Alex Petkas - Want To Reignite Your Inner Hero? Start Here
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All right, Alex, welcome to the Man Talk Show. How are you doing today? Great. It's great to be here, Connor. I've very much been looking forward to this conversation. This is like, I've had a lot of people lately asking me to go more into myth, archetypes, symbolisms, stoicism. And I've talked about, you know, Terrence McKenna had this sort of idea that what culture and society needed was what he called an ancient revival.

And I feel like in some ways you're really spearheading that in your own way, that there's sort of this revival of ancient wisdom. So I'm looking forward to this conversation and digging in. So with all that said, let's actually start with the role of the hero in ancient times. So when you look at Stoicism and the sort of like Greek era, what role did the hero play? Why was he so central and what happened to him?

Yeah. Well, it's worth observing that the first great work of literature, the first text written in the Western tradition is an extended meditation on the hero, on Achilles at Troy. It's Homer's Iliad. Homer's Odyssey also, in a similar vein, two very different main character heroes, Achilles and Odysseus. But

I have this theory that I believe is anthropology would back me up. Certainly, the study of oral poetry would back me up. The West Indo-European culture has this tradition of epic oral poetry, which we can look at what the Indian Vedic poets are doing, like the Bhagavad Gita, Indian heroic epic, and the Mahabharata. And we can look at Homer and

and their related languages, actually, ancient Sanskrit and ancient Greek, and we can actually posit a common ancestor. And we can actually go back and look at particular phrases that occur in Indian poetry, ancient Indian poetry, and ancient Greek poetry and see, okay, there are some concepts and maybe even some themes that these share that

kleos aftiton is one eternal glory in greek there's a some sanskrit very i don't know sanskrit but i've read the you know studies of this and i'd like to learn it someday but so what this means to me is that if you look at how hard it would be to become the kind of person that homer was to

learn this immense tradition of stories and formulaic language and to pull it off with this virtuosic power that Homer could and like the authors of some of the Indian epics could. There's a tradition that goes back a common ancestor, thousands of years before the invention of writing because they're memorizing this stuff when they can't write it down. And they're expending

tremendous amounts of cognitive fuel to ensure that people are, that people get from generation to generation, the most important stories of the most important heroes. This is like, to me that says, this is a structuring element of a healthy society. You have to have good heroes. You have to tell stories about them, good stories. Use your best literary artistic talent on telling

telling the stories of the heroes and you'll have a strong culture as a result of that. So, but why, why, why would you say that it is like what's relevant about the hero arc that is necessary for a healthy society and culture? And maybe we could even, we could hone in on the Iliad as, as one example, because, you know, I think the Iliad is, is an interesting one in

in the sense that Achilles, from my interpretation, my understanding, part of his role as the hero within that story is that he's kind of living this duality of seeking like

Some of the characters in the book are sort of seeking this eternal legacy, right? Like living forever versus the shortness of life, right? So there's kind of this dichotomy between how do we as men embrace the finite versus the infinite that seems to play out in part of it and not get caught in

territory of one is exponentially more important than others. I'm going to live specifically for the legacy and screw short-term morality. I'm

I'm just going to optimize everything in my life for legacy. So anyway, I'll pause there. Why is the role of the hero so important for a healthy culture and society? Yeah, great question. Well, if we look at the Iliad and specifically, it's, you know, the story is Achilles makes this choice, as you said, he has the option of living a short life.

life of immortal glory or a long and happy but obscure life and um i think he's talking to his mother and this was like his fate he had one way he couldn't have both he couldn't have both glory and uh in a long life i think in a long way in a lot of ways the poem as a whole is a meditation on death as a way to think about the power of life because so like

Just viscerally, so much of that poem is spears going through eyeballs and various body parts and men taunting each other about how they're going to kill each other and how much they're going to laugh when they kill each other. It's kind of horrifying. It's supposed to be horrifying, I think. I think it was horrifying in a way for the ancient Greeks.

But it's that whole aesthetic of it underlies this point that, you know, the choice of Achilles, like what does it mean to live a good life? And what are you willing to die for? What is worth dying for? And for him, the honor that you get from doing something great that is kind of done on behalf of the community. I think I think that's really important, actually, for the concept of a hero, even though Achilles seems to be such a self aggrandizing character.

In our perspective, he abandons the Greeks in their battle against the Trojans because of a personal quarrel with Agamemnon. But it's kind of about principle because Agamemnon sort of stands for institutional authority that isn't necessarily the most competent, but happens to hold the scepter and have the most ships and stuff. But Achilles is the most talented. He's not just the best fighter. He's also the most...

powerful speaker, the most wise in council. So it's a kind of a competence versus authority. There's principles there. But when he does die, there is a personal grudge aspect to it because Hector kills his buddy Patroclus and he sort of goes and is motivated to go back to the war out of the sense of revenge. But it does end up benefiting the community. So I'd

I think there's this kind of duality in the Greek hero that by pursuing your own glory, according to a moral logic of the heroic honor culture, you end up benefiting the community also. But you also end up probably dying young, suffering massively more than any man can suffer.

