseus, in the poem, he introduces himself that his name is no man. He tells Polyphemus that his name is no man. So then when they blind Polyphemus and he's screaming to the other Cyclopses, which also don't exist in the movie, he's saying, they say, who hurt you? And he says, no one has hurt me or no man has hurt me. And they say, okay, well, if no one has hurt you, shut up. This isn't a problem. And then he goes away. And then Odysseus, having escaped, shouts out at him, hey, actually, it wasn't no one that hurt you. It was me, Odysseus, sacker of cities, that did it. And you'll know my fame. And so it's this moment of hubris and ego where Odysseus needs credit for what he inflicted on Polyphemus that sets in motion the central conflict of the book, which is he's cursed by the gods. So that's missing. And I think people will recognize that. But to me, that the critical choice that Nolan makes is that they walk into the cave, they start to sense something is amiss, and then the cyclops walks in and then begins eating them, right? So the cyclops is indisputably the monstrous villain of the encounter. But in the poem and in the most retellings, Odysseus and the men walk into the cave, see that it's full of sheep, slaughter the sheep and eat them. And then Polyphemus comes in and is enraged that someone has killed his sheep. And so it's actually Odysseus first who violates the law or oversteps Odyssey. And Polyphemus is, although monstrous and eats humans, somewhat righteous in his anger. And then Odysseus is cunning in his craftiness for getting out, and then egotistical in claiming credit and then bringing the wrath of gods upon him. So it's like, obviously you have to simplify it in the movie, but I do think this is an essential simplification, because first off, it makes it simple. And the whole point is that the Odyssey is complicated and it's hard to know who the good guy is. But also the idea that Odysseus just shoots Polyphemus with an arrow when he escapes and this is what makes the gods angry, is really not what is the driving force of the Odyssey going forward.
- [12:42]
Rich Roll
It strikes me as a glaring omission if you're trying to underscore the hubris of Odysseus. But the way that I make sense of that begins with the chiron at the very beginning of the movie, where it says, this is a time of apparent magic. And I think the word apparent is important. I think what it's telegraphing is that this is a story of unreliable narrators. And the way that Nolan plays with time and narrative is through the whole movie is anchored in a recounting of what happened through the perspective of a couple different people. It's Odysseus telling the story to Calypso when he's on the island with her, and it's Menelaus sharing what he remembers from the Trojan War to Telemachus. And so we have to question whether these recollections or the way that these stories are being told are actually what happened or a version of what happened that suits the internal narrative of the narrator. And I think when you think of the way that Odysseus is recollecting what happened and, you know, his version of what went down with the Cyclops, maybe he conveniently decided to omit that part because it confronts him with his own guilt and his guilt and his trauma. And this PTSD that he's suffering seems to be what Nolan is most interested in. And he's interested in it because this is his portal into wedding, this ancient story with what he. With his perspective on what's happening right now in modern society. And for me, that's what makes this version, his interpretation, so resonant, because it seems so current with what we're seeing around us at the moment. And this is something that you talk about a lot through the lens of Stoic philosophy, this degradation of kind of our moral center at the moment, where if you look at what's happening in the house of Ithaca, there's sycophants and people behaving badly, acting on their own self interest in a very craven way. And is this not simply a metaphor for the White House at the moment?
- [15:03]
Ryan Holiday
It's like a hostile takeover.
- [15:05]
Rich Roll
Yeah, it seems to be like, where Nolan's interest is and why he felt urgently about telling this story now.
- [15:14]
Ryan Holiday
Yeah, it's about a collapse of the old ways. And I think he does a really good job, maybe a better job than I would have anticipated or even considered, of showing the collapse of the old ways all the way around back to even interpreting the Trojan horse as some sort of, you know, violation of the laws of. Of war and trickery. Although it even goes back, you know, even further. There's a sort of predecessor story of. Of the. To the Odyssey of. Of why they get sucked in to this law of war. There's this, you know, sort of party of the gods, and they all make this pact about who's the most beautiful one. And it's a. It's a long story, but basically, like, Odysseus doesn't want to go fight in the Trojan War. That's not something you see in this movie or in the Odyssey. Exactly. But Odysseus doesn't want to fight in the Trojan War. He tries to get out of it. And he actually claims that he's crazy at first, and he claims that he's crazy. And only by the test that they prove that he's not crazy. He's like plowing his field. And they lay Telemachus down in front of him plowing his field. And when he stops to not run over his own son, that's how they realize that he's not actually crazy. And so the whole idea of this being this sort of insane war that shouldn't have happened in the first place, that he's sort of sucked into and fights in reluctantly because of this kind of pact that he'd made many years before, all these sort. Like what. I think what's so lovely about Greek mythology and about philosophy is that kind of the more you know about it, the more it operates on all these other levels. Like, this would be a modern analogy, but it's like you can't watch Arrested Development one time. You got to watch it like 30 times, and then you understand that it's. It's operating on all these different levels, and there are these callbacks. And so not only is the Odyssey something you should read and watch and read and watch again, but you should read multiple translations, and then you have to read the other myths, and then you have to read the poetry about it and the stories about it and the interpretations of it. What you start to get each time is just a slightly different understanding of it. And from that, you're able to consider these questions from all these different angles. Each author has a different take on Odysseus, has a different take on Helen, has a different take on Polyphemus, as we were talking about, has a different take on Telemachus. Is Odysseus a hero or is he a villain? Is he both? Is Agamemnon a hero or a villain? Is Helen a hero or a villain? Was she kidnapped, or did she fall in love? Or there's another version of it where she's transported to Egypt. There's all these different versions of it. And so if we understand it more as source material that people are riffing on over and over and over again, almost like a song sample, I think we understand a little bit more of what they're trying to do. And then the idea is each one of these reads helps correspond to something ultimately in your own life. This isn't just like debating what style of painting is best, but this is like, okay, but what kind of person should I be? And what you find is that ultimately what all these things come down to. Some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy and in life, like, the trolley problem is really interesting in philosophy, right? This idea of, okay, do you have a trolley run over one person? If you do nothing, a trolley runs over. Was it five people? But if you pull this lever, it runs over one person, right? That's the trolley problem. But this is actually the choice that Odysseus has to make between Scylla, Scylla and Charybdis. Although I always thought it was Charbidis because I never heard it out loud.
- [19:25]
Rich Roll
Yeah, no, it's. I'm pretty sure it's Charybdis.
