Ep 509 - The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
Overdue
Headgum
4.6 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2021
⏱️ 68 minutes
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Summary
We learn the art of military strategy, deception, and fire from Michael Nylan's 2020 translation of this classic text. We start by going in-depth on the contemporary political references in Nylan's Introduction to this edition, and then we go blow-by-blow and nugget-by-inspirational-nugget through Master Sun's timeless wisdom.
Here's translator Michael Nylan writing about the book for LitHub: "The Art of War is Actually a Manual on How to Avoid It."
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a headgun podcast. |
| 0:06.2 | While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well-told |
| 0:10.5 | tale, they will not shy away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary. |
| 0:16.3 | Plus these are books you should have read by now. |
| 0:43.6 | Happy window between Christmas and New Year's. |
| 0:54.8 | The Lost Days. |
| 0:59.4 | In Seer T those down for a time. |
| 1:11.9 | 20 insert number here was not the world's best year, but because events conform to our |
| 1:24.8 | understanding of time, like Gregorian and calendars and stuff, we can tell ourselves, |
| 1:30.7 | you know, 2022 is going to be better. It's not just going to be a continuation of stuff that was |
| 1:36.3 | that was bumming us out about this past year. It's not. It's a clean slate. It's a chance to begin |
| 1:41.9 | a new with all the same people and all the same positions. Yeah, unfortunately. Let all the |
| 1:48.1 | quenants be forgot and end of song. I'm good. All right, let me talk about books on this podcast |
| 1:56.3 | along with the unceasing march of time. And this week, Andrew, I already said the name, what do we |
| 2:01.9 | read? We read The Art of War by Sun Zoo or Sun Z. Ah, Mr. Sun, let's say. |
| 2:09.9 | Master Sun, yes. And we read the translation by Michael Nylon. Yep. |
| 2:17.0 | And that's the one we're going to talk about. There have been others. There will be more. I'm sure. |
| 2:22.2 | Yes. But that's the translation we're talking about today. Before we get into the book, I do want |
| 2:28.0 | to highlight our January schedule. Andrew, speaking of the March of time. I love it. So we do have |
| 2:36.7 | our final episode of December 2021 coming up our happy horny days coming for Christmas. I'm |
| 2:43.7 | already. I want to I want to keep myself fresh for the episode. Uh, find out more about how to |
| 2:49.5 | join us for those recordings or get it early at patreon.com. So sure, every pod, but it'll still come |
... |
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