The Daily Stoic - Life Is Too Short To Read Bad Books

Episode Date: February 26, 2023

To the Stoics, it wasn’t that we read. It’s what we read. We should seek out books that make a difference in our lives…not ones that win prizes. What matters is what we think of the books, not what other people think. What’s impressive is what we get out of them, not how they look on our shelves or that they might impress certain types of company.Read widely. Read aggressively. But don’t be a glutton for punishment.In October of 2022 Ryan Holiday was asked to speak at the Austin Central Library about the importance of reading books that resonate with you. In today’s episode, he shares a recording of that speech.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, from the Stoic texts, audio books that you like here recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to actual life. Thank you for listening. Listen to Business Wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. It's good to be with all of you. Well, actually, I do feel like as a bookstore owner, I'm coming into the fows of my world enemy,

where you get to do the way books for free. I think you guys have this socialism that my parents, friends on Facebook, who are warning me about. I actually love libraries. I wrote most of my first book at the library on the Chewland campus. Actually, as I was prepping for this talk, I found this pencil which I still have

that I stole from said library. I wrote most of my next book at the UCR library, the UC Riverside where I went to college. I dropped out the beginning of my, or the end of my sophomore year. Actually, I think the first time I entered said library was to write that book after I had left. I wrote a good chunk of the next book

at the 42nd Street Library in New York City, and then my book equals the enemy, which is the first one I wrote after moving to Austin. I wrote a good chunk of at the UT library. So I've always worked in libraries. They're wonderful places, which is something I want to talk about today. But I fell in love with books at an early age,

or at anything I could get my hands on, which did set up one somewhat traumatic memory at a library. I fell in love with Westerns. I loved books about. Holiday. I liked all the Lou the Moore books. You haven't read Lou the Moore's education of a Warner and man. One of the most beautiful celebrations of reading that I've ever read. I read all of his books. And then I was at the library in Sacramento, California, where I grew up as a kid, and I read pretty much every move of the more book there's ever written. And then I came across the section

of a whole bunch of questions that I've never read before. Got them, and I took them home. And there was a reason I hadn't read any of them, and probably shouldn't have been allowed to check them out. This is the long-awaited series, which is a very different kind of Western and Western and very different audience. But I survived that scarring, a jarring experience. And I would go on when I was in college,

my life would get changed by a book recommendation. I was at a conference, sort of like this, covering it for my college newspaper. And I went up to the speaker afterwards, and I said, hey, what books are you reading? What books would you recommend to someone my age? If you recommended, Meditations for Mark's Reels, this is my Amazon receipt long before Amazon Prime existed, so I had to buy this other two books to get free shipping. It came to my college,

my college apartment, and blue and white, This is the book. There's a private thoughts of the emperor of Marx really is. And it's a book. I think unlike any book ever published, it's not meant for publication. It probably been mortified that anyone was reading it, let alone a 2,000 years later. It was what the economist Tyler Cowan calls a quick book. It sort of shook everything that I thought

and knew about the book, which at 20 years old was not much, but it was this transformative experience that I've put quite a few miles on that copy over the years. So since 15, 16 years old, it's starting to show somewhere. As you can see, I want to come back to the idea of sort of putting miles on a book. But there's one passage at the beginning of meditation. It's Marcus begins meditation with a section that's

titled, Dex and Lessons, where he talks about the things that you learn from the most influential people in his life. And one of those people is his philosophy teacher, Rousticus. And he says, thank you, Rousticus, a number of great things that he learned. But he says, through him too, I came to know Epithetists' discourses of which he gave me a copy from his own library.

I think it's this beautiful idea that the course of Western civilization is changed by the thing that you do day in and day out, which is recommend books to people. This book, Reformation to a Young Man Markets, is probably 20, 25 years old, changes the course of his life. It's exactly what he needs. It's also a sort of a beautiful study of contrast, right? Epic Titus is a slave in Nero's court. He is as powerless as one could be

in Rome, and yet his writing, his thinking, is through philosophy, through the conversation that books enable is able to influence the most powerful man in the world. And I think it's interesting that these two figures, whose lives could not be more different, whose lived experience, is could not be more different, are still struggling with the same fundamental questions, how it means to be human beings.