And that is somehow like we need, I think the poems are there in part structurally to ensure that there are men around that are willing to live up to that challenge. Because that's a lot of times what a society needs to defeat its enemies, to get through an incredibly difficult political transition, to overcome a plague. There are all kinds of areas where I think men uniquely are called to sacrifice themselves on behalf of their

the community and a women's role is important but different but this is and this does relate to the pursuit of like honor and excellence and fundamentally

Yeah, it does seem like the hero plays this role of riding the line between individual fulfillment, individual morality, individual expression of desire, individual passions. It's like, I'm going to pursue what I want at all costs. And that really does seem to be a part of the hero archetype, regardless of what myth or story you're looking into. There's kind of this unapologetic

ruthlessness to the pursuit of individuality over the arc of the hero, it seems as though what ends up transpiring is that the hero, at least in myths, is really in service of the greater good in some way or in service of the community. So can you just speak to that? Because I think when we look at, maybe I'll just tie this into modern times,

and the relevancy of the hero. Like one of the things that has come up on this show before when I've talked to people is like there's this man named Francis Weller who I had on the show years ago and he said, "We're living through the death of the hero." And he's a wonderful therapist

And I would agree with that in some ways, that the hero archetype is the enemy. It's sort of like that scene in Batman where you can die the hero or live long enough to become the villain. And the role of the hero in modern society seems to have become distorted so much so.

So maybe can you just speak, and I think I'll tie that all in and then I promise I'll stop my very long question. It seems as though the hero archetype is dying in our modern culture and has become the villain in part because of the perspective that the hero is only interested in individual gains, individual purpose or function. So can you talk to that aspect of the hero in terms of individuality versus community?

Yeah, I think you've put your finger on something. So for example, like when I was in ninth grade, I was a terrible student. And I hated English class, I hated history, I was into the math and science stuff. But to the extent that I even stayed awake at

in class at all or did any homework at all. But one of the things that I really hated was being forced to read books that I didn't choose. And so when I was in the ninth grade, we had to read the Iliad. We read some kind of, it was kind of dumbed down, a prose version of the Iliad. And I just remember, this Achilles guy is an asshole. These people are all children. And I expressed that view in class and nobody really corrected me. It was just like, hmm, yes, very interesting, Alex, yes.

And I think that we don't really understand these people. And our culture has moved in this direction where it only sees, like what you point out, the negative aspect. And it only sees that as kind of toxic or patriarchal or something.

But I have a family and I often have to make choices of whether I'm going to go on some, you know, take a speaking opportunity, go to some networking event or stay home and help my wife take care of the kids. And like, I do feel this tension. And I think a lot of men feel this tension that, you know, there is a sense that part of what your responsibility is as a man is not just to be a servant leader and be self-sacrificing, but to go out and achieve.

achieve something to like will some something into existence like a business or an initiative or a political campaign and this requires like seemingly neglecting the one's own affairs at the family level sometimes but your kids are going to admire you more and they're like you have to be a moral example for them your wife is expecting you really you know if she's kind of aligned with you well I think

you know, she should be expecting you to like challenge yourself and make the most of yourself. And there seems, I think, from a kind of communitarian perspective to be something very disturbing and problematic about that. But that's, I think that's kind of what, like you partake of that hero archetype a little bit when you do that. And it's really important for you to do that, to serve the people around you by being the best version of yourself. And that's one of the reasons why I do, I agree with your friend, Mr. Weller, that

We are living through the death of the hero. And I think that you can trace that to a lot of historical developments in the history of education. But I think we have a chance to bring it back. I don't think the hero is, he's just mostly dead, you know, we can we can revive him. So I'm hoping that we can do some of that.

Some mouth-to-mouth hero resuscitation. Hook them up to a machine. That's right. Hook them up, give them some CPR. Give them some vitamin D, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So maybe can we pull on that thread a little bit? Because I think I would love to tie this into the individual listening to this show. When we attempt to eradicate

the hero from within, when we sort of demonize that element of ourselves, as we've kind of been talking about, which is we can kind of see happening socially, are there stories? Well, I just want to ask it directly. What happens? What happens? What's the result of that? What's the impact of that? And do the Stoics talk about this? Do the Stoics or the ancient Greeks talk about the diminishment of the hero in any way?

Well, I can speak from my own experience because having been through public school education, my

My parents were divorced when I was in middle school and my dad was not there a lot and kind of raised with my mom mostly. You know, I felt this, I felt it, but I didn't know that I felt it, if that makes sense, that I didn't have strong role models to aspire to. I didn't have, nobody was telling me, this is what you have to do to become a man and you want to become a man because that's who you are. You have to become the best version of yourself.

I was kind of trained, I feel, by, I don't know, I'm in Texas, so this is, it's not like hardcore, heavy, you know, anti-patriarchal feminism just suffocating me in school. But there is a kind of sense that you get maybe from movies or whatever the case may be that wanting to be a manly man, oh, that's silly, you know, manly man, well, a real man is sensitive, a real man is thoughtful. There's all this kind of like,

Yeah, that's true. There's this aspect of real masculinity that kind of understands the feminine and can master it. I think you see that in a guy like Odysseus in particular. How so? Can you just pull on that thread really quickly of how Odysseus masters that part of him? Yeah, well, his patron goddess is Athena, who is the god of craft and trickery, metis in Greek.

And the story of Odysseus is this man that gets stripped of everything that he has, all of his companions, all of his weapons and armor. He loses his ship, gets shipwrecked. And he just threw the power of speech and craft and not force, right? Persuasion through persuasion, which is

which is sort of coded feminine in Greek. It's a feminine word in Greek. And he has to win his way back through. He first, I think it's in book six or five, he has to persuade the daughter of this island king who's out there on the beach washing clothes. He has to cover his nakedness with a bush and somehow persuade her that he's not a creep.

to escort him to the palace. And he has to persuade the king's wife to get in on the king's wife's good side so that she can persuade her husband to send him home with the ship. Odysseus is really a master of charm, which is coded feminine. I think that a good king needs to master the virtues of both genders. That's something that really...

comes out in a lot of Greek myths that you find in Hesiod. The king has to be a friend of the muses in the poet Hesiod's work on the gods. So that's kind of where that's coming from. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because I think I saw that you wrote something along the lines of

why Achilles played the lyre. Admittedly, I didn't read the whole thing, but it was interesting because time and time again, I think one of the main things that gets misrepresented in Stoicism or from the ancient Greeks is actually the importance of being able to embody both the masculine and feminine within us as men, and that there is something noble about that pursuit.

