Steven Pressfield Painted Porch Book Tour

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2:12Welcome 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, audiobooks that we like here or 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 your actual life. Thank you for listening.

2:53Happy Mother's Day, everyone. This is a special Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast because I wanted to talk about Marcus Aurelius' mother. Stoicism is obviously a very male-centric... The history of stoicism is obviously a very male-centric thing. And in In today's episode, I wanted to talk about where Marcus learned to be Marcus, and the answer is that he learned from his mother. Marx Rebius's biographers all talk about how Marcus was very much a product of his mentors and tutors. We've talked about his adopted father and his predecessor, Antoninus. We've talked about his rhetoric teacher, Cornelius Fronto.

3:30We've talked about the Stoic teacher who introduced him to Epictetus, Junius Rusticus. And while all three of these were crucial influences. They didn't enter Marcus's life until he was already chosen as the successor to the throne at age 17. Before then, there was really only one person who shaped who Marcus became, and it wasn't his birth father who died when Marcus was just three. It was his mother. In Meditations, Marcus writes how often he thinks about his mother, and when he does, how he thinks about her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability, he says, not only to not do wrong, but even to conceive of doing it, the simple way that she lived, and not in the least like the rich.

4:12So where did Marcus get his profound and his lifelong commitment to doing the right thing, to kindness, to charity, to justice? It was from her. Only one thing is important, Marcus Aurelius writes elsewhere in Meditations, to behave throughout your life towards the liars and crooks around you with kindness, honesty, and justice. That was him channeling his mom. And today on Mother's Day, it's worth celebrating that. For all our debates about how to do good in the world, about what rules create a fair system, Marcus learned from his mother that doing the right thing was pretty simple. You have to be kind.

4:48You have to avoid the corruption that can follow wealth and power. You have to keep your heart from hardening. You have to do what's right, not just because there are consequences for doing wrong, but because it's inconceivable for you to be the kind of person who would try to get away with something. We do what's right because it's right, and we should do it right now. And anyways, look, that's the idea behind the new book, Right Thing Right Now. Good values, good character, good deeds. There's a whole chapter about Mark Surrealist and this idea of wanting to be a good man, which I think he learned from his mother, not just a great man.

5:20And I hope that you check out the book. You can pre-order it now. It's got awesome stories from Harry S. Truman and Florence Nightingale, Frank Serpico, Sojourner Truth, Cato the Younger, role models who, like Marcus Aurelius' mom, sort of both shame and inspire us. And we've got a bunch of awesome pre-order bonuses. I'll send you the opening chapter, the intro to the book right now. You can get a video message from me on how to read the book, what you're going to get out of it. And then you can get signed and numbered first editions at dailystoic.com slash justice. You can even get signed manuscript pages from the writing of the book.

5:57Plus, we can all have dinner together and talk about these very ideas. You can grab that. Discipline is destiny. The sign one sold out and same with courage is calling. So grab one now at dailystoic.com slash justice. I'm celebrating Mother's Day with my wife and my in-laws. I hope you are having a great Mother's Day. Also, I appreciate all the men and women who listen to Daily Stoic every day. And I'm doing my best to live up to Marcus Rios' mom's example, Marcus Rios' example, and the example from my own family. And I hope you do the same.

6:34One of my prized possessions in my office, it's so prized, I don't know why I'm saying this, because I'm worried someone will break it and steal it. But don't do that. But hanging on the wall on the other side, like right across from where I write, is a framed manuscript page, the final page of the first manuscript of Gates of Fire, Stephen Pressfield's amazing book about the Battle of Thermopylae and the 300 Spartans. And I got that last page because I know Stephen, but I gave him the idea. He was like, hey, I'm trying to promote my next book and I don't know what I should do. Got any ideas? And he had been telling me earlier how he had just found the manuscript of Gates of Fire, which he'd written on a typewriter.

7:20This is how long the book came out. And I said, you know what would be cool? What if you came up with a thing where if people pre-ordered a certain number of copies, they could get one of those manuscript pages? And he was like, I love the idea. I'm absolutely going to do it. A couple of months later, he told me he was doing it. And he said, I'd like to give, you can pick any page for giving me the idea. And I was like, I want the last page of Gates of Fire because that's the one that has the famous poem at the end about how, hey, stranger passing by, tell the Spartans here obedient to their laws we lie.

