Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key sto...
courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Heal yourself with this. Sometimes life gets heavy, relationships dissolve. The job you thought you'd have forever disappears without warning. Someone you love gets a difficult diagnosis. It stings. Stoicism is designed as medicine for the soul. It relieves us of the vulnerabilities of modern life and restores us with the vigor we need to thrive.
“That's why the stoics urge just to read to study into journal, not as abstract philosophy but”
to help us recover from the stuff life throws at us. Don't return to philosophy as a task master. Marx really says in meditations, but as patients seek out the relief, entreatment of sorrows or addressing for a burn or from an entwint. Regarding it this way, you'll obey reason without putting it on display and rest easy in its care. Masonius Rufus also believed that we could be like doctors treating ourselves with reason. The power to think clearly to get to the truth of the matter
that is how we recover from being bashed around by our emotions or from moral events. He was not interested in shortcuts he said or smelling salts that revive but do not cure the disease. So that's what philosophy does. It cures what ails our souls. So check in with it today and let it do. It's healing. So you're stuck. You're not reading as much as you want. You've got a bunch of books piled up, life got busy. You're a bit of a reading right? What do you do? How do you get back on track
if you're not reading as much as you'd like? As an author I read as part of my job but I get stuck too. We all do. Reading slums are real and you can get real stuck in them. Usually when I'm stuck from not reading as much as I want I have three go-to options. Either something really short, something I read a page a day of or just something that's going to rip your face off. It is so good.
“And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode because the way out of a reading”
right is to find the right book. I've been doing that for the last 20 years not just in my own habits as a reader but now owning my own bookstore and it's a little bit different than your average
bookstore. At the pain of course we don't carry all books. We carry only books that are amazing.
Like the kinds of books that can change your life. The ones that have changed my life or my wife's life. The kind of books that are so good you're going to think. Where has this been? Why haven't I read this yet? Come with me. Let's go next door and I'm going to give you some books that are so good they're going to blow your mind. This is one of my absolute favorite genres of books. The daily devotional. You read one page a day every day for a year and then ideally you read it year after year
and even though the books days the same you bring something different to it each time and you take
“something different out of each time. These are some of my favorites. One of the classics of the genre”
is Tolstoy's calendar of wisdom. This book was actually banned. Shortly after it came out by Soviet
Russia and it was only rediscovered in the late 80s but just absolutely incredible book with his favorite
quotes from The Stoics from Chinese wisdom from the Bible, from the transcendentalists, the greats in so many different eras. I love this book. This is one I read every single day. I can't take credit. This book was my idea. I love Robert Green's books but people shy start with the 40 years of power or laws of human nature. A mastery or our seduction. I was like Robert there should just be like a greatest hits album. So this is the greatest hits of Robert Green. One meditation
every day on power, seduction, mastery, strategy, and human nature. Great book. Peter Drucker. This is one page a day from the business strategist and management expert Peter Drucker. My agent actually did this book and when he was an editor at Harper Collins and the success of this book is what gave me the idea to do my book, The Daily Stoics, which is one page a day of Stoics, philosophy, leather addition and I also followed up later with The Daily Dad which is one page
of parenting advice every day. This is the parenting division. It's not one page that day exactly but the idea is it's a parenting meditation. You can start each day with he doesn't go it only goes to 80 but you can just start over once you get to 80. We just got home from a spring break trip to 12 hours of driving, we're pulling into the driveway and we're like oh man what are we going to have for dinner tonight? What are we going to have dinner for tomorrow because we don't have
time to go to the grocery store? Then we remembered we had a hell of fresh box delivered while we were gone. We had someone put it in the fridge that took care of everything because hell of
fresh makes cooking effortlessly. Always look forward to a homemade meal and with hell of fresh
no two meals will ever be the same. You can choose from 80 plus global recipes every month,
Be it to me, is Moroccan, Caribbean and more.