They're both, for instance, thinking about what it means to be human beings. They're both, for instance, thinking about what it means to be free. Epictetus in the literal sense, but also the figurative sense, free of the tyranny that's over him, free of the despair that quite naturally would wash over him. And then Marcus and Muleys in this decision of great power and wealth and privilege, which he does not ask for, is also thinking about freedom, freedom from stress, freedom from disturbance, freedom from energy, freedom from greed, freedom from a more figurative kind of enslavement. But nevertheless, some powerful people are as enslaved at epitons, we'd say, or perhaps more enslaved than even literal slaves in Rome's time. So what I wanted to talk about today is I love books, I was thinking about books, I write about St. Claussi,

I wanted to talk about some of the lessons that the Stoets give us as readers and thinkers and lovers of books. And the first is this idea that we must not just read, but read very, very deeply. I have Masonius Rufus, who is Epictetus's philosophy teacher in real life, riffing on a line that Epictetus says in his discourses, this is in my Kings book, The Girl Who Would Be Free. He says that it's not what you read. He says it's not what you read.

It's what we read and how we read. At one point, in real life, Epic Titus is talking to some of his students who are bragging about having read all the works of Christ's siphon when the earliest Dougs was very brilliant, but very difficult to read and tended to be right-hurry long books. And Epictetus looks at them and he says, you know, if Christ's this was a better writer,

you would have less to brag about. And his point is that, you know, it's not reading, whatever else you should read, it's not reading the books that everyone says are important, but it's reading deeply into the important text of our time. And actually, in that same passage where Marcus is thanking Rousticus, one of the things he specifically thanks and for Risticus is Marcus's boss, Dijer, he says that from Risticus, I learned to read attentively,

not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of things. Now I think I understand, but no, I actually did put in the time and the work to truly understand not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of things. Right? Now, I think I understand, but no, I actually did put in the time and the work to truly understand what's happening here. This is my copy of Tom Rex, great Austin author, and I think he spends about half the time, half the year here. This is his new book.

It's a military history of the Civil Rights Movement, called To Wage of Good War. This is a copy that I read about halfway through. But you can see here when I read books, this is one of the reasons I don't check out books from the library, is that I insist on folding the pages and writing in the margins. Of course, you're not allowed to do.

But the point is when I read, I'm not just casually consuming information. This is why I'm not a huge fan of audio books, although I don't fault anyone for reading them. I want to engage very deeply with the text. And so I not only read very deeply, but then after I read, I go through, and I type up all the passages that I like.

I want to feel them coming through my fingers. Some of them I write by hand, I do these on physical no cards. And this work not only goes into forming and building my actual recall and understanding more than just getting a gist of the book that gone through it several times, but these no cards also become the building blocks

for the books that I go on to, right? Now, the story also says, it's not just enough to read. Deeply, we have to read why in my book, The Boy Who Would Be Came, which is about the boyhood of Marx's realist, Rousticus places in Marx's hand to book, and then Who Would Be King, which is about the boyhood of Marx's realness, Roussicus places in Marx's handbook and then another and another and another. The Marx says, what does a reading books have to do with being a king and Roussicus says everything?

The idea that we have to read, that reading is the best way to understand what it is that we do is important. There's a great dictum from this market. It says, any fool can learn by experience. I prefer to learn by the experiences of others. And that's essentially what books are, an opportunity to learn quite deeply from the experiences of others.

And we have to unveil ourselves of as many of these experiences as possible. General James Mattis actually traveled on all of his deployments with a copy of Marcus Aurelius' meditations, like he and I had gone back and forth over what's the best translation. But he would say that if you have not read hundreds of books

about what you do, he says you are functionally illiterate. And I love this idea, right? It functionally illiterate. And I love this idea, right? It functionally illiterates that you have not ingested a wide enough breadth of experiences or insights about your profession, you're just winning. He says in his line of work, this is tantamount to murder because you're gonna be learning lessons by experience at the cost of other people's lives or lives.

To all spaces, I cannot understand people who do not want to communicate with the wisest people who have ever lived. This is the twin quote whether he said it or not, we're not quite sure, but it says, those who do not read have no advantage over those who cannot. And so I like this idea of functional literacy as a really important concept. It's not that we read occasionally or we read about some of the people who do what we do or some of the things that are interesting. We have to swarm topics.