Whether that's emotional mastery, if you want to put it that way, creative expression, artistic expression. I remember reading, what are they called? The movie 300, the Spartans. Yeah, Zack Snyder. The Spartans, yeah. The Spartans, there we go. I remember reading that the Spartans had a practice. I can't remember what it was called. It was like gogi or something like that. Agogay, yeah. Well, they call it the agogay in the movie. Yeah, the agogay, yeah. But part of it was that they would take the boys for training, but...

But part of the training was that they had not just to learn how to use a sword and a shield, but they had to learn how to write poetry and sing and dance. And so here's some of the most feared warriors on the planet, and they're being taught how to dance, how to write poetry. And I remember reading that and thinking, what an interesting approach to developing men that we would...

in today's culture, that that would sort of be seen as ridiculous or pointless. So what's your take on that? If we can just touch on this part of developing the feminine within and the use case for that, both for the hero and maybe specifically for modern men who might be disconnected from it. And then I do want to talk about how do we actually develop the hero within us because that's clearly lacking. Yeah, no, that's a great insight.

insight and the Greeks called education they called well they called let's call it education how you would raise your sons properly okay you're going to teach him to throw a spear and all this stuff to throw the discus and work out the gymnasium but you're also going to teach him music music

But it is music, it's like play the lyre and dance. But it's the art of the muses really, who are the daughters of Zeus and memory. They're the daughters of memory and some other god. But poetry, history, art, music, dancing, all of these are tools of persuasion. They're tools to persuade not just other people but yourself.

to order yourself in a certain way to live in a certain kind of harmony to like the right music a warrior band of hundreds of men that can dance together in a coordinated fashion can also lock shields in a coordinated fashion and they can coordinate on a kind of magical level and spartans and all the ancient greeks they know this like it is incredibly terrifying to see a

a whole lot of heavily armed, very muscle, muscly men pointing their shields at you moving in a kind of unified coordinated fashion. And that requires these, these arts that I think that we might code like softer today, especially because, you know, since, since we've generally robbed men of the strong, uh,

the more obviously toxic versions of masculinity, then I think that those arts often do end up kind of, they don't reach their potential in us. We don't have a lot of great poets today because we don't have a lot of great men. But if we had great men again, we could have great poets.

for example, and dance could be something manly again, even though, I don't know, maybe it is in some niches. But I think you develop it in some sense by covering your baseline of, yes, you need to be working out, you need to be challenging yourself physically, you

You need to be taking risks and entering into difficult conversations. You need to stand up for yourself, take a few punches, go wrestle, go on adventure trips. But also, while you're doing that, take the time to read some of the grand poets of the past. Take the time to appreciate some

sort of like noble musical composition or good art you know like that's all very manly in context and it gives you a kind of power of persuasion and not just persuading other men but persuading women too right like it gives you a power of connection it's like that um

I forget the name of it. There was this documentary made about these chimpanzee bands, and I think it was in Africa. And one of the things that they observe is the boss chimpanzee, the super number one alpha, he's not the strongest, the biggest, strongest chimp.

That chimp starts to piss off the other chimps and they band up against him and like drive him away or kill him. It's the chimp who is strong, but also knows how to build coalitions, uses those power of persuasion. So this is really deeply rooted in our nature, this power of like mastering. And he's, of course, he's the chimp that gets the most girls, right? Like,

These things go hand in hand, I think. So that's one way to develop them by reading and just exposing yourself to culture more and seeing that as part of your manly development, as a form of training to go alongside those other forms of training that you practice. So important. I mean, he's since passed away, but I had Franz DeWall on the show and he was basically, besides Jane Goodall, one of the most preeminent primate psychologists. Yeah. Primate researchers. Yeah.

Yeah. Primate researchers on the planet. Yeah. And he was, we were talking about gender differences in primates on the show, but he was one of the people that talked about how it's his work that was misrepresented when talking about alpha males within primates because he was one of the first researchers to identify that the male chimps

who use excessive forces of aggression and sort of over-index on that aggressive trait that's normally attributed to masculinity, they can use fear for a period of time, but oftentimes their reign is shorter and they have less power

female partners because everyone's afraid and eventually they just get overthrown because the rest of the society doesn't want to live with that. And it's actually the more, the somewhat more agreeable chimp that knows how to, how to repair social bonds, which was really fascinating between, you know, some of the, some of the other men, like males in the hierarchy or, you know, between the teenagers that are coming up and causing problems and the women, you know, the, the female chimps,

And that was so fascinating to me. It's like, oh yeah, like that's our culture and our society. So, okay, but I want to return to this notion of the death of the hero. How do you see that playing out within our culture? And is there anything from ancient times that we can take about the sort of restorative process that might need to happen for the hero? Yeah, so just kind of to return to the thread that we were on earlier, you know, I didn't have the

role models. I felt like I felt the sense of purposelessness that I felt the lack of a sense of I need to become something really made me sort of sad and depressed. And like, I just didn't work that hard. I didn't find life that inspiring. I didn't feel confidence. Like I feel like I could have had all those things if I had sort of known what to strive for and had

just a better model of that. And I think that this is really what, what heroes do and having a healthy culture of heroes does for, for young men, especially who really need to look to these, you know, women, I think want relationships,

role models that are close to them that can model certain kinds of behaviors or skills or ways of dealing with difficult people and inner strength. They need their own versions of heroes too, don't get me wrong. But I think men in particular look as high as they can typically. And they love the war heroes. They love the basketball stars. And we just tend to look to the pinnacle of what we can find. And if we don't find real embodied heroes celebrated unironically,

To take this to the philosophers, Aristotle has this concept that he discusses in one of his treatises called zeal. The Greek word is zealos, and it's where we get the word zeal in English. And zeal or zealos, sometimes it's translated as emulation in this particular passage of Aristotle, but it is basically...