pre-proportioned for you. You don't have to be a five-star chef to make dinner tastes great. The recipes are easy to follow. They don't require fancy equipment and again all the ingredients are right there. Go to hellofresh.com/stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus a free neutral bullet ultra. That's their compact kitchen system. It's almost a $200 value under third box. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan must
order the third box by May 31st, 2026. Usually when people are thinking about supplements or training, they're thinking about recovery, they're thinking about protein, they're thinking about creatine. But one of the most overlooked pieces is gut health. If your gut is not dialed in, everything else struggles to work the way it should. And that's where momentous fiber plus comes in. Momentous fiber plus addresses one of the most overlooked foundations of long-term performance
“that is gut health. Because fiber is not just about digestion, it's the key driver of gut health”
which directly impacts a bunch of things, nutrient absorption, energy stability recovery, focus mood, and overall performance. Momentous fiber plus is a complete 3 in 1 formula with soluble fiber, insoluble fiber, and prebiotic resistant starch. Like everything momentous makes fiber plus is built with the science first formulation, clean and minimal ingredients and no artificial out of this or artificial flavors. And right now momentous is offering our listeners
up to 35% off your first order with promo code daily stoic. Head over to livemomentus.com and use promo code daily stoic for up to 35% off your first order. That's livemomentus.com
promo code daily stoic. Amazing books you can read in a single sitting. So this little book I
left it so much I bought a thousand copies of it. I think we're one of the only bookstores in the country that has it. This is a little book by Stefan's wife who wrote the world of yesterday and it's just a short biography of Montaine. He's writing as the world is falling apart and he's writing about a guy Montaine who is writing and thinking when his world is falling apart it is a lovely book that you can read very quickly. The war of art this is a book you can read in one
“sitting and then you should read it again and again and again. I tried to read it before I”
start any creative project. This is the new Walter Isaacson book The Great of Sentence Everwritten about the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence on the 250th anniversary of a country he does a nice was this 70 page or so meditation on a wonderful sentence and what it means. This is gift from the sea by Ann Maro Lindberg. It's a lady walking along a beach riffing on modernity, quietness, stillness writing on youth age, love and marriage, peace, solitude and
contentment. She writes this on a abbreviation and it's kind of a vacation of a book to be actually read this flying through the beach on vacation on a two hour flight or so. It's perfect. This one's almost too short to be a book but it is in fact a book. This is Stockdale's courage under fire. This is a man testing with the doctrines of Epictetus in the Hanoi Hilton as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Okay 21 pages so you can do this and less than one's
at it. I think it like this one now. This is Claire Keegan's small things like these. I'll get one novel in here. This book is 114 pages but it is incredible. The ending is going to fuck you up but it's very good. 84 turn cross road again this doesn't seem like an amazing book but it is the series of letters between a screenwriter in the US and a antique bookseller in the UK right after World War II but you will fall in love with all of the characters in this book in
the V hour and one setting. This one is very relevant today. This is written by General Smedley Butler. This is War is a racket. The anti-war classic by one of the most decorated marines in the US history. All right so this is a letter 120 pages. This is a letter that Kafka wrote to his father.
He had this overbearing imperialist judgmental father. They never got along. He never understood
his son and so one day Kafka sits down and says I'm going to write him a letter. It's pouring out
“all my thoughts and emotions and that's what this book is. He sends it to his mother who of course”
never gives it to his father but this to me is a great parenting book. It's also a great book if you had difficult parents of yourself. Still like an artist this great show your work is great. Keep going is great. You want to be more creative. You want to be more inspired. You want to do better work. You want to build an audience for your work. Heck in these three books are great and they've got lovely little drawings and doodles in them too. You can definitely read these in one
sitting. This is one of the greatest sports books ever written. I would not have guessed that it was so short. It is exactly 150 pages about the famous match between Arthur Ash and
Clark Grabener just an incredible exquisite piece of sports writing and character study and psychology.
It's so stuck in my mind and so riveting I would have guessed it's 250 or 300...
obviously reads extra faster than that. This is the way of love by Anthony Demaine. Not only
“is it only it's 190 pages or so but these are very little pages. If you wanted to put this on”
a normal size it's going to get way smaller. basketball coach gave me this book one time and it changed my life just absolutely beautiful writing in here. Timothy Snyder's short book on tyranny fairy apropos of this moment clocks in at a hundred and twenty six pages. If people could just read these pages we would be in bed of faith. Some books that are so good you'll have trouble believing that they're true but they are and they're so well written they'll rip your face off.
“Literally that's true for this one this is Night of the Grizzlies which is about a series of”
Grizzly Baritacks that happened on one night in 1967 in Glacier National Park. The first time
it had ever happened in the park when you read about the lead up to it happening you realize it was inevitable like they would have shows where they would feed the bear's trash every night and then they let people camp right next to the shows mind going of course the best animal versus man's narrative nonfiction book is the tiger by John Blan. I just can't tell you how
“good this story is and if you haven't read it I don't know what you're doing with your life. I just”
read marriage at sea just about this couple sailing from London to New Zealand and then halfway through a whale sinks their boat really like Moby Dick which is also what in the heart of the sea is about like the true story of Moby Dick but hundreds of years later basically the same thing would happen again and they spend many many days on this inflatable raft that catch turtles and sharks and they somehow manage to survive against all odds. It's this sort of interesting look at the
marriage that is understrain throughout all of it absolutely incredible. The stranger in the woods
and the art thief both written by the same guy this guy steals literally billions of dollars worth of art from tiny museums all across Europe and then he just keeps him in his apartment until I once boil it incredible and then one day some guy just drives off into the woods in Maine and then he doesn't come out for 27 years. Everyone knew there was someone who was breaking into their houses and stealing supplies and there were whispers and rumors of it but no one saw him just absolutely
incredible book. This is the black count about a black general in Napoleon's army who also just happened
to be the father of Alexander Dumas three musketeers the Count of Monte Cristo incredible book and that's close this out with the river out about theater Roosevelt exploring a river in South America where he almost dies post presidency just mind blowing and by the way he took a copy of Epictetus and if you want more book recommendations I send these out in my reading list newsletter which I've sent out every month for 15 years and he can sign up at RyanHolyday.net/reelist