We have to go very, very, very in depth and then reading as widely and as deeply as we possibly can on this topic. And the other stuff in concept that I take as far as reading that I think about a while ago, I've tried to, although I try to read as widely as possible, for the last couple years, I've been concentrating by reading not just in a few areas, but also on going back to reading books that were influential early in my life,

or that I struggled to read the first time. So this idea of reading is a really important concept for the Stoics. There's a beautiful metaphor that the Stoics do. So Marcus writes, a good chunk of meditations. The only true location we have for it is listed in Book 2 of the Meditations among the Quaddai.

He's on at the front of the Roman lines. This is near a tribute area of the Danube River. And then he writes the rest of it, or a good chunk of the rest of it, at a Queencom, which is a camp outside Budapest, also on the Danube River. So this theme of a river comes up multiple times in meditations.

And Marcus likes to quote Heratlenus, the great mystic poet who says that we never step in the same river twice. The idea when we return to a book is the book is exactly the same and yet we are different. The context in which we are reading is different. What we are looking for is different. When they say that they never step in the same river twice ago and go in, it's not the same river, and it's not the same man. In many cases, the book is exactly the same, but we are different. We have changed. And so every time I go back and read a book, I find something in it that I never would have seen before. I reread it, I read it, I read it a couple of times since, but it's a book I read in high school, and I remember taking from this the idea

that the government tries to censor what people can read. And it was only later in the context of the times that we live in now that I realized that's actually not what Bradbury is trying to tell us at all. Bradbury was concerned about a world that was too stupid to be concerned about government censorship.

And he was actually most concerned about people who wanted the government to censor them because they didn't want to be offended. They didn't understand what the fuss about books was all about, they didn't understand why something so explosive or controversial or divisive should be allowed to exist. And at 15 years old, I was incapable of understanding

what this was about. And it also seemed a bit naive or science fictiony. And now we live in a world where tragically, that's not the case. So every time you return to a book, you get something new out of it. You discover something new. And Seneca says similar to Marcus's line, perruzicus about not being satisfied with getting the gist of it. He says, we must linger among a limited number of master

thinkers and digest their works. He says, everywhere means nowhere. Reading lots of books, trying to set a record for how many you read or being in a contest with people, even as a little kid, or the contest of library or a little stickers for how many I read, which is wonderful. But as we get older, we have to understand that we have to pick a lane, to a certain degree, and we have to go as deeply in that lane as possible. So my copy of Meditation, which I was showing you, so I got this at 19 years old.

You can't quite tell from this photo, but that cover is taped on with Scotch Day, because it is ripped off after spending so much time in my bags over the years. But what I love about every time I pick up the book is not just that I get something new out of it, but I also have this strange relationship where I get to see what's struck me when I was 19, what's struck me when I was 20, what's struck me when I was 20, what's struck me,

at all the different ages that I've read this book because I had a different pen in my hand at each time, or at a different highlighter, I fold the different page. And I can see what these different notes to myself were about. And sometimes I shake my head, what was striking to me, and sometimes I am reminded why that struck me.

I'll give you an example of one of my favorite passages in meditations for Marcus is in book five. And he talks about struggling to get out of bed in the morning when it's early. He says, what were you put on this first to do to huddle under the covers and stay warm? Now, as a college sophomore with early morning classes that I didn't want to go to, this

struck me as a really important advice. It was quite helpful. Now, as a writer whose routine is rooted around getting up early, I love the mornings. Now I don't need any help with it at all. I actually sometimes need the opposite reminder that, hey, this is the weekend, if it's sleeping, if you want to, if you've got junior and kids, you're probably going to wake you up in the middle of the night. Tomorrow night, you need to catch up on your sleep.

So we take different things out of the book, and that's why we have to go back to them over and over again. We can't be satisfied with just getting the gist. We can't be satisfied with just understanding what our experience is up until that point allowed us to understand. And so by coming back to them, we get something new. But my favorite things about reading Marx our experiences up until that point allowed us to understand. And so by coming back, then we get something new. One of my favorite things about reading Marcus is this is nothing only translation of Marcus

that I have. I particularly like this translation from Gregory Hays for the Modern Library. I think it's the most beautiful and lyrical of all the translations. But I've read the really antiquated ones. I read the new translations when they come out. Robin Waterfield just did a new translation in an annotated edition that I really enjoy every time I go and then he realized, oh, not even.

