The Daily Stoic

He had started out as a journalist, a poor starving artist, a man who loved craft, who didn't need much provided he had a few pencils and a notebook and something to write about.

It did not take me long to discover that the somewhat shy and youthful reporter whom I had met in Chicago had vanished, he observed. In his place was a literary celebrity.

Ernest Hemingway opens his book The Sun Also Rises with a Bible verse, one generation passeth and another generation cometh but the earth abideth The Sun Also Rises and the sun goes down and resteth to the place where he arose.

It was this passage as fascinating editor Maxwell Perkins who I urge you to read about. Perkins would say that it contained all the wisdom of the ancient world

100 stumps that is writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas not about drugs but about the American dream that to me Hell's Angels is captured by the Quarries is myths and legends die hard in America because they proved to us that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final it's a the Hell's Angels were a revolt against the corporatization and the you know the buzz cut you know button down sort of world that had come out of the Second World War but Thompson is basically Thompson isn't celebrating them he's saying that the curates maybe worse than the disease these are these he shows them you know doing a gang rape right

you can see the high watermark of the sixties which is come receiving down into the emptiness and materialism temptation of a town like us.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man

you look outside your hotel room in Las Vegas and you see the high water mark of the 1960s

We have this book in the bookstore that I think about all the time. It's this book called Asylum by this guy William Seabrook.

And he's an alcoholic, but before alcoholism is a thing. So he's a drunk, which is what they would call them. And there's no place he can go or thing he can do to not be a drunk.

And he writes this memoir, like a travel memoir about being in this insane Asylum as a non-insane person trying to get clean.

The book, spoiler, it ends somewhat tragically, but there's this sadness that I felt after I finished it, because it's like, if he had lived long enough for the invention of Alcoholics Anonymous or 12-step or recovery, the story might've ended differently.

Asylum... by the way this is an incredible little memoir he has.

I first heard about it from Fitzgerald's The Crackup which was about his own struggle with alcoholism and this was a book that was basically totally lost to print and then it recently got brought back out.

Like I had to buy an old expensive copy on Amazon and then it started to become popular again.

I can take some partial credit from having talked about it in the reading list over the years. So there's a new edition of it.

We carry it in the painted porch. You should read it.

That's really good. I never know where they are.

Oh, have you read, um, have you read this book? Do you know who Jan Morris is? The historian?

I'm looking at this book, Asylum.

So this guy's name is William Seabrook. He was like the biggest journalist in the world in the twenties, but he's an alcoholic and um, so that's not a thing.

Like you, like there wasn't, there's a pre AA.

And so he checks himself into an insane Asylum to treat his alcoholism and he writes about the whole thing.

And it's, it's like this fascinating memoir of this person struggling with this thing, kind of like that, that nobody understands is the thing.

He, he, um, he was this crazy travel journalist.

Like he, he's the one who brought the word zombie to America.

Like he would go, he wrote all these books that were, you know, you read about like, Oh, this book sold 200,000 copies in 1917 and you've never heard of it.

Uh, but yeah, Asylum is another one that when I found it, uh, and started talking about it, there were basically like no copies left and then this publisher brought it back in print.

Uh, and then we seemed to not be able to keep it in stock.

I've been raving about it since it came out. I took a ton of notes on it. It's one of my favorite books that I read this year.

Definitely grab the book. The audio is good. We have the physical copy here at The Painted Porch, so I'll link to that in today's show notes.

So listen to this episode, grab a signed copy of Marcus Aurelius, The Stoic Emperor, and How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. You can grab both of those from The Painted Porch.

I cannot recommend his book, Marcus Reuss, The Stoic Emperor enough.

Two of the only non-Ryan Holiday Stoicism books we carry at The Painted Porch, not written by actual Stoics. So I can't recommend them enough.

There really isn't any. There's some great biographical essays, which Gregory Hayes talks about in his intro to meditations. There's some older books. There's some little profiles of him, but there's no great singular biography of Mark Sreelis. And I had to wait almost 20 years for a great biography of Mark Sreelis, which I just read. My friend Donald Robinson's book, Mark Sreelis, The Stoic Emperor, just came out from Yale University Press. And it's incredible.