- [19:27]
Ryan Holiday
It is, but, like, he. And he doesn't fully weigh it that much in the movie, but, like, between a rock and a hard place. Or sometimes you'll hear people say Scylla and Charybdis as just meaning, like a dilemma, like just a hard choice. But it's so much more than that. It's. Odysseus has to choose between letting six of his men be destroyed for sure, or do they all go down in the whirlpool? And it's actually really interesting because in the movie, Nolan kind of has him trick the men into choosing for him. Like, he kind of abdicates the moral choice. But as the band Rush would say, even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. This is still. He's still the moral choice. So, anyways, I just think it's so fascinating that you have this poem from 3000 years ago accidentally chancing upon, or not accidentally, but chancing on this moral question that philosophers are still debating to this day.
- [20:32]
Rich Roll
On top of that, there's the question of transparency with leadership. Like, should he have told his soldiers what this dilemma was and let them choose of their own free will, or to just make the choice for them with them knowing what the consequences are? And that same dilemma plays out with the Elliot Page character. What's his character's name again?
- [20:56]
Ryan Holiday
Starts with Sinon.
- [20:57]
Rich Roll
Sinon, where in Hades, Sinon is sort of taking Odysseus to task for not trusting him with the truth that there were soldiers inside the Trojan Horse. And this becomes kind of a central recurring theme. Like, what is Odysseus relationship with the truth and with being truthful with the people that he's responsible for? But I think this idea you mentioned Zeus's Law a moment ago, which is a reductive take on Xenia, like, this idea that there is right and wrong, like there is natural law that exists independent of men. In the same way that what resonates about this story has nothing to do with interpretation or authorship. It's just in the ether. It is a story that speaks to us. It is an architecture that is almost embedded into our DNA. And I think that that is one of the reasons why it continues to live and be relevant. But with this idea of, like, there being a morality at play and what are the consequences of violating that we have Odysseus, who in his hubris thinks that he can defy the gods and get away with it, that he is beyond consequences in this regard. But what's interest the denial that he has to harbor in order to continue to kind of function. Like when it comes to hunting animals with his bow, he always pulls the bow because this is the just and fair thing to do. But what he does with the Trojan horse is exactly the opposite of that. It is the antithesis of that. And it's in the aftermath of that that he recognizes that he's basically broken the world. And this will end the Bronze Age and usher in this time of darkness where the only stories that will be told of what happened are in song because nobody will be able to read or write again. Which, which kind of conveys this idea of interpretation like however this story is going to be told in song, it can't possibly be as truthful as it could be because there's no one educated enough around to like be a, you know, kind of a responsible steward of this story. And so it dooms the future to repeat the mistakes of the past. You really get to know your mattress in the summertime. Don't laugh. It's true. The nights get warm and if you're sleeping on a slab of synthetic foam, you're gonna feel it. And now I've been on a Birch mattress for about, I think about five years at this point. And I think the thing I notice the most this time of year is that I just sleep cooler. It breeze. And that comes straight from what it's built out of. Organic cotton, natural latex, real materials, responsibly sourced, firm, yes, but also comfortable and more importantly, built to last. No polyurethane foams, no questionable off gassing. Which matters when you think about how much of your life you actually spend on the darn thing. And they make it easy to find out for yourself. It ships free, rolled up in a box. Simple, simple to set up. You get 120 nights to see how your body responds. All risk free. And they pack every single mattress with a limited lifetime warranty. Because they own their own manufacturing and stand behind the work, they can do that. Sleep is the foundation everything else is built on and it's really worth getting it right. I want all my listeners to enjoy a deep restful night's sleep with a new mattress from Birch. Go to birchliving.com rich roll for 20 off site wide. That's birchliving.com richroll and get 20% off site wide. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I am a 30 plus year believer in the transformational power of therapy, which is why I've advocated on behalf of BetterHelp for many years at this point because it's a platform that democratizes access to mental health services. But don't take my word for it, take in the reviews BetterHelp makes available and easy for anyone to read. At betterhelp.com reviews, hundreds of people describing in their own words what working with their therapist has actually done for them. And the aggregate numbers behind those reviews are pretty impressive. An average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session. And this is all based on over 1.7 million client session reviews. More than 6 million people have used BetterHelp globally. And at that scale, the feedback is very reliable. It speaks for itself. The service underneath it is straightforward. You answer a few questions, they match you with a therapist based on what you need, every one of them with at least three years and a thousand hours of hands on experience. And if the fit isn't right, you switch anytime, see the reviews, see what stands out and see if BetterHelp is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com richroll that's better. H E L P.com richroll.
- [26:12]
Ryan Holiday
I'll give you one little quibble, and I'm not normally like a cinematographer. I don't usually harp on these sort of little choices, but I do think it was illustrative if the point is golden age leads to dark age because of choice of Odysseus. I think it was odd that he presents the Greeks in such sort of darkness. And I don't want to say ruins but like one of the interesting things that we miss and it's just, it's always interesting how we interpret things. Our understanding of Greece is like that it was bronze statues and sort of like white marble when actually it was an incredibly bright and shiny world. The buildings were painted, the statues were painted, the armor was bright and had things painted on it. Right? It's only because after 3,000 years most of that is scraped away or ruined that we tend to think of that world as being like, it's like you grow up now, you think the Statue of Liberty is green, but that's not what it was like when they put it up. Right? And so I thought it was interesting that like his castle's kind of old and, and dark and like, I don't know, like, I don't think he did an amazing job of showing that the actual brightness of The Bronze Age, just, like, what antiquity was like. And there have been people who have quibbled at sort of, like, how realistic the armor was. Like, I care less, like, whether Agamemnon's helmet was realistic or not, and more like, why was everything so somber and dark when that's not really what that. If that's the apotheosis of the moment, it's not fully representing it. So I did take a slight quibble with that. But I think, like, to me, what's so interesting about the sort of moral. The contradictions of Odysseus is that is the point of the Odyssey. He's both, like, the best and the worst. He's this trickster character. Right. And he's both better than everyone and possible capable of worse things than everyone. And that, to me, is supposed to illustrate that we contain that in ourselves, too. And which side of that are we gonna. Are we gonna let out?
- [28:40]
Rich Roll
Yeah. This is the mindset of every alcoholic and addict. Like, I'm smarter than everyone else, and I'm the worst person in the world. And it is a megalomania like that speaks to his hubris. He believes that he's so powerful that he could break the world or make the world. And that's absurd. Right? It's death by a thousand cuts or the contributions of millions of people.