It's not even that you can miss something in a book that you read for the first time. But the translator has so much leeway, so much discretion over what they emphasize or what they take out of it. And then in many of the books that we read that are particularly of translations, are reflections of not only the time in which they are who were translated, right? When you read an edition from Marcus from the 1700s and he says,

thou dost nod or thou shalt not. He was not saying that. He was writing in Greek to himself. He would have been totally unfamiliar with these figures of speech or this style of English. That's the translators in the search. And so when you go back and you read these books, you read different translations. You get something new because each time you're seeing it from a slightly different angle. I would say these notes also remind us that we have to read, and this is more important than ever, we have to read people that in a disagreement. Senaqa talks about reading like a spy in the enemy's camp, right? And my favorite line from Senaqa, she says, all quote of that author, if the line is good.

And he does this, he's not just saying this. In Senka's letters, the philosopher that he quotes the most is not another stoic. It's not a philosopher you would think that he would agree with at all. The philosopher that Senka quotes the most is Epicurus. Ostensibly his his moral rival, the school that he would disagree the most with. And that's his point, is that he's a reading like a spy on the enemy's camp. And he's quoting Epicurus, not just where he disagrees with them, and is using Iron Shrupp and Zeyer, and it's explaining why he disagrees, and why the Epicurians were wrong. For instance, the Stoets believed, he says that he says the Epicurians believed, that we should not be involved

in politics if we don't have to be. And then Senaika says the Stoics are involved in politics contribute to public life, unless something prevents us. So they have these diametrical differences, and Senaika is not afraid to debate these or discuss them. But they are also much more aligned than you might think. And he has no problem cited at that author if the line is fit, right?

So he's reading deeply, he is intimately familiar with all sorts of schools of philosophy that you might not think he would be or that you might think he might want to push away. So he is adamant about reading people that we disagree with. And to go back to Ruse the Kisses' advice to Marcus Ruse, Marcus Ruse, I think,

following the same path of he never quotes the Seneca in any of his writings. It's sort of a prudent omission. But Marcus says that one of the things, and this is what I think we are struggling with as a society, when we engage with the points that we disagree with, Marcus says that in the most of case teaches him not to fall for every smooth thinker, right, or a smooth talker. And his point was, you should be reading the things, you should be engaging with the things. It doesn't say that you should be sucked down and be having all that you should lose your grasp on reality. You have to still go to the core of what they're saying,

you have to put what they're saying to the testing up, understand it. I was don't believe that this sort of learning process, as Matt asked us talking about, is something that goes on forever, that we must always stay astute. They believe that ego was the enemy. As Epictetus says, it's impossible for a person to learn

that much they think they already know. Right? And so if we approach what we read, if we approach knowledge, if we approach our craft or profession from a place of humility, from intellectual humility, that we can get better. If we approach it from a place of humility, from intellectual humility, that we can get better. If we approach it from a place of intellectual and professional arrogance, and we are frozen in place, and we can't get better.

You think about the socratic method, right? The socratic method is rooted in asking questions. You think about Socrates as a person. What Socrates does is go around Athens. He's very wise, he's very smart, he almost always knows the answer, but that's not what he does. He does not go around telling people that there's a bit, we're telling people that they're wrong. He goes around asking them questions. He tries to understand why they think what they think, tries to engage with them

in a debate, in a conversation, so that by the end of them, by the end of both of them understand the truth. That, the physicist John Mueller says that, as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline ignorance. I think one of the most rewarding parts about reading and about learning, about the sort of self-education journey, is they never feel like you've arrived. Certainly you feel like you know more, but you also have this creeping sense that you

know so very little, because you've been exposed more and more to things that you didn't even know that you didn't know about, right? Domains, or whole industries, or areas, or lines of thinking, authors authors that you didn't even know you were unaware of until you heard them mentioned obliquely or alluded to and looked something up. And this process then of understanding that you'll never get there. It's like the horizon always moves a little bit out further out from your grasp. To me is actually really challenging and compelling and exciting. It's the whole point. There's a story about Marcus Aurelioz, he's widely in love with this philosopher King, he's known as the Abrilyant and Smart and Educated in contrast to so many of his

predecessors, and he's seen leaving the palace one day late in life. And his friend stops him on the street and is his Marcus, where are you going? And Marcus says, I am off to see sex as the philosopher to learn that, which I do not yet know. Sex is the philosopher, Marcus also thinks at the beginning of meditations, and was the grandson of the grand nephew of Flutr, the great biographer. But Marcus says, I'm off to see sex as the philosopher of the grand nephew of Flutrarch, the great biographer.

