The Daily Stoic

The last thing Cato did before he died was read. It's incredible really, even as Caesar had destroyed the Republic, the Civil War was lost and his inevitable suicide just hours away. Cato took the time to read some Plato. Twice.

And in today's episode we're talking about David's latest book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, How Jack Welch gutted the heartland and crushed the soul of corporate America and how to undo his legacy.

I'll leave that to you and I encourage you to read the book.

a CEO's primary social responsibility is to assure the financial success of the company

it was a bag of shit

the manager of the century the greatest CEO of all time

one of the pages I have in there I was struck by this passage in in senator Ben sass's book the vanishing american at all and he's talking he says you know if an alien came down to earth one of the things that would strike them weird about our society he says is how age segregated we are that basically young people spend time with young people old people spend time with old people

the best description of this phenomenon I heard it was actually relayed to me by by Will Smith when we were working on the book together

It's just a it's a sweet lovely hopeful little book about a topic that I don't think we connect deeply enough to stoicism because stoicism seems to be so much about restricting the emotions about being free of the passions but without the second part of that equation right to be full of love I think we're missing something

I thought the book was very very interesting and it was fitting for me because I am I'm doing this book on justice right now and one of the chapters I'm doing towards the end is about love so I was thinking about the themes in the book like as I was reading it.

the subtitle of this book is going easy on yourself you know going easy on yourself going easy on other people everybody we love we could list every single imperfection they have none of that qualifies them from the love we feel from them but for some reason we feel like we have to be perfect all the time to to qualify or earn love and I think that is a result of you know being in a culture of by-shit be happy and in order for them to get us to buy shit we have to feel like we're not we ain't shit until we buy this shit

to be loved is to be loved and that's why we put the D in parentheses

I had written most of the book by about a year and a half ago but was still working on updating it.

And I said, well, a couple things could happen. I'm going to wait for the October 2020 Nobel Prize because if we're lucky, I might go to the CRISPR inventors whoever they pick.

And then as I was writing the epilogue, as you can see from reading the epilogue, I was on the balcony right behind me looking at the diversity of people on Royal Street here in the French Quarter and thinking about what CRISPR could mean.

And that's when the COVID crisis, that's when the shutdown happened. And I decided to delay the book because clearly the notion that an RNA-based virus that was going to be fought by an RNA-based vaccine and detected by RNA-based CRISPR technology.

So I spent the past year and so writing that part of the book, but compared to most things it wasn't a rush. It was a nice easy-going thing.

I'm supposed to believe that Carl Icon's wife cooks meatloaf

the way he he talked about his son was was particularly disturbing to me because you know as a father

PBNS is please but never satisfied or sometimes please but not satisfied

continuous improvement uh is important and complacency kills

when you're succeeding it can be really intoxicating and also very dangerous because your brain kind of turns off right

it's heart wrenching yet of lifting and he said it's the story of his resilience and self-actualization into the person an artist that he is today and he said it's tragic, funny, profound and a hell of a good read and I would totally agree

when I sat down to prep for this show I thought okay I'm going to skim the book you know see see what I can add some more because I have more familiar with his music but I ended up reading the thing from cover to cover. I really enjoyed it.

I mentioned who wrote a book called Loving What Is which is the basic idea and simply says when something happens ask is it true? Is it true that this is a terrible thing? Is it true? And can I really be sure that this is going to be a wasted year?

Opportunities are like buses; there's always one coming around.

And like me, he lives out in the country in Victoria, British Columbia. So at the end we nerd out about country life, which the Epicureans said was an important part of our philosophical pursuits. So here is my conversation with the one and only Dave Asprey.

his son wrote a great book called Stories I Tell Myself one Thompson and so I tried to end with Nixon leaving but those years after are really tough because it's the way we understand alcoholism now coupled with how Thompson would take Dexter Drain and there was a price to be paid later and his son writes about getting hooked on the stuff I mean he was drinking a 750 a 750 milliliter bottle of Jack Daniels every day starting when he woke up and it just dissolved him from the inside out in his mind too yeah you know and so you're right like that's he's seen in this kind of extreme way and he would present himself that way but eventually it became he became the caricature he would promote you know and that happened later and it wasn't through tons of acid or drug which are you know whatever but it was it was just through alcoholism you know and it was eventually you know speed and cocaine and all these different things but he was just dissolving his body with that and I I think that that gets lost