- [29:07]
Ryan Holiday
He's taking the full moral weight of the Trojan War that he was, by the way, as drafted into as everyone else and as at the mercy of Agamemnon as everyone else. And I think that's a great point. There is a grandiosity about. He makes himself the main character. And I mean, he is, in a way, the main character, but he has this kind of main character syndrome. And you see it in the movie. It's like these other men are raping and pillaging Troy. And yes, it was his idea, but he's not doing it. But he's looking around and going, what have I done? Because I think that's the point. He has the capacity to feel the responsibility and the guilt that if he didn't, if he was more a product of his time, I think he would get away with, like, we don't get the sense that Agamemnon was carrying the same guilt for sacrificing his daughter as, say, Odysseus was, even for just being away for 20 years.
- [30:15]
Rich Roll
Yeah. It's important to understand that your actions have consequences, but it's also important to have the humility to understand that you're actually not as important as you might believe. Yourself to be. And he's on both extremes of this spectrum. I'm curious also around your thoughts around the ending. We see them sort of sail off into the sunset in a way that is not really authentic to the text. This guy who, yeah, like this is a guy who can't sit still for a minute as soon as he's like, they do address this. Getting back to denial, like, after he hears the song of the Sirens, he's disabused of his denial that he actually doesn't want to go home. It's all about, like, we just want to go home. And actually maybe one of the reasons he doesn't follow Agamemnon is because he doesn't want to go home. And he's trying to find the long way so that he can stay away. He can't say that out loud and maybe he can't admit that to himself. But you know, he is, you know, to kind of quote Arthur Brooks, like, he is a striver facing the strivers dilemma and he just cannot sit still for a moment with himself. And the minute he gets home, he has to leave again and go off on another campaign. And Nolan chooses to end the movie differently. What are your thoughts around that? Why do you think he made that decision? And what is it that the Odysseus that you know did and why?
- [31:49]
Ryan Holiday
So I think there's two reads here that I want to get into. The first is, yes, Odysseus the striver. Odysseus the restless. Odysseus, actually the tragic, tortured hero who not only can't go home as he hears from the Sirens. I think it's worth pointing out the Sirens don't just sing a beautiful song. The Sirens tell you exactly what you want to hear. Or the deepest, most painful, beautiful truth you can imagine. So in the movie they tell him, basically, you don't actually want to go home. And I think on a simple level, the Odyssey is about a guy fighting to get home. But when you look at the full arc of the character, you go for a guy who claims he wants to go home, he sure makes a lot of choices that prevent him from getting home, as you said in the movie, from not following Agamemnon. But like, you know, he spends seven years with Cersei, not like she does drug him a little bit, but he basically has a seven year affair on his wife and he lives in paradise. Right.
- [32:56]
Rich Roll
And he also had like a one year affair with Cersei, didn't he?
- [32:59]
Ryan Holiday
Yes, yes, he has a lot of affairs. Penelope is Supposed to be true and loyal. And Odysseus is under no such compunction, right? And so, you know, you imagine it's like that's his son from 13 to 20 or something. Like he misses, like, a good chunk of his son's life because he's really enjoying himself on an island paradise. And if we can understand Odysseus as not just a character who doesn't want to go home, but as people in the ancient world would have understood, Odysseus. Putting aside Nolan's ending for a second, he leaves after he gets home in some of the other retellings, like he has to go replenish his coffers. Actually, one of the Post stories has Odysseus leaving Penelope at the end and marrying somebody else. And then it goes on and on. He is the addict, you know, the typical addict, the striver, the person for whom there's never enough, who, you know, has the midlife crisis and starts a second family and a third family. Like, he can't. He can't help himself. And so even I think when you read Tennyson's poem, you get the sense, depending on what age you are reading it, that actually it isn't admirable and impressive that this guy. What is the wording? Let me find it here, he says, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. You know, he can't stop. He can't slow down. There's never enough. He's not capable of being still. And if we understand Odysseus as this tortured hero in that way, it's like, you know, and a lot of people have made the PTSD comparisons, but if you've seen the Hurt Locker, right? He gets home. Or if you've seen American Sniper, they're similar character arcs. They get home, and then they're just like, this is nothing compared to what my life was out there. And in that way, they are tragic, flawed, broken men that we should pity rather than celebrate and want to be
- [35:08]
Rich Roll
like Back to the Sirens. What's great about that is you can draw this parallel on this notion that they're singing this song of everything you always wanted to hear. And there's a beautiful monologue that. That. That is one of my favorite parts in the movie where Odysseus says, you know, I can't recount it exactly, but it's. It's basically like everything you always wanted to hear about, you know, everything you always wanted to have and can't have, but Already had and, you know, like some kind of thing like that. And it's is like it perfectly encapsulates this idea. But there is this parallel with confirmation bias in social media. It's like it's telling you what you want to hear. And that is a, you know, hypnotic thing. You know, it's very difficult for us to immunize ourselves from. He has to. They have to put wax in their ears to prevent them. We have all these devices that we have to put on our phone to kind of like, protect our attention. There's something going on with this. It's like. It's like these. These tech. And you've talked about this, like the tech barons and all the. Like, they are the sirens on some level.
- [36:16]
Ryan Holiday
Well, and the reason we have to be familiar with the Odyssey is just the sheer amount. It's like you have to watch the Godfather or you'll miss, like, 40% of pop culture references, right? Or you need to know what. You need to know your sports history, or you're going to miss out on a lot of metaphors and references. You have to know the Odyssey because so many of the things that we use to explain the present come from the literature of the past. I mean, Chris Hayes last year wrote a really good book called the Siren Song that's all about comparing social media and the attention economy to the sirens. And he makes this point about how the sirens aren't just this beautiful, seductive thing, but there's some element of the confirmation bias at work that you said and how we are complicit in our own manipulation. And he does a good job in the movie of the guy rips the beeswax out of his ears and throws himself over the boat. It's like the sirens aren't plucking him from the boat the way that the monster is, right? They're saying, like, hey, come over here. It's nice. And people are willingly killing themselves to get it. Which I think is the sort of ultimate metaphor of the thing. And then, yeah, the commitment device of Odysseus saying, I want to hear it, but I don't trust myself, so I want you to tie me to the master. Is what I thought was interesting. Is, okay, so Odysseus knowing that if he goes to the Sirens, he will surely die. So he doesn't just say, hey, guys, don't let me go over there. He says, I need you to tie me to the mast and under no circumstances can you undo it, and I'm gonna block your ears. So flash forward like an hour or so in the movie, they are landing at the island where the sun God keeps his cattle. And because they learned this from the dead in Hades, if they eat the sun God's cattle, they will all die. Not Odysseus, but everyone else will die. And at first he doesn't tell them this. And then they ask him, and he does. He discloses. He says, if you eat the sun God's cattle, you will die. And they go, okay, we still want to land in the island. We just won't do it. And he says, no, no, no. The best thing is to not go anywhere near the island, right? The commitment device again. Like, if you don't want to eat, if you don't want to drink, don't have alcohol in your house, right? And they go, no, no, no, we're fine. We promise we won't eat the sun God's cattle. And then what happens? They get there and their willpower lasts for a while, but it's not invincible. And eventually they do eat the sun God's cattle and they die. I thought that was an interesting contrast between the two commitment devices. Like a promise is not enough. A commitment is not enough that you have to be able to prevent yourself from doing the thing that you know you don't want to do.
