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.

Aging. It’s universal, it’s relentless, and it’s something that every culture and every era has had to reckon with. From the philosophers of ancient Rome to modern-day music legends, the question remains: what does it really mean to grow old? Is it decline, wisdom, endurance, or something else entirely?

In this episode of the TOP Podcast, Michael DiMatteo takes you on a journey through the history, literature, and culture of aging. We begin with Cicero’s De Senectute (On Old Age), where the Roman statesman argued that while the body weakens, the mind and memory can flourish — old age as a harvest, a crown of life. Then we step into Shakespeare’s darker vision, where aging is “second childishness and mere oblivion,” a slow march toward dependence and loss. Hemingway enters next with Santiago, the aged fisherman of The Old Man and the Sea, embodying endurance: frail in body but unbroken in spirit.

From there, we move into popular culture, where America’s obsession with youth collides with the reality of age. We confront denial in commercials that promise to “fight” aging, but we also find reverence in the weathered pride of Clint Eastwood, the battered honesty of Johnny Cash, and even the wistful grace of Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year.”Each offers a different sound, a different face of what it means to age.

But aging isn’t just for the philosophers and the stars. It’s lived every day in families and communities — and in this episode, Michael draws from his own work, Falling Leaves, to bring that truth home. In Musings of an Old Man, an eighty-nine-year-old narrator strips away the masks of denial, confessing the loneliness and truth of old age. In John and Gloria, we witness love carried through decline, memory, and even into absence — a reminder that family and companionship are the anchors of dignity in the face of time.

This episode explores how class has always shaped the experience of aging. Senators in Rome lived long enough to reflect; peasants in Elizabethan fields did not. In Hemingway’s Cuba, a fisherman works until he dies, while in modern America, the wealthy prolong their years with comfort, and the working class ages faster under the weight of labor. Yet despite these divisions, one truth remains: aging, no matter your station in life, need not be without dignity.

Aging is not an abstraction. It is harvest and decline, endurance and loss, memory and love. It is the reckoning of a life lived.

Join Michael DiMatteo for this deep dive into the meaning of aging — in history, literature, music, and lived experience. And discover why, in the end, aging is bearable, even beautiful, when it is carried with dignity and lived in the presence of family.

Michael DiMatteo is the author of Falling Leaves, Confessions of a High School Football Coach, the Flavius Fettotempi series, and his newest work, Bloodlines: A Story of Memory, Silence, and Family. Learn more at www.mrdwrites.com.

Episode: Dostoevsky’s Demons — The Warning We Still Need

When Fyodor Dostoevsky published Demons in 1872, he wasn’t just writing a novel—he was writing a prophecy. What begins as the story of a revolutionary conspiracy in a provincial Russian town becomes a chilling diagnosis of what happens when ideas break loose from faith, morality, and tradition.

Demons gives us unforgettable characters:

• Nikolai Stavrogin, the aristocrat whose charm conceals a hollow soul.

• Alexei Kirillov, the engineer who reasons that if God does not exist, man must prove his freedom by suicide.

• Pyotr Verkhovensky, the manipulator modeled on the real Sergey Nechayev, who turns ideology into pure destruction.

• Ivan Shatov, the defector from radicalism, murdered by his former comrades to preserve their solidarity.

• Stepan Verkhovensky, the fading liberal, replaced by his son’s ruthless fanaticism.

Dostoevsky’s characters are not just individuals—they are archetypes of forces that have shaped the modern world. His warning is stark: when belief collapses, people do not become free—they become possessed by demons of ideology.

In this episode we follow a Rankian method of history—facts first, literature as witness. We trace the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, where up to 300 people a day were guillotined, many of them peasants and workers, the very people the revolution claimed to liberate. We see echoes in Russia’s emancipation of the serfs, where promised freedom turned to debt and resentment. We watch Nechayev’s real-life circle commit murder in the name of “progress.”

From Nietzsche’s cry that “God is dead” (1882), to Camus’s reminder in The Rebel (1951) that every revolution risks becoming an oppression, the voices of philosophy and literature confirm Dostoevsky’s fears. Solzhenitsyn, in his Templeton Address (1983), would later say: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

The novel’s prophecy did not stay on the page. Within 45 years of its publication, Russia fell into revolution, civil war, and terror on a scale Dostoevsky foresaw. And the pattern has not vanished. Whether in campus radicalism, digital mobs, or politics turned into religion, the same demons still haunt us.

This is not an easy book, but it may be the most prophetic novel of the last two centuries. In this episode of the Triple Option Podcast, we explore Demons as literature, history, and mirror.

Because Dostoevsky’s warning was not just for 19th-century Russia.
It was for us.

