The Daily Stoic

his book averages over was hugely influential to me I can't recommend that one enough

sometimes when i find passages that i really like i write them down like sort of life advice i i printed out a passage and averages over where you said in today's global economy here is what is scarce quality land and natural resources intellectual property or good ideas about what should be produced quality labor with unique skills and what is not scarce unskilled labor money in the bank or held in government securities which you can think of as simple capital not attached to special ownership rights i've got to say i found i found this to be very true when you wrote it like six or seven years ago but given the inflation the labor market and uh the internet uh you could not have called it better this is like a thousand percent spot on prediction

I added my own extracurricular translation of The Idiot by myself for no one but me. I was just interested in how you could translate and basically a prose poem into a similar kind of thing for English

Even some of the best writings on Stoicism by Cicero, Montaigne, and by Seneca was done while these men were forced into exile or hiding while the world tore itself apart.

Are you wondering about God? Cicero has a great dialogue about this.

One of the best books I read while I was writing a book Trust Me Online was called Being Wrong by the Wonderful Catherine Schultz.

And Being Wrong adventures in the margin of error was definitely that.

if you're listening and you haven't read that, I mean, you just got to read The Things They Carried.

But he talks in that book about soldiers dying because they were too cowardly not to.

But of course what he's really trying to say is people choose the honor of not letting their comrades down over personal safety.

Have you read Halberstam's book called The Children? Yes. Incredible. But the character that jumped out to me most in that book was not all the monstrous white people. It was Floyd Mann. And who's the sheriff in this book that tries to do a good job?

reading Nietzsche or reading Marcus Raleus is triple the pleasure when you read live in a world that's so antithetical to it

His book The Psychopath Test also very very good but of course I think his best and most relevant book which is one I also carry here at the Painted Porch is so you've been publicly shamed

I was thinking about psychopaths while you were saying that uh because one thing I did learn I learned to let all tip when I when I when I was writing The Psychopath Test and I went on there on Robert Hayes course and learned about the checklist and obviously one of the um main items on the checklist is lack of empathy yeah and I'll tell you let me tell you a story really quickly after I finished writing The Psychopath Test so this isn't in the book I was interviewing this spy this this spy who had worked for the for the Russians um but he was British so I'm talking to this guy and I noticed that he was um not listening to any of my questions just just monologueing at me for a long time and I hope that this is more of a kind of conversation we're listening to each other which is an empathetic situation but this guy didn't have that so I thought I remembered another item on the checklist early behavior problems and first things to do with childhood so I said to him like when you when you were a child uh were you were bully at he sort of looked twinkle high and he said oh yes yes he said I was uh I was a terrible bully I used to I got a pile of bricks and I put them in my bag and I had a head behind the tree and then I jump out and hit the other kids with with this bag uh and he said but it was always like other bullies you know yeah sure or that's what he said so I said um I said how did I make you feel he said good and I said I'm looking back at it now 60 is 70 years later how does it make you feel and he said uh he said still good uh so you're not really the sort of person who feels empathy and he said you've really got to the root of it there uh he said you know all uh he said you know if a dog dies who I'm you know if my pet dog dies I feel incredibly upset I cry for days but all the people who I've hurt I just feel nothing uh so the two if you if you're you can um get a psychopath to really get to the root of it and it had similar conversations with one or two other uh psychopaths too

If you're looking for a definitive history of the 90s a boring aspect like that don't read this. If you're looking for the 90s as an excuse to explore a bunch of angles and perspectives and quirks and events and all of the things I think history is supposed to be there for well then this is a great book

as Judd Apital writes in his wonderful book Sicker in the Head one of the magical things about being a comedian is when bad things happen to you you think I can use this in an act and it's not purely bad

I read The God Delusion. I read The Blind Watchmaker. I read The Selfish Gene.

there's a fascinating book called The Reason Why about the charge of the liper gate which i'm sure you've read

the best way I understood Trump was Sinclair Lewis's it can't happen here