And I told him this when I read it. We immediately started carrying it in the store. I've written a bunch of daily stoic emails about it. It's just awesome. And I'm so happy that he did it. And I'm glad he did it so I don't have to do it and I can tell you about it. It's a wonderful book.

We ran an excerpt of it on the podcast a couple months back, but I asked if Donald would come out. He lives in Greece, so that was no easy trip. But he was in the United States and he came by.

We like to say that we don't get to choose our parents, Seneca said, that they were given to us by chance. Yet truly, we can choose whose children we'd like to be.

In today's reading and meditation from The Daily Stoic, Ryan examines why Seneca stated that "no one is crushed by fortune unless they are first deceived by her," and the folly of trusting in fortune. You can read more of Seneca's views in On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It.

It's a beautiful, as said you can read it in On the Shortness of Life one of my favorite little collections of Seneca's writings but we'll get to the quote now he says no one is crushed by fortune unless they are first deceived by her.

if you haven't read On the Shortness of Life pick up a copy there and the pain of porch if you could all I'll link to it in today's episode right there's something sweet about the fact that Sennaqa is the one exiled but he's writing the consolation to his mother

In what is almost certainly his greatest piece of writing On the Shortness of Life, Seneca is writing to his newly retired father-in-law, Polinus.

It is not that we all have too short a time to live, Seneca says, But that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long enough, and it's given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well.

We're all the geniuses of history to focus on a single theme. They could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give even an inch of their estate or the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay. Yet we easily let others encroach on our lives.

We're tight-fisted with our property and money, and yet we think too little of wasting time. The one thing we should all be the toughest misers about.

And this all comes from his wonderful essay On the Shortness of Life, which you should absolutely read. It's a very powerful essay. It's worth rereading a couple times a year, to be quite frank.

Julia Baird, as she writes in her wonderful book, Phosphorescence was diagnosed with rare abdominal cancer.

And then talking to Julia Beard her book on queen Victoria is spectacular a biography everyone should read and her new book Foss for Recense was just a joy for me to read one of my favorite books this year so here's me talking to Julia Beard

yes I think that's right and it's almost hard to put your finger on and that's what I was trying to to grass like what is that when you're sitting on a hill in a it's some area where there's no light pollution you're looking at the stars like what is that we all know that that soothes us we all know that it makes us feel better but but but why and and that's why I think you know scientists are trying to get to it and why have we designed life to be literally the opposite of that and to have as little of that as humanly possible that is the strange that's from strange thing about the modern world the infinite distraction I think

she sent me this little book called Foss for Essence which I'm carrying my hand the subtitle is a memoir of finding joy when your world goes dark.

Foss for Essence is basically things that sort of illuminate in the dark and she's talking why why do some animals glow particularly sea creatures literally glow what makes a firefly do what it does that's where the word Foss for Essence comes from

there's sort of a as the subtitle hints right a memoir of finding joy when your world goes dark there is this sort of looming darkness in the book that you are combating with the Foss for Essence

I really became very very intent on finding it for some like I'm physically finding it and actually it occurred in my neighborhood just about a month ago which was unbelievable my daughter saw it as well because I had dragged her along to see it once and she said it was just the most euphoric experience of her life

The memoirs of US grant. Have you ever read that?

And he talks about Bastrop. He talks about when he was here writing the Mexican war.

What did he say? It was in Texas. I think it was Texas.

I got to show you two things, but I just read this book. It's just read this book, which you would look. It's called Grant's final victory.

So first off, you know what happens to him at the end, right? He basically, so after the war, he becomes, um, he joins this wall street firm, but he puts his entire fortune in it. His son is running it. He's working with this guy named Ferdinand Warrant. Who's basically like the Bernie Madoff of his day, but he doesn't know it.

So Grant becomes obscenely rich and then loses all of it.

And, um, so he's a broken man. He has to hawk his war mementos to JP Morgan, uh, just to live.

And so he starts to think about writing his memoirs. Cause he then, he has this problem with his tongue.

They find that he's dying of tongue cancer. And so he realizes that he's going to leave his family destitute.

So he starts to think of writing his memoirs.