- [39:10]
Rich Roll
And Odysseus is rolling the dice and in defiance of the gods, by not putting the wax in his ears and sort of wanting to be the one person who can survive this, to distinguish himself and make himself feel special.
- [39:26]
Ryan Holiday
Okay, so to go back to the ending real fast, because this is something I haven't seen enough people talk about. So there is a giant plot hole in the Odyssey. There's two, but I'll go back to one. But the big plot hole in the Odyssey is Penelope is weaving the burial shroud, right? So Ithaca is without a king, and Telemachus is too young to rule, right? Odysseus is gone, and Penelope is stalling by weaving the burial shroud. But who is she weaving the burial shroud for? Right? Laertes, Odysseus, Father. So our modern understanding of kings, it's like, why doesn't he, if he was previously the king of Ithaca, why doesn't Laertes just come back temporarily until Telemachus is old enough, Right? I don't really know. There's not a great answer to this question. But I think the idea, their argument was like, if you're not strong enough, if you're not fit to be the king, you have to voluntarily cede power. And then Once you voluntarily cede power, it's not yours anymore. Right. So there is something interesting about Laertes waiting on. He's like, my time has passed. I'm no longer fit to be king. Yes, that leaves a power vacuum, which is a bit weird. But Nolan kind of solves for this by when Odysseus comes home, he doesn't rule Ithaca for very long before he leaves and cedes it to his son. So there's an interesting statement here, I think, particularly in this aging democracy of ours where, what do they call it, A gerontocracy, where old people are not stepping away. There is something about the peaceful transition of power here that's really interesting that Odysseus, in going into voluntary exile, now that his son has proven himself, is demonstrating in a way that I think is interesting. It's not the main point of the Odyssey, but the going into exile to me was less about in one reading. It's less about Odysseus restlessness and even the debt he has to pay to his old soldiers, and more about solving for the question of who's the next generation, and I think also the less implicated generation. Right. If Odysseus generation has failed and corrupted itself and stained it in blood with the murder of the suitors, for instance, then what Telemachus portends is a free, potentially a fresh start, you know, clean hands. And this is why Odysseus is so insistent that he not participate in that final massacre. Odysseus is the sea people who's been raiding and murdering and doing all this bad stuff. And Telemachus represents potentially a new and brighter future.
- [42:31]
Rich Roll
That's an interesting perspective. It's a little bit more optimistic than mine in that there is this peaceful transition of power, there is succession, and we're meant to feel like things are stable while at the same time understanding that the Bronze Age is over and we're going to now be entering into this age of darkness. Clearly, Odysseus does not want Telemachus involved in killing all these suitors. And Telemachus were pretty clear that he's no great warrior. He has his one moment upstairs in the weapons locker where he finally gets the best of that one guy. But that aside, we're in no position to believe that he has matured to the point where he can successfully kind of take charge of Ithaca and kind of acquit leadership responsibly. And it's unclear whether Odysseus has considered this. He's just like, I'm out of here now. And we're going to go over here and I feel good about my son taking over, but we as the audience are left to question whether that is actually a good idea. I know in other interpretations of the Odyssey, Odysseus grappling with his striving and his restlessness, says at some point, and I think you've talked about this to Telemachus, like, you're a better man than me and you're more, you're more fit to rule than I am because I can't just sit here on a chair in this throne in this house, like I have to go out and conquer and you know, like achieve to use a, you know, kind of a modern, you know, a modern version of that. And he basically conveys to his son like, you know, this, he's passing the torch in kind of a beautiful way that we don't see in the movie.
- [44:23]
Ryan Holiday
Yes. Obviously in the poem, you know, both Odysseus and Telemachus are blessed by Athena and guided by her right mentor is Athena in the poem. And I think the sun is setting on one and the sun is rising on the other, we could say. And so yes, Telemachus, especially at the beginning of the play and Emily Wilson has talked about this in her translation, just like how modern, some of the sort of whiny, insolent, insecure, just like how teenagery Telemachus comes off in the early pages of the Odyssey and then his journey to see Menelaus and then Nestor and then coming back and then, you know, there's also this coming of age story at the beginning of the Odyssey and, and throughout it, and we're supposed to see Telemachus as a kind of a rising hero who, yeah, who's young and inexperienced and desperately needing of help, but comes out of the other side of this, I think, ready and stronger. One of the things my 9 year old pointed out, or I guess he would have been seven or eight when he pointed this out, but I thought it was interesting because it goes to the polyphemist thing we were talking about. He was like, I don't understand if, if Polyphemus is Poseidon's son, why did Poseidon need Odysseus to take credit for blinding him, to know that he did it? Isn't he a God? I went to read about it and I asked Chatgpt about it. I was trying to figure this out because I hadn't thought of that either. And then what I came to understand is that was my son projecting the Christian omniscient God onto Poseidon like that the Greek gods knew everything that was happening everywhere in the world. That they were minutely monitoring human affairs, which is not the Greek understanding. The Greek understanding is the gods are over here on Mount Olympus doing weird stuff, raping people and taking them prisoner and starting storms and feuding and fighting with each other and then occasionally coming down to earth and interfering and getting involved. And so it is interesting to think that the Greek understanding of Odysseus is that had Odysseus just kept his mouth shut, he would have gotten away with his crime. But it was the bragging about it and needing attention for it that actually sows his fate. It just shows the different understanding of the gods. There's this famous quote I like from Flaubert. He said when the gods had ceased to be, but Christ had not yet come, he says, between the time of Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. So now we're going from the Greeks to the Romans. Here he says man stood alone in the universe. That there was this brief moment of philosophy when the old system was falling apart. The Greek understanding of the gods which the Romans inherited. And then before the Christian understanding of an all powerful all seeing God who gives us the golden rule that Nolan is sort of projecting back on the Greeks, there was this kind of brief moment where humans are just doing their own thing. And then this is when we get kind of. This is where we get Stoic philosophy and Epicurean philosophy and all these other sort of other ways of thinking. I just thought about that quote because at the beginning of the movie he says in a time of apparent magic, he's kind of saying the same thing. There are gods, but they're not as involved. They're not everywhere. The concept in the movie is that you have to treat the stranger well. Not because God wants you to, but because that stranger might be a God. They're probably not, but they might be. And so it is interesting. This kind of like maybe, maybe not ness of the magic in the movie is interesting.