But Marcus says, I'm off to see sexist of philosopher to learn that, I do not yet know. And this says the man, and he has this great mind that I think is worth recording forever. He says, oh Zeus, the king of the Romans, in his old age, takes up his tablets and goes to school. You cannot learn that, but you think you already know. Marcus is explicitly leaving the comfort of the palace where everyone tells him he's a genius, where he is in control, where he has unlimited power, and he's seeking out teachers and philosophers

and ideas. It's a lifelong process. He is explicitly seeking out things that he doesn't know. He remains a student even until the end of his life. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday's parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts.

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I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. The Stoics, though, when they read, when they think, when they explore, when they pursue philosophy, they were looking for things that they could use, right? The Stoics would have, I think, looked down on so much of academic philosophy today. Just as so much of academic philosophy looks down on Stoicism, it could simple, and I think it's too close to self-help. I suspect that what it really is, is it's hard to get a Ph.D. and specialize in something that just comes out and says what it means.

For the Stoic's philosophy was something you applied in your life, Mark Smith's inventations says, it stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you're in right now. He wanted to be a philosopher. He is thrust into power. And he realizes that actually that is the opportunity

to be the philosopher, right? It's not something you do in the classroom and something you do in life. that actually that is the opportunity to be the philosopher. It's not something you do in the classroom and something you do in life. Santa can talk to you about how children are taught. Back then, students were taught the Odyssey in the Iliad in school. And he says, what does it matter where this stuff happened?

What does it matter how to pronounce the names or who wrote it or any number of these things, right? What I remember primarily about studying Homer in elementary school and middle school and high school was like debates about whether he was real or not, right? Debates about whether how he wrote it. I remember there were questions about, you know, like all the minutia of it, right?

This is what you get tested on in school because minutia or trivia is how we have taken it in the classroom as a way of verifying knowledge. But Zendek is this, what is all of this matter? What matters is what Odysseus is struggling with, the themes, right? What matters for instance, in the Odyssey, is the theme of hubris.

And so I can say, and we are struggling with hubris in our own lives right in this moment. Mark's really, what's beautiful in meditation is how often he is quoting poets and playwrights, the popular culture of his day. He even specifically talks about how tragedies can be a way of learning about life. He says, if it doesn't upset you when it happens on the stage,

why should it upset you when it happens in life? So the Stokes try to read and consume and study, but always with an eye on practicality. How do I use this information? How will it make me a better person, right? And Marcus talks about how often we want to be seen as smarter, is you want to be a better wrestler, a better writer, but you don't want to be a better person,

a better forgiving of false, a better friend in tight places, he says. The point of studying these ideas is to get better as a person. And he says that what he learns from Rousticist is to, again, is trying to teach him in real philosophy, not peniting philosophy, as in real philosophy. He says, not to be sidetracked by my interest in rhetoric, not to write treatises on abstract questions or deliver moralizing little sermons or compose imaginary descriptions.

And that's what's so wonderful about meditation and why it is so unique among all the works ever published in philosophy. It's that it's straightforward. It says, why are you losing your temper? It says, why are you afraid of death? He says, why are you afraid of death? He says, why are you doing this? Why are we doing that? It's core questions about what it means to be a good person

in the world. One of the areas that stillism and Buddhism overlap is in this idea of stillness, peace, tranquility. And in fact, almost all the philosophical religious traditions converge around this idea. They all have their own word for it, but to me the idea of being still while the world spins around you, not being driven by external or internal forces, getting to a place of inter-piece, no matter what's happening in the world. And to me there's nothing better than that than books.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, before Church of it is re-installed in power, he writes to a friend and he's working on his, what he thought would be his magnum opus, a history of the English speaking peoples. And he's way back, he's still early on in the book. And they say, how are you handling all this? How are you dealing with him?