In this episode of the Triple Option Podcast, we turn our attention to a forgotten name from the First World War—Harry Butters, an American who chose to fight and die for a cause larger than himself before his own country had even entered the conflict. Butters was not a soldier of fortune, nor a thrill-seeker looking for adventure. He was a man of conviction, shaped by faith, family, and an acute sense of duty. His life and death raise questions that echo forward to us today: what do we stand for, and what are we willing to sacrifice for it?

Born in San Francisco, Butters lived a privileged life, yet his choice to join the British Army in 1915 placed him far from the comfort of home. He endured illness and shell shock at the front, returned to the line despite medical advice, and met his death at the Battle of the Somme in August 1916. He was just 24 years old. His burial at Meaulte Military Cemetery in France remains a quiet testament to the Americans who believed liberty was worth their very lives, years before Woodrow Wilson committed the United States to war.

Winston Churchill remembered him. Theodore Roosevelt honored him. And Franklin Roosevelt, reflecting on the sacrifice of Butters and others like him, would later speak of “the great tradition of service and sacrifice” that defined American character in its finest hours. In Harry Butters, we see a man who refused to stand aside while others fought tyranny.

But this episode is not merely about biography. It is about legacy. We connect Butters’ story to the deeper historical tradition of men and women who believed that one’s reputation, honor, and service endure beyond death—a sentiment found as far back as the wisdom of the ancients. Napoleon himself once remarked that “the only thing that lives after you die is your reputation.” That reputation—what others remember of us, and what values survive us—becomes our true monument.

Have we lost that spirit today? Do we still understand the kind of devotion that would move someone to leave behind comfort, family, and safety to risk everything for principle? Or have we replaced it with cynicism, distraction, and partisanship, where the death of a political opponent can be mocked rather than mourned? These questions frame the story of Harry Butters as more than history. It is a mirror held up to us.

Join me as we walk through the battlefields of the Somme, the letters and remembrances of those who knew him, and the echoes of his sacrifice that reach into our own uncertain age. In the story of Harry Butters, we find a reminder that courage is not a relic of the past but a demand of every generation.

We all inherit something. A name, a story, a dream left unfinished by those before us. Sometimes that inheritance feels like a gift, but often it becomes a burden. That’s what I’m calling today: the weight of legacy.

In my Flavius Fettotempi novels, this theme is front and center. Flavius lives under the shadow of his father Honorius, chasing a vision that was never truly his own. It’s a tragedy not only of ambition but of inheritance—the cost of living someone else’s story.

History echoes with the same struggle. Alexander the Great carried his father’s conquests but burned out at just 32. Rome’s emperors lived and died under Augustus’s shadow. Winston Churchill admitted he spent his life trying to redeem his father’s disappointment. Dynasties from the Habsburgs to America’s political families inherited not just opportunity but expectation.

Literature gives us the language for this weight. William Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom!, wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman shows Willy Loman crushed by a dream he inherited and tried to pass down. Toni Morrison’s Beloved reminds us that even trauma is a legacy, carried forward until someone finds the courage to face it.

This episode is about asking: what do we carry forward, and what do we set down? Legacy is never neutral. It shapes us whether we embrace it or reject it. The challenge is deciding what belongs to us—and what belongs to the past.

Join me as I connect the tragedy of Flavius Fettotempi with history, literature, and the legacies in our own lives. Because maybe the real weight of legacy isn’t the past at all. Maybe it’s the present—the courage to decide, here and now, what story we will make our own.

In this week’s episode of The T.O.P. Podcast, we explore the quiet force that shapes history, literature, and our personal lives—missed opportunities.

We often imagine turning points as moments of bold action and decisive clarity. But just as often, the real hinge of history is what doesn’t happen. What isn’t said. What we hesitate to do. And what we can never get back once the moment passes.

We begin in literature, where stories are built on what could have been:
• Jay Gatsby, reaching for a dream already gone.
• Hamlet, overthinking his one chance at justice.
• George and Lennie, losing their dream to a world that never gave them a real shot.
• And Robert Frost, standing at a fork in the road that still haunts readers a century later.

From there, we move into the historical realm:
• The Fall of Constantinople in 1453, where pride prevented unity—and a thousand-year empire vanished.
• General McClellan at Antietam in 1862, whose caution prolonged the Civil War by years.
• Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered the link between unwashed hands and deadly infection—but was dismissed, ridiculed, and died before the world believed him.

And finally, we bring it home—to our lives, our choices, our own roads not taken. The job we didn’t apply for. The phone call we never made. The apology we withheld. We reflect on the simple truth captured by Kierkegaard:

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

As always, we find threads between the past and the present, between the great dramas of history and the quiet choices of our own days. Because missed opportunities aren’t just for kings, generals, and poets—they belong to all of us.

This episode invites you to reflect not with regret, but with resolve. To stop waiting. To choose the road that’s in front of you. To act.