The Daily Stoic

Something I just read in...I want to say 'Raising Resilient Kids,' maybe the name of the book...

I was walking through your bookstore and I saw The Peloponnesian War yeah you know one of my favorite books and I again I don't know I only make two nuclear war jokes a semester that's my my limit with my students but I think I've already reached it but you know in the last ten years before the president how we um kind of slanted that hadn't been as larger conversation nuclear war as in the past but that conversation between Sparta and Athens and whether to aggressively go on the Athenian part and invade um and what could happen with the consequences could be still feels as relevant and not like a piece or not but I always think a Syracuse you know sending the fleet to Syracuse and it was so awful that when people came back the few survivors of the fleet to tell the Athenians what had happened they wouldn't believe them yeah but the whole fleet could be gone they were executed for even saying it well when General Mattis was Secretary of Defense he assigned a history of The Peloponnesian War as a book for people to read because that what they call it the um the Thucydides trap the idea of it and send an dominant power and an ascended power and China and America would maybe talk about which one is ascended which one's dominant uh which is ironic but um the idea of how these clashes play out so instead of you know obviously the state in the defense department have access to latest cables latest studies, greatest intelligence and here they are reading a 25 hundred year old book about a war fought by ships that had ores you know to give you a sense of how long ago was the the ships would clash and then the men would jump off and fight each other with swords like as if it was the ground that's how long ago this was um and yet the same things are happening um i'm just writing about this in uh the book i'm doing now the the the the mellion dialogue or million dialogue like the most famous passage in the the history of The Peloponnesian War is basically Athens going to this little proxy client state and going might makes right is the strong do what they can and the weak struggle as they must right as today we talk about you know systemic racism and structural problems and intersection that is the same discussion right it's it's and but how many people that throw these buds buzzwords around could actually connect it to some sort of classical understanding of that some real insight into human nature that goes back far enough that you're not thinking republican democrat white black america whatever it's it's taking it back far enough you can see what humans do and how a lot of the systems we developed the stories we tell the institutions we build were designed to counteract those impulses yes right like the UN being one such invention right or treaties being another invention or the Geneva can we've we've invented stuff to deal with things and sometimes we forget the source of that insight or that hard one lesson and so to not have that historical basis it's just an enormous liability so people talk about stem and how you need to learn math of whatever but if you don't have an understanding of how humans work and how they've always worked what good is your ability to build really good rockets or whatever

there's a great book wasteland about um Ezra Pound yeah and T.S. Eliot that came out recently as a biography of the poem the wasteland and you just saw Ezra Pound's mind deteriorating with like not syphilis but anti-semitic conspiracy theories it is really interesting like the way i was talking to someone about this recently i was saying that anti-semitism may be the oldest virus yeah like and it's this thing that's in i mean it infects the Romans different emperors at different times different leaders at different times and and then yeah these different tropes are different like the elders is the protocol not designed what's it called uh it's not that old right no it and it's like Russian propaganda just this thing this horrible thing yeah that someone puts out in the world and then it can't be eradicated and and you can be immunized against it with information and understanding but it's just going around effect but if you lack the firewalls for it it can you know my metaphors are getting very mixed here but if you lack the different you know something it can go big or small and yeah there's there these certain viruses and i've watched it i've watched it happen with people i know even people are fans of mine where it's like you can kind of see it like you know okay you know like you fall up on instagram and then it's like oh i haven't seen a picture they're spousing a while and then then it's like announcing they're separated and then announcing that you kind of sensed you're like oh you kind of keep this mental tab like you know where they are in that transition right and you can kind of go okay they just retweeted something from Elon Musk and then you know now they're talking about trans women in sports and you you can kind of watch this it's like this evolution you know the the metaphor they use is about taking the red pill but it's actually not a thing and you get it you don't actually on that there's this latency period where it's kind of working on you and you don't understand it and maybe it was escapeable maybe it wasn't but i'm very fascinated with the way that yeah these kind of idea viruses get into a person and how they how they change

that's what the new book disciplines destiny is actually about but this virtue of temperance self discipline self commit it's everything it's deterministic and predictive you will make you better at what you do it will make whatever you do great if complemented by self-commanding self-discipline

there's a great book On Immunity by Yulebis and it was the first time reading it she's a non-fiction writer is the first time I begin to understand she articulated that immunity is not about you yeah I know it's about how the participation and she had been ready while she was pregnant in the 2010s you know and and she'd a great writer go to Iowa and it was the first time I step back and realize like those systems you talk about it's about your participation in them not to protect you but so all of us can come together and get a different outcome then we have to get individually we have this understanding of America being about liberty which it is but there's liberty and then there's responsibility yeah and they were seen that the idea was government would create liberty and then philosophy and culture would create virtue and these two things have to coexist or operate together for the package to work

I teach shooting an elephant today you know by George Roy well i love him much to Catalonia there's parts of it where he's talking about what or well it's talking about what it was like as a colonial administrator and how he knew colonialism was wrong but it's a lot like Thompson he was caught up in enforcing it so he shows how it destroys him as a way to argue against it which Thompson does a very good job of too but you know the talk of editing parts of or well now right you know instead of dealing with some of the you know like language that he has in it to me is mind blowing like within our present and just scrambles that goody or bady argument immediately you know and and it's to be really dangerous because it's like the example he gave us Roosevelt it's tinkering with something so essential information that is essential to us like you know his perspective so i don't know you know i think about our our current media situation it freaks me out a lot when and this gets back to the canon and banned books freaks me out a lot when we're going beyond our online like fights with each other and there's the idea that because our lens is the latest and the most important we now can begin to take out certain passages of a war well sure edit them and i mean i i i don't think that's anyway inherent to the present but i do think so much is magnified right now by the way that we wake up in the morning become accustomed to communicating with our phones or with everybody else

And if you haven't read his famous essays or Sarah Bakewell's How To Live you must

some parenting books I love there's a self-driven child there's a better man the good news about that behavior how to raise kids who aren't hassles to get to failure reading for our lives expecting better they're all really good but I found that reading them once wasn't nearly sufficient what I needed as a parent was the thing that I'd check in with and read every day seeing parenting as an ongoing process

I thought your ego section was really good I thought oh thanks really similar to Cycle Equin she's been since the whole book called Melino it's very good yeah check it out

she handed me a first edition of the harder they fall by bud Schuylberg which is a book I've talked about this before it's a book that changed my life when I was at American apparel it's about a publicist who shouldn't be a publicist who dreams of being a writer and I have this memory of that book changing my life like I shortly thereafter quit and became a writer

whose book millions of dollars a year Netflix specials all the prizes of the profession or his and the person was sort of unhappy and busy and too busy and said he never gets to see his kids and you know and Pete was just like what are you talking about like this is all a voluntary thing you're choosing for it to be this way