A pain, says Aristotle, felt when a man sees present among others who are like him by nature, things good and honorable, which he is capable of attaining himself. And so it is that feeling of, it's kind of related to this word zeo to boil. So it's like steamy feeling you probably feel in your midriff that when you see somebody doing something great and it makes you want to imitate, emulate, match that in yourself.

The pain is because you don't have it and you're like, ah, I could do that, you know, or I could, I want to do something like that. And I think that's broadly what heroes give a society and what heroes give an individual is the sense of like a North star of, ah, I'm trying to be that. And you'll need great ones, you know, the kind of paradigmatic, everybody's hero heroes, the George Washington's and Alexander Hamilton's and maybe Elon Musk's for a lot of people. But you also need,

specific mentor figures that serve that in a more granular way for your specific path of life in a discipline that you choose probably. You need a whole cloud of them. You need a lot. It's not just one. You'll focus on a few. But that's the role that I think Homer plays for the Greeks. I think it's also the role that Plutarch has played, the biographer for not just the Greeks and the Romans, but for much of Western history like the US founders.

So it's important that we recover this stuff. Yeah, I was going to say, as you were describing a lot of that, I couldn't help but sort of think like, oh, that's missing from our modern society. That's missing for men. That's missing for men. You know, like the role models that are out of reach,

are largely missing, the role models that are more present within our lives are largely missing. And even to the degree of within the family system, right? I mean, one in four kids in the US is gonna grow up without a father in the house. And so just something as simple, maybe not simple, but as important and foundational as having a father around that maybe is a role model for better or for worse,

He's there. And so I think we've kind of done young boys and men a disservice by stripping these elements out of culture and society. What's interesting, just to pull on this a little bit more, is that from an archetypal standpoint, moving through the hero is a requirement to morph into or alchemize into a king. Yeah.

And so in order to become a king, and I think I was thinking about what a good example of this is, and I can't pull from the ancient Greeks like you can, so I'll pull from Lord of the Rings. Great. Love it too. A little bit more modern. But Aragon is a perfect example of this. He's the sort of wandering, self-focused...

hero who is largely unknown, living life on his own terms, sort of unapologetic, I'm living for me.

discarded from the community and the culture, right? He's sort of hidden away. But he comes from a lineage of kings, but his family is gone. And it's not until he finds a sort of greater mission that he's called into that he reluctantly over time, right, through the books, through the movies, if you haven't read the books, not you, but whoever, finds his way into

into the kingdom of kinghood, right? And it's through a whole bunch of steps and a whole bunch of experiences that he has to go through, through the books that leads him to that, where he does have to die as the hero. He does have to die as the hero and sort of don the robes of the king

And so, you know, I think it's interesting because it's hard to, there's almost no way around it, right? Like there's no producing Kings without a hero, but the hero is definitely a villain in the story of modern culture. It's sort of, I think it's like a sort of scene is like acting and behaving hero like, um,

One, I think we've strip-minded down into this one-dimensional character. Modern heroes within movies, within culture, the way that we talk about them, they're just these one-dimensional things. And I think about somebody like, and I even hate giving his name airtime, but like Andrew Tate, who is a hero to a lot of young guys. It's like, well, he's a very one-dimensional character.

He's never talking about poetry or beautiful music or the beauty of life and existence. Those things just don't happen. Those things aren't being portrayed. He over-indexes on this very one-dimensional side of the hero that resonates with a lot of men because it's so lacking in our culture and society.

So I'll let you weigh in on everything that I just said. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. And it's like Mark Andreessen has been talking lately about how Hollywood doesn't allow us to have heroes, only anti-heroes. Like the only kind of admirable men you can have have to be like Tony Soprano or the guy from Breaking Bad. It's like there's something likable and admirable about them. But remember, they're bad guys. Remember, let's not forget they're criminals or bad guys.

And when you have that kind of an aesthetic landscape, then young men are desperate for somebody to look up to. And so Andrew Tate comes in to fill this void for them. And this is kind of what you get if you don't take the concept seriously and take the paradigm seriously and take the need seriously. We could have much more interesting heroes. I mean, he's done good things for people, I'm sure. But there's...

There's a lot more nuance. He's certainly not the hero for every young man. There's a lot missing there, as you say. I think if you don't offer it to them in great movies and stories, they're going to get it somewhere. They might as well get the best version of it.

Let's go to, because I could go down this rabbit hole all day long, but I want to really leverage your expertise and your insight. And so let's go to Plutarch and tell me a little bit about who he was and why you

you are maybe so dedicated to bringing some of his wisdom more into the front and center of our collective consciousness right now? - Well, I wanna start with a quick example that I thought of when you were talking about Aragorn and this necessity to go through

the warrior phase on your way to the king phase. So one of the figures that I covered on my podcast, who's a hero from Plutarch's Lives, that I'll get to in a sec, was this King Pyrrhus, who was a Greek king and nephew or cousin of Alexander the Great.