7:49It's the epitaph to the sacrifice that these 300 Spartans made, not just to their fellow Spartans, their fellow Greeks, but all of Western civilization, which was saved from being conquered by Xerxes and what was then sort of Eastern despotism. it's one of my favorite possessions i love it and it i gave him the idea and then i stole my own idea because for courage is calling discipline is destiny and now a right thing right now the books in the virtue series that's what i've been doing if you buy five copies of those books you could only do it for the first two when it was in the pre-order phase and now that's what we're doing for right thing right now if you pre-order it you can grab this at dailystoker.com justice if you pre-order the book, you pre-order five copies of the book, you can get a signed manuscript page, like the pages from the first drafts that I was doing, then later when it got designed by the publisher, and you do what's called the first past pages, then the second past pages.

8:48These are pages I'm doing notes on. Mine from Stephen doesn't have his handwriting on it. Each one of these drafts, I'm making changes on that. I'm sending it back to the publisher, sending it back to me. Even the audio book, which I just recorded in the Painted Porch studio, I was making changes. So you can get not just a signed manuscript page, but signed manuscript pages that were actually used in the production. You can see me making changes, tweaking things, adding sentences. If you want that, just grab it at dailystoic.com slash justice. Eventually, we'll run out because I only put notes on so many of the pages.

9:21So grab those while you can. Why am I telling this story? I'm telling the story because I wanted to give you a little special Stephen Pressfield episode. So when we do the Daily Stoic podcast, basically we sit and talk with the guests. And then we were just finding afterwards the guests wanted to sort of walk through the bookstore. And I'd be like, oh, have you read this book? Have you read this book? And I just recommend a bunch of my favorite books. And we sort of shoot the shit and talk. And so finally we just say, hey, why don't we just carry mics and just record this? And it's a great conversation.

9:47You can be a fly on the wall for it and hopefully get some book recommendations. and I wanted to do this with Stephen because Stephen came to the painted porch before it was the painted porch. I don't even think we had a name for it yet. I just bought the buildings and he came in to have this conversation about how he would market his books. And so we were hanging out at a restaurant up the street and then I was giving him a tour and telling him what I was planning to do for this. So it was sort of a full circle moment. And anyways, he's one of my favorite people. I love seeing him. And that's what I wanted to bring you in today's episode.

10:19Here's me and Steven Pressfield walking around the painted porch, telling him a bunch of my favorite books. I give all the guests on the show a handful of books. They walk out with books I think they should walk out with. And it started out, oh, yeah, just take this one. And then now the manager of the bookstore is like, you have to tell me which books you give the guests because we thought we had a shoplifting problem. But really, the problem was I was being too generous with the guests. So I won't tell you all the books that I recommend in the episode right now because you should just listen to it.

10:52But I will link to them in today's show notes if you want links to them. But I absolutely love talking to Steven Pressfield and that's what I'm going to do. We not only do the bookstore tour, but then I show my office, which had been built out. And I hope you like this chat with me and Steven Pressfield walking around the Painted Porch bookstore, which you're welcome to come to anytime people come in and they'll all be in the middle of one of these tours. So there's always someone cool at the bookstore to check out as well. Thanks to Stephen, one of my absolute favorite writers. If you haven't read The War of Art, Gates of Fire, and any of Stephen's books, I don't know what you're doing with your life.

11:29He probably signed some copies while he was there. We sell out of them pretty fast. We might still have some. So check those out at paintedporch.com.

11:40I want to give you this Pontius Pilot book. Thank you. This one's incredible. You got to do this one? Thank you. I swear they're a good movie out of this. It would be an incredible movie. And you already got Deliver Me From Nowhere? You just haven't read it, right? Yeah, I got that, yeah. Okay.

12:03How do you decide which books you're doing? It's either ones I read and loved, or they're ones that Sam read and loved. So that's the test. not which actually makes it hard because like that book um when it was i think it was successful when it came out but it's like 30 years old so i bought it and we talked about it and then it totally wiped the publisher like it wiped the publisher was probably selling i don't know 10 copies a month or something for like 10 years and then we sold so many they had to do another printing so and then we bought all those uh so that's always cool when you take a thing that like wasn't super well known or like hasn't been moving and then it just like blows out the sales trajectory, that's like, that's my favorite.

12:50I've done that with a couple books. I don't know if we have a We have this book Asylum that's really good. I never know where they are. Oh, have you read, um, have you read this book? Do you know who Jan Morris is, the historian? No. Oh, so she He was in the British Army and then was the news correspondent who climbed Everest with Hillary and then wrote these three books, like a history of the British Empire. It's incredible. and then in 1965 somewhere in there basically comes to she'd known it since she was a kid but that she's trans and then so she gets gender reassignment surgery but in like the 60s before it was cool but it's like an incredible memoir from like one of the this all time badass But I love reading books about people who went through something that people are talking about now, but because when they experienced it, when they wrote about it, there's no political baggage, there's no controversy, there's no phobia about it, it just is.

