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. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the 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 DailyStoic.com.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. I guess it was two, maybe almost three years ago now.

I was flying back from Istanbul in coach. It was a brutal, incredibly long flight.

Who knows what happened, but almost the evening I got home, I wasn't feeling well, and a couple days later I really wasn't feeling well.

I had super bad food poisoning, and then it just like it never went away, and the feeling not good went away.

I went to a doctor and they said, oh, this is nothing. You probably just had a flu, so then I came home, and still feeling sick. I went to another doctor. Finally, I was feeling so terrible. I ended up going to an urgent care.

They said, look, there's nothing wrong with you. I don't know why. My wife had tossed it out. She was like, ask them if you have mono.

I was like, I guess I did. I guess we can give you a mono test. As it happens, that is what I had. It was brutal. I was out for almost three months. It took forever to recover from anyways.

The two morals of the story. One is why I am taking the COVID-19 very seriously. For most people, viruses are nothing, but you never know where you're going to end up falling on the spectrum.

There's brutal recovering from mono. It sounds like this cheesy thing. Isn't that what you get? Making out with the football team or whatever. But no, it really knocked me on my ass.

And the consequences of getting knocked on my ass was that I had been planning on doing the Leadville Marathon with Lance Armstrong and my guest today on the podcast Eric Burns.

The Leadville Marathon is like a apparently notoriously brutal marathon. You hit a high like 13,000 feet. But anyways, it was for a sort of like a war for a vets charity. And it was supposed to be really cool. I was really looking forward to it.

And I just like I hadn't been able to run in months. I was just not able to do it. And so that was supposed to be my chance to meet today's guests in person. We've never actually met. But we talk quite a bit. He's a fan of the Stoics.

And just an all around incredible athlete Eric played in professional baseball for 10 years. He was a star for the A's, the Rockies, the Diamondbacks. He ended his career with the Mariners.

If that was not enough, is an incredible endurance athlete in support of his his foundation, let them play. He did a he did a triathlon across the United States a couple years ago, which is insane.

I follow him on Instagram. And it's like this unreal spectacle the other day. He did like a 60 mile run on a treadmill in his house.

Clearly as you'll tell from the interview, just an absolute intense guy, tons of energy. I wanted to talk to him in part because of that. I mean, I think we have this idea of the Stoics being sort of boring and low energy or just sort of stoically enduring adversity. But Eric is much more passionate than that.

And I think I think that's a that's an important side of the philosophy to illustrate. Great dude. I think you'll really like this interview. Eric is not just energetic when it comes to athletics.

He hosts the Daily Hustle, which is a daily podcast. Eric wrote a book called the Fuck It List, Life Lessons from a Human Crash Test dummy, which you can check out. And of course, he's also an analyst for the MLB Network.

You can follow him on Twitter at Burns 22. You can go to Eric Burns dot com to sign up for the Daily Hustle there. I think I really like this interview. And I hope to one day run the Lead Bill Marathon and see Eric in person next time. All right. Enjoy.

...