The Stoic Code General Mattis Lives By
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
General Jim Mattis has spent his life proving that philosophy is not just for the classroom. In today’s episode, Margaret Hoover interviews General Mattis, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, and Ryan about why philosophy matters most when things are difficult. They discuss how leaders fall back on their first principles in a crisis, and what Marcus Aurelius, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln can still teach us about courage, citizenship, and character today.
👉 Watch the full conversation on Firing Line with Margaret Hoover here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33Rzi-jQYS4
📚 Book recommendation: Call Sign Chaos by General Jim Mattis
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, |
| 0:07.8 | courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. |
| 0:14.7 | Make Stoicism translatable for us right now. |
| 0:17.9 | Deal with it. |
| 0:19.0 | Just deal with it. |
| 0:20.2 | No victimhood, no cynicism. Deal with it. Just deal with it. No victimhood, no cynicism. |
| 0:21.6 | Deal with reality. |
| 0:23.6 | And keep confidence in yourself and each other. |
| 0:27.6 | We'll get through this. |
| 0:29.6 | Stoicism is the idea you don't control what happens. |
| 0:31.6 | You control how you respond to what happens. |
| 0:33.6 | And the idea was you can, not just that you can respond to anything with virtue, |
| 0:38.2 | but the worst the situation is, the more important that response becomes. |
| 0:43.7 | Find by how we handle the toughest things in life. |
| 0:47.1 | How we respond. All right. |
| 0:49.4 | Okay, so that was me and the great General Mattis talking about Stoic philosophy. |
| 0:56.3 | How did that all come to be? |
| 0:57.7 | It's kind of a crazy convergence of events bringing this all together. |
| 1:00.8 | Let me walk you through that. |
| 1:02.4 | Okay, so back in March, a bunch of things converged pertaining to the ideas that we talk about here, to Stoicism. |
| 1:08.5 | So first was just the application. |
| 1:10.3 | I had a brutal, brutal travel day. |
... |
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