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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a

meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short

passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life.

And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known

and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped

them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first,

we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Um, about

every three or four months, I have to have this little conversation with myself. I'm thinking

about what I want to read next and I go, Ryan, you cannot justify reading another book about

the American Civil War. And I almost always lose this discussion and I end up reading another

book about the Civil War because I remain as ever just endlessly fascinated by what

happened, the characters, the heroes and the villains of it, the humanity of it, the tragedy

of it, and then the remnants of it, the consequences of it, the bloody implications of it that continue

to this day right down to the fact that there is a Confederate monument about a block and

a half from the painted porch that I have been working on getting removed. In fact, I donated

a bunch of the money to have it removed. Not everyone understands that. Some people have

gotten very mad. I've got a number of really angry emails about it. But the more I have read

about the Civil War, the more I have studied American history, the more I realize that I

have been in the past. The past tells us a lot about the present and a lot about the future.

And my fascination with the Civil War as just an event of history as opposed to something

...