14:14And so, like during COVID, you would read about the Spanish flu, right? So you understand what's happening now through something that doesn't have any of the... That's like one of my all-time favorite books. I just read it like maybe a year ago, and it blew my mind. It's really, really good. I think you would like that one. And then let me give you one more. If I can find Asylum. I might have to have your mail. You should do that. Oh, you don't have a suitcase? We'll send them to you. That's fine. I'll send them to you. I'm looking at his book, Asylum. That's another one. So this guy's name is William Seabrook.

14:52He was like the biggest journalist in the world in the 20s. But he's an alcoholic. like, and so that's not a thing. Like, there was a pre-AA, and so he checks himself into an insane asylum to treat his alcoholism, and he writes about the whole thing. And it's like this fascinating memoir, this person struggling with this thing, kind of like that, that nobody understands is a thing. It's called asylum. Yeah. He was this crazy travel journalist. Like, he's the one who brought the word zombie to America. Like, he wrote all these books that were, you know, you read them, and you're like, oh, this book sold 200 ,000 copies in 1917.

15:33And you've never heard of it or whatever. But yeah, Asylum's another one that when I found it and started talking about it, there were basically like no copies left. And then this publisher brought it back in print. And then we seemed to not be able to keep it in stock. So maybe I'll just give you those two. Oh, have you read, um, that book is incredible. So good. Yeah, he's already read it. He has a new one that's very good also. This one. Have you read this one soon? Thank you. That's been pretty quiet. I've read that a long time ago. Oh, you did? It was a huge book. I haven't read it in years.

16:14Oh, it sold like five million copies or something. Oh, yeah, yeah. But it's beautiful. Yeah. Would you mind sending this to me in the mail? Yeah, that's what I'm getting. So I just write these, write these? Just sign them and then we'll... Do we have a chair? Yes, do we have a chair? Two important things. Can you bring that chair over? Oh, you want to do that one? They are. We'll see, I guess. They definitely are.

16:47Do you think about that when you're writing books? Is anyone going to be interested in this? Oh yeah, all the time. and I always figure nobody's going to be interested in this. And I'm always amazed when they are. The Memoirs of U.S. Grant. Have you ever read that? And he talks about Bastrop. He talks about when he was here writing the Mexican War. No, no, that's, there's, I think, I think there's a battle in Bastrop. I love that. I think there's a Mexico Bastrop. There might be. Did he say it was in Texas? I think it was Texas. Really? I mean, there was no battle he was talking about. They just talked about that they were here with the army, you know, on their way to fight Montezuma, whatever it was.

17:27Yeah. So Bastrop was of going and concerned. I gotta show you two things, man. But I just read this book. It's, look, I just read this book, which you would look. It's called Grant's Final Victory. And it's about the last year of his life when he's dying of... So first off, you know what happens to him at the end, right? I don't. So after the war, he joins this Wall Street firm. He puts his entire fortune in it. His son is running it. He's working with this guy named Ferdinand Ward, who's basically like the Bernie Madoff of his day, but he doesn't know it. So Grant becomes obscenely rich and then loses all of it.

18:05And so he's a broken man. He has to hawk his war mementos to J.P. Morgan just to live. And so he starts to think about writing his memoirs. Then he has this problem with his tongue, he keeps ignoring it. Then he finds out he's dying of tongue cancer. And so he realizes that he's going to leave his family destitute, so he starts to think of writing his memoirs. And so he starts to write the memoirs, he's thinking about it, and then Mark Twain hears that he's doing this and comes by to say hi and just asks him about the contract. And he basically realizes that Grant's about to get ripped off again.

18:44and Twain is like I'll give you the money and we'll self publish it and you can take 50 % of the profits and sets him up to do like a self publishing deal he realizes that this publishing company doesn't know what they're doing and so grants basically dies like three days after he writes the memoirs and then they make the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars because Grant because Mark Twain had set him up so well. But the memoirs are incredible right? They were so good and people thought Mark Twain wrote them. Because he'd been involved. But yeah, it's maybe the greatest American military memoir ever.

19:27I mean, the reason I read it was because Mattis, I was talking to him and he said, what's a great thing to read and he said that. Well, I'll take you upstairs. I have a first edition of them. Which you've got to see. And then I have my other memento is I have a ticket to his funeral. Really? Yeah. A ticket to his funeral. Yeah.

