Jordan Klepper's Reading List (From Ryan Holiday)

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You would not think that a thousand page biography of William F. Buckley would be would be fucking with me? Yeah. You're fucking with him. Thousand page. It's incredible. Really? Incredible. Yeah? Yes. Like, first off, just because it's like this arc of, history that's fascinating. Mhmm. And he all these different, like, James Baldwin's in there. He I mean, he was the first person to publish Joan Didion. Right. I guess he wrote for the National Review. But, yeah. So it's this arc of American history that I think is fascinating. So, basically, he fondly recounts he was not invited, but his brothers at the direction of their father go burn a cross on somebody's lawn. Like, they his father's, like, profoundly anti Semitic Mhmm. Profoundly racist, just a reactionary bigot. Mhmm. And then so when you understand that, then when you understand when you understand William Buckley, you're like, oh, he's he's actually doing this thing that's kind of endemic to the conservative movement, which is, like, people have these opinions, these instincts. How do we intellectualize that? It's a way of creating, like, an intellectual cover for these sort of, like, primal, like, emotional prejudiced ideas. Like so there's the arc of that in his life. Mhmm. And then he starts by writing a book about liberal overreach on college campuses that his dad pays for. Is that right? Yeah. His dad was a, like, an oil speculator. Okay. Then he is a speech writer and adviser to McCarthy. Mhmm. And the next he's this sort of Machiavellian genius behind Mhmm. Like, all these pivotal moments. It's it's fascinating. Really? You will realize, like, oh, if you just change a couple of these names Yeah. It's the same thing's happening Yeah. Again. Yeah. But but, like, I I I think the the free press, which I like for some stuff, is it similar role where it's like part of what it does, though, is is create kind of intellectual cover Mhmm. For things that people want to believe. Like, realizing that, like, we tend to think of propaganda and misinformation as, like, inserting false ideas. And, actually, its job is to give you reasons to believe what you already believe. Yes. Give you give you a way to not look like an asshole in conversation. Yes. Yes. And kinda gives you this it's like, okay. So the Wall Street Journal is this part of the hierarchy, and then all the way down to, like, you know, Charlie Kirk was in there somewhere, and then the gateway pundit is down here. But they're all doing this thing, and they have various levels of funding. And it was it was interesting to me to watch, like, how people sought him out just like char like, Charlie Curtis is this average kid who wants to go …