- [48:46]
Rich Roll
This episode is brought to you by Element, a company I have been working with for years. And what I respect about Element is that they've always stayed focused on the fundamentals. They started with simple electrolyte drink mixes, then came the sparkling cans. And now they've introduced lemonade iced tea, which I've had my fair share of caffeine over the years. And what I've come to understand is that it actually doesn't create energy. It just shifts your perception of fatigue. What does generate energy though, are physiological Processes that rely on hydration and electrolytes. And that's what Element continues to build around. From the drink mixes to the cans. It's everything you need and nothing you don't. And this new tea combines that electrolyte profile with a modest dose of caffeine from real tea, plus L theanine and polyphenols. So the experience feels steadier, less jagged. And by incorporating it into my daily morning training, it's significantly reduced my consumption of coffee. So that's a huge win. Right now you can try out Elements New Lemonade Iced Tea. Get a free 8 count sample pack of Elements most popular drink mix flavors with any purchase@drinkelement.com RichRoll the first time I saw an R2 in person, I got it immediately. This is the Rivian that a lot of people are going to be able to enjoy driving it with. RJ only confirmed that. All right, so. So first impressions in my first experience in the R2.
- [50:24]
Ryan Holiday
Nice.
- [50:25]
Rich Roll
All right, now I'm getting the feel. Yeah, it feels really tight.
- [50:29]
Ryan Holiday
It feels nice, right?
- [50:30]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Interestingly, like from a first impression point of view, when you see it from a distance, proportionally, it looks very similar to the R1. You know, the, like, the way that it is designed, it looks kind of integral with the original.
- [50:47]
Ryan Holiday
It's quite a bit smaller. And so when you look at them separately, sometimes people will be like, is that an R1 or an R2? And they have a lot of similarities, but I actually think R2 ended up with a better set of proportions. And it's that kind of thinking that just exists across everything to try to deliver an experience that still feels really Rivian, like, but a fraction of the cost of R1.
- [51:09]
Rich Roll
First impressions aside, there's a lot more to the R2 than what you see at first glance. To learn all about the R2, watch the rest of our conversation and book a Demo Drive at stories.rivian.com RichRoll. I thought that Nolan was implying indirectly and overtly at times, a degree of omniscience with the gods, because unlike other versions that have rendered on screen and in the text, like the gods are not around all the time. We see Athena pop in and out. But, you know, the gods aren't like, you know, coming down and interacting with humans in the way that, you know, other, you know, other versions of this describe. And Odysseus doesn't have to say I'm Odysseus to the Cyclops. Like it's just understood that this communication is going to get conveyed to Poseidon or he's overlooking this and then you know, hell is going to break loose on the open seas. Similarly with the sun gods and the cattle. Like he even says Odysseus overtly at one point, like do you think, did you think like the sun gods weren't going to notice?
- [52:17]
Ryan Holiday
So this is the best part of the movie.
- [52:19]
Rich Roll
Nolan is saying like there is an omniscience here and he's sort of layering over a more Judeo Christian notion of God as all seeing.
- [52:28]
Ryan Holiday
Yeah, you're right. Yeah. He says, did you think if you ate very quietly the gods wouldn't know you still you ate their God kind
- [52:35]
Rich Roll
of in this hole. You know, like they dig this hole. So like as if that is going protect them in some way.
- [52:42]
Ryan Holiday
But then they say we didn't think we would fool the gods, we were just trying to fool you.
- [52:49]
Rich Roll
Yeah. And what does that get them?
- [52:51]
Ryan Holiday
Yeah, it doesn't change the prophecy.
- [52:55]
Rich Roll
You know, I want to turn to some of the lessons for life that we can extract from this story in your video. Maybe we can start with this. You talk about the difference between perseverance and persistence and I'd never really heard those parsed in that way and I thought that was super interesting.
- [53:17]
Ryan Holiday
And look, I might be making a semantic difference but I do think there is something, there's something about, hey, I'm going to do this hard thing for a while and then I got to do this the rest of my life. The day to dayness of endurance
- [53:41]
Rich Roll
is
- [53:41]
Ryan Holiday
to me the more impressive thing. How do you deal with this forever? And you could say the 10 years of war in Troy, the 10 years on the journey home. In one aspect that's the Odyssey for Odysseus. But the deeper one might actually be once he gets home, the guilt and the pain and the re entry is actually the harder and longer battle in the obstacle is the way I sort of did. I used Odysseus to make that distinction between, you know, perseverance and persistence. That perseverance is just sort of persistence on steroids and that. But you know, wanting something really bad and being willing to sacrifice for it is one thing, but you know, life asks so much more of that than you and I do. I mean look, when you do endurance sports it's like you think you've hit your limit and then there's this whole other reservoir that you have. Yes.
- [54:49]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I think what's interesting in this context is we see Odysseus, he is this avatar of perseverance, of persistence, of being unrelenting in this quest to win the war and get home and all these sorts of things. And it speaks to the human will and our capacity to weather obstacles and overcome them, et cetera, if we just stay in it and remain focused and just never give up and all of that. But ultimately, the only way that he gets home when he departs Calypso is through surrender. Like he has to relinquish his grip on control and recognize that not only can he no longer defy the gods, that he has to completely surrender and let go of any attempt to even try to get home and put it completely in their hands. And there's something beautiful about that in a Zen Cohen kind of way. Like you have to strive, you have to be perseverant and persistent and courageous and unrelenting if you want to achieve things and accomplish your goals, et cetera. And yet ultimately you will be capped in your potential to the extent that you are refusing to relinquish your grip. At some point you have to recognize that your self will is the obstacle in your way and that the kind of next level, whether it's climbing Maslow's hierarchy of needs or just growing and evolving as a human being, demands surrender like this. Recognition that there are higher forces at play and that you are not the center of the universe that are, you know, you're not the puppeteer pulling the strings.
- [56:38]
Ryan Holiday
And ultimately that requires more willpower and discipline. That surrender, that submission, it seems like weakness, but it's not.
- [56:49]
Rich Roll
It's much harder for him to lay down on that raft and let the waves take him where they will, than to stay on that beach for 10 years and figure out how he's finally gonna, you know, breach the walls of Troy.