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21:11To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under Podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org, code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. Well, it's almost here. Christmas is just a couple of days away and maybe you're scrambling. You're like, what should I get my dad? What should I get my mom? I got to get something to my sister. People love showing off pictures of their kids and that's where today's sponsor comes in. I've gotten one as a gift. I've given it as a gift.

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22:47Which edition of Grant's Memoirs are you reading? which one did you get it's called the personal memoirs of uh i don't know it's uh i just wonder i'm just a real quality version i have like a library of america version which is really good you have if you have it here i can tell you it's the same one okay okay but here you got i'll show you this and my other one i got a free french bite wow it looks like there's blood on it i don't know wow probably coffee yeah but maybe it was charles de gaulle's coffee could be This is a great little room right here. It's my favorite room. That's definitely not one.

23:26No, no, this is the first edition that I read. I read one like this from Library America. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. So what Twain's idea was that they sell them door to door by subscription. That's how his books were selling. So what he had to say, he was like, look, if you go with them, they'll slap it in a few bookstores and he's like, the way for this book to really work is you gotta send salespeople out all over the country pre-selling them by subscription. So that was his whole plan. And that's why it became this huge book. And that's also why, uh, Grant was able to, Grant's family was provided for from this thing.

24:02Wow. Uh, and then I had no clue that anybody ever sold anything like that. Yeah. That's how books book, you know, like back in the day, you know, this is, or this is like probably 1887, 88. So there wasn't like big retail stores. So they would have to, And they would, someone would come, if you lived in Bastrop, Texas in 1888, right? Like, how did you buy stuff? You had catalogs or someone would come to your door and be like selling pots and pans. And you would be on these different subscriptions. So that's how memorable. And then this is, this is his, it's a ticket to his funeral. Wow. Now, where did you come by this?

24:44Wow. On an auction. A ticket to his funeral. August 4th. I'd love to go but I can't afford it. Well, I imagine as a dignitary, you know, like, it was probably a pretty hot ticket to get. Political funerals are a big deal now, right? Like, you don't just allow anyone to go to the street. Yeah, I guess so. But I didn't know you could buy a ticket. I thought you had to be like Hillary Clinton or something. Well, I mean, maybe it was for, I don't know if you paid for it, but I think it's, uh, maybe it was friends and family. I don't know. there's a really terrible movie that I love called Midway. I don't know if you've seen the most recent Midway.

25:22This is just a very small thing. But one of the... they make a point in the movie Admiral Yamamoto, whichever one it is, is reading the memoirs of U.S. Grant. In the movie? Yeah. I'm not sure why they make a point of this, but it's a big... you know the camera zooms in on it. Wow. Sherman's memoirs are also incredible. Yeah, that's another thing. Ah, that sermon, yeah. I also bought that book because of Mattis. Oh, really? Yeah, which I have not read yet. They're both incredible.

25:54Yeah, and Grant, when you see Grant, you realize Grant, all this stuff about Grant being an idiot or a butcher, you realize he's a genius, just this sort of a simple, straightforward genius. That's incredible. there's a scene i i think i tell it in um in the book i just said in the justice book i tell a story about uh and it they talk both of them talk about in their memoirs but at the uh when grant is sent to take vicksburg uh he has the plan he says we're gonna run the gun boats we're gonna come he has this complicated plan and basically sherman's like it's a terrible idea it won't work it absolutely it's going to end in disaster we can't do it and grant's like okay um and sherman goes back to his tent and he goes i just i don't think he understands me i'm going to lay out my my objections in writing so he can really understand and he sends grant this letter and grant gets the letter takes it seriously but decides it's the right thing to do and then of course grant does take vicksburg and it it's the turning point of the war and it it sends grant on his path to ultimately take over the Army of the Potomac.

27:05And so nobody, nobody remembers, even the next day, or like a week later, something, this foreign news correspondent is there, and Grant comes over, and he hears Sherman talking to him, to the reporter, and he goes, I just want you to know, I thought it was a bad idea, and I sent Grant a letter, all the credit goes to Grant. He was like, he wasn't trying to say, I told you so, he was trying to, he was trying to make it clear that grant was the genius and there was no shared credit and then when grant is writing his memoirs sherman would come check on him because he lived in new york in the news time he he knows grant and he knows that almost certainly grant won't mention this so he digs up the letter and the telegram and sends it to him again just to say you better include this in in your memoir that you were right and i was wrong and that was and does he yeah and that to me embodies their friendship and their collaboration because technically even then Sherman outrakes Grant.

