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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four

Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school.

When we have the time to sing, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring.

American born businessman George Cohan, the founder of McDonald's Canada, was never satisfied with the status quo. Throughout his career, George was always searching for new ways to innovate and revolutionize the way he did business.

At McDonald's, that innovative spirit let him to do something truly extraordinary. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of the business leaders who risked it all, the critical moments that define their journey and the ideas that transform the way we live our lives.

In our latest series, George Cohan gives up his career as a Chicago attorney to open the first McDonald's fast food restaurant in Canada. But as George moves up the McDonald's corporate ladder, a chance meeting with members of the Russian Olympic Committee gives George an opportunity to shake up the status quo once again.

In the midst of the Cold War, George sets out to open the first McDonald's behind the iron curtain. Find out how, follow business movers wherever you get your podcasts, and you can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondry app.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode, the Daily Stoke podcast. Man, when I recorded this episode back in October, you know, the pandemic had gone on for a really long time, and I was sort of exploring how stoicism had helped me cope.

I was going through the pages of the Daily Stoke calendar. I was basically out of the Daily Stoke calendar. It's at some desk, I tear off a page every day, it's an awesome quote.

And I was just, I went back through and I wanted to see like what had transpired over the last, I guess at that point, seven, eight months, you know, sort of how had I been waking up, what was the stoic wisdom that was guiding me.

And it was quite a surreal experience just to see some of these quotes from the stoics, you know, Marcus Aurelius writing during a pandemic, during a plague, and then how often I think what's so awesome about the stoics is, even though I've written this stuff a long time ago, even though they wrote a long time ago,

and I arranged it, you know, several years ago, in some cases, how serendipitous, how perfect some of the quotes or the ideas happened to be on the days they land on, it's like you're struggling with X, and you know, you flip open a page of Marcus Aurelius and boom, that's exactly what you needed on that day.

And so I found that to be true as I was going through, I think I went from like March, seventh, eighth, when the pandemic, lockdown started in Texas, that was when I stopped traveling, I know all the way to like I think October 17th, that's when the episode you're going to listen to spans, what's also crazy about it is just how much is transpired in the month or so since, right?

It's certainly hasn't gotten better. We are in the, you know, we are in the throes of some people calling it the third wave, it's really kind of just the first wave that never stopped, but it is, it is as bad as it's ever been thousands of Americans are dying every single day, people are dying all over the world.

What I want you to take from this episode is first off, House Doisism helps one cope with something like a pandemic, but I also hope it makes you take the pandemic seriously be smart.

I hope people were smart about Thanksgiving. I hope you're going to be smart for the holidays. Looks like they're working on a vaccine, which is incredible, but we can't expect a magical solution.

It's not going to be here right away. This is going to be with us for a while, so let's settle in. This is going to be a marathon on top of a marathon on top of an ultra marathon, but we will get through this, we will survive.

And Stoicism is there to guide us as always, so enjoy.

You can bind up my leg, Epictetus would say, indeed his leg really had been bound and broken, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.

We'd like to think that the modern world is so different from the ancient, but is it Marcus Arelius' reign from 161 to 180 AD was defined by a pandemic which originated in the distant east and quickly overwhelmed Rome's institutions, civil unrest, interminable wars in the provinces, personal health issues, cultural decadence, income inequality, and so much else.

This was his daily existence. As he would observe in meditations, people have always been people and life has always been life. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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