Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
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Chapter 2: 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. I just heard this stat that shocked me, given that I hear from the sales staff at my publisher quite a bit.
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Chapter 3: What personal experiences shaped General Mattis's view on Stoicism?
He's studied the applicability, and he understands it in almost classical terms. And so that was what drew me to Ryan's writings.
Yeah, there was a Stoic about a century before Christ named Scipio Aemilianus, who's one of the great Roman generals. And he was famous, an ancient historian said, for training as much in philosophy as he did at arms. And I think of General Mattis as maybe a modern reincarnation of that philosophy. very timeless idea.
The warrior monk as an archetype is not a new thing or even a particularly rare thing. You have to study what you're doing. And as you talk about in your book, the idea of learning by trial and error is both arrogant and reckless.
And so we turn to the past because the people in the past lived through situations like we're in right now, like whatever the one that you're in as an individual right now. And this goes back to the origin of Stoicism. Zeno is this merchant in the Mediterranean. And he stops at the Temple of Apollo. And he asks the Oracle there for the secret to the good life.
And she tells him that it is having conversations with the dead. And he takes this only later to mean that reading the study of philosophy is a conversation with the dead. And how do we access this wisdom, bring it into our own lives? Because again, to the general's point, to learn by trial and error is largely an expense paid by people other than you.
We're approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence signing. This is a time in our country of division, uncertainty, and now war. General Mattis, what guidance can Americans glean from the founding generation?
Well, Tom Ricks has written a book about this sort of thing called First Principles. And what you do when you're in a crisis, you fall back on your first principles. Well, what are our first principles? Declaration of Independence, you just mentioned, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.
and you fall back on those things, and you look at our founding fathers who, drawing from the enlightenment, which is all based on the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, they had guidelines for themselves. And based on those guidelines, they drew up those documents with a lot of skepticism about human nature, yet a belief in, quote, the people, unquote.
And so what you do is you look for something to kind of ground yourself on. I mean, think of the Simon and Garfunkel song, about Mrs. Robinson, and where have you gone? Joe DiMaggio, our nation turned its lonely eyes to you.
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Chapter 4: What lessons can we learn from Marcus Aurelius and other Stoics?
And you see him actually turning to the examples. You think of Cincinnatus. A wonderful example that obviously Washington was very, very aware of, and others too, actually. So what he's gaining is the ability, when he's in a fight up against the finest small army in the world, remember the Redcoats a few years later are going to humble Napoleon.
That's the army that he defeated by keeping his army alive all those years. And he's doing it largely set on a foundation, I think, of the ancients, of the philosophers. Furthermore, he has learned how to actually apply what they said and what they wrote about. And he is the most boring leader you can ever find.
I guarantee you, as a colonial officer in the British Army, as a revolutionary general learning how to fight from French generals half his age but with more combat experience, to the father of our country as the first president, He does the same thing time after time. He listens with a willingness to be persuaded. He quiets himself down, tones down his temper, and he learns.
He listens and he learns. And then, a matter of fact, one of his aides said he listened so well he could even hear what's not being said. That is a man in control of himself. And then after listening and learning, he helps them, and then he leads. That's the way he melds this army into a war fighting instrument that can actually survive these bloody battles.
And so you see almost a direct line from the examples that he reads about, straight into his conduct on a daily and hourly basis. listening to even what's not being said. He can even read body language, in other words, in the midst of all the crises he's going through. And remember, in crises, we fall back on first principles. He had them in him.
He didn't just read it and then pass the course in college. He never went to college, you know. He actually lived them.
We do these men and women a disservice when we make them superhuman, when we forget that this was hard work. One of the sculptors of Washington spends hours with him sitting there, he notes that that actually right beneath the surface there were these fiery passions, that he was in fact an incredibly passionate man with quite a temper, as you said.
And he notes that Washington's first victory then is over that, over himself. which is the basis of stoicism, that no one who has not first mastered themselves is fit to govern or to lead. And so it was work for Washington. He's not naturally this way. There are people who are naturally lowercase stoic, but I don't think that would describe Washington. It wouldn't describe John Adams.
It wouldn't describe many of the founders. It was work. They learned about these ideas as young men, as part of the educational process. And then it was a lifetime of trying to apply them and falling short and trying to get a little bit better, falling short and trying to get a little bit better. And that is what makes Washington so impressive and why we were so lucky. I think Thomas Paine
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