Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today.

Welcome to the Daily Stoke. Or each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength,

insight, wisdom necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's

greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at aleystoic.com.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Weekend Edition of Daily Stoke. I'm actually just about to rush out the door. I am heading to Nashville for two talks.

From Nashville, I'm flying to Frankfurt and then to Venice. I'm giving a talk at Aviano Air Force Base, which is a US military base in Italy.

I'm going to talk to something like 8,000 service members. I'm a bit intimidated by it. I think that will be my largest audience that I've ever talked to at one time.

I'm excited. I'm going to talk about James Stockdale. If you guys aren't familiar too much with Stockdale, he is worth like read his New York Times obituary, read his book Courage Under Fire.

Stockdale was a Navy pilot. He ends up being introduced to Epic Titus when he's a graduate student at Stanford.

And actually, as he's shot down, he's parachuting into what will certainly be captivity, if not death, at the hands of the North Vietnamese. He says to himself, I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epic Titus.

And so he spends something like seven years as a POW, almost no contact with the outside world. He spends the majority of that time in solitary confinement.

But he manages to cultivate what they came to call sort of a culture of defiance where they had the secret language between the prisoners. I tell a little bit of the story in the well section of the obstacles away, but they have the secret language with each other.

They can soul each other when the prisoners inevitably do break under torture. I believe Stockdale's Medal of Honor accommodation talks about how he inflicts a near mortal wound on himself the night before he died.

And so, I think tonight before he's told that he has to go basically, I think, speak in front of these cameras. He's going to be used as a propaganda tool by his captors. And he says, you know, like, under no circumstances am I going to do this.

And what I think so fascinating about Stockdale is that so many of these sort of stork stories are like really ancient, right? Like you hear about Kato, or you hear about Epic Titus is sort of defiance under slavery.

Iron will that these characters had and you go, okay, but that was different back then. I mean, Stockdale only died a few years ago. There are plenty of people walking the earth right now that knew him.

We think that the world is so different that, you know, everything is safe and wonderful and that we don't need these sort of tools. But Stockdale is is proof one that Stoicism has survived up until modern times and that these sort of iron inspirational larger than life figures still do exist.

And that we can still learn from them that we can be inspired by their example, but but also that, you know, you never know you you may sort of need these things in real life.

So I'm excited to talk about that. I'm less excited about the very long flight with a number of layovers. One of the things I try to do when I am flying as I try to walk through that pre-meditashomalorum thing we've talked about so many times here in these emails, I go, okay, what are the delays I could experience?

How difficult is it going to be can I resign myself in advance to all of those things happening? I'd rather be sort of pleasantly surprised that all the travel goes exactly as expected than pleasantly unsurprised when oh, lo and behold, you know, the more complexity you introduce into your travel plans, the more delays you happen to experience.

So I sort of go into that knowing full well what's going to happen. And then I, you know, what's my plan? I'm going to try to read. I'm going to try to relax. I'm going to try to experience some stillness and, you know, amidst the craziness.

I want to be ready for all these things to happen. That's kind of how I think about it because, you know, I've done this long enough. That is what happens. I think I spent the night at Newark Airport a little less than a month ago. It was not fun, but I knew that could happen.

...