Paul Kix On The Civil Rights Movement And What It Means To Be Courageous
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 August 2023
⏱️ 95 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ryan speaks with Paul Kix about his new book You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America, how Ryan helped him shape his writing career after being laid off by ESPN, the painful realities of the Jim Crow south and 1963 Birmingham, and more.
Paul Kix is an author, journalist, and podcaster whose wide-ranging work examines sports, politics, social movements, and world history. He is a former senior editor at ESPN Magazine, and has written for numerous publications from the Boston Globe to the Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. His highly acclaimed writings include his book The Saboteur: True Adventures of the Gentleman Commando Who Took on the Nazis, and his articles The Entrepreneur Who Is Dying to Succeed, Prepare for Death, and The Accidental Get Away Driver. You can find his work and writing course at paulkix.com, and on Instagram @paulkix and Twitter @paulkix.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation |
| 0:09.7 | inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues |
| 0:15.1 | of courage, justice, temperance and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper |
| 0:21.2 | dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we explore at length how |
| 0:28.7 | these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. |
| 0:35.9 | Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, |
| 0:41.3 | be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, |
| 0:46.8 | and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. |
| 0:50.8 | Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I'm glad I was |
| 1:03.4 | about to head out of the office and then I got an email that said I needed a recording intro |
| 1:06.8 | for today's episode and the timing was perfect because I picked up Paul Kicks' book. You have to |
| 1:12.4 | be prepared to die before you can begin to live, which is an amazing book. I'll rave about it in a |
| 1:17.4 | second. And then a giant wasp somehow snuck into my office probably because this is a very old |
| 1:24.3 | somewhat porous building and sometimes they make their way through. And I use this book to |
| 1:30.0 | save myself and all the Daily Stoic employees. So thank you, Paul. I had Paul out to the bookstore |
| 1:41.2 | about a year ago, which was cool. He was on vacation in Houston and he stopped by. That was fun. |
| 1:45.6 | And he told me about this new book that he was working on. And I actually met Paul Kicks when he |
| 1:49.6 | was writing at ESPN where he was an editor for many, many years. He edited a past guest, |
| 1:56.4 | Wright Thompson, among many others. But Paul got introduced to Stoicism partly through my work. |
| 2:02.1 | And he wrote this really cool profile of me for ESPN, which I was quite honored to be featured in. |
| 2:08.3 | And I loved his last book, The Saboteur, which was about this resistance figure in World War II in |
| 2:16.8 | France. This sort of fascinating war hero. And we talked about that in my previous episode of |
... |
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