The Daily Stoic

I mean the book Endurance about Ernest Shackleton's voyage. That was either first published in the 1920s or someone else wrote the exact same story and it went nowhere. Nobody cared. And then it was either republished or maybe it was a new book recently that exploded.

bill walsh talks about this in The Score Takes Care of Itself he's like at the end of the season whether you win the super bowl or or you know you go 0 and 12 you you have to look at the the bad calls and the balls that bounce out and you know the the injuries there's definitely good breaks and bad breaks and you know also you know we all have good good breaks and bad breaks as far as when we're born where we're born who we're born too it can be very self-serving to pretend those things don't exist as well

the great quote for me is always Elliott actually that um we shall not see some exploration then the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time that to me is is what what's going on that's what the classics are about that's what that's what a life of um learning will do Elliott and it is very important figure for me also someone you can't read and understand if you do not understand the gazillion references like who um but you know at Harvard i actually dramatized the Four Quartets created four different speaking parts within them and then orchestrated it with uh messian i'll leave your messians quartet for the end of time um both were written in 1941 uh messian was ending as a world too was ending bombs were landing in London messian was in a prison of war camp and Elliott was in the blitz and they both wrote these two extraordinarily eternal pieces of art and uh i just i wanted to combine the two which led to a rather long two hours but at the same time we looked everybody stayed awake uh through the whole thing but um beautiful and i began the performance with an air raid siren wow so people knew the context in which these beautiful things were doing that transcendence is what scholarship can really do for you and and that's why i find so much of contemporary uh critical theory discourse so because there is no transcendence there there is no truth there was only power and there was only now an anger it's anger

He's got some great books as well that are worth reading. Love your enemies, the conservative heart, The Road to Freedom, gross national happiness and his first book Who Really Cares, which is about charitable giving.

So that one's just kind of like the little things will over time and we'll think you have like a Slight Edge and then we'll just kind of add up.

have you have you read a structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas yeah you know he taught we think science is this like brilliant genius has a breakthrough that turns the world upside down but as you know it's it's this slow accumulation of things not adding up the old theory not holding true anymore that eventually encourages someone to come up with something new and then that's what they call a paradigm shift and I think uh you know we think that's an epiphany but actually it's this kind of slow slumbering updating of of how you see yourself

Machiavelli, who supposedly admired Seneca says in The Prince that fortune is a woman and it is necessary in order to keep her down, to beat her and struggle with her.

Now compare Machiavelli's view with Seneca's. Not only is he saying that the more you struggle with fortune the more vulnerable you are to it, but he's also saying that the better path to security is in the impregnable wall of philosophy.

I think what we're talking about here is something that Seem to Leb talks about which is how dependent is your life, your lifestyle, your business, how dependent is it on luck?

there's uh you know one of the people we regard is sort of one of the fathers of modern wildlife conservation and also in some ways you know a person who was deeply influential to me though he you know we never cross paths uh is guy named Aldo Leopold who uh his most famous work is San County Almanac right which was which was basically a collection of things that he'd written during the sort of dark ages of American wildlife which was around the 1920s

And this would have been right around at the time sometime between 10 and 11 years ago that I read one of the best books of narrative nonfiction that I've ever read. Rising Tide, The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it changed America by John Embary which I read and totally changed how I saw New Orleans, so I saw the Mississippi River, which I did not know that much about being from California.

And most of all, it turned me on to Walker Percy and his kind of Southern stoicism turned me on to one of my all-time favorite novels which would be The Movie Goer which I recommend all the time.

You absolutely have to read them, we carry both of them here at the painted porch but they probably make great audio books to sit down and read them, they are incredible books.

I was really interested in Tim Miller's book, Why We Did It? A travel log from the Republican road to hell.

It's not just in politics where people work outside their integrity because they're competitive because they want to succeed because they're the pay for their kids college fund.

I'm really good at Whitty Bonn Moths. I'm really good at attacking people. I'm good at finding a news story that can define an opponent. I'm good at narratives and messaging because I'm good at that and because that is incentivized in the field that I chose, I don't need to think about whether or not I should be doing that because that's my job and the culture of other people in that job was such that incentivized conformity.

what does you get it mean? It's not that you get you know how important it is that we're doing here and you get the like really the you know that you know that the long tail factor of this is public service. You get it means you get the game, you get how to manipulate it, you get how to play it.

what does he say enough brains to see it and not enough guts to stand up to it thousands of us millions of us corrupted rootless career-ridden good hearts and yellow bellies living out our lives for the easy buck the soft birth indulging ourselves in the illusion that we can deal in self without becoming the thing we touch

This is the week the book launched, it's called Meet Me in the Middle. It's an awesome children's book with a story on the importance of seeing things from a different perspective.

It's also a really interesting design book, like each page is two-sided, so you can start from either end of the book.

I think a lot of it has to do with people's inability to understand that their subjective opinions are borderline audacious and often delusional.

I think a lot of things I think about when I think about attention or even the concept of the kid's book, like finding the middle.

The point of this book, and I'm so excited to be going into kids' book land because the truth is I've really felt the impacts of getting to kids 15 to 25.

Hey, I read jab jab jab right hook. This is a book that I wrote 10 years ago.

And I'm a fan of his awesome book, Unreasonable Hospitality.

His book, Unreasonable Hospitality is selling like crazy. It's awesome. He's speaking all over the world about it. It was even featured in an episode of The Bear, that awesome TV show.

And I'm super excited to spend some time with him talking about this amazing new book, which I've already had a chance to read.

This is a book that challenged me to want to live with profound integrity.

I'm only halfway through this book and I feel like I'm a slightly better version of myself than I was when I started it and I'm almost certain the same will be true for anyone who picks it up.

There's a stoic named Rutilius Rufus who's brought up on these. He's a contemporary of Julius Caesar. I talk, Caesar and Sister, I talk about him in Lives of the Stoics.

He is brought up on these fake corruption charges for which he's not guilty.

And he believes that his duty as a stoic is to not even defend himself.

He just sort of quietly is margured.

He doesn't utter a sentence in his defense.

I'm thinking of that Aaron Morgenstern book, which I'm reading right now called The Starless Sea. I don't know if you've heard, but it's like it's very magical.

Seneca says, Philosophy calls for simple living but not penance.

There's a strictness to Stoicism, treating the body rigorously as Seneca said, but he meant that in terms of like pushing yourself on a walk or a run, trying to lift something heavy, trying to do a little bit more than you can. He wasn't saying you drive yourself into the dirt, he wasn't saying you, you know, you whip yourself or you pinch yourself or you hit yourself or you talk rudely or meanly to yourself because you're not a bad person and you don't deserve that.

This is The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen.

I loved this book. Like I loved this book and it's awesome. And I wanted to reach out.

And I think what I loved about this book is like, you don't think of The Notebook as something that was invented, but of course it was. Obviously, different scraps of paper writing little things here or there has existed for a long time, but The Notebook as we know it, like the Moschino or whatever, this is an invention.

And he has amazing stuff in this book about da Vinci. I absolutely loved it.

The first thing I said when I finished, I went to the manager of the Painting Portion, I said, we've got to carry this book in the bookstore.