He says, sometimes in the world is falling apart. It helps to put a thousand years between you in the present moment. And losing himself in history, being able to step back and see the big picture is critical in giving him the perspective, the wisdom that he needs, ultimately step up and lead in this crisis. General Mattis again says, if you were

to sum up the single biggest problem of leadership in the information age, it's a lack of reflection. Since it's a lack of solitude, everyone's just emotionally immediately instinctively reacting to everything. We're not stepping back, we're not thinking. I think there's something special about libraries, not just because they're full of books, they're also full of silence. That silence is so important in a time of noise, in a time of endless noise. The ability to step into somewhere quiet,

the Stokes talk about washing off the dust of earthly life. I think they also mean the noise of everyday life, and having this place of stillness where we can reflect and we can think and we can see big picture Marcus talks of taking Plato's view meaning the view from above He also talks of being like the rock that the waves crash over And eventually fall still around and then again when I could do this I don't just think of the rock, but I think of sitting there,

meeting, following that into the world that the author is setting up, of going, entering another time or place historically, this gives us the perspective that we need. Obviously, morning, because I was talking about our wonderful place to have this before the world is awake before it's noisy, before you have gone straight to your phone, or your inbox, or your social media fees.

I try to every morning, not just to wake up early, not just to go outside and look for a walk, but I try to spend time with journals. Like I tried to put my thinking down on the page, Anne Frank wrote in her diary, that paper, his work, patient, and people. And I think that's a beautiful idea. Using the page, getting some physical distance

from you and your thoughts. That's what Marcus was doing in meditations. He's writing it, as I said, at a camp, at the frontier, at the front of the Roman army. He's writing it in the palace at Rome, in Rome. He's also famously, as people contemporaneously noted down, would be seen at the Colosseum, because he couldn't escape it.

It was a work function. As the gladiatorial games raged below, Marcus would be seen writing in his journal or reading philosophy. We have to find moments to cultivate and seek this stillness. We have to spend some time with the patient paper. The last one I want to talk about is this idea of reading life and insult.

I don't just need widely or deeply or any of this into what we're talking about. I'm talking about reading like a person with some fortitude with some strength, with some self-control, with some maturity. Epidetus reminds us that if somebody succeeds in offending you, remember that you are complicit in taking offense, he says.

It takes two to tango. So my wife and I opened this little bookstore on a mainstream in Bascher, Texas almost two years ago now. It was quite an experience. You could store this old, store a building. We did this all in the depths of the pandemic. It was already going to be hard. It was probably already going the cost more and take longer

than anticipated. And then it was like a legal to open. And that was quite stressful. And we weren't sure we wanted to open. And we weren't sure we wanted people coming around as I'm sure many of you felt and sort of torn, conflicted feelings. You love what you do.

You want to bring it to the world in the middle of this public health crisis that we were all more or less left to tend for ourselves. And my wife and I are still married, so I consider the whole thing a success. But as we decided what books to carry, we thought about not just the books that we liked, not just the books that we knew would sell or be popular,

but the books we really thought people needed to read the average can you paint a bookstore as about 10,000 titles. We have about 750. They all set face out their books that we really stand behind. Not all of them are popular, but I think they're all very important. And then we noticed, as I'm sure many of you did, with with alarm, this recent trend in Texas that's going towards the banning of controversial books and literature, including at Baxter High School, which is almost within eyesight of our store. There was one funny story, I think it was in Baxter, but the mom was quite offended. She heard online that there's this book, Law and Boy,

that's closely has some explicit adult sexual content. And she didn't want her children to be able to read this. And she wanted to ban from the library. And the library gets up at the school board meeting and says, you don't need to carry a title called Law and Boy. But this book is by Gary Paulson. And it is literally about a boy who mows lawns. So we are dealing with a reactionary, uneducated,

ignorant group of people who, although it is admirable that they want to protect their children, the dangerous part is that they're willing to actually endanger not only their children, but everyone by taking away our access to the things that we desperately need access to, two controversial ideas, two books that push the envelope, two books that challenge how we think. So we did one collaboration with Skript, which is a library, sort of a library,

a Netflix of e-books, and audio books, and we gave away thousands of copies of these controversial books, specifically the ones that they wanted to ban in Bastrook and in Texas. I thought I'd highlight three that I think are really important, I'm sure you're from going with all of them. But forget the Alamo, I think is a really important book. You should not just understand the history of the place that you live, but the unpleasant history of the place that you live, right?

