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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 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.

The kind of politics you should study. Following today's politics is easy. You turn on the news and a bunch of pretty people tell you that your side is good and the other side is irredeemably evil.

You pull up social media and you get a bunch of rage profiteers telling you what to be outraged or angry about. Everything is simple and clear cut, compromise is unnecessary.

And in the end, none of it really matters anyway because the world is going to end in 2024 in a nuclear holocaust, 2050 from climate change or any day now in the rapture.

Needless to say that's not very valuable or very philosophical. What is the stoke to do then? Especially when politics and participation in the polis, the empire was so essential to Zeno and Marcus Aurelius in Senica.

Well, first they'd urge you to turn backwards to better understand the present day. Even the early American founders knew this. As John Adams wrote to his son in 1777, there is no history perhaps better adapted to this useful purpose than that of Thucydides.

You will find in it full of instruction to the order, the statesman, the general, as well as the historian and the philosopher. Indeed, people in the State Department right now are reading Thucydides to better understand the rising threat of China.

Countless millions, including many of the Stoics, have read this book over the past 2000 years to understand the ethical dilemmas inherent in leadership, in war, in politics, and in life.

Because Thucydides was so smart and so timeless, he is able to teach lessons to us even now. And because the countries and the events are so distant and impersonal to us, we can actually hear them and learn them.

And if we're smart, we can apply them to the political situations we face today, the ones that could desperately use less partisanship, less virtue signaling, and a lot more wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage.

Hey, just a quick reminder, stillness is the key. It's the key to success. It's the key to happiness. It's the key to insight. It's also the title of my next book. You can get stillness is the key. It comes out October 1, everywhere books are sold. It's currently available for preorder. You can get it in audiobook, ebook, physical, Barnes and Noble even has a few signed copies.

If you've gotten anything out of my writing, anything out of this podcast or my emails over the years, I would love your support stillness is the key available everywhere books are sold in preorder now and it comes out October 1.

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