Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast.

Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics illustrated with stories

from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do.

And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic

intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave

you with, to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing.

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music. Download the app today. So let's get into it.

How to better understand the past. In retrospect, so many of the decisions that the Stoics made

are baffling, Marcus Aurelius and his son, Comedis, Senica, and Nero, their attitude towards

women, towards slavery, towards violence, towards what society was supposed to look like,

even more recently, what have stocked down on the complicated nature of the war in Vietnam?

Didn't they know? Didn't they know better? Sometimes, but not always. To understand the

Stoics, we have to understand something. They weren't living in history. They were living

in what they viewed as the present, what they thought was actually a progressive time.

They did not know where things were going. They had only a partial view of the picture.

Just as today, we have only a partial picture of our own moment.

The late David McCullough, who's true in biography, I've raved about a bunch of times,

and I carry at the painting porch. He once said that the hardest part about being a biographer

is getting the reader to keep in mind that nothing was ever on track. As he continues,

things could have gone any way at any point. As soon as you say, was, it seems to fix an event

in the past, but nobody ever lived in the past, only in the present, he said. The differences

...