And he's an incredibly inspiring figure in his youth. He kind of rises from, you know, having a hit on his head as a teenager and he's exiled from his throne and he wins it back through craft and intelligence and grit and toughness. And he becomes, I call it,

in the first episode, the rise of a warrior king. But he doesn't ever really rise out of that warrior phase to become like a true king. And I think that's one of the tragedies about him for Plutarch. He's, so Pyrrhus is the first man to bring war elephants to Italy.

against the Romans. He fights the Romans in these famous, horrifically bloody battles that he wins technically, but they're so costly that if he keeps fighting battles like this, he'll lose the war. And this is where we get the word Pyrrhic victories from King Pyrrhus, who is, you know, an amazing warrior and an admirable man in a lot of ways. But like,

just couldn't stop picking fights and wars because he loved war. And that was what, that was the thing that he was good at. And he never really, like he had the potential to build a great, powerful, peaceful kingdom. But, you know, as he's getting into his late forties and fifties, he's still like fighting in stupid wars and it ends up costing him his life and his son.

So Plutarch is this figure, this ancient philosopher that is our main source for a guy like King Pyrrhus. He is a rough contemporary of Seneca, the famous Stoics like Seneca and Epictetus. He's a little earlier than Marcus Aurelius. His grandson actually ends up being a tutor of Marcus Aurelius. So he's a Greek living under the Roman Empire, and he's a philosopher by mission and training.

He's also a local politician and he is a priest of Delphi. So he's a very busy guy, but he has a clientele of the upper classes of Roman Greece. He's got students or clients. I kind of think of philosophers as therapists in a way, or it was like kind of self-help gurus.

But, you know, friends and clients who are Roman aristocrats, he's got friends and clients who are Greeks, Greek client kings of the Roman Empire, this guy Philopappos of Syria, who's got a monument to him that's still standing today in Athens today. You know, and so he writes all these moral treatises on how to, you know, how to tell a friend from a flatterer.

how to praise oneself without giving offense, on moral virtue. There's all these great essays that he writes. But his classic work, his contribution to mankind, I think the greatest thing that he did was he wrote this collection of biographies, the Parallel Lives, which is 48 or so lives of Greeks and Romans. He pairs them together, two individuals together to compare them, put them in parallel. They're concise, they're cinematic,

their, you know, the greatest quotes, greatest moments. And they give you a snapshot of character of who these men were, what were their virtues and what were their vices? What were their supreme excellences and where did they have weaknesses and what brought them down often?

And, you know, they're bite-sized, you know, 30 to 60, maximum 90 pages, 48 of them again. And he wrote them with this explicit mission of evaluating these characters so that while we feel the zeal that Aristotle talks about, we can also learn from their mistakes. We can learn from their successes. Like, we can suffer with them and we can scheme with them. And that's

That was how he felt, I think very wisely, he's drawing on Plato and Aristotle there, very wisely saw that narrative is a particularly powerful way of transferring moral wisdom that you can get so much by osmosis, if you will, because of this process of zeal. Because that's the way that humans are programmed to learn how to be, especially men need these stories, I think.

Because, well, as Nietzsche puts it, Nietzsche was a great admirer of Plutarch. Plutarch's figures, or in general, great men of history, expand your concept of what it is to be a man. And that's what we need to expand our concept of what it means to be ourselves, I think. So I've started this podcast a few years ago called The Cost of Glory that is really based on

Plutarch's biographies. I'm retelling the biographies and summarizing some of his moral essays, but I think he was really onto something. He was the most popular ancient writer of the entire 18th century in the American colonies, a century that was obsessed with antiquity. He's more popular than Plato or Caesar or Homer, second only to the Bible. He's like a

Number one, number five, top most likely books to be on your shelf in the American colonies. So he used to be extremely popular and he kind of fell out of fashion in the late 19th, early 20th century. But I think he was onto something and I'm trying to kind of bring it back. People have brought back the Stoics already and I think that's great. Plutarch's not quite a Stoic. There's a lot of overlap, but I think he's due to have his moment.

One of the things from my understanding that he really focused on, talked about, taught, et cetera, how we want to frame that is the role of an individual's character.

And maybe I'm misinterpreting it, but there's something innate within our character that we need to attune to for our destiny, our legacy, however we want to frame that. So can you maybe speak to that? Because I find that in a lot of the work that I do, half the battle is helping men to shift away from a kind of self-loathing of their innate character.

You know, that there's this animosity towards, you know, this is who I am and I can't effing stand it, you know, and I wish I could just kill this part of me off versus learning to be in relationship with the elements of our character that we might not know how to deal with and that there's merit in being able to

relate to the elements of ourselves that we struggle with. So can you maybe just speak to the role of character? Yeah, I think Plutarch is very sensitive to this. He talks about this hero Lysander that I profiled, who was the guy who defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War.