- [57:02]
Ryan Holiday
Sure. Yeah. And look, you know the great American named after Odysseus is Ulysses S. Grant. Right? That's how the name is re Ulysses. One of the great military victories in American history is Grant's victory at Vicksburg, where he basically lays siege to this citadel, not unlike Troy, for months and months and months he has to try to reroute the Mississippi River. At one point he ends up having to cross the river miles, miles south. He has to run these gun batteries. It's one of the great military campaigns in human history with actually an equal amount of cleverness to Odysseus. He basically goes around Vicksburg and then he attacks it from the other side. And then they're suddenly trapped in this fortress as opposed to being safely ensconced inside it. So Grant's Sort of success in the Civil War is your sort of standard persistence, right? He's like, look, I don't go backwards. I don't quit. They said he's like a bulldog. He grabs on and he doesn't let go. That's Grant's sort of military strategy, and he ends up succeeding. And he probably thinks, that's the most difficult thing I'm going to have to do in my life. That's his sort of persistence. Well, after Grant is president, all of his money is stolen from him. He gets swindled by this Bernie Madoff figure. He loses all his money. He has to hawk his Civil War mementos in uniform to JP Morgan just to pay off his debts. And so he's basically looking at complete poverty, humiliation. And then he finds out he's dying of throat cancer. He's smoked, like, 20 cigars a day. And so Grant is now facing what they call his final battle under debilitating pain. He writes and dictates his memoirs over the next several months. Mark Twain agrees to publish them. He ends up publishing them. He dies, like, three days after he finishes his memoirs. It becomes the bestselling book in American history. It's his final battle. But I think at some level, it's a different kind of persistence. It's perseverance, because it's operating here now at this kind of soul level. It's. So it's one thing to fight really hard for what you want, and I think it's another thing to sort of stare down death or to conquer your own body. And so when we're talking about the distinction between persistence and perseverance, I think, yeah, fighting at Troy is persistence, but the odyssey home and the ultimate surrender, as you said. And then as he says in the movie, just like taking your punishment, basically, that is a perseverance at a different level. And then the making of amends and having to face the people that he's drawn, that's just a whole other kind of journey that's different than being cold and tired and wet and lonely. And I think ultimately, that's the message of the Odyssey. That sort of perseverance, not persistence.
- [60:23]
Rich Roll
The acceptance of certain things that are unmutable. Like, there's the idea of, we're gonna breach the walls of Troy. It's unac that we can't, and we're not leaving until we do. A refusal to accept a certain reality, because on some level, there is a sense of mutability to that. But cancer, you know, like having your money swindled or Whatever. To persevere you have to first accept this as reality and then figure out how to survive and navigate your way through it.
- [60:56]
Ryan Holiday
Yeah. To accept your humiliation and your failure and your mortality. These are all, I think, much more soul level battles. As opposed to most of the Odyssey. Is Odysseus fighting with his cunning. We're told over and over again in the poem that he's the craftiest, most cunning, smartest man in the world. And that only gets him so far and ultimately it gets him into trouble. Right, right.
- [61:25]
Rich Roll
He's a galaxy brain.
- [61:27]
Ryan Holiday
Yes. And it's the sort of having to conquer the other things at the deeper level, which I think the movie does a much better job. There's less catharsis in the poem. There's less resolution because the Greeks didn't have the same struggle with guilt and responsibility. And you know, Odysseus is not as tortured of a figure in the poem. Like he's like, yeah, I'm going to murder all these people and I'm also going to murder all the female slaves for cavorting with them. Even though I think we would say now that they were not consenting participants in these exchanges. But yeah, at the end he just murders all these. The catharsis is the murder. The catharsis in the movie is the. What am I? Culpable? Is dealing with his own culpability and his own responsibility and, and then ultimately trying to make amends by heading. Heading west and, and honoring. Honoring the dead.
- [62:32]
Rich Roll
Yeah. If, if you were going to like, what stood out for you as intolerable in the movie that you would change, like if you were doing your version, like what, what was missing or what do you think is relevant for us to know that was lacking in the film?
- [62:49]
Ryan Holiday
So I don't think Christopher Nolan does a good job showing how crafty and clever Odysseus was, which is his predominant character trait in the poem. And so I think skipping the opportunity to trick Polyphemus, the no man joke, which it's just amazing that like, you know, watching my kids just like fall over in laughter at a 3,000 year old joke from an ancient epic, it just does show you it's.
- [63:18]
Rich Roll
Who's on third, basically.
- [63:19]
Ryan Holiday
Totally, totally. It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. And so he misses a handful of opportunities to show Odysseus as being clever and how that cleverness is both his secret strength and the source of his undoing. I thought that was a flaw of the movie. The only casting choice that I think people are allowed to be upset about is the casting choice of Agamemnon. I think Black Helen, totally fine with Elliot Page, totally fine with. Fine with everything. I just don't understand how the Bane character could be one of the Safdie brothers. How he's supposed to be the more intimidating brother of Menelaus. Who? Jon. What? Bernenthal plays John Bernthal? Yeah, incredibly. And you can get both the pain and the kind of menace I think he captures. I mean, that's why he's a special forces operator in every movie. And he's the Punisher. He is perfectly cast and captures it perfectly. Peeking behind the mask on Menelaus, I'm like, I don't buy it. I don't like it at all. I would have loved Agamemnon.
- [64:37]
Rich Roll
You mean Agamemnon.
- [64:39]
Ryan Holiday
Agamemnon. Sorry, sorry. I would have. I think Cillian Murphy could have done it. I think Christian Bale could have done it. I think so many other people could have done it. I just did not buy him. I'm violating my own rule by questioning about this, but that's my piddly concern with the movie, and I hated it.
- [64:56]
Rich Roll
But he's frame mogging everybody in every scene that he is. I mean, when the gates of Troy open, he. He's 10ft tall and he's just dominating and you don't see his face. You know, someone like Cillian Murphy or Bale, they're not gonna say yes to a small part like that.
- [65:14]
Ryan Holiday
That's why I think it would've been so good.
- [65:16]
Rich Roll
But to me, it doesn't really matter. Cause you never really see his face. He doesn't take his mask off until the end. And when he does, it's this moment of vulnerability and realizing that he has gravely, you know, made this grave mistake that ends up, you know, with him being killed. And again, it goes to the unreliable narrator aspect of it in that this is we're seeing Agamemnon through the eyes of Odysseus, telling the story to Calypso. And so whether or not Agamemnon was as tall and as imposing in real life doesn't matter. It's Odysseus interpretation of Agamemnon through his memory of Agamemnon being this imposing figure dressed in all black. It's so interesting that we have Agamemnon in black and we have the black helmets of, you know, the Ithaca army, the warriors, and everybody in Troy is dressed in white. You know, this is like, it's, you know, it's pretty binary in that regard, interpret from that as you will, but he's inverting, you know, these expectations slowly.
