The Stoic Code General Mattis Lives By
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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.
Make Stoicism translatable for us right now.
Deal with it. Just deal with it. No victimhood, no cynicism. Deal with reality and keep confidence in yourself and each other. We'll get through this.
Stoicism is the idea you don't control what happens, you control how you respond to what happens. And the idea was you can, not just that you can respond to anything with virtue, but the worse the situation is, the more important that response becomes. Defined by how we handle the toughest things in life.
How we respond. All right. There you go.
Okay, so that was me and the great General Mattis talking about Stoic philosophy. How did that all come to be? It's kind of a crazy convergence of events bringing this all together. Let me walk you through that. Okay, so back in March, a bunch of things converged pertaining to the ideas that we talked about here, to Stoicism. So first was just the application. I had a brutal, brutal travel day. I was down in Florida. I had a seven... a.m. flight out of Panama City, which I had to get there super early because all the airport TSA stuff was going on. Get on the flight, fly from ECP to Atlanta, Atlanta to San Francisco, drove down to Palo Alto, got a decent run in. And then I had to show up at the Hoover Institute where I've been doing a bunch of research and
for the book that I'm writing about Stockdale. Stockdale studied at Stanford. This is where he was introduced to Stoke philosophy. So I'm walking around the campus. I'm seeing the exact building where Professor Philip Rhinelander handed future Admiral James Stockdale a copy of Epictetus, the book that he would rely on in the Hanoi Hilton. So that was incredible. And then I walked down to the Hoover Institute and I did a television interview where I sat on stage with one of the few modern Stoics of our time, the great General James Mattis, four-star general in the Marines. 40 years of deployments. He carries Marxist Meditations with him and then was the former Secretary of Defense before he resigned on principle midway through the first Trump term.
Just a hero of mine, a lifelong student of the Stoics. We've been trying to meet for many years now since Steven Pressfield connected us, but he was doing this thing for PBS's firing line where they were going to talk about the 250th anniversary of the founding. He wanted to bring in some of the sort of stoic ideas, which Tom Ricks talks about in his lovely book, First Principles, a mutual friend of ours. And he suggested that they also interview me. So that was just an incredible honor and incredible opportunity to say, that's what I was flying out there to do. And we got to talk about stoicism quite a bit on stage. We had a call beforehand where we got to really nerd out about the Stoics. Obviously, with the events happening in the world, they wanted to talk about some more political stuff with him.
So if you want to watch the whole episode on Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, you can listen to the whole podcast. I think they split it up into two episodes on TV. But if you want to hear me and General Mattis briefly talking about Stoic philosophy... Well, this episode is for you.
How does Stoicism apply to leadership in times of crisis?
You can grab General Mattis' wonderful book, Call Sign Chaos at the Painted Porch, which we carry. There's a lot to learn from him, I feel, when it comes to honor and leadership. And in the meantime, here is me and General Mattis, Margaret Hoover, talking about Stoic philosophy.
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