And he talks about how Lysander was a melancholic figure. This goes to the ancient humorous theory. It doesn't mean he was a sad guy or he was always depressed, but they believed in various humors that kind of had fixed...

effects on your character. A melancholic person tends to be calmer or crafty, disciplined, and maybe mercurial, a little bit hard to pin down. Aristotle apparently had thoughts on the melancholic character. In other words, he has a sense that people do have their nature that they're born with, and that there are some things that you're destined to be like. Human personality is not infinitely malleable as

as much as a sufferer of ADD, I wish it was. But he also believes very strongly in something Aristotle talks about a lot, is the power of habituation, that virtue is above all something that you develop through habit, that is about a supervenient quality or an aggregate of the choices that you make. And these choices have a kind of momentary

momentum that shapes you in an ultimately permanent fashion, that you do have a whole lot of choice in the way that you shape yourself. But I think that perspective of, you know, some people are kind of built a certain way. There's always an excellence is what Aristotle was a there is you have a kind of nature, if you will, that is what you're born with, but you have another nature in another sense of like, the thing that you have the potential to grow into the full fulfillment of your nature.

which is a product of what he would say is like, he would call it philosophy, self-cultivation through good habits, through, you know, reading things for 15 minutes in the morning and journaling, through going out and taking risks and challenges and like through action. Character is ultimately something that you can only see in action for Aristotle and Plutarch both. So it's a combination of like personal cultivation and just like the kind of

that you throw yourself into, that you need to first understand your strengths and weaknesses that are there by nature, but not be so convinced that you can't change them unless you have really strong evidence to prove

And if you can't, then that's just who you are. I think we all have to accept that I'm not gonna be a great basketball player or a brilliant mathematician. I never could have been, right? But I can be a great something else too. And the great thing about studying a lot of biographies, having a cloud of heroes like we talked about, is it gives you a lot of options. It gives you a whole lot of tools because Lysander is the right tool for one guy. King Pyrrhus might even be the right tool for one guy.

But for another guy, it's going to be the orator Cicero or Sertorius, the greatest Roman rebel, Aristides the just. And I think we need a kind of really nuanced palette of mentors and heroes to help understand who we are and then what's our unique path in life. So who are some other heroes that you think embody a quality that modern men could not

use or could benefit from learning about? Because I think you just listed off a bunch of heroes and I'm like, I don't really know any of those guys. So maybe some of the listeners do, maybe missed out on Greek history.

But yeah, who are some heroes that maybe embody some qualities that modern men could benefit from learning? Well, here's a cool example. Here's a guy, okay, I was a professional classicist, right? Like I taught ancient history for a few years, ancient philosophy, the universities. Towards when I was leaving academia a couple of years ago, I was a professor at the University of New York.

I decided that I needed to read all of Plutarch's lives. So it's not like I've been studying Plutarch in depth for 20 years, right? But I knew that I was sick of academia, leaving my tenure track job and taking this big risk. So I started reading these biographies of Plutarch. And as I'm working my way through, I come upon a couple of guys, one guy in particular, that I felt like...

in my 15 years of studying classics professionally, I'd never heard of this guy. Why is this guy in Plutarch's 48 biographies? Why couldn't he pick Leonidas of Sparta? That's not a biography. He has to pick this guy, Eumenes of Cardia. Who the hell is Eumenes of Cardia? I guess I'll have to read it because I just want to read all of them. I start working my way through this biography and my eyes just

bug out and my jaw drops. I'm like, holy, this guy is unbelievable. Eumenes of Cardia, in a lot of ways, was one of the guys that inspired me to start this podcast because I'm halfway through Plutarch's biographies maybe. I'm like, well, if even the most obscure ones are this impressive. All right. Anyway, so who is Eumenes of Cardia? He is Alexander the Great's secretary.

So, Alexander's a Macedonian, they're kind of Greeks, they're kind of not. Alexander conquers the Persian Empire, this long-standing rival of the Greeks to the east. And while he is doing this, his dad actually, his dad Philip II, picks up this kid, Eumenes of Cardia, this 18-year-old kid. He's visiting one of these obscure backwaters in northern Greece that nobody's heard of even in his day.

and he's watching a wrestling match. And Eumenes is there wrestling on this day that Philip of Macedon, this great king, happens to be visiting. He sees his kid wrestling. He's like, huh, that's a good wrestler right there. And I imagine his dad leans over and he's like, you know, he can write too, just in case you need a secretary. And so Philip picks up this guy, Eumenes, into his entourage.

And basically has him as a ghostwriter. He writes letters for the king of Macedonia. When Philip dies, he's doing this for Alexander. He's keeping the papers. He's doing accounting. He's a numbers guy. And he's also working his way into the trust of the royal family of Macedonia. He gets to know Alexander very well. They're the same age. They both study under the philosopher Aristotle, who's Alexander's tutor, right?

Eumenes befriends Alexander's mom, Olympias, which is the best evidence you could possibly want of this guy was really good with people because she was a difficult person, an incredibly difficult person to get along with. And so he befriends her, he becomes her most trusted, et cetera, et cetera. When Alexander dies, he's 33, Eumenes turns out he's been paying attention

as the campaigns have been going on. He's been there in a lot of these battles watching, and he's picked up the art of war without anybody realizing it. And so because he's not Macedonian, he's actually an outsider, which I think is really interesting. So he's a Greek. There's no chance that the Macedonian royal army would ever follow a Greek permanently. They're not going to make this guy king permanently.

So that means when Alexander dies, because he dies without designating a successor,

Eumenes is not a threat to a lot of these guys who are basically a war breaks out very quickly after Alexander dies. They're wars of succession. They're trying to decide who will rule this empire. They eventually break it up. It's a terrible story. But Eumenes is like the best guy in the whole mix. And they give him this position of a governor in Cappadocia or something in Asia. And they give him a little bit of money and a few troops. And he turns around and...

essentially becomes a warlord, as it were. He ends up fighting on behalf of the son of Alexander, who's like three, and there's a regent who's not a very honest guy, kind of like the stereotypical version of a bad alpha male. He rules by fear, this guy Perdiccas. But Perdiccas trusts Eumenes, and he's trying to fight to keep the empire together,

so that he can pass it on eventually maybe to Alexander's infant son. And this is what Olympias wants. And Eumenes is kind of fighting for this legitimate cause. We need to be loyal to the honor, the memory of Alexander the Great, our best friend, the guy who made this all happen. And these other guys like Antigonus and Ptolemy and Seleucus, they go on and they found empires after this. But

They're kind of nihilistic. They're out to just... They don't really believe in this whole loyalty to the dead king thing. They're just trying to kind of get their piece of the pie and be done with it and become dynasts in Egypt or Syria or whatever the case may be. But Eumenes is like...

the man standing in their way. He leads the royal armies, he outsmarts them, outwits them, out-negotiates them. There's so many great scenes. There's one scene where he is sieged in this fort on top of a hill by Antigonus, who's kind of his old friend, frenemy. And he's got 600 guys up on top of this hill in this tiny fort the size of a soccer field.

