In this episode of the Triple Option Podcast, Michael DiMatteo turns his attention to one of life’s quietest and most enduring mysteries — friendship.

Why do some friendships last a lifetime, while others fade into memory?

Why does it hurt so much to be forgotten?

And what does it really mean to be known by another person?

Through literature, history, and lived experience, The Ties That Hold explores the many faces of friendship — its birth in Renaissance humanism, its moral depth in Chinese and African philosophy, its endurance in poetry and film, and its fragile persistence in our modern, transient lives.

From Aristotle and Montaigne to Erasmus, Luther, and Pico della Mirandola, the episode begins in Europe’s age of rediscovery, when friendship was seen as the mirror of virtue.

But it soon widens its gaze:

In China, Confucius taught that friendship was moral companionship — a path toward self-cultivation.

In Africa, the wisdom of Ubuntu declared, “I am because we are.”

In Latin America, José Martí and Gabriela Mistral found in friendship a language of solidarity and resistance — love strong enough to outlive exile.

Between these philosophies, a single truth emerges: friendship is not sentimentality but shared humanity — the recognition of ourselves in another soul.

The conversation then moves into film, as Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me reminds us that some of life’s deepest friendships begin in youth, before we have words for loyalty, courage, or loss.

As DiMatteo reflects, friendship evolves — from the laughter of youth to the quiet understanding of adulthood, from presence to memory.

Drawing on John Keats, C.S. Lewis, Rainer Maria Rilke, and even an ancient poem by Li Bai, this episode reminds us that the ties that bind us are both fragile and eternal.

Some friends disappear; others reappear decades later as if no time has passed.

Some teach us how to hold on; others, how to let go with grace.

The Ties That Hold is a meditation for anyone who has ever lost a friend, found one again, or wondered why the ache of connection endures long after the laughter fades.

“Maybe friendship is like music,” DiMatteo says. “Most songs fade, but a few stay with us forever.”

Every generation celebrates its rebels. They fill our pages, our art, and our imaginations—men and women who stand alone against the world and call it courage. But beneath the romance of rebellion lies a haunting question: When does defiance serve truth, and when does it become its own kind of tyranny?

In this episode of The Triple Option Podcast, author and historian Michael DiMatteo explores the timeless allure—and the danger—of the noble rebel. Drawing on literature, history, and moral philosophy, he traces the figure of the rebel from myth to modernity: from Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, to Oliver Cromwell and John Milton, whose seventeenth-century English revolution tried to purify a nation and instead created a new tyranny.

The episode moves through the Romantic era, where poets such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Victor Hugo turned rebellion into beauty, and into the nineteenth century with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, where intellectual defiance collapses into despair. Finally, DiMatteo considers Albert Camus’s warning in The Rebel: that rebellion, without conscience, descends into nihilism.

At its heart, The Myth of the Noble Rebel asks what truly separates the righteous dissenter from the self-appointed savior. The answer, DiMatteo suggests, lies not in how loudly we protest but in what we serve. The noble rebel serves truth and conscience; the false rebel serves only his reflection.

Measured, reflective, and steeped in history and literature, this episode examines the line between conviction and obsession—the fine edge between moral courage and hubris.

Suggested Reading:

• John Milton — Paradise Lost

• Albert Camus — The Rebel

• Fyodor Dostoevsky — The Brothers Karamazov

• Percy Bysshe Shelley — Prometheus Unbound

• Victor Hugo — Les Misérables

• Edmund Burke — Reflections on the Revolution in France

Episode 11 – On the Search for Truth

“What is truth?” Pilate’s question to Jesus still lingers. In this episode of the T.O.P. Podcast, we follow humanity’s search for truth across time and cultures — from Socrates in Athens to Augustine in North Africa, from Confucius and Laozi in China to Solzhenitsyn in the gulag.

The ancients believed truth was worth dying for. Socrates declared, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Plato warned that most of us mistake shadows for reality. In Egypt, truth was personified as Ma’at, the goddess of balance. In India, the Upanishads taught: “Truth alone triumphs, not falsehood.” The Stoics — Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca — saw truth in integrity, freedom of the mind, and living in harmony with nature.

Faith tied truth to the divine. Augustine confessed, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Aquinas reconciled faith with reason. Al-Ghazali insisted only God grants ultimate truth, while Averroes defended philosophy as its ally. Confucius grounded truth in ethics; Laozi reminded us, “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.”

The Renaissance and Enlightenment put truth in human hands. Petrarch called for a return to the sources. Galileo risked trial to defend the cosmos. Locke claimed the mind is a blank slate. Voltaire warned that “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Kant urged: “Dare to know.”

But history shows truth is costly. Socrates drank hemlock. Jan Hus was burned. Solzhenitsyn endured exile for writing what others denied.

And today? We live in an age of “my truth” — interpretations dressed up as reality. The French Revolution’s Reign of Terror reminds us how “their truth” devours its own. Orwell foresaw a world where power dictates truth: “2 + 2 = 5.”

So where does that leave us? Leopold von Ranke believed history could show things “as they actually happened.” Niall Ferguson warns falsehood now spreads faster than fact. Maybe truth isn’t gone, but buried. Our task, as ever, is to turn toward the light — even when it hurts.