Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

Hey, it's Ryan. What I wanted to do in addition to telling you the story of how the book came together giving you a couple different reads of it for the audiobook.

I wanted it to really explain sort of behind the scenes process with with Vic Ujas, my wonderful collaborator on the art, which obviously listening to the audiobook, you would not have seen, but I do hope you check out the physical version of the book because I think it itself is a work of art.

I'm so proud of it. Vic was an amazing collaborator to work with. He does sort of really funny stuff and really serious illustrations. He's appeared in every major publication you can think of.

You may have seen some of his best work in Rolling Stone. Among the books he's also illustrated is D is for democracy, a citizens alphabet, G is for gladiator, and R is for rhyme.

He lives with his wife in the New York Berkshires. Vic is an award-winning illustrator, a great guy, and you can see really understood deeply the material we were dealing with here in Marcus Relays.

I think you'll enjoy this discussion between two collaborators with a lot of respect for each other and how this book came together and what the stout characters meant to us and some of the decisions that went into the book that you've just listened to.

Here is me talking with Vic Ujas hope you enjoy it.

Well, I'm so happy it exists. It's time people are listening to this. It will be well into a year of the process, but it feels amazing to me to sort of hold.

I don't have the finished finish book in my hands, but I have been the final the final page proofs and it feels incredible to me that the thing that was just an idea in my head is now a real book and you helped make that possible. I appreciate it so much.

My pleasure. It was an absolutely fascinating process and I learned so much during it and also from my standpoint, there was it was such great fun to do and I it was one of those blessed experiences in an illustrator's life.

The idea of it being somewhat blessed struck me in that afterwards you and I guess maybe I should have done more of my research, but you came so highly recommended by by our mutual friend Sean coin that and I saw your drawings on your sign I was like this guy can do it.

But what was incredible to me was you sent me to like like last month you sent me two children's books that you've done about ancient Rome. I didn't even know you did that what are the chances that you'd already you'd already studied this exact era and practice.

Yeah, well that was a year ago I did those one was on actually Greek mythology. Z is for Zeus it was for sleeping bear press and the other one was G is for gladiator about the Romans also for sleeping bear press and in with both of those books.

I did an awful lot of research I think one of the great pleasures of being an illustrator and doing a book like this is is the research time that I get to put in I'd say 40% of the book is is basically just looking up and reading and finding reference and just learning more.

I was curious about that so like when you like let's say you set out to draw someone like Marcus really as a young boy where and I know I gave you some some pictures of my kid as a as a loose inspiration but like when when you go to like I want to get the essence of someone who who's you know I'm trying to depict on the page what do you look for.

I would think that most important for me is is getting that as much factual reference as I can before I start interpreting the factual reference now of course we have the statues of Marcus are really us.

I think we even have a painting or two but I do know that we have statues and and actually there I found something on Google and God bless Google for for all this access to information.

I found reference one sculpting of him attributed to him as a young man a young boy right so I said okay good so now I can jump back and forth.

As it turns out I found his face very interesting and aged it appropriately to the older Marcus are really as statues and from that point it was a matter of just staying staying faithful to the sketches the drawings that I had created so that we didn't veer off too far I think during the process of of sending sketches sketches back and forth with you.

...