- [66:25]
Ryan Holiday
If I could give another recommendation to people. Aeschylus trilogy, Orestia is a side plot of the Iliad and the Odyssey that you briefly see in the Odyssey, because they do focus on Agamemnon a little more than people would think. So for people who don't know, the brief story is to get favorable wins to Troy, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, which obviously his wife is not happy with. So what? Clemenenstra, again, I'm bad with the pronunciations, but his wife takes a lover while he's gone, and then when Agamemnon comes home, he and she kill Agamemnon, and then they don't bury him. And then the rest of the trilogy is in. And this is also where we get the story of Cassandra, because he brings Agamemnon, brings Cassandra home from. From Troy, and she is gifted with the. The power of prophecy, but cursed that no one will listen to her. And so she predicts all this is going to happen, and nobody listens. He ends up dying. But then his. His son avenges his death, kills his mother and her lover. That's the second one. And then the third play is really interesting because you get where all these myths come to explain to us, like where our modern system, where our civilization comes from. So anyways, after he kills his mother, he brings on the Furies, right? The gods are angry at him for killing his own mother. And so they're chasing him and torturing him, and he flees to the temple of Apollo. And what is proposed as a way of solving this conflict is that he plead his case to a jury of 12 peers and explain why he did it and what happened. And then they'll render a verdict, and he will abide by that verdict. And so from this play, this fictional event, we have the Greeks explaining and trying to deal with the cycle of vengeance, right? Like somebody does a crime, someone avenges that crime, and then someone has to avenge that crime. So the Greeks were wrestling with this question of how do we stop the cycle of violence? How does the state step in and resolve the cycle of violence? And they settle on the legal system, right? The impartial legal system and the jury of our peers. And so it's just incredible. You're just reading this play that's basically 2,500 years old, and then you're recognizing. You're like, oh, wait, this is where that comes from. And so again, these stories are not just weird Stories with names that are difficult to pronounce from a time long ago. They are the origin stories for the institutions that we take for granted today. And they are also wrestling with the same, like, fundamental problems that groups of humans, which we call society, have wrestled with for all time.
- [69:52]
Rich Roll
Everyone can kind of quibble around the margins, oh, it should have been like this. Why didn't they do that? I don't understand this. It doesn't make sense. If I was doing it, I would do this. Everybody, everybody's free to go off and make their version of the Odyssey and render it to film. My thing is, we should just be celebrating what is just an absolutely fantastic achievement on behalf of Nolan and everybody who contributed to this extraordinary work of art. Like, the attention to detail, the scale. Like, I've watched all these documentaries on how they did what they did, the behind the scenes stuff, the sets that they constructed, the far corners of the Earth. I mean, they go to Iceland for one sequence to shoot the Hades thing, and they're schlepping just an unbelievable amount of gear and this 70 millimeter camera that they had to construct a housing for so that it wasn't so loud that they couldn't record dialogue between two characters standing in front of it. The house of Ithaca, like, you know, everyone had to get into costume and hike up there. Like, the commitment to render this story on film in the most visceral and authentic way possible is something to really appreciate in Marvel. And I think the fact that leading into it, there's sort of this culture war going on, at least on X, which sidebar, like, everyone on X is arguing about casting.
- [71:25]
Ryan Holiday
These are the sirens.
- [71:27]
Rich Roll
What's that? Yeah, these are the sirens. The influencers are the Sirens. They're having this ridiculous debate that makes it seem like there's a controversy when I actually don't really think that there was. And Nolan recognizes this. Like, he's not paying any attention to this. But all of that quickly gets replaced as soon as Emily Wilson writes a somewhat negative review of the film. And then all of the discourse on X becomes like, kind of piling on her. Like, suddenly they're on Nolan's side. Like, anyway, that's all weird and very funny, actually. But we're all talking about this story.
- [72:03]
Ryan Holiday
Yes.
- [72:03]
Rich Roll
And we're all wrestling with the themes and what it means and how it applies to our lives. And I think that that is just, you know, just an incredible thing. Like the conversation that I had with my 19 year old daughter on the way home from seeing the movie last night. Was just, you know, precious, and I'll never forget it. And I think that that is super cool. And I think that Nolan is his own superhero for figuring out a way to make us interested in this thing, and we should be doing nothing but celebrating this achievement.
- [72:36]
Ryan Holiday
It's really powerful to think that that conversation you had on the way home is the conversation that parents have been having with children for almost 3,000 years, right? Like, people coming home from hearing a bard sing it to them. People coming home from seeing it performed, People seeing art, talking, seeing it in museums and in statues and in private homes. Like, they just found a mummy that was wrapped in papyrus, because that's what they would use to wrap the mummies. They found a mummy in Egypt that was, like, 19 years old, 1900 years old. And one of the pieces of papyrus has lines from the Odyssey. Like, somebody had a copy of the Odyssey, threw it away, and they used the scraps to wrap a body that's almost 2,000 years old. I was just in Italy, and on this island of Ithaca, they discovered a cup that is. They call it Nestor's cup. And it's just like a cup with a line from the Odyssey that's, like, again, 2,000 years old. And. And so people have been quoting lines, talking about these ideas, debating them, wrestling with the moral questions of them, saying things like, I'm between Scylla and Charybdis here, or, you're distracting me, like the sirens on the rocks. I'm on an odyssey here. They've been making these references and allusions for basically as long as there has been such a thing as Western civilization. And, like, we're a part of that tradition. So Nolan should be celebrated not just for bringing it back, but I think, also for managing impressively to add a new take on it. I think his take is fresh and new and different. And there's parts that I would disagree with. There's parts of it that I think. I prefer the older part, But I think he has presented an interesting take on Odysseus that lands especially hard now. And as you said, hard not to see the suitors overrunning the house and just sort of looting it and destroying the institutions and violence and then go, yeah, we have a similar hostile takeover of our political system here in the United States. This is the subtext through which we are interpreting this art. And hopefully, a thousand years from now, if we haven't destroyed ourselves, we'll be looking at different takes of different kinds of Odysseys because we'll have a thousand years of history Repeating the fundamentally human themes from the art.
- [75:24]
Rich Roll
Yeah, beautifully put. I mean, there's no reason in spending years trying to render a version of this story to the screen unless you have an interpretation. And it's about. We're kind of coming full circle to end this with the point that we raised at the beginning, which is the point is interpreting it and sharing that interpretation and the discourse around that interpretation and other people's versions of that story and their interpretations. In that synthesis, we find some indelible truths about what it means to be human, what it means to live a meaningful, good life, and what's important. And I think that the conversations that are happening all over the world right now around this. We're getting, like, a B12 shot right now, and I think it's really fucking cool.