Not the mythology or the propaganda, but the true facts. I heard a great expression of, if the history you're reading is comfortable, you're probably not reading history, right? You're reading is propaganda in myth. So this is a really important book. Another one that I know, a very courageous librarian in Texas says has gone basically to the mattresses to fight for, and I believe lost her job over her,

is I need a new black, which my kids absolutely love. I don't know what has to be going through your mind that you have a problem with this book. But again, that is the problem, right? They haven't read the books. They don't actually know what they're about. And I think what they're relishing is the power over other people and the attention

and the outrage that comes from stirring these things up. But even Ray Bradger's book, when you get down to it, it is reminding us that the stakes of these conflicts are not over a few more kids going through me or not reading a funny children's book or a book about Texas history. But there are many ways to ban a book, he says, even smearing it, you know, trying to associate a book with something negative is a form of banning, I would argue, making

it costly or expensive or unpleasant to carry, right, to speaking people ganchai, I think it's a problem. But, you know, there's a famous expression that's where they burn books eventually and indefinitely they burn people. The stakes of this fight are not, again, just the books or just one single book, but are intellectual and free cultured upon which so much depends. And I just think we got us in trouble, as you can imagine, in Bastrop. Which is that after, during Pride Month earlier this year, an adult drag show was chased out of town from first from a local golf course,

and then a local movie theater, and then had to secretly hold this event in the middle of a field somewhere. So people didn't know where it was. They couldn't go and committed it to people. We held a drag time story power, which struck me not only with their threats, not only did people start to mess with our powers on Google, but only did people sort of repeatedly attack us in the time

to boycott the business. I struggled with the logic of all of it, right? They're like, why would you do this? And I said, I think you're going to have real trouble in October when your kids want to dress up in costumes. And everyone's dressed up in costumes. If the lionly draw is that adults should dress up in costumes. If the lionly draw is that adults shouldn't dress up in costumes

and entertain children, a lot of fun stuff is going to be off the table, right? So we did that, and then the other thing we did when we set the books, or we can not necessarily end hearing us to some of the old-timers, is I donated the first half of the funds needed to move a Confederate line of the Army. Don't clap yet. Two years later, it's still there and it's not moved even though we raised

all the money, even though it wouldn't cost the taxpayers a dime, and even though the City of the County Council has passed a resolution, setting the motion, it's eventual removal. I have been repeatedly, I would say amazed, but really disappointed, at the lengths and effort people will go to preserve a monument to literally the worst thing that's ever happened in this country. But that process for me was in part spurred by a book that I read a few years ago called Life of a Clansman

about a white man whose family was from New Orleans. He'd been told this certain, you know, inspiring story about his Confederate ancestors who fought on the Civil War, who were sort of old-time Orleans family. And then he actually researched it. And he found that his family not only participated in Confederacy, but then in a attempt to overthrow the Union government after the Civil War

and engaged in race riots and almost certainly the murder of innocent black men women. It's a fascinating book, but it goes right back to what we were saying because this author, after it came out, was set to speak at Chewling University. This was remote, it was during the pandemic, and it was protested by students, and eventually he was asked not to address virtually the students, because well-meaning students didn't repast the title and didn't understand what the book is actually about.

Right? The book is not the celebration of the life of a clanspin, but it is an unflinching honest and true look at the life of a terrible person who did terrible things for the purposes of stripping away the illusions and the property and the lies. So I don't want to make false equivalencies because there are different things happening at different levels right now, and this is the big that we're having, but it is not just one political party or one end of the spectrum that is attempting

to use these tools and suppress the access to ideas that we have. Slightly better approach, slightly more light art, I guess. Just don't say that it's not just enough to read and explore these ideas, but they say we have to add our homes spin to them. In the Daily Stoke, which is my introductory book to Stoke Philosophy, it's one page of Stoke Philosophy every day, for the end of it, we had this page, it's one of my favorite quotes from Seneca, and he says, it's disgraceful

for an old person at the end of their life to only have the knowledge of others in their notebooks. And he says, you know, Zino said this, or Cricipus said this, he says, but what have you said, right? He says, we must take these ideas and put our own spin on them. We must add their knowledge to our own, but then make our own on that contribution. And in my contribution, fully aware of the irony and the medication that I do on the ancientry, I meditate on one of my favorite quotes from Emerson where he says, I hate quotation, tell me what you know.