Their horses are in there. They're miserable. They're not getting any exercise. They're going stir crazy. They don't have a lot of food. Eumenes comes down to negotiate with Antigonus. They have an exchange of prisoners. Antigonus is like, Eumenes, I've got you surrounded with 10,000 men. I've got another 30,000 over the hill over there. What do you say? Shall we have you surrender and stop this game?

And Eumenes says, "Well, Antigonus, yeah, well, as long as you can restore me to my legitimate governorship and all of my possessions and all of my men, we have a deal." And Antigonus is like, "Eumenes, come on. Considering the circumstances, shouldn't you be addressing me as a superior?" Eumenes says, "Well, as long as I have my sword, I consider no man my superior." He turns around and he walks back up into the fort.

It's like, what is this guy doing? He's just incredibly courageous.

And turns out, within a few months, the political situation changes and Eumenes is able to kind of worm out of there. And within a few more months, he's at the head of a 40,000 strong army commanding, you know, forces against Antigonus. Just the Odyssean craft of this guy. He's a persuader. He's a, you know, he's spent his career doing these things that we've been talking about. The music, if you will, you know, he studied as Homer. He's a storyteller. He's

He's charming. And he always plays this card of, hey, I'm just trying to do the right thing. I'm trying to be loyal to the memory of Alexander. I'm not trying to be king. I'm just trying to do what Alexander would have wanted us to do. Because he's able to unite himself with loyalty to that cause, he ends up just having this amazing career that I don't want to spoil it, but it kind of ends in tragedy.

Which if you know anything about history, you know that the story of Alexander's you know The Succession's it's kind of a tragic story But but I think it's all the more I think some of the best stories and most inspiring stories are these ones that in tragedy that at the end of the day you look at that guy's life and he died fighting he went out with the bang and You got to say it was worth it. Like I'm glad that he died out fighting like I it's I think so often when people have a tragic end and

This kind of goes back to that Homer point. We think, "Oh, what could he have done differently?" I think there are things that you can often point to, "Yeah, he could have done differently this or that." But often the fact that you died for a cause that really was good and meaningful and you were willing to sacrifice for it is even more inspiring to me. So that's one of 48 figures that I find all to be almost equally amazing and just draw a drop droppingly inspiring.

It sounds like there's a connection to your own values, virtues, beliefs in a way that is very strong. I'm just trying to extract some of the lessons within that story, which is wild. The way you described it, I definitely want to go read it now. And it sounds like he was somebody that cast a broad net, meanwhile was fishing quite deep within himself.

And I think that attribute alone seems to be lost quite a bit within our modern culture, specifically within men. So that's interesting. And then I think living for a greater cause, that does seem to be something that's... I think the internet has just destroyed our ability to live for a greater cause that isn't something that we've been ideologically captured by.

Like I always say to men, there's merit in taking some of your ideas of who you think you are and how you think the world works

and going out into nature for five, six days by yourself to really chew on them. Like, are they true? You know, are they really true? Can you still mend them versus just finding yourself in echo chamber after echo chamber after echo chamber of having that belief reinforced externally? Can you grapple with that perspective internally on your own?

And then, you know, if you really come to a conclusion that that belief or that value is something that you fundamentally believe to be beneficial for not only yourself, but community, humanity, men, women alike, then are you willing to enter back into the fold and live in such a way where that's at the forefront of your decisions and your character? Because that is hard.

in our society. It sounds like that story kind of embodies some of that. Are there any other pieces to his life that you want to just emphasize for the listener that maybe was captured by a story and was like, oh, this is interesting? Yeah, I think that he's living in this time of chaos because when Alexander dies, it's like instant chaos, gigantic empire. Nobody knows who's supposed to rule. Okay, I don't have to paint it further. It's a chaotic situation and it's a lawless situation in a lot of ways.

And he is really scrupulous about, he has a strong sense of justice, which I think is really important in, in particularly in situations where like lawlessness is on the rise. Like people look to who they can trust and people look to those who are honest, who are going to resolve a dispute. Like there's a, well,

Well, this is kind of on that note. There's an instance where he loses a battle to Antigonus and he has to flee and he kind of takes Antigonus, his opponent, on this circuitous route and then he cuts across a mountain pass and goes back to the battlefield to bury the dead that he had to leave there in a rush. And taking a considerable risk because he's leaving himself exposed for

for a while and he's got this enemy hot on his tail. But, you know, he knew that burying those men

was key for the morale of the army because like that could have been me right these people died so that I could live you know what are they going to do when I die and emphasizing that you're the kind of person that that will take care of of the dead and even at great personal and military risk very significant and I think it goes to show why people actually follow this guy and

There's an instance where he requisitions, so there's a civil war going on and he's on one side and other people are on other side. There's probably three sides. And so he goes to this royal stables that is controlled by his enemies and he captures it and he takes a bunch of horses. And then he fills out a very detailed expense report and submits it and sends it to his enemies. Like, here's how many horses I took and here's how much they cost. Yeah.