And so he starts to write the memoirs, thinking about it. And then Mark Twain hears that he's doing this and comes by to say hi and just ask him about the contract.

And he basically realizes that Grant's about to get ripped off again.

And Twain is like, I'll give you the money and we'll self publish it. And you can take 50% of the profits and sets him up to do like a self publishing deal.

He realizes that this publishing company doesn't know what they're doing. And so Grant's basically dies like three days after he writes the memoirs and then they make the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars because Grant, because Mark Twain set him up so well. But the memoirs were incredible, right? Yeah.

They're so good. And people are, people thought they were so good.

People thought Mark Twain wrote them because he'd been involved. Um, but yeah, it's maybe the, it's maybe the greatest American literary memoir ever.

I mean, the reason I read it was because Mattis, so I'm talking to him and he said, what's a great thing to read? And he said, Mattis.

Well, I'll take you upstairs. I have a first edition of them. What you got to see.

And then I have, um, my other moment too is I have a ticket to his funeral. Really? Yeah. A ticket to his funeral.

I was just talking to someone about Grant's memoirs. And one of the most striking parts of Grant's memoirs is just how scared he was to start at this school and how miserable the first year is for him.

I mean, they were younger than I think they were 15 or 16. And they're coming from these tiny farm towns and it's a much more brutal system in many ways.

It just you reminded me that they gave us that book. I probably have it around here on one of the shelves. You know, it's that thick and Grant wrote it. And then he died like a week after, you know, really shortly after he finished that memoir.

So definitely, you know, when you look at some of the history of West Point and individuals that made it through there, we draw on that.

I really like what Princeton university press has been doing with this ancient wisdom for modern reader series.

We carry a bunch of them in the bookstore.

I've used them because it's like the greatest hits kind of in the way that daily stoic tries to do this, greatest hits of little snippets around certain themes from the stoics.

They've got some from Cicero, they've got some from Plutarch.

I really liked their one, how to be a leader from Plutarch, which I've been recommending to a lot of people.

I've raved about Princeton University Press's ancient wisdom for modern reader series and today we have an excerpt from their edition of Epic Titus which I quite like How to Be Free in ancient guide to the stoic life translated by Anthony Long and in it Epic Titus talks about how being free is a matter of being unobstructed by things that are out of your control.

You can pick up the physical edition of the book here at the Painted Porch. I carry it. It's a great book. I love it. I've got it here on my shelf.

And if you are interested in learning more about Epic Titus I just did this new kids book called The Girl Who Would Be Free which is a fictionalized version of Epic Titus and his slash her origin story to introduce your kids to stoicism or maybe just remind you of the principles.

I was blown away by the Merle Miller biography of Truman.

I think that's one of the most unique presidential books.

It's Truman as Truman would want to be seen, but it's also, it's so folksy and accessible.

The crazy thing about that book where Truman intersects with my world is there's a scene in the Merle Miller book where Merle is asking him some question. Truman goes back to his room or his office or whatever, and he comes back with his copy of Marcus Reles' Meditations, and he gives it to Miller who goes through it and he sees-

Truman had a copy?

And you know, it's stuff about how, you know, first off that, you know, the Cardinal Virtues, it's stuff about how when people judge you, they don't understand your character.

There's a story in the Merle Miller book where he makes some obscure reference to something and a journalist goes, that can't be right.

So he makes some comment about Alexander the Great like in a speech Truman does. And the reporter goes, what's the president talking about? He's obviously wrong. And so he goes to prove that the president was wrong.

So he goes down this long rabbit hole. All the experts don't know what he's talking about. Finally, he ends up at the Library of Congress and he talks to the librarian who spent several days tracking down this anecdote and finds it in a book in the Library of Congress.

And they open up the front of the book and in the library card, the only person to check out the book in the last 50 years has been Senator Harry Truman.

If you want to understand the Cold War, David McCullough's book on Truman,

The late David McCullough who's Truman biography I've raved about a bunch of times and I carry at the painting porch, he once said that the hardest part about being a biographer is getting the reader to keep in mind that nothing was ever on track as he continues things could have gone any way at any point.

As soon as you say was it seems to fix an event in the past but nobody ever lived in the past only in the present he said.

