You’ve Gotta Make Them Work For It | The Presidential Biographies You Can’t Afford to Skip

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 gotta make them work for it. It's depressing. It's discouraging. It's distracting. All this stuff that's happening in the world, all that's wrong in the world. Maybe you're worried about authoritarians destroying institutions we once trusted. Maybe you're worried about group think and cancel culture and chilling effects. Maybe this is making it harder for you to focus. Maybe this is making you afraid. But you know what you can't do? You can't give up your work, your freedom of thought, your freedom of choice preemptively. It may well be that the social media mob or the goons with guns come for you at some point, and you'll be forced to reckon with that use of force. But this is not that point. So why are you giving up your power voluntarily in advance? In the Hanoi Hilton, James Stockdale counseled his fellow prisoners of war that they would inevitably be tortured and almost certainly break under the torture. But, he told them, and this was the key, they needed to resist up until that point. They should make their captors work for it, he said. They should go as far as they could. They should not surrender until they had to. They had to make the guards work for it. The stoics knew about tyranny. They knew about exile and torture and duress. But they also understood that for the time being, that is to say right now, they possessed a freedom of choice, and they had to use it. They had to hold out. They should not give up out of fear or anticipation prematurely. They should not hand over their focus or their freedom until the tyrant actually made them. And this advice applies as much today as it did then. Favorite presidential biographies. I haven't read a biography of every president, but I've read most, and I'm gonna give you some of my favorites. Okay. Truman, underrated president. You wouldn't think you would wanna read thousand plus pages, but this David McCullough biography is incredible. It's not my favorite. My favorite Truman biography is Plain Speaking by Merle Miller, which I have upstairs in my office. It's out of print, but it's sort of an oral history of Truman's presidential administration and absolutely incredible. As Truman said, there's nothing new in the world but the history you don't know. McCullough's biography of Theodore Roosevelt is really good, mornings on horseback. But, again, not my favorite. My favorite Roosevelt biography, this is Teddy Roosevelt, is The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, which I actually bought on the same Amazon order as Meditations for the first time twenty years ago. Love this book. Very good. They say about Washington, the more you read about Washington, the more you like him. And we should have Chernow's biography of Washington here somewhere. So …