And then Antipater, the guy's like, well, I suppose I should start sending him expense reports, huh? But it just goes to show it's funny and it's crafty, but he's also making a point like, hey, I'm the legitimate representative of the kings and I'm acting like it, right? You need to harness every bit of legitimacy and honor and justice that you can and

in a chaotic situation like that. And, you know, there's so many places in business where the rules are not clear. And if, um, if you get this reputation of saying, well, what, what can we get away with? You know, then people are going to want to know what they can get away with at your expense too. Right. So I think he shows the universality of like honor and, and justice in a really powerful way. So good, man. There's so many, so many beautiful lessons in that.

Fortunately, we need to wrap up for today. I would love to have you back on to talk about more of these stories and maybe dig into two or three stories because what we just got into in the last 20 minutes was... I really enjoyed that. That was phenomenal. And I think there's so many lessons that we can pull. And I like that notion of...

Just to sort of wrap this up, maybe what we can end with is the power of narrative. I've talked about this on the show before, but Yuval Harari, who wrote Homo Deus and Sapiens, in Homo Deus he talked about how the wars of the immediate future are going to be fought in intersubjective reality, in the reality of narrative. And that's always stuck with me, and I've really tried to hold on to it because I see it everywhere.

In the West, we're not in a hot war. We're in a war intersubjectively, in a war from a narrative front. And there's different narratives constantly trying to capture us because narratives are extremely powerful. And it's almost like the degree to which people have forgotten how powerful narrative and stories are, the easier it is to capture people through narrative and storytelling.

because they don't see it as something that can be hostile and weaponized. But it also, not just hostile and weaponized, can be this incredibly powerful tool for expanding our individual and collective consciousness in a way that creates cohesion.

So, I would love for you to, I mean, I don't even know if I have a question there outside of, I know that was more of a statement, but maybe just twofold. If you want to just expand on the power of narrative, if you want to give any sort of personal adage in terms of how that's shifted for you and how people can leverage narrative.

I think the other thing is that oftentimes it's like, okay, sure, I'll read more myth. Sure, I'll read more about the Greek spirit. What do I do with that? Is it just supposed to work its way into my unconscious psyche? I think we've become so do these five things to fix your life that to read a broader story like the one that you just told,

and get something personally from it can seem ambiguous and sort of vague. So I'd love for you to just maybe unpack that a little bit before we wrap. Yeah, it's an art of not just of storytelling, but of drawing lessons from stories. I think that we often see the study of history or biography as a kind of optional leisure activity that's entertaining, if that's your cup of tea. But part of what it gives you is

is ability to appreciate narratives and stories at large scale. And depending on how deep you go, if you read several biographies about the same figure, you start to see how differently you can tell the story depending on your presuppositions.

you know, I deal with this a lot, putting these biographies together. But, you know, I think that Plutarch was right, that biography is a really powerful self-development tool. And, you know, I try to learn from the best storyteller that I can, well, other storytellers, but Plutarch is one of the best, you know, in my own show, I try to

Not change too much but provide more context so that you can appreciate the story of a guy like you minis or purists but part of what what I think you get from studying biographies not just the sense of personal development but a sensitivity to the way that narratives shape you both for the for better and for worse and the ability to detach yourself from that narrative and

I do have a, on the side, I'm building this business on the classic art of oratory, which is kind of the classic art of statesmanship, the art of persuasion, which was a very, it was basically the backbone of the ancient education system and widely practiced until say the mid 19th century. So if you want to know more about that, I do have a little email course that I've started putting out. I don't have anything to sell quite yet.

quite yet. Where can people go? If people want to check that out and just learn from you, where can they go? Yeah, costofglory.com is my website. And if you go to costofglory.com slash gift, you can find the authoritative speaker's guide, which tells you a little bit about how the ancient order of persuasion works and how one of my real missions is to bring back the sense that history is a practical discipline, particularly in that it will teach you

both how to find and emulate and activate emulation of great figures of the past, and how to master narrative and to tell your own stories, hopefully one day, which is just an important tool. It's the art of Odysseus, it's the art of Eumenes, it's the art of Plutarch, and so many of the greats. I've been doing this series on my show about Julius Caesar and his Gallic War campaign, and I realized this was Caesar's superpower. He's a great commander.

He has two superpowers at least. One of them is leading armies. The other one is telling stories about people. He was an incredible writer. He was able to tell his own story very effectively. He's able to tell stories about other people very effectively, portray them in just the right way.

but it would bring out that they're great because they're his friends or that they're, they're bad because they're his enemies. Um, so it's, I think we have this sense today that like there are humanities people and then they're like math and science people, but everybody, every man needs to know something about storytelling and about at least about how it's done, how it's being done to you. Right. Um, to, to be free from that. If, um,

if you need to. So true. What a great way to put it, how it's being done and how it's being done to you. All right, we'll have the links to your website, Cost of Glory, name by the way. Love the branding on that. Thanks. And we'd love to have you back on the show, talk about oration.

talk about the power of that and maybe what men can do to develop that part of themselves. And then maybe talk about some other stories of specific individuals that maybe exemplify some of the things that we as modern men are lacking in and trying to develop and sort of chew on ourselves. So

for everyone that's out there if you enjoyed this episode don't forget to man it forward share it with somebody in your life that you know will enjoy it maybe it's one of those episodes that you listen to with a friend and you have a bit of dialogue around because there are some some really great stories in here so until next week conor beaton signing off

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