The idea is it just that we memorize other people's thinking that we just explore these other ideas. But we should, we don't know which of we feel in power, we should feel obligated to put out our own insights, our own ideas, we should add them, right? We should quote bad authors, if the line is good, if the center cat is saying, we should find connections between one school of thought and another, right, we should reinterpret the remix,

and now we should feel free to jettison the bad ideas from old thinkers or old ideas and take from them only the good. So as I sit down and do my writing, I feel very lucky to be able to talk about, popularize, explore the thinking of the stugs. But what gets me excited is making my own unique contribution to this philosophy, seeing it as a 2,000 year old,

a 2,000 year long journey, a passing of torches, just as Marcus has influenced by Epictetus, I feel influenced by Marcus and Epicetus and all the other great writers in this genre, all the great philosophy teachers and thinkers' registry, when we think about engaging with the material about reading deeply, it should be ultimately with the idea of putting our own spin on it.

That's what I feel like my books are, my own spin on things. But I think the Stokes didn't just mean that a reader must become a writer. They made, and in Cedica says this explicitly, you can also put your own spin on things, putting the ideas into practice your actual life. Right before the pandemic, I gave a talking pencil bay now, staying in rag-more townships and place outside. So without fear, I was running this, no, it just fallen,

and there's this old revolutionary war cemetery that I stopped in. It was sort of beautiful and inspiring, and a monument to one of the best things we've ever done, and the bears and some of the worst things we've ever done, and the bears and the worst things we've ever done. But I stopped specifically at this tombstone, which was a person I never heard of, and when I looked them up, I couldn't really find much

about them at all. But there was a beautiful epitaph on it that I think captured is what the Stoics wanted us to do with this thinking. They said, verses on two stones are the idolies spent the living character is the monument. The greatest thing you can say or do, sorry, the greatest thing you can say is what you do, right?

The greatest thing you can write is with deeds, not with words acted on verb, but the stoves would say deeds, not words, right? This is the greatest form of philosophy is this ultimately taking action. And as I wrap up, I will give you one last thought. I'm gonna try to tie this to reading, but I carry a coin right now where I'm wearing a ring

that has this piece, okay, the market's returns to over and over again in the meditations, which went over my head a little bit at 20 and as I've gotten older, it's simply a little bit harder, but this is momentum morning. I remember that you are mortal, remember that you could die.

He says, you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do, can say, and think. I think that's not just to mean that we shouldn't take time for granted, we shouldn't take other people for granted, we shouldn't procrastinate, we shouldn't delay. But to me, the main reading lesson here is that life is too short for bad books, and we should put them very, very quickly. As a writer, my job is to write something that's entertaining and accessible and practical and usable. If that's not immediately clear, that's on me, not on the reader. The best rule I've ever heard is 100 pages minus your age. As you get older, you should be less and less patient with

bad books. Deck over shadows you just do, it should say, read accordingly. Tim Irving did this wonderful video he posed a few years ago where he sort of thought about how many books one might read in a week, in a month, in a year, and then realizing that you don't have that many books left, and that we should choose these books accordingly. We should respect this time properly. Senaika says it's not the life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it,

we read a lot of bad books and we keep reading some books just because we've started. And Senaika says that it's not the deafness thing in the future. Right, deafness happening now, he says, the time that passes belongs to deaf. Right, deafness happening now, he says, of the time that passes belongs to deaf. You never get a minute back, you never get an hour back, you never get a year back. And so we should read and act accordingly. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books

in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The Ops goes the way. You go as the enemy. Still, this is the key. The leatherbound edition of the Daily Stoke. We have them all in the Daily Stoke Store,

which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com. Hey, Prime Members. You can listen to the Daily Stoke early and add ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.