28:09And so he could have, and you know all the Civil War generals are constantly stabbing each other in the back, but Sherman is so loyal to Grant that even when he disagrees and he's proven wrong all he's thinking about is... Wasn't Vicksburg like heavy, heavy, heavy casualties? It's kind of a disaster but they won anyway. That's Shiloh. Shiloh is the one that could... Vicksburg is this slow, methodical siege and then they take like 10 ,000 prisoners. It's probably the... It's the moment that the Civil War is lost but then they fight for another two years. Like they're... the South, if they were at all rational, would have surrendered.

28:53Actually Gettysburg doesn't matter at all and once they lose the Mississippi River, the war is over. They just don't know it and they can't accept it.

29:07Well, I haven't gotten to this point yet in the memoirs, was my great-grandfather fought in the Civil War on gunboats to retake Texas. So he was on the same rivers that Grant was on, Yeah, the Red River, the Arkansas River, wherever the hell that was. Well, it's weird. You read it and all these Navy guys are involved. Yeah, I don't really get how the Navy's involved. Yeah. And then you realize, oh, the rivers were just as dangerous as the ocean at that. Yeah. And that the ocean was how you traveled the or the rivers were how you traveled the United States. Yeah. So you have Vicksburg is effectively a naval battle.

29:53that Grant, what Grant does is he sends the boats down, Vicksburg's on these bluffs overlooking the river, and so Grant, going with the current, sends them down past the gun batter, so they have to sort of go past this blast of gunfire, knowing that once they get past, they can't go back the other direction. So then it's kind of a burn the boats behind you moment, where once he does it, then they come up from the other side. But yeah, there's all these great naval battles in rivers. Yeah, and I guess the interesting thing was at least when I was reading about this was it what happens is the rivers would drop And the gunboats would be stuck.

30:29Yes, and the Confederates would just you know just wail on them They were like your ironclads right yes, but Sharpshooters putting bullets right through the little holes in the side, you know well, I haven't holes I have another book for you all Man, I'm coming out of here with things. I could never finish No, and not only... I love this whole place up here, Ryan. Oh, you have Walker Percy here. I think you showed me that before. Yes.

30:58And the river would flood, and there was all these sunken things that sink your boat at any moment. One of the plans for the campaign at Pittsburgh is he wonders if he can dig a channel, like the river has this bend in it, right? And Vicksburg is at the bend in the river. And so he wonders if he starts to dig a channel like at the top of the bend, will enough water come through the channel that it will just reroute the river. So at one point that's his plan. He sends thousands of men and they start just trying to redirect the whole Mississippi river, like something out of ancient warfare. And it almost works.

31:38But they don't have, like today, that would absolutely, it would have worked if they'd had tractors. and dump trucks and stuff. But yeah, he tries to rewrap the Mississippi River. There's this amazing, there's this guy named Lee Sandlin, who's amazing writer. He wrote a book called Vicken River about the Mississippi River in that era. Because it's, well, I'll send you this one too. See, it's beginning in the 1800s and climaxing with the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, brings to life a place where the river pirates brush elbows with future presidents and religious visionaries share passages with thieves it's totally changes your understanding i'm surprised they haven't done movies about this whole stuff you know about yeah i know sherman or grant or what i you know he's very briefly can do that i know grant the grant story is incredible uh it's because the reason there's no grant movie is because the lost cause bullshit.

32:36Like our understanding of Grant as is all basically Southern racist. Yeah, they'd never, would never sell a lot of Robert E. Lee movies. Southern, yeah, yeah, Southern movie theaters. Yeah. And only slowly now do we understand and appreciate him. I mean, we talked about the Klan in our interview. He's the one, he basically sets up the Department of Justice to go after for the Klan. Is that right? Yeah, because there was no there was no federal, how do you deal with a multi-state criminal organization designed to deprive Americans of their rights to vote, especially when the southern government, state governments are tacitly condoning what they're doing.

33:26And so then a hundred years later, this is the exact same problem that Kennedy and Johnson have to deal with Because they realize, oh, like I just read this book, Three Lives from Mississippi, about the murder of those three civil rights workers. Like there's murder is not a federal crime. So how did, but the state, the state police and the local police are complicit in the murders. So how does the government investigate and prosecute the same thing? This is basically the FBI comes a little bit before you. The same fight is going on today, right? Sure. It's nuts. Well, it was amazing to see all mail in these.

34:12Thanks for having me, Ryan.

34:21Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way. You go as the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.

34:58My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner, and honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota trucks are built for. Off-road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer.

35:28From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks, they're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. You hear that? That's not just a Toyota truck. That's the sound of no crowds, no alerts, no distractions, and no telling what you'll find next.

36:13You know, like a detour. so why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour Toyota Trucks