What Our Fathers Teach Us, For Better Or Worse | Tom Junod
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 June 2026
⏱️ 62 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Some fathers show us who to become. Others show us who not to become.
In this Father’s Day weekend episode, Ryan looks at two very different examples of fatherhood. First, he reflects on Marcus Aurelius and the extraordinary influence of Antoninus Pius, the adopted father who taught him compassion, humility, discipline, responsibility, and how to hold power without being changed by it.
Then Ryan talks with Tom Junod about the harder side of inheritance: what it means to love a father who caused pain, kept secrets, inspired fear, and still shaped the man his son became. Tom’s new book, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, is about masculinity, moral injury, family secrets, and the lifelong work of deciding which parts of your father you carry forward and which parts you refuse to repeat.
Tom Junod is senior writer for ESPN, where his work has won an Emmy and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a winner of the James Beard Award for essay writing. Previously he was a staff writer at GQ and Esquire. The film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was based on his article in Esquire.
Follow Tom on Instagram | @tom_junod
📚 Grab signed copies of In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man by Tom Junod at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/
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Transcript
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