The challenge he said is to get the reader beyond thinking that things had to be the way they turned out and see the range of possibilities of how things could have been otherwise.

Also like is it on writing again? Yeah it's his memoir about it so it's kind of I would say Government Cheese it's like the stories between all the stories in the War of Art so it's like what he was actually doing as he was learning all that stuff.

You think which one? Which one? These two are the best.

if you haven't read The War of Art, Do The Work, Turning Pro, Gates of Fire, government cheese, Tides of War, A Man at Arms, what are you even doing with your life?

It's his memoir, but I really like the book. It's sort of like it's the stories in between the lessons that make turning pro and the war of art and all those other books so fantastic.

He also has one called The Algebra of Happiness. I would say those two things are related, right? The purpose of wealth is to facilitate happiness.

He also has one called The Algebra of Happiness. I would say those two things are related, right? The purpose of wealth is to facilitate happiness.

her new book bitter sweet about sort of the melancholy side of life because I was speaking at the Naval Academy

Susan can who i love her new book is called bitter sweet and she's sort of talking about how melancholy is that kind of depressive outlet but there's also if done right a sort of love of beauty and

wonder and solitude and what it's so it's like if you're only getting the negative part of it you're probably doing it wrong but if it's actually kind of shaped you know it allowed you to create some

some inner world that you can retreat into and it connected like you can you can kind of choose to see it different ways i guess is where it comes down well that's kind of the David Foster Wallace

She lost her brother and her father to COVID in 2020, which I can only imagine how devastating that was.

And so it's both fitting and a bit haunting that she had been at work on this new book, Bittersweet, How sorrow and longing make us whole.

If the power of introverts was about the power of that sort of quiet reflective inward life, this is the power of a more melancholic outlook and why our culture has been so relentlessly focused on positivity and excitement and passion and hopefulness and that there's also something very powerful about reflection and meditation about coming to terms with getting up and close in person or with loss and sorrow and how we harness those difficult emotions to create value in our own lives.

There's this great book called Why We Swim by Bonnie Toy. She talks about why humans swim, what our attraction to water is.

There's this great book called Why We Swim by Bonnie Toy. She talks about why humans swim, what our attraction to water is.

It's called Why We Swim. It's an argument that I think any swimmer would get a lot of value out of. It's a deeply philosophical and moving sort of ode to the wonderfulness of swimming.

I absolutely loved the book.

I wrote a lot of Why We Swim in the pool or, you know, out on the water, swimming in open water or surfing or something like that.

The other sort of arm of effective altruism these days and I interviewed Will McGaskill who just wrote a book called What We O The Future. That was really interesting. He was saying that a lot of philanthropy or a lot of our efforts are we have a sort of blinkered view of like helping only the people that are around us or that are existing today.

What We Owe the Future is really about this concept of long termism which I think is an important breakthrough as we think about doing good as we think about altruism as we think about stoicism.

It's not just how do we do good for the people around us but how do we do good for the people in the future people we will never meet.

Will is a fantastic writer, a fantastic thinker.

Check out What We Owe the Future.

Check out What We Owe the Future and enjoy this conversation with the one and only William Magascale.

I'm working on William Agascale's new book uh and the title is What We Owe the Future so it's sort of like what do you owe the past and then what is the contribution you're going to make in the future that sort of passing of torches maybe that sort of despite the unrealness of your individual circumstances actually ends up rooting someone in a somewhat grounded place

and he has a book Yes to Life that I think is really like but the South is what's so important in spite of everything yeah

We also talk about Jack Weatherford's book Indian Givers which I also enjoyed. I put in the reading list email this month and we're carrying in the store and people really love as well.