- [76:15]
Ryan Holiday
Yeah. And I'd much prefer we're debating this about Homer and the Odyssey and Odysseus than, you know, like, superheroes. No offense to the Batman movies, which I also thought were good. And he imbued with sort of real substance and symbolism. But, like, these are the myths that people used to understand. They used to understand we would teach kids at a young age about hubris, about loyalty, about angering the gods, about moral injury. And by sort of going like, oh, that's a bunch of old, dead white guys, or, oh, those are old stories, or those are racist or violent, or all the different. Both the right and the left have undermined our collective stories. And then our education system has underplayed them. They're like, oh, let's read the Hunger Games. I think anything that brings these ancient stories to a modern audience is doing something really important because all those norms that Odysseus is lamenting are being violated, are being violated today. But we just don't have the shared language and story and myth that helps people appreciate where those norms came from and what they mean and what the costs of violating them are. That, to me, is one of the root causes of the political and cultural nightmare we're in.
- [77:48]
Rich Roll
Agreed, my friend. Well, this was super fun. I could talk to you about this for a million hours. I appreciate your perspective on this. Hopefully more conversations like this to come. And I loved it, man.
- [78:04]
Ryan Holiday
Thanks.
- [78:05]
Rich Roll
Anything else? Was there anything unsaid, any point that you wanted to make before we ended here?
- [78:10]
Ryan Holiday
You know, actually, I was curious for you. How did the calypso scene resonate with you as a person in recovery? Because in the poem, he's a much more active participant and conscious participant in his sort of indolence and escapism. She presents him more as a person who is injured physically and spiritually and is just in a kind of a self induced stupor because he can't handle the pain. And it takes him time to sort of claw his way out of the bottle, so to speak. I was curious how that scene landed with you.
- [78:48]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I thought it was fascinating. Here you have this guy whose, you know, in a modern day context, he's a workaholic, he's a striver, he can't sit still. It's always about, you know, the next conquest, what's he gonna achieve. And the thing that he's trying to achieve in the moment is to get home, whether he's in denial or not. Like, he's on this quest, but he doesn't really want to go home. And he can't tolerate the internal dissonance that he's experiencing. On the one hand, he's being celebrated as this great leader and he has this egoic attachment to his identity as this great leader. And yet he also knows that he is a complete piece of shit who has just broken the world. And how do you reconcile that internally? And that dissonance is eating away at him. He's already established himself as an addict, addicted to striving and work, et cetera. And that blinds him from being able to be the better leader that he could be. And so when he lands on this island and Calypso gives him the lotus flower and he takes a taste of it and suddenly he can't remember and he doesn't feel so bad, he's all in. Like, this is like the person who's tried heroin for the first time. And they're like, oh my God, like, finally I can breathe and all I want to do is do this. And even Calypso says to him at one point, like, wow, you really like that. Like, even she, you know, I know she's a manipulative figure and she's got her own agenda and all of that, but she's the codependent in this relationship and she's more than happy to hold him captive and feed him the lotus flower because her emotional needs are being met on some level by him remaining there. So she's participating in this and contributing to it. And the only thing that brings him out of it, the only way that he's able to emerge out of it, is because deep down he has this knowing that, that he could be better. Like in order to save himself, he's going to have to get off of this island.
- [81:00]
Ryan Holiday
And drugs.
- [81:01]
Rich Roll
Yeah, like he doesn't have. There isn't like a well defined, like rock bottom for him. But he recognizes that if he doesn't get off this island and stop eating these lotus leaves, that he's never gonna leave and he's gonna perish on this island. And that is more painful than the pain of him having to reckon and reconcile his guilt and his guilt over what happened in the Trojan War and his guilt for having left his son and his wife for so long. And that's ultimately what wakes him up. But in this very kind of like 12 step way, the only solution, the only way he's going to solve this problem isn't through like white knuckling it or like trying to just will his way out of it. He has to surrender. And this is beautifully illustrated on screen. Like, he has to let go and like, I can't, like the alcoholic is like, I can't control my drinking. My life is unmanageable. I have to turn it over to a higher power. And Odysseus has to turn it over to the gods when he lays flat on that raft and says, just, you know, you take me, like, it's your problem now whether I get home or whether I end up drowning in the sea. And I think that there is this really poetic and beautiful parallel with the addiction recovery story in that I thought the same thing.
- [82:34]
Ryan Holiday
It's like there's surrender, there's accepting a higher power, there's the fearless moral inventory, there's the making amends. He basically goes through most of the 12 steps.
- [82:44]
Rich Roll
He has to remember doing this inventory. Yeah. And he's doing a fifth step with her. Like she's on the receiving end of him explaining all of his moral failures and character defects. And she takes that and says, okay, now you have to go. Now you have to really surrender and take these contrary actions well.
- [83:07]
Ryan Holiday
And his speech to Penelope is a similar one. He's making amends to the men when he goes and leaves. But when he sort of, when he lays out everything and she sees it, she goes, oh, you were the sea people. This is her wrestling for the first time with who her husband was and what he did. And, you know, she accepts him anyway, which is a beautiful sort of gesture, and that the screen between them eventually comes down. But yeah, if you told me Christopher Nolan was in recovery and that was the subtext for the whole movie, I would buy it. You know, it seems like it's there.
- [83:46]
Rich Roll
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty well illustrated. Yeah. And the final amends is him going to the west to pay tribute to the dead. It's a living. They call it a living amends because he can't actually make amends to these people. They're already dead. Yeah, I'll probably see it a couple more times in the theater. The first time I saw it in Washington D.C. in a Dolby with Dolby sound, but not an iMac. I saw it last night in the Chinese Theater in IMAX 70 millimeter, which was its own insane experience. If you have made it all the way through to the end of this podcast and have not seen the movie, I don't know why you would still be watching or listening. But please make a point of going to see it, preferably in imax.
- [84:32]
Ryan Holiday
Nine years old is too young, right? I can't take my 9 year old to see it.
- [84:36]
Rich Roll
I think it's too young. Yeah, I think it's too young for that. But there is this thing, like, I'm sitting in the Chinese Theater, it's being projected in. There's a difference between IMAX and 70 millimeter IMAX like this. There aren't very many theaters that can do this. And I just thought, like, this is. You know, I'm so glad I'm doing this because soon this will not be in the theaters and maybe five years from now they'll screen it again. But there was this specialness to the idea that we have this opportunity to have this story be told to us in this way. Hopefully more stories like this will be rendered to the screen in the wake of this massive success. All right, dude, I'll let you go. Thank you so much. Super fun.