The Marcus Aurelius Quote Tom Junod Can’t Forget
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. There's that expression, a writer's writer, like somebody who's writing is appreciated by people who appreciate the craft. Like people who do it, they know that, look, anyone can enjoy this, but if you really know how stuff works... you appreciate it at a different level. There's certain comedians that are comedians, comedians, writers who are writers, writers, musicians who are musicians, musicians, right? We joke about how Epictetus is your favorite philosopher's favorite philosopher.
That's kind of the vibe, right? And Marcus Aurelius and Meditations are that. I mean, Meditations is a very popular philosophy book, but among people who are writers who can appreciate it on a very different level. Tom Junod is a writer's writer, one of the great magazine writers of his generation. Millions of people have read his articles. Not everyone knows who he is, but the people who do know writing know he is one of the best All the time. Always manages to get to like the real story beneath the story, not just as an investigative reporter, which he's really good at, but like on a human level. And then his sentences managed to express that. That's why his The Falling Man, which is about that unidentified victim plunging from the World Trade Center, is so deeply moving.
That's why his piece on Mr. Rogers was so incredible. He has this new memoir called In the Days of My Youth, I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, which is... This sort of reckoning with his father. Tom is a senior writer for ESPN. He's won an Emmy. He's won a Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sports Writing. He's won two National Magazine Awards. He's won a James Beard Award. I mean, he's just as good as they come. So when he came on the podcast, I really wanted to dive into Meditations. He told me he'd been reading it. And I wanted to learn from a writer's writer about the sentences that stayed with him, why they stayed with him, what Marcus meant to him as a writer. So that's what we're going to dive into in today's episode.
He's just an incredible writer. Like when writers read his stuff, they're like, oof, I wish I could do that. which is actually one of the feelings I had when I read Meditations for the first time. How is he doing that? And the idea that he's writing it to himself 2,000 years ago, it's just unbelievable. Anyways, I think you'll like this conversation. Do check out Tom's new book. He signed copies of In the Days of My Youth, I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man. And if you haven't read Meditations yet, well... I don't know what you're doing. What are you listening to this podcast for? Go read Meditations as well. We have the Leatherbound edition in the Daily Stoic store. Grab the Haze edition, which I wrote the forward to, or really any edition.
I think the Haze edition is the translator's translation of Meditations. I think it's the most beautiful one. Let's get into it. There's a ton of information out there about what you should do to be healthier. People trying to sell you this, people trying to sell you that, people trying to tell you to do this, people trying to tell you to do that. Everyone's got an opinion and it's hard to know which one to listen to. And that's where today's sponsor comes in with superpower. You do one simple blood draw that gives you information on over a hundred of your blood biomarkers. By the way, your annual physical only does like 10 to 15. And this testing gives you a much deeper understanding of your body across 17 core systems, heart, metabolism, thyroid, inflammation, and even environmental toxin.
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