I just read this fascinating book um by Jack Weatherford called Indian Givers it's not a great title is actually written in the 80s but it basically it's it's a look at all of the sort of things that we got from the native americans um who we also you know uh if you want to talk about a holocaust we perpetuated a holocaust here in america against the the uh aboriginal people and and and what what he was talking about in the book is all these things and it really hit me because i'm from i'm from california now live in the south but you know race is native americans it's more of a part of the sort of cultural conversation and history in california than race is because it wasn't a slave state um and you know what not really part of the civil war but but you know i've i've had a bit clearly had a bit of a blind spot as to the severity and the the horrific tragedy of of what we perpetuate against native americans and reading this book it was very eye-opening and inspiring and interesting and anyways the one of the things he concludes the book with and i encourage everyone to read it is he's talking about it's it's not just all the things we got from native americans um that we should be grateful for but he says the cautionary tale is what our racism and our fear and our sort of insatiability took from us you know he talks about all these things that you know native americans discovered that they brought us all these modern medicines at the root of this and that ways of hunting ecological preservation and he's like as the last of these people die out they are taking with them knowledge and understanding in a way of living that is lost to us forever and that's been happening he said for 500 years

another book called Indian Givers of his that's fantastic about what i don't think it's the greatest title but it's what the native americans gave to western society incredible incredible book

I'm a big fan of his book. Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It which I carry here in the bookstore. You can check it out. I highly recommend it and actually we have a plan to excerpt a chunk of it here on the the podcast. It's a sort of cult classic for a reason almost everyone I know in Silicon Valley has read it

they worked together they originally loved yourself like your life depends on it was self-published and they did an expanded wonderful edition for Harper Collins that's the one I carry in the store he did that

when I read and obviously I know you but when I when I read love yourself like it depends on it I see it is like this is come all at the bottom of this pit and he's clawing his way back to what he's capable of being what he wants to be how he wants his life to go

Today's episode is an excerpt published by Harper Audio of Kamal's book Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It.

The books and collection of Kamal's writings on overcoming depression, living a happier life focusing on self care and mental health.

You can pick up Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It at the painted porch, thepaintedporge.com anywhere books are sold and you can get the audio book published by Harper Audio on Audible and anywhere you get your e-books.

I asked Kamal if we could excerpt a chunk of Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It his book on overcoming depression and living a happier life and ultimately being a better friend to himself

I'd reach my breaking point I remember it well I couldn't take it anymore I was done done with all this this misery this pain this angst this being me I was sick of it done done done done and in that desperation I climbed out of bed staggered over to my desk open my notebook and wrote this day I vowed myself to love myself to treat myself as someone I love truly and deeply in my thoughts my actions the choices I make the experiences I have each moment I'm conscious I make the decision I love myself

I didn't know all I knew was that I'd made a vow something far greater than I want or a desire and I wish are a nice to have a vow I had to go all in on destroying myself trying there was no middle ground

I started telling myself I loved myself a thought I would repeat again and again first lying in bed for hours repeating to myself I loved myself I love myself I love myself I love myself I love myself I love myself

If I love myself truly and deeply, would I let myself experience this?

you are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live he said, the more I read, the more patiently I think and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know.

On his way to work each day in Boston John Adams would hear a man singing as his great biographer David McCullough writes in John Adams it was a beautiful almost joyful song that inspired him as he headed to his law office in the mornings

griefs upon griefs disappointments upon disappointments what then this is a gay married world nonwithstanding

it could have been Seneca or Epictetus's or Marcus's too yes life is hard people can suck yet it's still a gay and married world still joy is possible still the best ways to face life with a smile never a sneer

one book that I absolutely adore carrying in the painted porch we don't carry a lot of sort of current events like books they don't fit in clear categories and this is one and I really think you should read it

I really liked this book again when I rave about books I'm really raving about books like I took some notes when I was writing this book I was like this book is better written than it should be

if you haven't checked out Freak Kingdom you absolutely should I'll link to it in today's show notes but uh go ahead and check it out

I also just read this book like I read this book Freak Kingdom a kingdom of freaks it's about I've spied this creative writing professor but it's about it's about the political activism slash writings of Hunter S. Thompson and there were it was one of those books I'm reading and I'm like the level it's published by like public affairs so not like a huge press or anything and I was like the writing is too good in this book like like the he was so good I was like I actually have to like slow down and appreciate this the way that it's been written

In terms of specific tools for getting more done, single biggest step I found is something I came across in a book called Make Time by Jack Knapp and John Zoratsky.

Single biggest step I found is something that came across in a book called Make Time by Jack Knapp and John Ziratsky they're called it the Daily Highlight I think similar to Gary Kater's idea of the one thing like what's what's the one thing I actually want to do today?