The Daily Stoic

it's a beautiful book I was excited to read an early copy of it and I was excited more still that Sid wanted to come on the podcast and talk about it

it came out in April and it's Sid story it's what it's like to be a kid in those days it's what it's like to have James stockdale as a father and it's a it's a beautiful book

when Grant showed up things began to happen

he loved the story of Daddy Kravitz

it's about this sort of hustling young Jewish kid in Montreal who like he hears from his grandfather that don't that like a man owns land funny over talking about it's like a man owns land that was like the mark of success they came from nothing and Daddy becomes a sort of host of these starts with like arcade games and he trades his way up to he's really successful and then he ends up like hurting or betraying his best friend to like get the land like his friend ends up at a wheelchair basically does literally anything to get the success and then he you know he takes his grandfather to see the land but his grandfather has heard what he's done to get it and Daddy can't can't understand slash accept that like he can't he can't understand that some things are worth more than other things and your self-respect your honor your values are more important than the success and they're the irony for Dove to have loved that movie and that story I'd probably never read the book he probably only watched the movie but it's like he it's like he only watched the first two acts and he like missed the turn where it's a cautionary place the thing man yeah it's like it's like missing that Gatsby dies at the end of great Gatsby you know like he ends up floating in a pool murdered but all you saw was the cool party yeah that's who I want to be

his first book came out peak performance which is a great book

and then he wrote the passion paradox and the practice of groundedness we carry both the practice of groundedness

this new book just came out Master of Change how to excel when everything is changing including you

I'm gonna assume 90% of listeners are familiar with Frankl for the ten who aren't and is briefly as possible Holocaust survivors psychoanalyst has written remarkable books about how to make meaning out of suffer if suffering excuse me and endure Frankl following Mansurge for Meaning wrote this essay that is very little known called the case for tragic optimism in Frankl defines tragic optimism as in acceptance of suffering in life and in a very stoic sense he says that suffering is inevitable for a few reasons

he says you know philosophy philosophers like a ball player that you know you throw them the ball and they throw it back and you throw it back and they throw it back and he says you know a school full ball player doesn't label your throw good or bad they just catch it and throw it back and he sort of label Socrates as the ultimate ball player he sort of deals with everything that life handles hands him with this sort of a plum and vigor and I like that idea of I like that idea applied to change which is like life is throwing stuff at you and you catch it and throw it back and you catch it and throw it back and that's sort of the game like that that that you have agency over how you play yeah but you don't have agency over how other people are playing you don't have agency over the rules be that gravity or mortality or the law

Dr. Drew during the pandemic was like you have to read this book what is it like the history of the masses or something of the masses? It's about like how that dissemination of information lends to hysteria and what happens in global bomb like oh yeah it always just repeats or all histories on a loop

David Halberstam's The Children

he wrote this book loan star which is a history of Texas which is incredible

he also wrote this book about the Korean War which he fought in called This Kind of War that's also fucking incredible

Lauren Isley The Immense Journey it's a history of nothing less than the entire earth's evolution oh and the writing is so fucking good like I'm talking like Tom Juno turned me on to that book he's like you've got to read this this is some of the best writing you will ever read

i think really interesting but but like everything that he went through in his life led up to the moment where she had a unique angle on the financial crisis and then he wrote the definitive thing on that topic right and so you just don't know what the like i like what i'm doing now and i'm totally immersed and engaged in what i'm doing now and i also go even if it doesn't work or it's not fully what i want it to be what i'm telling myself is it's prepping you for some moment that you you don't know maybe it's not even a book right maybe it's some medium i can't conceive or maybe it's just a chance to apply the things that i've written about in the books but just this idea that you know you're preparing for something and all this stuff is reps or um you know practice for something in the future yeah it's i i've been lifting weights since i was 14 and uh one of the things that i do now when i think about weightlifting is i think about how you actually need to press the reps to the point where you are exhausted because that is the point at which those reps actually become efficient and what does that mean or we're efficient for your body and what does that mean well the next time you do it now you can do perhaps a half rep more right it's like the first ten don't matter it's the 11th one yes it's it's it's in my boys and i we run now in mahamad al-Ili was great about this like he was like you don't count the sit-ups until they hurt he's like you don't count the running until it's until you're like exhausted um and uh and they're getting into it now i'm like we're gonna go for an al-Ili run that's what we call it um that's so great but but i mean i say that to you if only because just to echo what you're saying like about how in more and more facets of my life i see that the key to me just i don't know like living well broadly speaking is just applying a practice where you see everything as practice yeah in some sense everything as another rep and like they're even the weightlifting is actually a great example because you can lift weights for three months and you won't see shit yeah but if you lift weights for three years then it's like you have to delay that gratification for such a long time well that's something you definitely experience with books two where it's like the first couple months um it doesn't feel like anything's happening yeah and it hasn't come together yet and then there's this moment where i always get really excited where i sort of call i'm on the downhill side of it which is like i got to the peak and now i'm just wrapping up everything so it's like the book came together the style came together the message came together and now everything like now it's operating under its own power you know and and i think that's true for a lot of good habits like there are habit good habits i have now where it's easier to do the thing than not do the thing i actually need like did you have to shut it down the discipline is to stop doing it to take a rest day or to not be stressed about it or so you know take one as a mess up or whatever um and that that's when you're on the you you've built the thing into a muscle memory now now it's operating under its own power that's what you want so i love the book i thought we'd start too with um not actually Birmingham i the the there's this moment in the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott that i find really interesting which is so rose park you know sits that our refuses stand up and first of the i think to me that's a just seminal moment in the civil rights movement because like people just see her as this old lady that like just decided not to do a thing one day right as opposed to a lady who trained at a school for activists right and also was a secretary at you know um the the nca p right what's the lcp yeah yeah sorry i don't know why i'm forgetting but she like she's in the heart of the movement trained for the movement and then the moment comes she does it and then um but it catches everyone by surprise it's not it wasn't like a conspiracy in the sense that everyone agreed that this was the stand they were taking this is when they were and they um you know they're all sort of like that forces their hand right because now she's arrested and she's going to be prosecuted for it and they're sort of having to decide what they're gonna do about it and as my understanding of the scene is that so they all get together and they're like well maybe this isn't the moment and uh i think it was shuttles where it said something like you all have been eating these women's fried chicken for too long you know to not to leave them hanging here right and so it's like this this little lady forces their hand and he says something like um what are you cowards and martin Luther King raises his hand and says i am not a coward and to me that's the beginning of the civil rights movement right there is she calls everyone's bluff and then martin Luther King jr steps forward he he accepts that's the the call to adventure in the hero's journey right there are you a coward and he says no no and yet he feels like one right because like well after that point he feels that he should not be leading in montgomery just as almost a decade later he feels like he should not be leading in Birmingham he doesn't feel and there are many times where he doesn't exactly exude leadership in Birmingham but at the same time what i love about him is this it's talking about like the call to action it's like even though i have so much trepidation around this he would later write how the only reason he felt that he was selected was because literally he had read a ton of books and he had gone to like the seminary equivalent of uh electrocution school like he could speak really well right like oh you're awesome in front of everybody else and that's why you should leave he's like i don't actually feel that i'm a leader and there's so many times like people in history it's the very people who don't think that they should lead or sometimes actually the people who should yet did you read that books that the captain's class by sam no what's his name uh oh we see that Wall Street general guy yes yeah or was it the wall street general yeah he wrote a piece and i think he's working on a book about it where it's it's called like the Eisenhower paradox or something which is that basically the best leaders don't want to be leaders yeah and that they are called to it in some way and they wrestle with whether they should do it or not and that it's the people who want it very badly that tend to do very badly but also um are the ones you should kind of be suspicious of and there there is this kind of reluctance in martinley thirking that is very interesting it it's only yeah because he basically gets called out that he goes fine and nobody else does like that's the other thing he basically realizes that if somebody else had said they would do it he would have gladly allowed them to do it but but you know there's that hello thing like if not me then who yeah those are the moments that i think real leaders emerge when you have to go literally no one else is going to do this i have to do okay today my favorite moment from mongamri it gave me like somebody chills and i was like i got to find a way to work this in the book and then i did so because mine's like very much just about the 10 weeks and berment right so uh so somewhere in mongamri i want to say like two three months in um they're starting to gain some traction right they're starting to have a little bit of success and it's some member of the clan and or the mongamri establishment who calls in one night and uh by that point he had learned that he has to answer the phone otherwise because if karetta is answering it she's gonna freak out right and they had i think one kid then and i think uh it was the oldest i think it's i think she was still a baby um so he picks up and the guy's like in a seven time goes listen n word we've had about enough of you as like uh if you don't leave town you're gonna you're gonna really not like it before next week and there was something about this sort of maliciousness in the tone and the specificity before next week that just set him on edge and so he's like it's middle of the night he wakes up and he um he goes downstairs and he makes us pot of coffees like i'm not gonna sleep anymore and he and he's like in the way he described it in a later later piece of writing he said i just was like i started to pray and he's like god i don't think i can lead in this moment i don't think i can even lead he's like i want to give up like i just want you to basically tell me how i can step away from all of this uh um and he said that he felt this sort of rush and the spirit uplifted and he said uh that that voice was telling him you know uh this is not your this is not the this is not the time in which you should step down and he said he felt so very buoyed by this that he was like the circumstances around remained exactly the same but suddenly my perspective had shifted and it was that pers shift in perspective that allowed him to continue to lead in Montgomery and by the way that threat was not idle two days later his home in Montgomery was bombed but he continued to lead after that and he had this like he felt so buoyed by that until Birmingham where he had another sort of crisis of of conscious and crisis of spirit and everything else but reading that i was just like whoa because something that i always love is this those moments and anyone's life where it's like you can choose to see any situation however you see fit and if you are a person of faith you'll say well god was telling king in this moment here's how you can choose to see this differently but i don't again i don't think it has to be necessarily religious i think it could be a secular interpretation i think the stoics would have written a lot about this right like every situation is completely ours to it's our perspective that we want to impose upon it right i just love that

Feynman's written a bunch of amazing books I think we carry surely your joking Mr Feynman the pain of porch awesome not just just a great book of writing period and wisdom and insight period but.

I've written this great book The Ways We Choose lessons for life from a POW's experience I think you're really going to like this interview

you can grab signed copies of captain Kerry's book at the painted porch where you can go to his website davkary.com

So when I started, I'll tell you how that came about. So when I started speaking, I started speaking because some friends encouraged me too.

he's written a beautiful inspiring book called The Ways We Choose lessons for life from a POW's experience came out in 2005 he signed some copies so I'll link to that in today's show notes

there's great book by Daniel Boersten called The Image that I suggest people read

I loved his books Keep Going. I loved Show Your Work! I love Steal Like An Artist.

And check out Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work!, Keep Going.

His poetry book Newspaper Blackout is also really cool.

Walker Percy is like...Walker Percy and *Lost in the Cosmos* has this theory of reentry where it's like we need to have a train...

I do think like as a writer you can dress how you want, your obstacle look how you want, you can set...I do think there's actually something about getting dressed, putting on clothes, shaving etc.

She is also a prolific translator of the Stoics. She is one of the translators of an interesting work on Seneca called Anger, Mercy, and Revenge, the complete works of Seneca which I quite enjoyed. And we talked about in today's episode.